Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 572-576

yes, the couch people are growing. friend of mine in virginia has three sons in their 20s. one has a successful theatre troupe in chicago. the other two, both with solid degrees in hand haven't had any jobs for years except for at walmart and now both are unemployed and living at home nearing the age of 30! and this is happening everywhere, a lost generation. and then there are those like me who in mid-50s is considered dead because i haven't had a job for years... good thing i'm an entrepreneur and can sell my art. good thing my wife finally landed a job or we'd be on the street. and this is with both of us having 25 year-long resumes
tazdelaney

AAA

If Straight A’s are a dream come true, then guess which dream it is. It’s that dream where you’re running late for class and suddenly remember you forgot to do all the assignments, or you flat-out forgot you even enrolled and now you have to go sit the final. If I had it all to do over again, I’d relax a little bit, have a lot more fun, go clubbing, hit on girls, go to the beaches for Spring Break, get wasted at parties. These are the memories one can look forward to looking backward on later– not memories of memorizing theorems and pounding flashcards.
Sam Alexander

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself [sic]; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men [sic] to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody."
Thomas Jefferson, 1813

So what’s the answer? Reorganizing the economy to make sure the vast middle class has a larger share of its benefits. Remaking the basic bargain linking pay to per-capita

productivity.
RobertReich
AAA

One way to change the attitude would be to get rid of that word "welfare" and substitute some such phrase as "income maintenance." In an affluent society there ought to be an income floor under every man [sic] below which society will not allow him to go - and this ought to come as a right and not as a charity.
Pierre Berton, The Smug Minority,
pp. 114