PHONETOGRAPHY

Moonscape

How do you punish a person who feels no remorse?  Along the same lines, what is a suitable punishment for those who have driven the world to financial ruin?  What retribution awaits the architects of our disaster?

Abject poverty.

The rest of their lives spent in squalor, stewing weevil-infested maize meal on a rudimentary charcoal cooker, sleeping under a tattered mosquito net on a mat covering a dirt floor, sparingly using toxic bug spray to keep the cockroaches out.  Ideally there would be some poetic justice in the choice of under-developed country in which they’d be deposited - a nation riven by resource wars fueled by first-world demand that they helped drive, or perhaps a state crippled by arbitrary debts and structural-adjustment loans (though perhaps that is a net cast too wide for any satisfying irony).

What distinguishes this punishment from simple revenge is that its “victims” would have as much freedom as most members of the society in which they find themselves.  In some cases their freedom would be greater: if they caught malaria, diarrhea, or some other disease, they would be given medicine without charge.  In other cases, it would be less.  Specifically, they would not be allowed any income greater than the what the majority of that country’s extreme poor take in: $1-2 a day - though this would be provided for them if they could not find work.

What’s more, their income would rise with that of the poorest billion.  Not that they would have any say in the matter (the poor never do - and criminals have even less), but if a decent standard of living became universal, it would be not be denied to the indicted.

Is this unfair?  Is it too lenient?

(A similar question is asked in the Propagandhi song “Iteration” - scroll to the bottom at the link for the lyrics.  I think they do a better job of answering it than I did here.)

What Might Have Been A Knife Fight

[This can be seen as an extension of my post from last week.]

Some months ago, a friend of mine went to one of those seminars about becoming and remaining wealthy.  Not exactly a “get rich quick” seminar - his goal was mostly to learn how to manage his money better.

One of the key points of this seminar was that in order to become wealthy, your “passive” income should equal and eventually surpass your “active” income.  Your goal is to make more money in your sleep (from stocks, real estate, what-have-you) than you would by working your day job.

In short, the best way to become wealthy is to never do any work yourself.  When the money you make through the labour of others surpasses the money you make on your own, you’re in the clear.

Alarm bells!  This is monstrous.

That it is accepted by many (most?) is bad enough, that it can be held up as one of the shining achievements of capitalism is despicable.  The moment our lifestyle is provided solely by others’ work is the moment exploitation begins.*  I say this, though I have a small assortment of blue chip stocks, some money in mutual funds, and money in the bank (which plays the stock market with my money, whether I want it to or not).  I’m guilty, too.

This is the crux of the problem: in order to have any sense of security (assured food and shelter) in this wretched system, one must participate in it.  It’s possible to live off the grid, but it is also isolating,  extremely work intensive, and does little to alter the grander structures.

Of course, in the wake up the ongoing financial crisis, this post may become largely irrelevant.  People still make money from rent, which is essentially charging money for something they don’t use.  There’s still money in stocks (somehow), which is speculating on the speculation that a company will continue to do well, without actually putting any funds into the company itself - all the while making money from the efforts of the people working at said company.   However, the continuing crash of real estate and the stock markets may render the notion of “passive income” defunct for all but the richest elite.  Whether all the inevitable suffering will result in positive change remains to be seen.  All we can do is keep working at it ourselves, generating our own bright futures.

* I should qualify this statement a little.  Since I am at my heart a collectivist, I definitely believe that a kind of interdependence within a community is not only acceptable, but important.  The idea of a commons (any publicly held land, good, service - see also this Wikipedia link page) is key to any well-functioning society.  The problem with passive income is that it is purely extractive - it contributes nothing to any community, save what little is siphoned off by taxes.