Why We Can't Have Nice Things, or A Basic Income

in #life8 years ago (edited)

We have a lot of idealists on SteemIt, don't we? Bless their hearts!

There are people here who will tell you about their dream of a Basic Income for everyone, so that a person's basic human needs would always be met, no matter if they have a job or not.

The problem is that the entire idea of money and jobs is based around artificially created scarcity: you don't work, you don't eat. Even if there's plenty of food already made for everyone, and it's just rotting away in the store, then goes straight to the landfill.

Let Friend Coyote share his priceless insights on this with you. Have a seat round the fire, make yourself welcome. Will the truth put a glimmer of a non-idealist hope in your eye? Let us see, let us see! It's what I love to see most, after all: the wilderness mysteriously returning into the broken and domesticated man.

Let's recognize something together first, something we may not like, but that doesn't make it any less true: the system of "get a job - sell your time - get money" is there in the first place, so that your lazy ass will be forced to work for someone else's enrichment.

That someone else is called a capitalist; they have the money, so everyone has to work for them to get some too.

In my view, friends, a man becomes an adult not when he gets to the ripe old age of 18 or even 21. It's when he realizes that no matter how great his job is, NO ONE is going to pay him that delicious salary he gets on the job, unless they themselves make way more than that amount from selling the result of his daily labours down the line.

Did you catch that? If you have a job, someone is always making way more on you than they are paying you.

Even if you scored one of those sweet do-nothing office jobs, the capitalist is STILL making money off you - perhaps you help his company fulfil a necessary government quota. Your clueless presence, your flipping of random channels on the TV, your surfing on reddit, anything and everything about your existence can and will be monetized by the savvy capitalist, so you being you is always just more water onto his watermill.

And the capitalist does that simply by owning things, places, rights and financial instruments. He doesn't need to trade his limited time on earth for money like he is forcing you to do, because he'll get it no matter what. He already has a "Basic Income", and then some. He'll get his money in great abundance because the wageslaves are all forced to stay working on his plantation no matter what he himself is doing or where he is.

Of course it's in the capitalist's bestest super-pinky biting interest to imbue every young man starting out with the understanding that "hard work" is what brings success, money and freedom. Sign up for your 9-5 like everybody else, bitch. Arbeit Macht Frei! Get to it!

It's once you understand these simple facts, that you begin to realize just how useless and pathetic it is to petition (beg) your owner for a Basic Income.

If you really want something in life, come and take it. Might want to be prepared for armed resistance though: as a coward or a harmless weakling, your place is always ONLY on the plantation.