This is an explosive report that, like usual, belabors the problem but refuses to posit a solution. This is because there is only one solution, the Citizen's Dividend, and the parasite class is too stingy and haughty to provide it. Therefore, the suffering will continue, as it has been since 1970, the last time average wages for American workers increased, forever. Mainstream journalists realize there is only one solution, the Citizen's Dividend. But they also realize that they can't say that without angering their readership, who will cry and whine about taxes they don't pay and a non-existent Red Menace.
My contempt for whiners who talk about taxes they don't actually pay and a Red Menace that doesn't actually exist is equal to the contempt they have for the unemployed. They refuse to admit the reality -- there are no jobs, therefore the unemployed are not to blame for their unemployment. The refuse to admit the reality -- that they aren't part of the top 1% and therefore it is ridiculous for them to protect the top 1% at their own expense, no matter what power fantasies they hold. They refuse to admit the reality -- that the jobs they do hold are parasitic makework and that, therefore, they are morally worse individuals than the unemployed who, at least, aren't stealing from anyone.
These three realities are why unemployed people are as good as or better than employed people. This is why the Citizen's Dividend must be implemented, because justice decrees that money should be distributed according to people's value as human beings, not according to their ability to game the system into giving them money. The world has been so radically transformed that the most valuable people are unemployed, while all the scum of the Earth are employed, because only scummy people are willing to take the scummy jobs that remain to be had.
First, let's explain what a real job, a moral, productive job, would look like. I imagine a logger, or a farmer, or a fisherman, when I imagine a real job. Someone who extracts natural resources from the Earth for the sake of servicing basic human needs. Then there are the people in factories, who take the raw materials and turn them into finished goods. This would also be true of construction workers turning basic plywood boards into finished houses. All of this work is also morally sound and productive. However, Americans are no longer employed in either of these fields. Farming, forestry, and fishing only employs .5% of Americans, an infinitesimal number. It used to be that the majority of Americans worked in these jobs. That was before machines took over and made human farmers farming small, family size farms economically impossible.
When farmers lost all of their farming jobs, they turned to factories. However, now America has lost their factory jobs too. According to the linked article:
Equally troublesome is the lower labor participation rate; some 5 million jobs have vanished from manufacturing, long America's greatest strength. Just think: Total payrolls today amount to 131 million, but this figure is lower than it was at the beginning of the year 2000, even though our population has grown by nearly 30 million.
This hasn't stopped America from manufacturing more goods than ever. Here, too, humans have been unemployed by machines, who outcompeted them in a straight contest. Of course, it hasn't helped American manufacturing that it has to compete with cheap labor from China, and elsewhere, that has no environmental laws and no worker safety laws, which works people 18 hours a day 364 days a year for a nickel an hour. How exactly is an American worker, with a high cost of living, supposed to compete with an overseas worker, where money goes much further? The same American dollar, if used to buy a product from overseas, can buy, say, ten times as much rice, as that dollar spent in America for rice sold in America. Therefore not only can foreign workers simply live poorer than Americans, they can ask for 1/10 as much in wages and still live just as well as an American worker, because their cost of living is much lower. In any event, the day of the American manufacturer is over. Whatever jobs are left will be lost sooner or later, because all of the economic forces are arrayed in a united front against manufacturing jobs in America.
It's cheaper for an American consumer to buy goods from abroad, or goods produced by machines, than to buy from fellow American workers. Therefore, Americans no longer pay Americans for their daily needs. They pay capitalists, who own vast quantities of machines, or they pay Chinese mandarins, who own vast quantities of may-as-well-be-slave labor.
No jobs have been produced since 2000, even though the population has increased by 30 million. The prospects for job creation in the near future are even worse. Soon the stimulus package which increased employment will expire, and be replaced by Republican deficit hawks who will actually lower government spending, which translates into reduced government hiring. State governments have already done this, axeing a great deal of public employees, like teachers and policemen, who once thought they at least would always have job security. Once the federal government joins in on this massive firing spree, there won't be any employment left anywhere.
This is because everyone left employed in America is actually just a parasite living off of the government. 50% of all spending in America is government spending, either federal, state, or local. Everyone, essentially, is already on welfare. This is where my third point comes in -- people who pretend, haughtily, that they're 'producers', unlike the evil parasitic 'unemployed,' is a hypocrite. If they were real producers, they wouldn't be paid by the government. This shows that they couldn't produce real value that people would willingly buy -- instead they used a gun to extract taxpayer money from others, and then used the taxpayer money to buy their worthless product no one would actually want to buy.
