Work
THE TOIL YOKE ‑‑ WORK/JOB DILEMMAS ‑‑ WORKAHOLISM ‑‑ THE ANTS OR WE - UNION METASTASIS --
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THE TOIL YOKE
An absurd reasoning:
Suppose (according to
popularized economics):
10 factories, with 100 employees each, manufacture the same product, in the same quantity and quality.
If 5 of them close , the remaining 5 can consolidate into one and double their total production to serve the same total market, but they don't need to double the manpower for that production.
That is, the resulting 5+5=10, consolidated into ONE, without radically changing their equipment and methods,‑ now produce, with a total maximum of 600‑700 employees, or much less in some cases, what 10 factories did before with 1000 people.
Now, if the 300‑400 dismissed employees were to retain their full salaries ‑ without any obligation to work‑, the 5 factories would still reap more profits than previously, due to drastically reduced costs (roughly half as many additional buildings and conne
cted facilities, less than halved additional overhead and administration procedures, centralized operation, etc.).
With steady sales, continuous improvements, automation and technological breakthroughs, they can produce still more, better and cheaper, to a point that only a total of (ideally) 600-700, of the original 1000, would suffice on the job, while the remaining 300-400 would continue receiving their full salaries and be free to stay home, or wherever, doing or contemplating whatever they freely choose.
This is a theorized possibility within our present means.
[Main question: how dot we capitalize and expand from this stage?]
It has happened and is happening approximately as above described, with the exception that the money available for the dismissed employees is allocated in other manners than before. Also a new model and theory can be formulated and implemented on it.
Again: what if the money were given to the dismissed employees?
We know, or we are convinced, that it would not work "because of human nature as it is now".
=== With this assumption, the problem is to set our eyes on a target higher than conventional "work".
But that is what we consider higher than work may have damaging corollaries.
Fanatical beliefs, "higher" goals or ideals tend to be intolerant.
We are unable to conceive better than right/wrong, true/false and other polarizing straitjackets.
It is difficult to live with the constant pressure to do right and see the truth, and with the fear/guilt when we don't.
Our abstractions are still too simplistic.
A friend of mine was a chemist with a larger corporation. His dream was to become a geographer, but he was resigned to the reality of having to run research on polyurethanes (a special kind of plastics and elastomers) for his employer, which he had been doing for 8 years.
The management, however, had no opportunity to focus on the results; they kept him busy, just in case...
He had 2 assistants and a generous monthly budget, plus overhead.
Company policy and circumstances beyond his control left his results unnoticed and ignored.
He died young, of a heart attack.
Now, had his employer given him and his 2 assistants their full salaries just to stay home and use their time as they pleased (which they were not traines to do, Which would reqiure a separate essay..), they would have still saved the $9,000 monthly expenditure, plus overhead. According to liberal optimism, my friend and his assistants would have pursued what they liked most, (certainly with not less success), would have had a chance to be better (?) individuals, spouses and parents.
Probably, then, he would have lived longer and healthier.
Or would they have lost themselves in the morasses of those who fail because they are not supervised by more knowledgeable people?
Adolf Hitler would have cost us gigantically less, even if he had been given a life-long salary of one hundred million dollars a year, or even more, with the only condition that he would have remained a private law-abiding individual, possibly away from politics.
It is extremely probable that, early enough in his life, Hitler would have gladly obliged for just a few hundred dollars a month (a lot in the ore-Depression 1920s) , without inflation...).
Over 50 or more million lives would have been saved, the worst war and destruon in the history of mankind would have been (probably) avoided, and no one, including Hitler, would have even known of the potential evil hidden in him and/or them.
It is hard to imagine that he would have nurured his evil (if any), under those totally different conditions) under those conditions, if he had been shown a satisfactory way to fulfill his basic aspirations .
There are many small and big Hitlers (I dare to be "probably sure"...), hidden in many forms, wearing many masks.
There are educators who poison minds forever, rotten politicians, social do-gooding vampires, cynical femi- or macho-nazi -judges and lawyers.Ther e are countless producers of useless and harmful products, their armies of executives, salespeople, parasitic officials officials, corrupt professionals, opportunistic clergy, in all kinds of jobs and places...: none of them aware of the muck they are in...
They are honored and unleashed.
