字幕列表 影片播放 列印英文字幕 Capitalism has always, from its beginning, failed in a fundamental task: it failed to provide meaningful work, even under its own terms of exploitation, for everybody. It couldn't do it! Its own mechanisms mean, that when you even get near to full employment, the position of workers bargaining for wages, allows them to put to push the wages up, which makes the employer react by saying "well I'm not going to pay you that higher wage, so I'm firing you. I'm not hiring you," plunging them back into unemployment. It's its own mechanisms, make a long story short, that prevent the system from ever achieving full employment. It's always only a question of how many people will be unemployed, how bad will it be, how long will it last, all of that, and the problem is that's not a viable system. Why? Because people who are literally without work and therefore without income, are going to have very little to lose, unless they quietly walk off into the woods and die, which some do, but most won't, they are going to try to find another way to exist, and they become the beggars, and they become the thieves and they become the marauding gangs, whatever you want. So the system has to come up with that, and so it invented, took centuries. It invented what we nowadays call welfare, or the safety net, or of a whole variety of terms like this, in which you basically say, not what kind of system leaves large numbers of people bereft, and even if it pays them, pays them so little that they can't live, we're gonna solve this problem by, let's see, taxing a bunch of money from those who have it, in order to basically give it to these people so they don't make trouble. We say to them: "Okay live over there, in a shitty part of town, but we'll give you enough that you can, you can eat, we'll give you a food stamp, and we will give you a section 8 voucher to live in public housing, and we will give your kid a free breakfast at school if they qualify, because we pay you so little that your life is miserable. and we'll, and that'll be called if you blump it all together, a guaranteed basic income. Hmm...the rational response to this would be, wait a minute, why do we have a system that creates this thing? We don't do that! We dare not ask those questions in our culture. So, we have basic income, welfare charity, whatever you want to call it, to keep these people going. But, no sooner do you do this, then you set up a struggle: all the people who have money, a job, income, they're gonna have to now be taxed to raise the money to take care of the people on the basic income. They don't want that. They worked hard for their money. Don't take it from me! Every right-wing jerk in any culture, has always seen a great opportunity here, to deal with the anger of those one step above those on welfare, who don't want to be told you have to pay for. Of course, the answer for the masses would be: "make the rich pay," and the rich understand this all too well, which is why they buy the politicians to make sure that's not the way it's done, and then they make sure that the way they escape their share of taxation, is to set the workers against the unemployed, in an endless, horrible fight that often leads to violence, and that leads to social conflict, and that leads to Brexit votes, and to Trump elections, and all the rest. Two years ago a French economist then Thomas Piketty writes a famous book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," 600 page book. His book shows in every capitalism that the world has seen, any country, any time, you let capitalism function, it creates an ever widening gap between rich and poor. The only time that is constricted is when people rise up, like they did in the 1930s, and change it all out of rage about this thing. And as soon as that rage passes, it's undone, like we undid the New Deal, and we start to say, which we are now in the middle of, you know. So what's the my response? We don't need, and we don't want, because it's socially destructive and socially divisive, to have one group of people who work ,and another group of people who don't. Give everyone reasonable work, and give everyone reasonable pay. Our societies are being torn apart by struggles over redistribution. do we take, and from whom, to give to those less fortunate, as if it was a matter of fortune, rather than an economic system that doesn't work. Redistribution tears societies apart. It's...here's the parallel: you're going into the park on a Sunday afternoon, you're a married couple, you have two children, one is six and one is seven, and you stop because there's a man selling ice cream cones, and you give one of your children an ice cream cone that's got four scoops, and the other one an ice cream cone with one scoop, and you continue walking. Those children are going to murder each other: they're gonna struggle. What are you doing? And don't then come up: "okay you've had, you've eaten your, this part of your scoop, so give the other part of your scoop to your sister or your brother." Stop! The resentment of the one who has to lose his ice-cream or he,r you see where I'm going. Every parent who isn't a ghoul, understands: give each child the same damn ice-cream cone, two scoops each. You don't need redistribution, if you don't distribute it unequally in the first place. Capitalism is congenitally incapable of distributing equally.
B1 中級 美國腔 EconoMinute。普及基本收入 (EconoMinute: Universal Basic Income) 30 8 王惟惟 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日 更多分享 分享 收藏 回報 影片單字