Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1135-1137

It is one of the fundamental changes of the last fifty years that in all Western countries the principle has been adopted that every citizen must have a minimum material security. Yet, while this principle has been adopted [sic], there is still, among most businessmen, intense hostility against it, and especially its widening application; they speak contemptuously of the welfare state as killing private initiative and the spirit of adventure, and in fighting social security measures they pretend to fight for the freedom and initiative of the worker. That these arguments are sheer rationalizations is evidenced by the fact that the same people have no qualms about praising economic security as one of the chief aims of life. One needs only to read the advertisements of insurance companies, with their promises to free their customers from insecurity which could be caused by accidents, death, sickness, old age, etc., to be aware of the important role which the ideal of economic security plays for the moneyed class, and the praise of the same aim for those in the higher income brackets is another example of man's unlimited capacity for thinking contradictory thoughts, without even making a feeble attempt to become aware of the contradiction.
Erich Fromm, 

The Sane Society, 1955
[emphasis JS]

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"It's hard on my psyche. There's no break. There's no time to breathe. I always have to think about the next step just to survive."

BOBBY BINGHAM, of Kansas City, Mo., who works three part-time jobs to make ends meet.

New York Times

Today's Headlines  Thursday, May 1, 2014

A year after the experiment had started, eleven out of thirteen had a roof above their heads. They accepted accommodation, enrolled in education, learnt how to cook, got treatment for drug use, visited their families and made plans for the future. ‘I loved the cold weather,’ one of them remembers. ‘Now I hate it.’ After decades of authorities’ fruitless pushing, pulling, fines and persecution, eleven notorious vagrants finally moved off the streets. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation did a study of this experiment.

Costs? 50,000 pounds a year, including the wages of the aid workers. In addition to giving eleven individuals another shot at life, the project had saved money by a factor of at least 7. Even The Economist concluded:

‘The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’

Why we should give free money to everyone

Rutger BREGMAN

The Correspondent
[emphasis JS]