Theoretically, they would be much less harmful if they were given their present income just to stay home "doing nothing" (somebody could well show me that it might be wrse).
Unfortunately, how do we spot these potential evil-doers before the facts?
Then, how do they remain harmless if left idle, supported and unsupervised?
Yet, it is good to know these alternatives for whatever equivalents we may find in the future.
A great number of talented and generous people would be happier, healthier and more useful, if they were free of conformity and unemployment fears, therefore free to develop in their own preferred and most productive endeavors [when that is more than wishful thinking],
If we add the above elements together, we c.ould already have ‑ present conditions remaining intact‑ immediate financial and other gains by dismissing about one fifth of our employees,
while they retain their full salaries.
In proper fashion and slant, the abve could generate
earth-shaking progress.
But, we know that the above wishful interpretation wouldn't work.
Plenty of books have been written on the subject. Many of them took a whole life to write.The number of people who started successful qctivities ans corporations with almost nothing only after becoming hopelessly unemployed is estanding...Tthe secret is concentrating with all yur being on what to produce or create, instead of on what toget.what to obtain...
The catch in our present evolution is that we are still in the Neolithic(primitive tool making) Age.
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We are now entering the cybernetic age, which is far more significant than the "second industrial revolution".
Yet, our ideas about work are still plagued by unrealistic religious, socio-economical and psychological immaturity.
Religion tells us that man is burdened with "original sin".
Thus, man needs "toil" (that insinuates that work is not a desirable virtue...!) to expiate.
Ever found a successful politician preaching this posture?..Preaching duties would be still worse...
The voters love to hear about their rights, not about their duties.
Rights without duties become the worst sociial cancer that has destroyed many cultures, while hidden under many masks.rights socio‑economical experience is that produ become ctivity and quality suffer without competition.
Man must experience g losses and fear indigence in order to be a useful member of society.
This is parallel to the economic-psychological conviction that man is expected to beco me a dangerou s burden if he is paid without working.
If those theories are correct, we still have a long way to go before the next evolutionary step.
Before then, work is too often considered as no more than a yoke.
Then, why do politicians and other activists see the solutions of our problems in creating more jobs?
For producing what kind of result?
Aren't those jobs no more than additional yokes and delusions?
A job is an act of imposed exploitation if it does not provide needed and requested products or services people benefit from and want to pay for .
Therefore, a job created only to employ people for money is a parasitic burden that only adds to the existing misery.
Socialism and leftist labor unions want to create, protect and preserve jobs, regardless of useful productivity.
Therefore, they pursue disastrous flops.
Are happiness and success condemned to an orgasmic pattern of a hopeless
descent after an ultimate pleasure peak?
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WORK/JOB DILEMMAS
Machine was created to do man's work.
Machine was improved to do many men's work.
Science and technology have performed miracles to multiply beyond dreams the substitution of man's labor with machine's labor or automation.
Many machines can be produced in hours, at relatively low cost, whereas one man is "produced" in about 20-30 years, at much greater expense and risk.
Automation would enable us to realize freedom from labor and relegate toil to machines.
[But then, we would call toil something else, for unhappiness is inescapable after a pleasure peak.[Forget I said it.].
Anyhows, by replacing men with machines, we liberate ourselves from work slavery toward the nobility of free pursuits.
This has always been man's dream.
Now, let's use the liberal approach for a while:
A man (please, read it "man/woman" and corollary expressions), oppressed by an inescapable necessity of working, is not free to pursue his primary goals of: knowledge, truth, justice (no kiddimg....), of freedom ( physical and mentalhealth,). Perhaps also women/men, wine and song, together with Liberty, Equality and Brother/Sister-hood).
The toil oppression has become such a habit that we have lost contact with our very essence.
In fact, the problem of re-educating man to rewarding leisure shows that man has lost the ability of facing himself.
He has been educated away from his own essence and his own need for true freedom from servitude to toil.
When a machine frees a man from toil and takes his place, something almost holy takes place, which we should facilitate by giving the liberated man all the assistance he needs in the new task of facing himself and the disciplines of true freedom.Instead, we punish the freed man into the disgrace of "unemployment", thereby prostituting machine's liberating function into that of a profit‑making contraption.
Humans are still prisoners of the quagmire of the combined work ethics and "adversary system" that seeks peace by making war.
