Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 06:08:15 +0100 (CET)
From: Joacim Persson <joacim-AT-ymex.net>
Subject: Re: History, Curious, eh wot?


On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, Bryan Moore wrote:

> I am an American. I have the unique perspective of living in the richest 
> country in the world. We consume absurd amounts of every possible resource, 
> much more than we could possibly need.

And also (consequently) produces more per capita. (Not proportionally to
energy consumption -- efficiency varies too.)

But we shouldn't count production per capita.
In this industrialised world, only a fraction of the produced value is
actually the result of human labour. A "worker" is someone pushing a button
on a machine, a machine not seldom powered, directly or indirectly, by
oil; and the "worker's" main problem is therefore overweight, because he
eats more than he actually works. There are no workers and so there is no
"working class". There's only the "greedy, lazy, fat bastards class". ;)

When a satirical cartoonist a hundered years ago made a drawing of a
"capitalist", he made him really fat. Nowadays I hear overweight mentioned
as a "poverty syndrome". Thus speaks those who have completely lost the
perspective on what poverty is.