Just a minute-- are we a bunch of old women, or what? From Jack Saturday's upcoming Podcast.

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Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 58

…an equitable distribution of resources which would then allow production without exploitation and without forced consumption. These new goals are necessary for our survival. We should not allow ourselves to be blinded to this fact by the coincidence that they are also old Utopian dreams. These new goals will require us to make many changes in both our legislation and our thought patterns; one will be fundamental.

We will need to adopt the concept of an absolute constitutional right to an income.

Robert Theobald,
Free Men And Free Markets

The Human, Brain

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Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 57

IT ISN'T THAT when Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton purchased Asher B. Durand's 1849 painting "Kindred Spirits" last year she got the state of Arkansas to pass legislation specifically to save her taxes - in this case, about $3 million on a purchase of $35 million. It isn't that Walton - the world's richest woman and thirteenth-richest person (with a net worth of $18 billion, according to Forbes magazine) - scooped the painting out from under the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had banded together to try to keep it in a public collection when the New York Public Library decided to sell it off.

It isn't that Walton will eventually stick this talisman of New York cultural life and a lot of other old American paintings in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Walton family museum she's building in Bentonville, Ark., the site of Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters. After all, people in the middle of the country should get to see some good art too. It might not even be, as WalMartWatch.com points out, that the average Wal-Mart cashier makes $7.92 an hour and, because Wal-Mart likes to keep people on less than full-time schedules, works only 29 hours a week for an annual income of $11,948 - so a Wal-Mart cashier would have to work a little under 3,000 years to earn the price of the painting.
from
Not so ‘Kindred Spirits’
By Rebecca Solnit
February 19, 2006, © Los Angeles Times

An Educator Gets Educated

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Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 57

Quick. What radical social policy has had the support of the Liberal Party, the former Reform Party, the NDP, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, free-market economist Milton Friedman, the Canadian Council on Social Development, the Canadian Manufacturers Association, certain taxpayers and poverty groups, and even Richard Nixon when he was president?

The guaranteed annual income.
…

Opponents also protest that it would be helping some who are undeserving. (This mostly from those who were "born on third base and think they hit a triple"). The good fortune of inheriting wealth is "undeserved" - and tolerated. Access to the means for a dignified subsistence is deserved and should also be tolerated.
from
GAI: HERE'S A SOLUTION, WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
by Rosella Melanson

Job To Die For

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Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 55 and 56

We should not take our politicians too seriously, we should not revere them, we should not give them undue respect, they are merely our employees, they are the cleaning lady.
P. J. O’Rourke



For in a Republic, who is "the country?" Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant-- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
Mark Twain