Sunday, June 12, 2011

Humanity at the Crossroads: Business and Jobs

From: Bill Totten (BillTottenWeblog)

 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25124

 

Humanity at the Crossroads: Business andJobs

 

by Professor John Kozy

Global Research (June 05 2011)

 

What's known as the economy has not only had horrid consequences, it is

ultimately unsustainable. In two centuries, it has turned human beings

into beasts of burden and their rulers into mere teamsters, it has

polluted the Earth, extinguished uncounted species and exterminated

millions of people, it has denuded forests, melted glaciers, and is in the

process of depleting un-renewable natural resources. Someday, no natural

resources will be available for industrial processing, and this economy's

assets will turn to dusted rust.

 

The economy, which is nothing but a collection of abstract ideas to which

humanity is being sacrificed, has brought all of this about. If human

beings and life in general survive, humanity will have to revert to its

natural state in which jobs are done in cooperation with nature rather

than in opposition to it.

 

Conventional wisdom is seldom wise; worse, it is often completely false.

And when it falls into the category of the obvious, it is doubly dangerous

for its obviousness makes it more difficult to question.

 

No one defines the word 'freedom' or lists the things Americans are free

to do that people in other advanced democratic nations cannot, but who

questions the claim that the American people are the freest on earth? No

one provides a comparison of poverty in America to poverty in other

developed countries, but who questions the claim that America is the most

prosperous nation the world has ever known? No one mentions that America

has not decisively won a major war in more than thirty years although it

has fought perhaps a dozen or more, yet who questions the claim that

America has the strongest military power yet created? All of these

conventional, obvious bits of common wisdom are dangerous; they lead

Americans into a false sense of complaisant superiority that is bringing

about the country's undoing.

 

There are many such conventional, obvious bits of common wisdom. An

encyclopedia would be required to list them all, but there is one so

astoundingly false that I have never been able to understand why anyone

believes it even though everyone seems to: businesses create jobs!

 

In fact, even deciding what this assertion means is difficult. If it means

that only businesses create jobs, it is patently false. Not only do

governments and even individuals create jobs, jobs existed for millennia

before any businesses as we know them came into being. Ever heard of

hunters and gatherers? Hunting and gathering are jobs that people

worldwide engaged in. So are herding, trapping, fowling, planting,

harvesting, building, skinning, preserving as in drying, cleaning, and the

ubiquitous cooking. When a mother cooks her family's dinner, she is doing

a job but not for a business. When an otherwise unemployed person is hired

to cut your lawn or clean your house, you, not a business, are creating a

job. In fact, throughout most of human history, these were the types of

jobs human beings engaged in; they did not work for businesses! Businesses

did not create any jobs. Anyone who doesn't know this should never have

been awarded a diploma from any university, not an MBA, a PhD in

economics, or a JD. Not even a simple BA.

 

American politicians and economists take this unquestioned falsehood and

attempt to make it the keystone of an economic policy and commercial law

that makes the company more important than the species. People are made

into factory fodder to be used like any raw material; buyers are cautioned

to beware because merchants are expected to cheat, the courts will uphold

a merchant's claim against a buyer but deny a similar claim made by a

buyer against a merchant. In other words, the company is placed in a

superior position to the worker, the job holder, the consumer, the person.

The economy becomes a Hegelian master-slave relationship which has never

been synthesized.

 

But what the proponents of this false bit of conventional wisdom fail to

recognize is that it has a logical converse. Businesses do, of course,

hire people and thus create jobs. Business is a necessary condition for

jobs of this kind. But in like manner, the availability of labor is a

necessary condition for the existence of business. One is no more

important than the other. There is no logical or even practical reason to

value the business differently than the job-holder. Just as businesses

make jobs possible, workers make businesses possible. The only reason

business has a predominant position in the economy is that policy makers

have either eliminated or prohibited most other kinds of jobs. If you want

people to be only factory fodder, prohibit them from being anything else.

 

One wonders, of course, how people who held jobs for millennia without the

intercession of businesses suddenly, almost overnight in historical terms,

became factory fodder. It happened because the masses were driven from the

land. They were driven into cities where the kind of work people had done

for millennia was no longer available. The only critters available for the

hunt are other people and the only stuff to be gathered are other people's

property. Industrial capitalism turned hunting and gathering, the most

basic forma of work, into crimes. Property became more important than

people.

 

How did this come about? We shall never know. The event has been buried by

the dust of time, but we do know who tried to justify it.

 

John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government argues that there are

three natural rights - life, liberty, and property. Thomas Jefferson, who

was familiar with Locke's writing, said, "Oh, no. That's a recipe for

tyranny by the status quo" and altered the trilogy into life, liberty, and

the pursuit of happiness. What Jefferson saw and Locke didn't was that if

all the property were already owned by the aristocracy, making property a

right gave exclusive possession of it to those who already had it, which

made the Hegelian master-slave relationship irresolvable, and so it still

stands today. Worse, it has been chiseled into a legal wall of separation

by the American federal courts when they imported English Common Law into

American jurisprudence.

 

What's known as "the economy", industrial capitalism, has not only had

horrid consequences, it is ultimately unsustainable. In two-short

centuries, it has turned human beings into beasts of burden and their

rulers into mere teamsters, it has polluted the Earth's atmosphere, its

streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans, extinguished uncounted species and

exterminated millions of human beings, it has denuded forests, melted

glaciers, and is in the process of depleting un-renewable natural

resources. Someday, no natural resources will be available for industrial

processing, and this economy's assets will turn to dusted rust. Industrial

Capitalism carried within it the seeds of its own dissolution. Its process

is a physical reductio ad absurdum. If human beings in particular and life

in general survive this collapse, will humanity revert to its natural

state? Will the jobs people do be done for the benefit of human beings

rather than for an artificially constructed economy?

 

The economy's leaders have indirectly brought all of this about by their

policy choices, but the economy has done it directly. What is happening to

humanity is being brought about by the economy which now controls the

actions of leaders and the fates of people. Everything that happens is a

consequence of it, and it is nothing but a collection of abstract ideas to

which humanity is being sacrificed.

 

Some will say that technology will be our savior. But that is nothing but

a belief based upon a hope, a unicorn on the back of a chimera, that is,

too, more likely false than not. Technology has been far more destructive

than constructive. Every technological advance has brought with it its own

horrors. Business is not a human benefactor, and technology is just

another kind of business. It does not exist for you and me any more than

hedge funds do. It exists only for the sake of the economy.

 

_____

 

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on

social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the US Army

during the Korean War, he spent twenty years as a university professor and

another twenty years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in

formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of

commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for

newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/

and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.

 

 

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