The freed one is defeated or unlucky if he/she does not rejoin the ruthless struggle.
The alternative is falling into the hands of glib do-gooders who are rewarded for their efforts, not for results tne system ccannot provide, beside blaiming the eocial worker or the victim.
Legislators, leftist gurus and hapless intellectuals keep providing instant-solutions that worsen the problems.
Then, while unexpected forms of life keep within the laws of nature and find solutions, we keep inventing new scientiic and other eissonances from nature, like lemmings' mass run to drowning into the North Atlantic Ocean..
In such a posture, Ariatotle, Einstein. Lincoln and all our great enlighteners have disabled us further away from the final natural solution...
Meanwhile,disastrous instant- patched remedies for the moral and intellectual quicksands for the American posture were injected into our society as all-purpose remedies.
In our society, man is expected to serve a beneficial profit‑making business. but only profits for the legislation protected few were nurtured. Formerly, I thought that such a situation was only a mantra to be written by those who have no better ideas...
The "Court of Justice" has bscome "Court of of Law", which alows immoral and nefarious decisions as long as they are legal, as in a card game.... and a 50/50 wealth partition is imposed between the one who made all the money and the exployting "claim jumper".
The judge has dictatorial power to decide on the basis of superficial claims in spite of solid 'IRRELEVANT' opposite evidence.
Any heinous crime can be commited as long as it is masked as legal.
Unmitigated tragedies are allowed and even glossed over and protected with "That is the way it is", blatantly meaning (but not admitting) that "no fault only protects the petitioner, whereas the respondent's trumped up "faults" are loudlu declared and recorded without any evidence of or "Your claim is irrelevant''. They protect anti-respondent biased decisions against all evidence, while the lawyer asserrs: "The time to complain has expired"after the respondent has complained to the heavens from the first day, every day, after the court decision (to boot, the lawyer had even said that he had to wait for the appeal... Now: unexpectedly: "Well, the trial is over..." and the appeal court would have to returh it to this same circuit, and same judge anyhow.".(his para-logical fabrication to be hired for more expenses... The judge has no reasons to love or hate the victim).
And: " that is the way it is.." Nothing more intelligent or respectable...
From an entire lifeof unqualified and beneficial successes, suddenly one falls
into a fetid legal mud, without recourse, and then... alone until death... Melodrammatic? Fitting, without sarcasm or extenuating circumstances...
"This is the way it is..." can be printed on any sewer of tutpitudes. Only God (not the anthropomorphic one they believe in) will do justice.
"IRRELEV ANT"
is the brazenly cynical elimination of any desire, need or desperate longing a lawyer cannot or will not handle..
Imagine now: the need and relevancy is instantly decided, like a Supreme Court decision on a vital and tragic matter, only bcause of rules that prresume to be as unchangeable as the laws of gravity...
And the lawyer must be paid indiscriminately. Including any phone conversation. even if they discussed other subjects. Of course, I cannot ptove it, but these facts are well known...
"THAT' S THE WAY IT IS" Same glib cruelty, without compassion ...omured into indifference (plus sadism?).
What about " we hold these truths to be selfevident....."?.Is the powder wet?,
Corny, ain't it?
Formerly, law and morality were combined. Or am I still deluding myself in my eighth language and in m,y second fatherland? and in my 85th year, when I was hit by those I would have needed most?
Now any immorality or abomination is allowed if it is not illegal.
What about justice abstractions, injected into and from our religions, ethics and former laws, and wrapped in our flag?...
It is our holy-toil faith. In this faith, we dedicate our technology, economy, laws and politics to the purpose of creating jobs, jobs, jobs.
That is: not freedom, but disp;ay of politically correct employment.
And we declare "free" only those who accept unquestioning servitude to work.We aggravate this delusion with myths, from "original sin" to the belief that those who don't work tend to become "evil and dangerous".
It is shocking to suddenly realize that our work fetishism has not only blinded us against using time creatuvely, but preccluded nurtufing the various possibilities hidden and to be discovered in creative leisure.
We ignore that evils and dangers caused by idleness are ordained by the priggish intolerant atmosphere our system imposes on the idle.We make laws, rules, and all sorts of regulations to transform the delusions into the "American Way of Life". However, who knows what "the American way of Life really is?
