commissioner.org
| Source | Sandwichman |
| Date | 08/04/12/08:38 |
| On 4/9/08, Marsh Feldman asked (and answered) the what-to-do question:
> Of course, my comments beg the question of what to do. As a starting point, > I'd suggest a better analysis of the problem. Digging through my charlatan's bag of economical cure-alls (and associated analyses), I retrieve a dusty vial prescribed by a English factory inspector, R.J. Saunders, in 1848: "Further steps towards a reformation of society can never be carried out with any hope of success, unless the hours of labour be limited, and the prescribed limit strictly enforced." Eighteen years later, the first congress of the International Workingman's Association paraphrased our factory inspector in a resolution: "The legal limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must prove abortive and The Congress proposes eight hours as the legal limit of the working day." Now said resolution for an eight-hour day was adopted 142 years ago, but as economist Sydney J. Chapman argued in 1909, technological advance would require the perpetually recurring and progressive reduction of working time to the extent that today's "utopian dream" of leisure time would appear as the day-after-tomorrow's timid anachronism. Even John Maynard Keynes, to whose name many economists even today attach an epigonic "-ian", prescribed shorter working time as one of three "ingredients for a cure" to unemployment and specified that of the three ingredients, working less was the "ultimate solution." Way back in 1821, Charles Wentworth Dilke had already defined wealth itself as disposable time (and nothing more!): "After all their idle sophistry, there is, thank God! no means of adding to the wealth of a nation but by adding to the facilities of living: so that wealth is liberty -- liberty to seek recreation -- liberty to enjoy life -- liberty to improve the mind: it is disposable time, and nothing more." But wait! All these ideas about the remedial properties of shorter work time are based on the insidious and laughable notion that there is "only a fixed amount of work to go round." How do we know that? Because unnamed "economists" say so! Because the Wall Street Journal, the Economist magazine, Paul Samuelson's introductory textbook and countless audio-animatronic econ professors standing in front blackboards have for years drilled this gem of revealed wisdom into the heads of nodding students, business managers and distracted perusers of the disinterestedly reported public-opinion consensus. More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette -- and the lump-of-labor fallacy is the best known fallacy in economics (look it up)!!! Who to believe? The factory inspector, the Workingman's Association, Keynes, Chapman, Marx, Dilke (and many more I didn't mention)? Or unspecified "economists" whose collective anonymous authority goes unquestioned by paid pimps for perpetual pump-priming? Believe those guys or your lying eyes? But, hey, I'm a mere sandwichman bearing a sign, "the end is nigh", leaping up on his soap box from time-to-time to rant about things that are either "too complex for ordinary people to comprehend" or "too simple-minded to be of any real use for policy" or maybe both. As the Madison Avenue crowd asks, "What good is happiness if it can't buy you money?" So, what to do? Anything but. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho