This will not happen if the
few hold most of the power, and accumulating wealth has become a habit that
knows no limits for some. A one-hundred-percent tax on income or profits over
some reasonably high figure in return for free education and health care for
all would create a great deal of peace. It would encourage divisions of labor
based on merit. Equal access to the system of justice and free speech go
without saying. Government will not work unless all conflicts of interest and
the insider trading now rampant in Congress cease. Lobbying by corporations
often proves more influential than the wisdom of the people. Money biases too
many elections.
Meeting the corruption that
follows the religion of money and making it big (the American pathology)5 require an ethic that
recognizes the subtle means employed to steal other people's labor. Unfair
competition, price gouging, and substandard wages may be legal but they will
never be ethical. Those who believe that crucial resources should be held
communally and used to support the population are labeled communist, an
ideology that never developed and its failures committed most of the same sins
in the means of production that capitalism committed. Trading resources for
cash and energy for power dominated the last six centuries.
In this context one has a
difficult time finding an ethic for dealing with exploitation of other people's
labor. The market appears to alleviate the need for an ethic, as if there were
no alternative. Capitalism harbors at least one fatal flaw. Under the market,
whatever can be done to suppress wages will be done. Getting people to consume
things they do not need to drive the economy creates a competition that also
drives down wages and wastes resources. Different living standards around the
world make it possible for business to shop for the lowest wages. Trying to
keep up, people work much harder and longer for less. The economy is failing
for lack of adequate wages.
If profits were shared and
the technology used to reduce labor were made to support labor, people could
work and waste less. If the machine cannot support the labor it replaces, it is
not more efficient. People have a psychological need to work at something
besides computers. The market does not provide the solution; it is part of the
problem. It replaces a sense of fairness with an algorithm for reducing
avoidable costs, such as labor, safety regulations, health care, and
environmental safeguards--profits for the few. People who cannot depend on their
neighbors must hoard wealth. Communally-held wealth and a promise to help your
neighbor is the ethic that will make waste unacceptable and fear of failure
less a drag on peoples' ability to move on.
It is all about white supremacy. The earth must be treated like a brother.
1.
Paul
M. Angle, ed., Created Equal ? 390, 393.
2.
Letter
to William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864, Hertz II, 954.
3.
See,
Natural Selection's Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the
Origin of Evil ,
by Carter Stroud, for the basis of these assertions and related matters.
4.
See,
note 3 and author's blog at natural selections paradox. blogspot. com.
5.
See,
note 4.
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