=== We instill love for work and sweat in our children and make them incapable of highr pursuits that use work as a means not as a goal.
=== The ordained goal of education is "to get a good job"; not knowledge, morality, ethics, devotion, generosity, beauty and other virtues for themselves.
=== Without them, a job is like a position in a rat race struggle.
=== Politicians and unions claim the opposite...
=== Once the job is sanctified as such, questioning the real value of work is made to look like a conspiracy to undermine our morals and our fatherland...=== We are not satisfied with considering work a necessity; we have to call it a "virtue", even when it is a hollow toil.
=== We also equate work with human rights. And we institute moral slavery by punishing those who don't work, instead of addressimg our existentialistic chances.
The pfoblem is not torxplain them, but to recognize them ouselves.
Does it help if we say thar life is a confluence of space and time, and that our blood circuation creates (our) time?
We have degraded the original usefulness of work into the "pay" of "gainful employment" .
In other words, our society does not even recognize work and toil per se , but an arbitrarily defined "job" or "employment", whether useful or parasitical.
That is not all.
A "job" or "employment" is not even assured to those who are fortunate enough to have it.
It can be lost for any of numarous reasons over which the worker has no control or responsibility.Thus, when one loses his job, it is his responsibility to find another, lest he be subjected to the worst tribulations.=== The Great Delusion spreads also into the brains of its own victims.
=== The distressed and poor clamor for "jobs", to reinforce the system that imposes the toil servitude on them...
=== The leaders and politicians find more ways to contrive new meaningless jobs...=== They make systems and machines not to free men from toil, but to create more jobs, more chains in a sterile direction, because they have no idea or inspiration how to create meaninful activities, services and products.=== Now that we have achieved such great wealth, technologic and minimum social progress, it is time we dedicate ourselves to formulating the freedom of man from toil toward a life of free pursuits.k
=== Slowly, we would find many ways to choose from, without depriving anyone of anything.
=== Yet, our techno cratic masochism says that we should not even attempt such an "evil" thing. === And Machine takes over.
=== And the holy maniac yells "God told me..."
=== And computers formulate the new ethics and spread the epidemic of infinite hidden data that dictate our destinies. Computer lack sense of humor.
=== And children are born and formed to do Machine's work.
=== That is the way I used to write when my ideals were plentiful and my experience still incipient.
Beside the biased claims against the conservative approach, we can make a few points.
=== First, the most intransigent worshipers of freedom, justice, civil rights, truth are often those with the least talents and ability to work.
=== Their "noble" pursuits may be sincere on their consciousness level, but too often they are subconsciously motivated by reluctance to work and to learn. kkk
They ignore the reality of the "Red Queen race", which is like the law of gravity, the speed of light, or entropy.
Liking or disliking, accepting or rejecting them is meaningless, like our attitude toward reality or life.
We must learn how to navigate with the winds and waves of life. If we do, we can enjoy life.The "flower children" never made it and will never make it. They had all the opportunities for at least 4 decades.
The conservative reluctance to dogmatize virtuous values for human endeavors avoids qualifications that allow any government to persecute citizens on the basis of crimes created by the laws.
The courage to accept the rules of demand and supply is not to be disparaged.
The do-gooders cannot avoid burdening society with their moralizing judgments.
This is a cancer worse than the loss of liberty it entails.
Our ideals, beliefs, morals, legislated rights and duties become chains.
The more government controls, the more the abuses by bureaucrats, which are more ruthless than any toil yoke.
The free job market may be a jungle; that is, when it fails.
But we can move in a jungle and choose a safe place, once we learn the rules of reality, which are like the rules of a game, which is just another reality.Indeed, we have a choice, and our freedom of choice is at least a cushion against any nationwide blunder.
No Inquisition can go really far against us.
The do-gooders would impose a web of regulations that suffocate those they want to protect.
Their ideals sound good, their intention are sincere, but their attitude is the more dogmatic, the more they fail.They constitute the modern Inquisition.
Once a work or any activity is infected with attributes of virtue, social duty, righteousness and whatever, it becomes like an incurable disease.
Then, the do-gooders see to it that we are rewarded or punished to fertilize their paradise.
They cannot avoid sliding into totalitarianism.
