>By the way, Gar, I resent your seer at my profession, as if good lawyering were a matter of sleazy and misleading rhetorical appeals. Good lawyering is about producing good arguments.
Because a good lawyer would never, ever, ever use a debating trick, or an argument that appeals to emotion rather than strict reason.
>I knwo that yoiu and Sreve don't think you want to send the intellectuals to the countryside, but I hope to make it clear that if you advocate the proposal as described here, that is what you would be doing.
Well you've asserted it repeatedly. I don't believe that constitutes proof.
> let the workers who (in a decent socialist society) manage production decide.
Why stop there. If workers in a particular factory decide they'd rather sell the means of production to a factory owner, put the money into vaction propery and work for wages, why not let them?
Obviously some decision are made at a soical level, not at a case by case basis.
But Parecon wont occur unless it is chosen democratically. It depends on free information flow. A coerced Parecon would collapse within a really short time.
And there are ways of measuring desirabiltiy of jobs. Assume a Parecon revolution. No job balancing occurs immediately because everone needs training. So four years after the revolution training has been done to allow for fairly balance job complexes. (Or seven. Or nine) Job balancing begins. People get together and figure out how to balance their job complexes as best they can. (And if there is not really widespread support for this, it never gets to that stage.) OK, so at the end of it all these job complexes are set up that are intended to be balance.
For a given amount of effort each job pays the same per hour. (And allocation of labor is seperate issue - one reason I hate to discuss it on a list; too many technical things to discuss at once in an environment like this. ) If you work a little less hard, (in terms of productive effort) you make a little less. If you work a little harder, you make a little more. OK, each job complex has a certain number of people qualified to do it. If the jobs are (on average) equally attractive - then each job should atract (on average) the same ratio of actual qualified applicants to potential qualifed as any other. Of course this won't happen; the first attempt won't get it right. But now you will know that any job that attracts a higher ratio of qualified applicants to potetial qualified appllicants in unbalanced in having too big a percent of the fun stuff. And any job that attracts to few has too much of the rote and unpleasant work. And you can rebalance. We have market-like iterative feedback as to whether job complexes are balanced or not!
>One would hop that feminist consciousness were further advanced. So women's work has little do s=do with the economy! Joanna, Kelly, no response?
More evasive argument JKS. We are talking relative balance between empowering and rote chores. You are counting the chores you do at home as part of the complex. But everyone else has the same chores. So if your paid work involves more pleasant and empowering tasks than the average bear has, then on average you have a more pleasant total complex - even if chores are counted. You are bringing it up in a context that implies othewise. I might say you are too smart to use a completely invalid argument like that accidentally. But this would only lead to another lawyer joke; but unlike most attorneys I know, you don't seem to care for lawyer jokes - so we will skip it for the moment. And I just know that as a courtesy in return you will drop the term "Maoist".