Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1076-1078

"No politician wants to mention “redistribution” because it conjures up images of worthy “makers” forced to hand over hard-earned income to undeserving “takers.”

It seems to me to be the other way around. The "worthy makers" are the working people who actually make everything, from hamburgers to heavy machinery. The "undeserving takers" are the capitalists who leverage their wealth to take a much bigger share of revenues from business than they reasonably deserve. If income is "hard-earned," it is by the workers much more than by the owners.

Income distribution has been decided by owners for much too long; who thinks they divide it fairly, unless one thinks that "fairly" is to be permitted to take as big a share as humanly possible for themselves, leaving as little as possible for employees? It's high time that some other paradigm besides GREED (e.g. NEED) determined how profits are distributed.

yankee2 

Comment on

The Time for Wealth Redistribution Is Now

Robert Reich's Blog / By Robert Reich

AlterNet

[emphasis JS]

Elsewhere, Weeks remarks that we should not underestimate just how much hesitation about anti-work positions is rooted in fear. Fear of idleness, fear of hedonism—or to borrow a phrase from Erich Fromm, fear of freedom. It is relatively easy to say that in the future I will be what I am now—a worker, just perhaps with more money or more job security or more control over my work. It is something else to imagine ourselves as different kinds of people altogether. That, perhaps, is the unappreciated value of Occupy Wall Street encampments and similar attempts to carve out alternative ways of living within the interstices of capitalist society. It may be, as critics often point out, that they cannot really build an alternative society so long as capitalism’s institutional impediments to such a society remain in place. But perhaps they can help remove the fear of what we might become if those impediments were lifted, and we were able to make our exodus from the world of work to the world of freedom.
Peter Frase
quoted by Uncle Vanya

Federal and state governments spend a trillion dollars a year just on these means-tested welfare programs, which does not include Social and Medicare. That is more than we spend on national defense. It adds up to roughly $17,000 per person in poverty, over $50,000 for a poor family of three. The Census Bureau estimates that our current Welfare spending totals four times what would be necessary just to give all of the poor the cash to bring them up to the poverty line, eliminating all poverty in America.

Peter Ferrara,

Forbes

[emphasis JS]