They become ruthlessly vindictive with those who expose their errors.
Historically, they are symbiotic with despotism and Inquisition.
WORKAHOLISM
"Workaholic" is a disparaging term for a characteristic that used to be a great virtue.
Those who use the term "workaholic" most apply it to others, never to themselves.
These pundits are mostly active in sociologic, psychological, writing, artistic and other endeavors that look down on business, management, sciences and other "non-humanistic" activities.
Their continuous interest in their subject is an acceptable or obvious vocation.
It is never workaholism, even if it lasts all their waking hours.
Other endeavors are considered less worthy, less essential.
They are defined workaholiks if they last longer than a certain time...
Many of us are caught in a net of complicated responsibilities that are like an irreversible set of commitments.
If we have integrity, if we love our families, we must finish what we have begun, even if it entails heroic sacrifices (not to be desecrated with glib definitions).
Others just like what they do more than anything else available or known.
They are like the artists, poets, writers, creators who are continuously inspired.
Any work can be as creative as that of artists.
Often more useful.
Many "workaholics" have no choice, either because they have no way out (debts, mortgages, commitments, taxes, contracts), or because all the alternatives they know are less worth, or less accessible, than what they are doing.
"Work‑work‑work, why nothing better and more interesting to do?".
This is a prejudiced observation that can be made by someone who is unable to find continuously active interest in any kind of work.
It assumes that work (activity) cannot be other than boring, undesirable or even degrading.
Sure, work can be boring or the worst thing, just like any other activity.
But it can also be more attractive, more exhilarating than any play or hobby.
Often, this posture depends on whether we judge the glass half empty or half full: happiness, unhappiness about exactly the same thing.
Want to study philosophy or psychology (worse) to understand it?
Do you realize how many happy or contented people are neither philosophers nor psychologists?Fishing, writing, painting, cooking, researching can be a hobby for some, or drudgery for other
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THE ANTS OR WE
Some people do something because they think it is necessary, unavoidable, or irresistibly inspiring.
Other people do the same thing because they are forced into it by circumstances: enticing remuneration, fear of destitution or punishment, contractual obligation, orders by people with power.
They are attracted by the remuneration or pushed by fear, not by the importance of the goal.
The former are the leaders, the creators, the generators of progress and evolution.
The latter are the "general public", the followers, "order takers".
That is the normal or conventional hierarchy.
The creators and leaders implement their goals because they understand the nature and value of what they pursue.
Many followers either don't understand, or don't know, or they understand because they are superficially taught and convinced by the leaders.
Thus, the judgment of the leaders and of the followers may not be on the same level, or have the same value.
Whenever the concept is understood, human harmony is achieved in adjusting to the hierarchy demanded by the orderly progress with the mutual dedication and goal devotion between leaders and followers.
Democracy cannot be invoked here as the regulating pattern.
When it is, a situation tends to degenerate into a hostile pattern like the present union‑management conflict.
On the opposite extreme, we have the truly successful society of the ants.
They have no conflicts, no changes, no disturbances of the established order.
Their pattern is so successful that they all comply with the implementation of the established pursuits.
There is no apparent place for leaders with power, for creators with bright ideas.
Nor there is place for masters or slaves in the human fashion.
Doubting or discussing the normal course of events would be incomprehensible, absurdly unnecessary.
It is believed that their pattern has succeeded for hundreds of millions of years: a success no one can dispute.
Our disparaging them because they have no freedom or any of the characteristics we hold so dear may be no more than an indication that WE are on the wrong track, not they.
Probably, the ants teach us that the pursuit of happiness, liberty, equal rights and democracy are nothing but human interpretations.Or we may not realize that they have achieved the true happiness: they like what they do, whereas we are unhappy because we lose ourselves in the pursuit of trying to do what we like before we do it (and even before we really know it).
Even from another perspective, the fact that they are so indifferent to their own individual survival seems to indicate that individual life is insignificant, compared to the survival of the colony, tribe or species. After all, our life is insignificant compared to the eternity we belong to before and after life.
Probably, our worship of the individual liberty and life is no more than destructive egotism.
The individual, life and liberty are inexorably condemned to death without exception.
When we are dead, what does it matter whether we have lived 5 hours or 5000 years, happy, free or as slaves?
