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Re: Sunday, December 14, 2003
I'm no economist but it seems to me there's a little more going on in that asymmetrical Dem/Rep thing than income production versus income redistribution. Income is abstract and highly symbolic for one thing. A bunch of numbers that need a three-stage alchemical process to transmute into groceries or hardware. The very real fact of its being translated into the most important and necessary 'things' in our lives doesn't change the essential 'not there-ness' of money. As any South American can attest those numbers are highly arbitrary. And numbers are all that's there. What's being 'produced' is a measure of desire, for goods and services, or demand, if you like that term better. What's being re-distributed is the only real stuff on the board, labor and resources. Resources are a whole issue by themselves, being essentially 'found', like buying property and 'finding' oil on it, though as we've seen recently, water itself, probably the most fundamental resource there is besides air, can enter the economic food chain and be bought and sold. But it starts as a free commodity, just like a laborer's time before he sells it. Labor, though even the word is now tainted somehow, is about as basic as human existence itself. It's the organization of labor that creates these entities of production. The CEO doesn't produce that income by the sweat of his brow, he organizes the sweat of others. The by-products of that organization make him a powerful laborer in that sense. The moral difference between the two camps is the 'gotcha' stance of the so-called producers, which truncates the fellowship, creating an 'us' much smaller and more tightly defined than the 'them' of anyone who isn't part of the 'producers' club, versus the inclusiveness of real liberal Democrats. The second group re-distributes the original commodity, labor and its fruits, back to the commons, to the wider, more openly-defined 'people', some of whom are producing now, some who produced before, some who will at some future time, and some who will never or only marginally produce. But the whole is 'us' and it's a recongition of that that drives the 're-distribution'. Maintaining the health and welfare of the commons to which we all belong, laborer and producer alike. You seem to be under the impression that these so-called 'income producers' are actually creating something. Maybe soon it will be so, when the automation of reality is more nearly complete, but then who will they sell their robot-produced goods to, other companies' robots? As far as that question of 'corporate' being an accusation... Try thinking of it this way. If mountain lions had killed ten human children in the last month, you can bet your bottom dollar there wouldn't be a mountain lion left in California by April. Guilt by association is very much a part of current public morality. The flat disregard for the well-being of all of us, children and elderly, hale and handicapped, shown by most, if not all, corporations, makes 'corporate' a morally dubious term at best, and its use a derogatory perfectly understandable.
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