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Jim Magay |
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I had to run to the post office yesterday to mail a package.
I was too late for the window service but in the lobby was
a line of people waiting to use an automated scale and postage dispenser.
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Yes, you could insure, register, and get delivery confirmation all by yourself with the swipe of a credit card and the pressing of a few buttons on a touch screen. Another afternoon a week or so later I visited Staples to get some flyers made up for a fundraiser we were participating in. The young clerk in the print shop directed me to a huge copy machine in the corner showed me how to insert my credit card, select the number of copies I needed and press the appropriate button – and then get a receipt from another machine across the room.
Automation, a wonderful thing - no sick days, no labor strife, theoretically accessible 24/7, eliminates all those jobs with their attendant human problems, no need for a water cooler ‘cause there is no one to stand around it in the AM talking over the latest episode of 30 Rock.
But what are we losing? The President and Congress pay lip service to “JOBS,” but their corporate backers are off-shoring what jobs there are to foreign countries while our unemployed ranks continue to grow.
A website called whywork.org has many thoughtful ideas relating to jobs and unemployment that differ remarkably from Washington’s (and our own) point of view. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment. Here are some examples.
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The National Dividend. Invented by engineer C. H. Douglas and revived by poet Ezra Pound and designer Buckminster Fuller. The basic idea (although Douglas, Pound, and Fuller differ on the details) is that every citizen should be declared a shareholder in the nation, and should receive dividends on the Gross National Product for the year. A share would be worth several times as much, per year, as a welfare recipient receives -- at least five times more.
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The Guaranteed Annual Income. Urged by economist Robert Theobald and others. The government would simply establish an income level above the poverty line and guarantee that no citizen would receive less; if your wages fall below that level, or you have no wages, the government makes up the difference. This plan would definitely cost the government less than the present welfare system, with all its bureaucratic red tape and redundancy: a point worth considering for those conservatives who are always complaining about the high cost of welfare.
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The Negative Income Tax. Devised by Nobel economist Milton Friedman and is a less radical variation on the above ideas. The Negative Income Tax would establish a minimum income for every citizen; anyone whose income fell below that level would receive the amount necessary to bring them up to the standard.
What do you think? A Utopian vision where every person could choose their own path to self fulfillment without fear of poverty, or a Darwinian struggle where only the fittest survive?
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