Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Crazy Proposals

I'm sure these ideas wouldn't pass muster with the "Saddam Hussein's WMDs are going to kill us all!!!" crowd. (Or the "The Muslims are sneakily going to impose Sharia law on all of us and left-wing multiculturalism is stopping us from fighting back!!!" or the "Global warming isn't happening but if it is it's the sun's fault and I know this because I read scientists and pundits who are paid by the oil industry and not the climate scientists who have been corrupted by the nefarious academic grants complex and who have resisted the tawdry offerings of the oil industry to debunk the whole global warming scam" or the "the amount of loans given to poor African-Americans by banks strong-armed by a series of Democratic federal governments and that couldn't be paid back is what almost sank Wall Street and caused the international financial crisis" crowds for that matter!)

But here they are:

The default setting for thinking about other human beings is to wish them well and try to ensure that they don't starve to death, get poisoned, be enslaved or get murdered.

That being the case, the wealth of the world should be redistributed enough to ensure that everyone gets a subsistence income to allow them confidence in the necessities of life. (Which would go a long way to reducing the "children as a retirement fund" behaviour that people in desperately poor societies are forced to engage in.)

Set about designing an international economy that is based on the continued provision of the necessities of life for everyone, rather than the "build a lot of environmentally destructive junk and sell it to those people fortunate enough to be able to afford it so as to justify your continued existence" system that is leading the human race to its destruction.

That's all.

5 comments:

karen said...

And while we are at it could we quit building condominiums and rock quarries and hydro dams on our prime (and becoming scarce!) agricultural land? Honestly so much of what we are doing reminds me of "The Gift of the Magi" (She sells her lovely long hair to buy him a nice fob for his pocketwatch. He sells his nice pocketwatch to buy pretty combs for her hair.) One of these days we will have homes and toys and diversions up the ying yang, but nothing to eat and befouled water and air. Yay. Stupid species.

Anonymous said...

The problem is, it's the gigantic corporations that have all the money, and they don't believe in sharing. They don't believe in paying taxes either.

It is the huge corporations, who call all of the shots. Politicians are merely their mouthpieces

thwap said...

karen,

You're another one of those "unserious" people I've been hearing so much about these days! Don't you know that useless junk is the very stuff of life?

Anonymous,

Capitalism is our civilization's driving philosophy now. And the most powerful capitalists have pursued the corporate form of organization. It's a very efficient structure in many respects, but they're over-powerful. But they're not invulnerable.

Owen Gray said...

All very reasonable proposals, thwap. The problem is, the more wealth someone acquires, the more unreasonable he or she becomes.

thwap said...

Owen,

Ain't dat da truth! Which is why we've got to get them away from the steering wheel!