John Kenneth Galbraith, October 15, 1908 - April 29, 2006

The answer or part of the answer is rather clear: everybody should be guaranteed a decent basic income. A rich country such as the US can well afford to keep everybody out of poverty. Some, it will be said, will seize upon the income and won't work. So it is now with more limited welfare, as it is called. Let us accept some resort to leisure by the poor as well as by the rich.

From a lecture by
John Kenneth Galbraith, 90,
(June 28, 1999) in London
on receiving an honorary doctorate
from London School of Economics.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Oct. 15, 1908- April 29, 2006


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Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 62

A poor man is not free and a destitute man is as much a prisoner as a convict; a convict generally eats better. A man who can't afford a streetcar ticket, let alone real travel, who can exercise no real choice in matters of food, clothing, and shelter, who cannot follow the siren song of the TV commercials, who can scarcely afford bus fare to the library let alone a proper education for himself or his children - is such a man free in an affluent nation? There are such men and women in Canada and their numbers are legion. Until there is a basic economic floor beneath them, these people cannot begin to participate in the whole range of what we mean when we talk glibly about a free society.
Pierre Berton,
The Smug Minority, p. 42-43

Come On Down

You have read about the inspired spring. Drink from there.
Be companions with those

Whose lips are wet with that water. Others, even though
They may be your father

Or your mother, are enemies. Leave, before they kill you!

Rumi

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 61, 62

Researchers at the University of Salford estimate that workers fake or suppress emotions in no fewer than a quarter of their conversations with colleagues and customers. According to psychologist Sandi Mann people who are forced into chronic insincerity can suffer from poor self-esteem, depression and cynicism as well as physical conditions such as headaches, sexual dysfunction and drug dependency. 'Burnout' is another consequence. Its hallmarks are emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation (where the sufferer starts to see others as objects rather than people) and a loss of satisfaction in personal achievements.
The Observer, January 19, 1997



When leaving their homes and starting the first grade, 80 percent of children in a diverse sample were found to have high self-esteem. By the fifth grade, that proportion was down to 20 percent. After finishing high school, only 5 percent still possessed it.
Gloria Steinem,
The Revolution From Within

Meaningful Work For Everyone

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Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 62

Since moral equality is not, and is not held to be, an inalterable condition, it is possible for a society that is committed to maximum economic productivity and to the moral equality of men [sic] to renege on its committments by defining the characteristics that are economically dysfunctional as vices that diminish or cancel, moral equity. In this way the lazy, the spendthrift, and people who are unwilling to take jobs and are content to remain "welfare bums" are held to have renounced their equity. But this argument avails only so long as the functioning of the economy is itself accepted as moral-- which accounts, I suppose, for the oppressive moralizing of the Victorian age, intent on impressing masses of industrial workers into a new, and obviously appalling industrial system-- which promised them, in fact, very little.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg,
The Disposal Of Libery And Other Industrial Wastes
(emphasis JS)

PIXIE-FACE ADDS TO ECONOMIC GROWTH

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Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 61

Even the dullest among us can understand
no amount of money the company pays
really compensates for the time and effort
the job takes out of our lives.
Tom Wayman

No money in poetry...

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Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 58, 59, 60

DETROIT, March 31 — Delphi, the nation's biggest auto parts maker, on Friday asked a federal judge for permission to throw out some of its labor agreements, a move that could cost 20,000 union workers their jobs and leave thousands of others with less than half their current wages.
Delphi said it would close or sell all but 8 of its 29 plants in the United States and cut 28,500 positions around the world. Beyond the 20,000 of its 33,100 hourly jobs in the United States that Delphi plans to cut, another 8,500 salaried jobs worldwide are to be eliminated.
"I took this job thinking this was my future," said Tracey Huffman, 37…
from
Car Parts Maker Moves to Break Its Union Deals
By Micheline Maynard,
NYT
Published: April 1, 2006




Youth unemployment has been one of France's biggest problems for 30 years. A quarter of those under 25 are jobless; that figure surpasses 40 percent in the troubled suburbs.
from
French Twist
By Corinne Maier
NYT
Friday, March 31, 2006



The importance to each individual of access to the means of labor will clearly diminish if and insofar as the amount of current human labor required to produce an acceptable flow of the means of life for all diminishes. For as less labor is needed, the requirement to work is less needed. The right to earn an income becomes less a prerequisite, or co-requisite of the right to an income.
C.B. Macpherson,
Democratic Theory, Essays In Retrieval