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
developed countries, but who questions the claim that
prosperous nation the world has ever known? No one mentions that
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
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
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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