Why then all our fuss about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Aren't we thus childishly primitive?
So primitive, so elemental, that ants don't even bother to think that we may be taught by them.
They wouldn't even know, or what to know, how to and why.
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UNION METASTASIS
Before the advent of the unions, and in their first years, unionized workers would not think of asking for a salary increase without an increase in performance.
The general expectation was that employers and employees would cooperate in a freely adopted common purpose.
Now, unionized workers demand improvements of pay, benefits and working conditions on the basis of their own wishes and declared needs, without offering any improvement in their performance (of course, they put it in a self-glorifying way, just like the greediest employer claims he only thinks of creating jobs to contribute to the community).
The accepted premise is that employers and employees are in adversary camps and do not volunteer cooperation unless forced by contract obligations.
In this atmosphere, cooperation and production improvements deteriorate in direct proportion with the advantages gained by the employees in the cycles of strike threats and work contracts.
beneficial organization that was necessary to correct the abusive exploitation by many employers against their employees.
Then, after legislation surpassed the union goals in behalf of the workers, most unions persisted in offering protection that was no longer needed.
Just like the Mafia, which started as a patriotic organization to free Sicily from foreign occupation just over a couple of centuries ago, and refused to dissolve after Sicily was freed.
Like the Mafia that forced people to accept their "protection", the unions became exploiters of the unionized workers themselves, who are forced to become union members and to pay exorbitant union dues.
It does not matter that 77% of the polled members are against forced union dues.
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, , Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wyoming are "right to work" states.
That is, they are states in which the law does not allow the federally-imposed system of compulsory unionism ("National Labor Relations Act and Railway Labor Act"), which authorizes forcing to join unions and pay union dues as a condition of employment
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‑ If a crowd of "average" people is put together in the midst of nowhere, without any trace of civilization and culture, without houses, roads and any products of previous human organization, lawlessness, violence, crime and most of what we consider evil would prevail, until some individuals emerge to organize and lead.
Those individuals are entrepreneurs of one sort or another: warriors, exploiters, priests, traders, kings, conquerors, builders, legislators, artists, manufacturers, scientists...
In all cases, they are eagerly followed by a vast majority of people who want to be told what to do for security and survival.
When survival and security have been achieved, there seem to be a turning point: either the successful society standardizes in the proven pattern and continues the march toward an ant or bee society, or the masses turn against their leaders and create a new confusion that will be later resolved by new leaders who impose new rules that will be called with the new names liked by the masses: "Freedom", "Equality", "God and Country", "Socialist Revolution", "To each what he needs, from each what he can".
And the road toward happiness is again paved with unhappiness.
‑ In labor‑management disputes, we only hear of discussions about salaries, working conditions and similar worker‑compensation subjects.
Outside of lip service, we hear nothing constructive about the quality of the products and services and their desirability.
Nor do we hear articulations about the quality of management.
Perhaps that has to be discussed elsewhere, but the fact remains that the general public's attention is kept away from the crucial issues at the core of our life's quality.
With the general public, also the politicians, legislators, the media and most categories of people forget that focusing on the financial compensation induces us to neglect the very sources of our national wealth.
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‑ "Safety" must now take the place of "Patriotism" in the aphorism: "Patriotism is the refuge of the scoundrels".
As a newly adopted posture, safety is becoming the additional smoke screen for covering deceptions, the vehicle for endless forms of dishonesty.
Some people indulge in convenient zealotry when they adopt a newly discovered righteousness.
Now it is the turn of SAFETY.
Politicians and others exposed to public attention are afraid not to show enough concern for safety.On the other hand, safety still begs for reasonable expectations and definitions.
It is almost impossible not to find an additional improvement of safety rules in almost anything, no matter how frivolous.
For instance, the atmosphere is propitious for those who may declare unsafe an umbrella because it doesn't stop falling bricks, or a glass because its fragments can cut. Water could be considered hazardous because people can drown in it.
The new bureaucrats hired to protect safety are eager to justify their jobs by issuing and pursuing the most frivolous safety rules.
In my chemical business, the 5-gallon pails we buy for shipping or any other purpose must have the following printed on the:
"Warning: children can fall into bucket and drown. Keep children away from bucket with even a small amount of liquid".