Who are these 'gun workers?' Everyone involved in the Health Care industry. The government spends more money on health care in America than most socialized health care countries, that actually provide health care for everyone, unlike America, which still has tens of millions of uninsured Americans and growing. Therefore anyone working for Health Care is being subsidized by the government, just like ethanol farmers. They aren't really producing any value, or else they wouldn't need a government subsidy, now would they? If consumers were allowed to set a fair price for medical care, instead of the absurd tens of thousands of dollars for a ten minute consultation with a doctor and a set of placebo sugar pills, the Health Care industry would collapse. But it is supported by tax breaks for employer health care benefits, medicaid, medicare, etc ad nauseum. Everyone working in the health care industry is getting rich off of the point of a gun. People only pay the absurd prices found in Health Care because what the heck, the service is free and they already paid the taxes for it, so they may as well get whatever benefits they can. If the same prices for Health Care were maintained but the government did nothing to help pay for them, no one would visit a hospital. They would simply die at home, without bothering anyone, and treat all their injuries themselves.
Therefore, the touted benefits of health care are all lies. People may be willing to pay 1/100th or so as what they are paying for health care if they had to pay themselves, instead of just relying on the government to subsidize them, but in that case the health care industry would be 1/100th the size it is today. 99% of health providers are, therefore, nothing but muggers.
Then there's the military. The next largest share of federal spending is on the military. But the military has done nothing good for America since 1845. Every war it's gotten into since then has been counterproductive, and most of them have been outright evil. The military employs millions of people, either directly as soldiers or indirectly as arms and equipment providers. Trillions of dollars have been spent on the useless Afghanistan and Iraq wars, all to no avail. All of these workers are just glorified muggers who extract tax dollars at gunpoint to provide a service no one needs or wants. The rest of the world defends their borders and keeps the peace with military budgets 1/100th our own. Only America requires one trillion dollars a year to defend itself -- only we don't even do that, because our borders are wide open and illegal aliens still flood across the border unchecked. The one thing the military could do -- protect America from the invasion of foreigners and stop a foreign conquest, they won't do. Therefore America has a trillion dollar military and a foreign invasion of illegal aliens that averages around 1 million new illegal invaders a year.
Everyone in the military should be fired. We could achieve anything sane with a military 1/100th the size. That 1/100th size military could then secure the Mexican border, and do something useful for a change, while finally retiring the troops we have stationed in over 100 different nations all over the world like an evil occupying octopus that seeks to dominate everything and everyone.
Next up is schools. Children are required to go to school, even though school hasn't shown to deliver any value to children. Home schooled children, for instance, score better on all standardized tests than either public or private school children. This school mandate goes further though, as federal, state, and local taxes extract money at gunpoint from people to pay for said ineffectual schooling. Since parents are forced to pay for the public schools anyway, they have no choice but to make use of them, thus employing hordes of teachers and support workers of all stripes. Generally for every teacher in a school, there's some sort of administrator or counselor who does God knows what, but assuredly something utterly unproductive and parasitical. Any bright individual can teach themselves, or be taught by their parents, everything they need to know. There are ample resources online and libraries to read from. Any dumb individual can't be taught, no matter how many teachers and support counselors are provided for them, as shown over and over again by No Child Left Behind testing, which shows the vast majority of Americans still don't know anything and can't pass any standardized tests at any grade level. There is no evidence that schools have added value to any student. The bright students do better home schooled, the dumb ones are just as illiterate as ever. But between the gunpoint-extracted taxes and the gunpoint-mandated schooling, everyone goes to school anyway, becoming a cash cow for an endless number of parasites. Schools should be reformed into private institutions where parents can pay for their children to go to a school of their choice teaching the material of their choice. Their ability to pay would come from the citizen's dividend, which could be spent on anything, not just schooling, such that teachers would have to compete in the free market if they want to be hired. They would have to show that they are better than more food on the table or a new set of clothes or a vacation to Europe, and not just automatically receive customers like wardens of prisons.
