Jobs, Jobs, Jobs!

"We need more jobs!" This has been the battle-cry of almost all politicians. People need a job to generate an income to be able to pay for the basic necessities of life. Here's a reminder of how dumb this whole idea really is.

_{source: Pixabay}

The idea that everyone needs to work for a living is just a lie, it's never been true in all of human history. Even in the hunter-gatherer nomadic tribes, only the strong, young men and women worked. And they provided enough food for the entire tribe. As long as we've existed, there's always been a minority who produced enough for everybody, including the elderly, the sick, the disabled, the children and the caretakers. The individualist and capitalist notion that every individual has to work to earn the right to exist is fairly new, and fairly stupid I might add.

In the 1950s many scholars, economists and sociologists predicted that we would have a 15 hour workweek somewhere in the 2020s; they predicted that the modern world as a whole would become richer and richer, while simultaneously the number of jobs, the amount of labor needed to produce all that wealth, would decrease. They were right about the riches, but wrong about the workweek as we've stubbornly hung on to the industrial capitalist model that started our way upward. And for a while things were moving in the right direction; in the 1960s and early 1970s workweeks did get shorter and pension-ages did get lower.

This is the natural progression, it's what's to be expected in a world of intelligent beings who invent more and more ways to make their lifes easier, better, more comfortable. And we've done it. We've reached a point in our evolution where there are no real shortages left; there are more empty buildings than there are homeless people, there's more food than mouths to feed and, most importantly, there are not merely enough jobs to justify every individual having to work 40 hours per week. Not by a long shot. We've reached a point where having a job should be seen as a privilege, not as a necessity. To the contrary; we already produce way too much. We burn the excess of food to keep prices up, we destroy the millions of cars that aren't sold, the same with mobile phones. And yet we keep on demanding the creation of even more jobs so we can make even more crap, destroying the planet in the process.

We're really not that smart of a species if we truly think that capitalism, the system of eternal growth, massive concentration of wealth and power, and limitless exploitation of the planet and its inhabitants, is the best we can do. We don't need more jobs, we need more free time. With more free time, without having to worry where tomorrow's bread or rent comes from, we're free to let our creativity run amok. We'll see an explosion of artists, musicians and inventors conspiring to make all our lifes more interesting and better. Simply redistributing the wealth won't do. A Universal Basic Income won't do. These are just excuses to keep this failing system intact. We need to change the system itself, which means we need to become the owners of the means of production. Because if everyone owns something, no one owns it. And that's the natural state of affairs; no one owns the planet we all have to live on and live from.

This concept is difficult to grasp for most people, which is unfortunate. And it won't work as an independent island of like-minded idealists, just like the same won't work for capitalist libertarians; Atlas Shrugged is a fantasy, and a nightmarish one at that. The only way it'll work, in my opinion, is if we let go of this deeply entrenched idea that we all have to individually fend for ourselves and ourselves alone. It's dumb. It never used to be that way. What's also dumb is to first concentrate wealth and then redistribute it; it shouldn't be concentrated in the first place, so we don't have to quibble about the redistribution. That's all I have for today, so excuse the little rant and watch the little video linked below; it explains in 5 minutes how dumb we are and why a Universal Basic Income is just another excuse to prolong the status quo.

_{The colossal problem with universal basic income | Douglas Rushkoff | Big Think}

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