Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 14:39:08 -0500
From: whitfb-AT-amanda.dorsai.org (Whit Blauvelt)
Subject: Re: Blind Rage


At 02:23 AM 11/14/95 MEZ, avant-garde-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu wrote:

>So let's not close our eyes and turn our backs on our fellow human beings
>simply by defining them away as abstractions best kept out of sight and out
>of mind.
>
>One of our American problems is that our country was founded in rebellion
>against unjust authority.  But we are not fighting against a king any more;
>we are fighting ourselves.

We have a very sophisticated government with an effective economic policy
based on keeping 6% of the workforce unemployed as part of a strategy for
keeping the wages of another 80% of the workforce steady or dropping.

Spending money on government programs to help people find work in a world
where the game is rigged so that there will always be 6% who can't find it
is - however wonderful it may be in specific cases - essentially a coverup
of the essential cruelty of a game tailored to maintain low wages and
unemployment. It makes it look like the government is good, when in fact its
hands are bloody here.

So the right is right about the futility of current welfare programs - as
long as we have a society that devotes substantial resources to preventing
full employment. If we were to change course, encouraging full employment
and rising wages consistently from the various offices of government (and
quasi-government, e.g. the Federal Reserve), then welfare and job training
would not only make sense, but be enormously productive.

Meanwhile, the authority is unjust. And its "welfare" a sham. "Irony"?
"Contradiction"? - or just plain ugly?

\/\/ I-I I T         = < [  whitfb-AT-dorsai.org  ] > =          nyc usa



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