| Subject: | [socialcredit] Re: Economic Design for a "perfect economy" (CITS C&D Alert) | | Date: | Sunday, October 16, 2005 12:45:49 (-0400) | | From: | W. Curtiss Priest <bmslib @...edu>
|
Dear Capital & Debt interested folk,
In the CITS Alert, I ascribed the philosophy of "A rising
tide raises all boats" to the Republican Party.
A reader notes that JFK used the phrase during his
term:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/42/messages/1052.html
According to this account, it was not until 1984 that
Jesse Jackson questioned the philosophy when he clearly
realized that "[f]or the boats stuck at the bottom there's
a misery index."
As Ashford describes it, only through the ownership of
capital does wealth accrue; the proceeds of capital
enable the 1% (truly) wealthy to purchase more capital,
and thus accrue more wealth. In Binary Economics, the
solution is to distribute wealth by distributing capital;
in the C.H. Douglas solution, the solution is a "B" amount
that exceeds what workers are paid (the "A" amount) and
then providing all workers a social dividend for "B" so that
workers can buy all goods. In the US "welfare society" such
as the we have operated 'off and on,' we have, I allege,
an extremely haphazard system. Consult "The Public Good:
Philanthropy & Welfare in the Civil War Era" by Robert H.
Bremmer, and, see especially, "As we Forgive Our Debtors:
Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America" by Sullivan,
Warren and Westbrook.
The US operates on a philosophy of distrust for those
deserving financial help (and a share of the productivity pie).
So, according to Sullivan, etc., we have wide oscillations
of helping/not-helping those who cannot meet "subsistence." We
currently are in the far anti-welfare phase of such a cycle.
Welfare-to-work pushed the burden of supporting low-income people
onto the states, who in turn made welfare difficult to obtain.
The Bankruptcy Act of 2005, sided with the lenders, and
has placed an onerous burden on those needing to declare
bankruptcy after October 17th. As a result, there were
eight times the filing of bankruptcy in MA this year, compared
to last year, in anticipation of the stringency.
The general model for 'the distrust' is that humans 'want to
be lazy.' "They want to be on the dole." The opposing
model is that such dependency undermines the integrity of
each person, and, given the opportunity for a "good job" --
that it is in our nature to like work and accomplishment.
However, fearing sloth, assured systems for the transfer of wealth
(above) "might reward the unworthy."
While most all of us know of someone, or family, that abused
the system, ran up debts, and declared bankruptcy only to do
it again -- this is not mainstream indebtedness among the
poor. Only in today's Boston Globe an article showed that
supposed ethnic abusers as the culprits of credit card
debt, to the contrary, it was the more affluent American that
has run up such debts.
Lower income ethnic groups only resorted to a credit card
for imperative purchases such as food.
[c.f.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/10/16/bankruptcy_law_strains_local_debtors/?page=full
]
While a system of "distributional equity" based on a cycle
of "good people" / "bad people" is, at least, in general,
a form of wealth equity, it is a horrible system for those
that monitor the system and those exposed to the system. I.e.,
if you are impoverished at the wrong point in the cycle, you
are damned. And, welfare workers are constantly torn between
fiscal realities and real needs.
WCP
Editor, CITS Debt Watch
--
W. Curtiss Priest, Director, CITS
Research Affiliate, Comparative Media Studies, MIT
Center for Information, Technology & Society
466 Pleasant St., Melrose, MA 02176
781-662-4044 BMSLIB@MIT.EDU http://Cybertrails.org
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