What If ... ******* Imagine what might happen if one morning we all woke up to discover that money had disappeared and all the banks’ computers had had their memory wiped. Imagine if the governments of the world begged their citizens to carry on as usual while they worked out what to do about the problem. Now if everyone went off to work just the same, waved their hands over the cash register as they left the supermarket, even bank clerks and insurance workers turned up and scribbled numbers on bits of paper, just the same as they had the week before, life would go on just the same. It wouldnt make a damn bit of difference to our lives that money had actually disappeared. But let’s suppose that after a little while people started to question whether they really needed to go on doing just the same things as they always used to do. What then, if people were to start changing the way they lived, if advertising workers turned to making experimental movies instead, for example and factory workers just decided to work shorter hours - would we be any worse off? Probably 90% of what we spend our time doing is a total waste of time anyway. So if 90% of people just decided to sit at home doing nothing, we’d probably be no worse off. Better off even, from the point of view of the environment especially. But I think that once people doing socially useless work had been idle for a few weeks, once they had given themselves a long overdue break, people, being human beings, would want to go back to doing something useful. Think of all those things - like health, education, aged-care for example - that society “can’t afford” nowadays, which would attract the efforts of people no longer interested in useless activity in advertising, banking, check-out counters and so on. All of sudden door-to-door salespeople and ticket inspectors would be history, and we’d be swamped in budding musicians, poets, golfers and sculptors. Couldn’t be too bad. But maybe the sewerage workers would start to lose interest in their work as well? Then we’d have to find a more environmentally rational way of dealing with waste, wouldnt we? And people would have to put in to solve the problem, or we’d all be in deep trouble. But does not all history teach us that nothing brings out the best in people, their spirit of self-sacrifice and their ingenuity better than a national crisis. Overcoming the difficulty posed by those jobs that no-one wants to do would pose the first great challenge. How could we plan the social division of labour and international trade without the aid of that fantastic accounting measure and ultimate lever of power and planning - money? How would we prevent enormous imbalances of productive effort without the aid of the market? Well, I don’t know, but we could hardly do worse than we do at the moment, could we? In one part of the world, the main ills are obesity and boredom, while the majority of the world fear starvation; a few wealthy families command more wealth than the entire population of the poorest countries of the world, people slave in sweat shops in Thailand or beg on the streets of Calcutta, while the supermarkets overflow with candy and pet food in the West. A world in which people endeavoured to meet the needs of other people, even given the misunderstandings, miscalculations and general anarchy with which they might go about it, could not be any worse than the world we live in at the moment where planning the distribution of the world’s benefits has been given over to a malevolent deity called the global economy.....
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 17:01:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015