| Subject: | [socialcredit] how big our claims? | | Date: | Monday, August 8, 2005 08:46:49 (EDT) | | From: | Triumphofthepast <Triumphofthepast @...com>
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Dear Friends,
Joe made the point but I reiterate it. I suggest to John that he look around and start toting up instances of the all-pervading waste that he can see on all sides during the ordinary course of any day. The following is from my chapter in Tony Cooney's upcoming new edition of "Social Credit: Economics."
"The phenomenon/problem that obsessed Douglas the engineer and to whose solution he devoted his entire life is what he calls the tragedy of human effort, the gross waste of people's labor. Douglas quotes a statement of H. L. Gantt that the U.S. industrial system was 5% efficient.1 That means 95% waste. That would mean we were at that time working twenty times harder than we had to to get the same results. Without committing ourselves to particular numbers, anyone not wearing blinkers can look around and see the same phenomenon today.
"We see myriad jobs that do not actually produce any product or service for human satisfaction; whole industries that are mere unnecessary adjuncts to, or parasitic on, real production (or adjuncts to adjuncts); incomprehensible legislation providing jobs for armies of lawyers and spawning the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the civil "service"; massive labor diverted from actual production to unproductive commercial warfare; vast resources diverted to seducing the public; the absurdity of a country's "living on its exports"; the crime of product destroyed to keep prices up; the heartbreak of wonderful inventions killed in the womb; the insult of "job creation" promoted as something desirable.
"We see all the cars and roads and petroleum used to get people to and from these unnecessary jobs. We see processing, packing, transport, distribution, and retail processes expended to put a jar of apple-sauce on the shelf when you could make a superior product at home by popping an apple into the oven. All this in the context of a technological capability that the engineer knows better than anyone could happily disemploy people. Yet despite all this technology at our disposal and all this investment of resources, our cities are still shamed by the specter of homeless and starving people, and even a middle-class family is but one illness away from economic ruin. The tragedy of human effort cries out for an explanation."
I put it to John that he is underestimating the all-pervading nature of the problem and therefore the huge relief that could be brought about by fixing it. Depending who he's talking to, he might want to make more modest claims, but among ourselves, we dare to make big ones. And what's wrong with abolishing taxation (i.e., letting government take its downsized money needs out before the dividend is paid)?
Michael
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how big our claims
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