Which brings me to prisons. An unprecedented number of Americans are in jail today. We have more prisoners than China, whose population is 4 times our own. Prisoners are more public parasites, but so is the entire criminal justice system, all of them live off taxpayer money while not delivering any value. As liberals have pointed out, states spend more on their prisons than their schools. Any objection I have to parasitical teachers I have even more vociferously for our prisons. Prison administrators, cops, lawyers, criminals, judges, they all live off the public teat. Untold billions of dollars are wasted tending to these useless eaters, when there's a cheap and easy solution we could implement at any moment: The death penalty for all felonies, fines or physical punishment, caning, lashing, etc for misdemeanors. We could take down all of our prisons and fire all of our prisoners, who live lavishly compared to non-criminal unemployed Americans, and all of their guards and all the cops hired to catch them too. Crime would quickly reach 0 all across America once criminals were summarily executed, either by deterrance or by directly attritting the amount of criminally minded individuals alive in America. It's been shown by countless studies that only a tiny group of repeat offenders are responsible for all crime in America. If we simply directly killed this group, there wouldn't be any criminals left. Most of these people are currently in jail. So all we have to do is go into these prisons guns blazing and finish the job. Once there are no more criminals, there won't need to be any police force either. A police force 1/100th the size could keep the peace just as easily. All the prison guards and trial judges could disappear too. The fact is all of these workers are unnecessary. Only brutality is necessary to stop crime. None of these people are adding value to the environment by deterring crime, because the American People can choose to eliminate crime whenever they want, regardless of what cops or prison guards or judges do or don't do. Crime rates have never been dependent on anti-crime workers. They vary entirely by the People's will to fight crime. That variable has been shown over and over by Giuliani and others.
Next there's the bureaucracy itself. With a citizen's dividend, an automated check that arrives in your bank account every month for $1,000, all social workers could be replaced by a simple central computer. All the social workers who go around distributing section 8 vouchers, food stamps, medicaid, medicare, social security, welfare, and every other benefit under the sun could be fired. They serve no known purpose except as paper pushers. I assume their job is to see to it that people who don't qualify for a benefit program don't receive it, and those who do qualify for a benefit program do receive it. But this job becomes (rightfully) superfluous when we treat all our citizens equally by giving everyone the exact same amount of public benefit, with their mere citizenship being qualification enough. In this way, we can fire all social workers and, at the same time, give tremendously more social aid to everyone. All social workers are simply parasitic middlemen who suck from the teat of our compassion to extract their own, completely unfair share.
Once everyone supported by the government was fired, the employment picture wouldn't be 16, or 20% unemployed, according to who you believe. It would be something like 70% unemployed. Even this isn't enough though. How many private businesses live off of nothing but conning people out of their money? I would say all insurance salesmen ((of course, auto insurance and now health insurance is mandated by the government, so they were parasites already.)) Most bankers. Any construction or real estate worker who relied on loans from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (read, all of them.) Credit Card businesses that actively encourage people to go into debt so that they can collect usurious interest forever. And all the companies that rely on making junk, and then updating it, so that customers have to constantly buy new versions every year of their product. It used to be that if you bought something -- a knife, or a backpack, you could use it your entire life. Now cars, computers, phones, everything breaks in just a couple years, and if doesn't break the software becomes obsolete and its no longer compatible with the outside world, so it may as well be broken. This universal junk sales strategy is just like the Monsanto seed strategy. They will sell sterilized seeds, but not fertile seeds, to customers, which makes you have to go back to them every year for a new crop. It would be easily possible to make fertile seeds that farmers would only have to buy once, cheap medicine sold for pennies instead of thousands of dollars, and open-source software that could be downloaded for free -- except for copyright laws, the biggest swindle of them all.
Companies, relying on copyright monopolies, drive the prices of everything through the roof. These copyrights are enforced at gunpoint. Therefore any company that makes its money from copyright enforcement is just another mugger, relying on the guns of the government to squeeze customers of their money.
Copyrights did not used to last 100 years. They were lucky to last 10 years. However, over the course of our Republic, their length has been extended again and again, until now everything is a monopoly that no one can compete with or infringe upon. Since the entire business world is selling a copyright protected product, it has a monopoly and can sell at any price the customer can bear. I've shown earlier many ways we could scrap copyright protections while still protecting businesses and allowing them to make reasonable profits. It isn't true that the current copyright system is necessary for any new inventions to be made or for companies to defray the costs of their initial capital investments. Nor is it even true that copyrighted products are better than their free alternatives, which would thrive in a world without copyrights.
Therefore anyone profiting from a copyright anywhere in their business model isn't legitimately making their money, and is just part of the gunpoint-taxpayer-funded mugger's alliance.
I would add to this list of fraudulent businesses anyone with slick advertising but no 'there' there. For instance, restaurants that serve tiny meals for hundreds of dollars that don't taste as good as a Subway sandwich. Or clothes with a designer label that cost hundreds of dollars that, without the label but mimicking everything else, only cost ten dollars. Or jewelry made out of diamonds and other precious gems that, to anything but a microscope, would look the exact same if made out of cheaper alternatives.
