The High Cost of Crap

 

We've all heard about the gi-normous costs of paying welfare to all the lazy people who don't want to work and how all those billions of taxpayer $$$ are being siphoned away from decent, upstanding folks, and discouraging them from becoming job-creating entrepreneurs and it constitutes a crippling drain on society as the parasites and the moochers get the public housing and the free food and the clothes and the females push out babies every year to get that cool $1,000 a month (or whatever) for each ward of the state they produce.

And even though our society has been brought to its knees by this siphoning off of the life-force to subsidize the lazy "useless eaters" the lib-left shitheads continue to tax and tax hardworking types until there's no more blood to be obtained by that stone and society descends into anarchy. And THEN those lazy welfare bums are going to find the state sugar-daddy is dead. And they'll probably die from SHOCK when they realize they're going to have to actually WORK to survive. (Growing food, building their own housing, finding their own fuel, whatever.)

Of course, in reality, this is all overblown, fear-fueled right-wing delusion. I mean, the part about society collapsing under the weight of the "socialism" of leftist politicians granting welfare to lazy people in return for their votes. (It never dawns on the people propagating this tale of vote-buying that poor people vote less proportionately than wealthier people.) The facts are that most people on welfare aren't on it for very long. Often they're the working-poor who suffer from precarious employment in a "flexible" 21st-Century, neo-liberal labour market. Often it's a woman with a few kids who left an abusive partner, and who was not in paid employment and who cannot find paid employment in the absence of affordable daycare. [This anti-welfare thesis also fails to account for the observable fall in the income provide by welfare payments to the poor over the decades. Supposedly, even though the money is MUCH less than what people got in the 1970's, more and more people, a veritable flood, are pouring on to the system, threatening to swamp us all.]

Yes, yes. Everyone knows an anecdote about a layabout substance abuser receiving welfare. Or a single-mother who continues to have children while on welfare. But Toronto has about 2.5 million people. Ontario has about 11 million people. Canada has around 35 million people. That's a lot of people. Of course you can find anecdotes about a few individuals who seem to live up to the "parasite on society" meme. But this is a minority of the small minority of the population that is on welfare. Most people want to work. The minimum wage in Ontario is insufficient to afford an average one-bedroom apartment nowadays. And the full-time minimum wage paycheque is more that double what a single individual gets from welfare.

Society isn't crumbling because of the welfare state. It never was either. This theory is (I believe) a product of the general sense of unease produced by the larger amygdala of the right-wing brain. 

But one thing that nobody seems to talk about is the high-cost to human civilization of making and consuming crap. Garbage that we don't need. They'll talk all the time about how much money it costs to provide housing and a subsistence to poor people. When there's a blackout they'll talk about the dollar value of the lost output. Or if people miss work because of accidents or hangovers, there's a monetary price that this costs "the economy" or society. But what about business-as-usual?

Don't we see it as a waste of resources when we manufacture mountains of useless, unnecessary consumer products? The human physical labour and thinking ability that goes into designing, building and distributing garbage are wasted resources. The money we spend as consumers on products that we don't need, that don't last and are occasionally damaging to our health, should be considered as wasted as well.

But according to our culture, everyone has to justify their existence by selling something. Capitalism rests on the idea that you can make people want what you're selling via brainwashing campaigns of marketing and advertising. So everyone's hustling, thinking up crap that they'll try to convince people to buy. And it's a never-ending treadmill of garbage. 

I was going to say more but I'll just finish by saying that this is no way to run a sustainable civilization.