If we did the same with puddles, tanks, creeks, rivers, lakes, seas and oceans, the sign industry would become larger than all other industries combined, and monstrously the most superfluous.
Employees rationalize their lack of cooperation with false safety complaints, vendors add superfluous features and costs to their products with the excuse of safety, a marvelous dignifier for their demands.
Few fields are as fertile for opportunists as safety, for almost anything can be called unsafe as such or under special conditions:
streets, fields, rivers, ponds, buildings, floors, walls, elevators, any type of machinery, tools or instruments.
Anyone can pick any of them and complain about insufficient safety measures, in order to extract advantages from those who don't want to waste resources in litigations.
There are no safety nets under trees, in case one falls from one.
Look at any mountain, cliff, river, sea‑shore etc.: they have no railings, no lifeguards, no telephone within immediate reach of injured victims, no ambulance helicopters watching tourists, no paramedics on call in the middle of a glacier or of a desert...
No knives or forks are specifically produced that cannot be used for killing, wounding, gouging or torturing.
We should declare water dangerous and toxic because people can drown in it.
Troublemakers who want to evade responsibilities and duties have found a godsend in safety claims.
By merely insisting on specious safety infractions, scoundrels may even succeed in obtaining compensations and satisfaction they could not even dream of in honest dealings.
As a new fetish, safety can become the modern jackpot for parasites.
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‑ The various initiatives undertaken by politicians to produce "high employment" or "jobs" are to be grouped with the countless futilities that are adopted to correct the symptoms rather than the ailments.
The error may not be malicious, but it is not less deceiving.
We need to work on improving quantitative and qualitative productivity, because only jobs caused by productivity can be relied upon.
Jobs contrived just to increase employment worsen the problems they try to correct, because their self‑increasing costs bleed the very work sources to death.
The presidential candidates claim they want to improve the economy by creating jobs.
"Jobism" is today's delusion that national wealth is measured in jobs, just like mercantilism believed that the measure of national wealth was gold.But, as gold is a burden if it is not used in productive manner, so are jobs a vampiristic liability if they are not productive.
Progress has always eliminated antiquated jobs, while it created new ones not as an economic goal, but as consequence of the new and increased productivity.
One of the main causes of the fall of communism was the socialist method of creating parasitic jobs rather than productivity.
Jobs are a result of productivity, not vice versa.
A job does not produce, unless it performs useful-and-requested work.
Politicians worsen an economic crisis when they create jobs just for the incomes, instead of improving productivity.
The same damage is done by labor unions who concentrate on preserving unneeded jobs, instead of promoting productivity and the needed skills that produce jobs.
Jobs preserved or created only as an income goal, not as a consequence of improved productivity and methods, are like leaches that can bleed our economy to misery.
As a young chemist, I dedicated years in German research organizations to the chemistry of proteins and coordination complexes which I wanted to employ in my family's tannery in Italy. But when I learned of the incredible advances made in polymer chemistry, I faced a radical choice: continue in the shrinking tanning industry, in which I was very competent, or venture in the new field, in which I knew very little.
I chose the latter, in spite of the sacrifices it entailed, but ultimately I went much farther than in the previous field.
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‑ To impose democratic structure in private enterprise, industry, production or business procedures can be as damaging as imposing dictatorship on social and economic processes.
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‑ To critically analyze the relevance of work, we should be sure to define the existentialistic differences between the work of the adults and the play of the children.
Probably the differences are only on the surface.
‑ In a free demand‑and‑supply economy, those who create the wealth are motivated by the demand to create and produce what is needed.
They have no reason to go beyond that, nor to expect any reward, unless stimulated by the needs of others.
The entrepreneur prospers by producing better and more, and gains by receiving extra rewards for it.
The worker, then, is motivated to producing by receiving more pay for more productivity, not more pay for more needs.
In a welfare economy, the incentive to help the needy is not an incentive to create and produce.
In order to obtain their votes, politicians induce the indigent to feel they are entitled to receive compensation help.
As the welfare recipients have more necessity to receive than motivation to produce, the resulting burden on the economy decreases the openings for productive jobs, productivity decreases, and the prosperity of the politicians and bureaucrats who cater to welfare increases for the same reason.
Those same politicians and bureaucrats lose prosperity and power when employment increases.kkkk Feb 11, 2008
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