> Paul Henry Rosenberg wrote:
>
> > > >
> > > > I think this is a terribly out-of-date 19th-century view -- and
> > > > puritanical to boot! Today the problem isn't scarcity, but abundance.
> > > > It's overproduction that killing us. And above all overproduction of
> > > > "goods" that are, on balance, more bad than good.
>
> So here's some non-ad-hominem info.
>
> 1. Nutrition.
How long has it been since Diet For A Small Planet? And how much work has Food First done since then?
The capitalist system turns one solution into 2 problems. What else is new?
Giving up food OUR problem as part of solving the 3rd World food problem is NOT giving up GOODS, it's giving up BADS.
(McLibel is just the latest book I've read which reinforces this view.)
> Refugees
Result primarily from their deprivation and political powerlessness. These can be eliminated WITHOUT increasing our deprivation and political powerlessness.
> Women
Mark's points here were a subset of food.
> Children
Mark's points here were a subset of food.
> MICRONUTRIENTS
Mark's points here were a subset of food.
> GDP
GDP correlation with social-welfare sensitive measures has been VERY poor in the US for the last generation.
My point is PRECISELY that shifting to a social-welfare guided system can improve the social welfare of all, regardless of whether our GDP goes down. Such a shift cannot be achieved by a capitalist system (except partially and temporarily, under extreme duress, such as competetion with a viable socialist alternative.)
> Douglas L. Kruse, a Rutgers University economist, worked with the AP to
> estimate the number of children working illegally in the United States.
> His findings: 290,200 children worked illegally in the United States last
> year; 59,600 of them were under age 14; more than 13,000 worked in garment
> sweatshops. By using child laborers rather than legal workers, employers saved $155
> million. Compared with the 2 million children who worked in the United States a
> century ago, these numbers may seem small. But in the larger context of a
> globally conscious, humane market, they are astronomical.
>
> How much stuff is there? Abunbdance or scarcity?
Removing children from the workforce was a key component in promoting greater distributional equity. Their return to the workforce is a symptom of the sharp erosion of such equity. Just because Ronald Reagan told us we had to choose between equity and abundance doesn't mean that we should believe him.
ONE of my key points is that inequity, combined with advertising--the everyday propaganda of late capitalism--produces artificial needs, the satisfaction of which produces net social loss of wealth on a HUGE scale.
Eliminate inequity, and you reduce an enormous component of economic activity which is WORSE than non-productive, thereby freeing up substantial reasources for productive activity...
> Renewable Resources
... and allowing the economy to be brought into conformity with the carrying capacity of the Earth.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"