Tuesday, May 10, 2016

'Not two Crises, but one' | National Catholic Reporter

'Not two Crises, but one' | National Catholic Reporter by MSW. MGB: I actually wrote a book about this. It is on my various blogs and parts are on oocities, including the summary.  Its called Musings from the Christian Left.  Very Googleable.  It predates Laudauto Si' by more than a decade.



Work is important, even if it is growing your own hydroponic vegetables, recycling your own waste water to grow hydroponic grass and produce fresh water and your own stem cell meat (including bone for taste and blood for color and taste). You can round that out with voluntary social action, the arts or anything you want to do - all of which can happen after an early retirement.  Of course, until these benefits are available world-wide, they really aren't stable, which is a main area of exclusion now - the ability to move jobs and fire more expensive workers  Marx taught us that.



What Marx never got was consumerism, which is why the hard core bureaucratic authoritarians states failed or adapted (China is now a consumer culture).  One of the laws of economics (and they are natural law) is that for factory work to occur without revolution, there must be some kind of consumer surplus.  Democratic socialist countries understand that and thrive.  MSW does not seem to have gotten the memo, however.  Because of that surplus, the government can provide social benefits for families and regulate business.  Its why Scandanavia is a decent place, aside from the long winters and short days therein (which is a huge suicide risk).



Basic gauranteed income supporters won't like this line of teaching.  They believe in income without work, mostly by either taxing land or creating money and depending on automation to do what workers used to do.  Of course, like Marxists, they don't understand that most work has moved off of the factor floor and into retail.  Consumerism again.

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