Truth and Lies
What Is Next? We have taken a step backward. Once we reverse that, once we restore the democracy that we have lost, we must set out to strengthen it. We must insure that power resides with the people and that it remains there. The aforementioned addictive quality of power means that this will be an ongoing, never-ending task for democracy, but for right now it has to do with money.
The truth is not really difficult to understand, but we have been fed such an enormous pile of lies that have gained the status of unquestioned assumptions that there is a lot of manure to bulldoze away. [THERE IS MORE HERE] This is just an outline:
- Lie #1: The Myth of Independence. The utter absurdity of this lie would be obvious to anyone who took the trouble to really think about it. Human beings are the most interdependent species that has ever existed. It is the source of our great strength; it is the reason that we dominate the earth. When people talk about wanting “independence,” what they really seek is power — power to command goods and services provided by other people. This lie is popular with the powerful because it implies that their good fortune is all their own doing and the misery of the powerless is the merely just reward of shiftless laziness.
- Lie #2: The Myth of Market Justice. This lie is interesting in that it both reinforces and contradicts Lie #1. It contradicts Number 1 in that it tacitly accepts our interdependence, since the marketplace is the link that mediates our interdependence; it reinforces it in that it is another way of asserting that we all get what we deserve. It is dependent on three assumptions, which, although fairly obviously false, are nevertheless generally accepted as true.
- Assumption #1: The Price of Something in a "Free Market" Accurately Reflects its True Worth. This more than obviously untrue, since anyone who has slightest acquaintance with elementary economics has heard about supply and demand, which together determine prices; “true worth” does not come into the equation. But somehow we have been persuaded that in a free market, supply and demand work magically together to produce a just and equitable price for everything. This is idiotic in too many ways to enumerate here, but here are a couple for starters: There is no such thing as a “free market.” There are always rules, and the rules always favor some people over others. There are always rules because markets cannot exist without them. And there are myriad ways in which powerful people can and do manipulate markets.
- Assumption #2: It's All About Hard Work. This is the convenient notion that our participation in the economy — the production of goods and services — is solely a matter of our willingness to work. This of course is all about pretending that the rich are loaded because they are such hard workers, and the poor are destitute because they are lazy. Here we get to the heart of the deception; this is the fabrication on which the whole lying edifice is constructed. Two things are necessary to produce the goods and services of any economy: labor and resources. Bob the Baker cannot make bread and cakes without flour and a furnace; Sam the Shoemaker cannot make sandals and boots without leather and tools. But here is the beauty part: if you can control the assets — if you own the factories, the flour mills, and the other supplies — you do not have to bother with work at all. Conversely, if you own nothing, you must sell your labor to the guy who does own the assets. He will take the profit made possible by your labor and give you as little as he can get away with giving you. The rules of our economy are designed to give the owners as much and the workers as little as possible. In other words, it is not about hard work; it is about ownership.
- Assumption #3: Money Is All about the Exchange of Goods and Services. The fairy tale we are told is that money was invented to facilitate the trading of goods and services. The old barter system, we were told, broke down because while Sam the Shoemaker may crave bread, it may happen that Bob the Baker has no present need of shoes. Money was invented as something of universal value that, since it could be exchanged for anything, eliminated the need for barter. There is no historical or archeological evidence that anything of the sort ever happened. No one knows how money was invented, and while it is obviously true that money facilitates the exchange of goods and services, its uses go way beyond that. Money is power. Money controls assets (see Assumption #2), and there are other ways to obtain it than by providing goods and services yourself.
- Conclusion: Our individual wealth is utterly dependent on the joint efforts of many, but there is no intrinsic relationship between what we contribute and what we receive. If you can contrive to control necessary assets or large amounts of money you need not contribute anything in the way of labor. Our system favors control of assets over labor, and provides multiple ways for the wealthy to increase their wealth without providing anything in return. And finally, the Myth of Market Justice pretends that the opposite is true: that we all get what we deserve and wealth is the reward of hard work.
On the one hand this is a rather interesting example of the ability of people to simultaneously believe two entirely contradictory ideas; on the other it is an outrageous fraud.
A System Based on Work, Not Wealth. The answer, at least in part, is to turn one part of the myth into reality. That is not the part about independence, for our profound interdependence is a simple fact of being human. It is the part about our share of the economic pie being dependent on work, not ownership. That we can change.
A New Creed. Everyone should have a right to a job doing productive labor for a living wage, and no one should have a free ride. Income based on ownership rather than labor should be discouraged; income based on rigged systems of gambling (think stock market) should be strenuously discouraged.
The goals are simple and obvious once we have cleared away the lies meant to confuse and blind us. Getting there is rather more complicated than we have room for in this abbreviated version.