Also, all oil companies, who rely on the public subsidy of the military, which is constantly fighting wars in the Middle East to keep oil companies in business. If oil was unavailable due to the insecurity of the third world, we would have had to change to alternative energy long ago. But since our taxpayer funded military continuously intervenes and keeps the peace, allowing oilmen to move in and do business, oil is still viable -- but only because the cost of the military is not factored into the price of oil, which it should be.
Stock brokers and the entire wall street crowd are also a wholesale con. It's been shown that they do no better managing investments than a monkey with a dart board. Everyone would have done better to simply buy a general index of the Dow Jones than to rely on any particular investment group. They make nothing but smoke and mirror products, "derivatives" and "credit default swaps," that do nothing but pretend to do something while earning massive unearned wealth.
If all of these private workers were also fired, who would be left? Maybe 10% of the workforce? Who knows. The exact number will never be known, but the general theme is assured: Some microscopic number of Americans are doing all of the work in America, and everyone else is just an ingenious parasite who has found a way to steal from them. The unemployed, by stealing the least, are therefore the second most honorable group in America, directly behind the producer class.
The producer class is the tiny group of entertainers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, farmers (who aren't farming ethanol or subsidized sugar farmers etc), miners, manufacturing workers, managers who organize it all and accountants who keep the books honest. Add in a few honest people here and there and you have the entire picture. A typical producer is someone like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs founded Apple, and it was doing fine. Then he quit, and Apple tanked. 16 years later he came back, introduced new products, new advertising campaigns, new store designs, etc, and Apple became one of the richest companies on Earth, changing the entire world with it beloved gadgets. There could be no simpler value-producing example than Steve Jobs, who is probably worth trillions of dollars to the market, nevermind the billions he's been paid.
Producers like Steve Jobs can afford to help everyone else in America. They can afford to give everyone else in America a lowly $12,000 a year. For one thing, government spending is already half of GDP. The GDP per capita last year was around $47,000. Therefore, the government is already spending $23,500 per person per year. The citizen's dividend is half of that. Therefore, we could half government spending, by getting rid of all of our parasitic government functions, while still giving a high quality of life for everyone in America. The only losers in this function are the parasite workers themselves, who used to lord themselves over their inferiors, the unemployed, by bragging about how they had a job and the unemployed didn't. They would also make much less than they were able to extract from the producers at gunpoint, enriching themselves but no one else, doing no actual work but securing vast fortunes, like the Wisconsin teachers who, through various pensions and the like, were being paid over $100,000 a year doing precisely nothing (as we pointed out, teachers have not taught the dumb, who fail all their tests, and cannot help the smart, who are smarter than the teachers and have no use for them in the first place.) Everyone else is benefited. The producer class would pay half as much in taxes (the only people paying taxes are the top 10%, everyone else is a net tax beneficiary.) The unemployed would have all their needs met. And the parasites would finally receive justice. The same compassion we afford everyone else, but not a single cent of tribute.
The Citizen's Dividend won't pass for a simple reason -- currently the parasites outnumber the unemployed and the producers. It is in their self-interest, in terms of money and status, that they retain their hold on the status quo. They enjoy extracting money at gunpoint while pretending to be holy, productive, valuable employed folk. They enjoy pretending to be the middle class instead of what they really are, simply the successfully parasitic class. However, this status quo is not in equilibrium. This is because unemployment is going to continue to rise, and rise, and rise, as free trade and machinery displace more and more jobs, and government deficits require more and more cuts in public spending, until the majority of voters won't be parasites anymore. They will be the unemployed, and they will need the Citizen's Dividend to live, just like the people they looked down upon in the past. At that point, they'll suddenly see the light and realize that the unemployed deserved compassion and respect all along.
Current employment levels are unsustainable. Computers continue to improve, doing jobs humans won't or can't do for less, 24 hours a day. Meanwhile, the US government faces a 100 trillion plus deficit, and is going to have to cut spending somewhere, which translates directly into fewer government supported jobs. Private jobs don't exist (the article linked shows there are 7 applicants for every open job in the market today), therefore any public job losses will translate directly into higher unemployment. Soon 90% of America will be unemployed, whether we like it or not. At that time, people's stomachs will overrule their pride, and the Citizen's Dividend will finally pass.
For now, the parasites can have their laugh. But nothing lasts forever.
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