New Article on Jobs & Land Issue (my comment beneath it)

[Colin Donoghue]

My comment, which mentions TLIO, posted on the truthout page is copied below
the article here.
Colin D.
---------------------------------The Jobs Mirage: How Much More Work Do
Humans Really Need?
Monday 5 September 2011
by: Jeffery J. Smith, Truthout | Op-Ed


(Photo: Ricky Romero <http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickyromero/1976286111/>
[3])

While honest toil is honorable, a day to honor labor does make it easy to
overlook certain realities, such as: Why do both left and right clamor for
more jobs? Would those who get to opine for a living be willing to perform
the jobs they'd impose upon others? And why jobs? If work is the only way
one can be worthy of an income, why not also clamor for self-employment and
start-ups? Must the jobless

look forward to having a boss their entire lives? And are more jobs needed,
or even possible?

Instead of clamor for jobs, why not clamor for a shorter workweek and divide
the necessary work among more people? How'd 40 hours a week get to be some
sort of magic number? Why aren't automation and globalization whittling that
down to 30, 20, 10, going, going, gone? Juliet Schor in her "Overworked
American" (1991) calculated that if increases in productivity (more output
from less labor input) over the course of a baby boomer's career were
applied not to things like fatter CEO salaries, but to shrinking the
workweek, it'd now be 6.5 hours. Why isn't it?

It has been drastically shorter in the past. In his "Stone Age Economics"
(1974), Marshall Sahlins calculated some aborigines worked 15 hours per
week. In his "Six Centuries of Work and Wages" (1884), James E. Thorold
Rogers, member of Parliament, calculated that after a plague, peasants
worked 14 hours per week. (Those were the Dark Ages, and now at 40 hours
we're the enlightened ones?) What happened was plagues left fewer people to
work prime land so, for a while, surviving aristocrats could not exploit
farmers. The key in both instances was access to bountiful land which let
humans choose to work as much or as little as they liked.

Now, days with billions of humans on the globe, land is not quite as
accessible, but it could be made more affordable. When that happens, jobs
sprout and wages climb, as has happened several times: In the 1960s and
1970s, New Zealand's employment rate averaged 99 percent for ten years. In
the late 1950s, Danish workers received the biggest one-time raise in wages
in Dansk history. And in the 1920s, New York City spurred the construction
of numerous apartment buildings that provided jobs and slashed unemployment
to negligible <http://www.progress.org/geonomy/Numbers.html> [4].

What was the one thing those places did in common? Their governments levied
land. Whenever landowners must pay a heavier land tax, they eschew
speculation and put their parcels to good use. The new construction puts
people to work as do the resultant shops, offices and factories, as does the
spending of wages by the gratefully employed workers.

Why is such a powerful tool for useful employment at decent wages left on
the shelf by jobists? Perhaps because today there's a huge disconnect
between labor, which has a voice, and its Day and land, which lacks a voice
and needs a Day. At college, economics students still learn Ricardo's Law
and how wasting prime sites, where wages are high and falling back on
marginal sites, where wages are low, forces down overall wages, but they're
required to forget that by the time they become the practicing economists
whose opinions you see in the media.

Ironically, what economists have forgotten labor organizers used to know.
About a century and a quarter ago, the most popular American in any union
was a self-taught reformer, Henry George, advocate of the single tax on land
and the Labor Party's 1886 candidate for mayor of New York, a race which he
won, defeating Teddy Roosevelt in the process, but was denied office by the
machinations of Tammany Hall. Samuel Gompers of the AFL-CIO proclaimed
himself proud to be a friend of ol' Henry, who even had a cigar named after
him. George's campaign manager, Louis Post, who went on to become assistant
secretary of labor under Woodrow Wilson, pushed to make Labor Day, which
some unions were already celebrating, an official holiday on the first
Monday in September, which would some years coincide with the birthday of
Henry George, September 2, and honor him, too.

It hasn't quite worked out that way. But forgetting the laws of economics
does not make them go away. Idle land still makes idle hands, as the old
reformers used to say. Drive around your city's slums; vacant lots -
invisible to contemporary urbanites - are still the best indicator of
joblessness, poverty and crime. And shifting the property tax off buildings
and improvements, onto land and locations, is still the most effective way
to harness both prime land and willing labor. A close second must be
detaxing wages. If you want jobs so badly, why make them so costly?

This shift of taxes, this powerful reform, awaits implementation even as the
left begs for jobs - anything to get money into the pockets of the poor -
and the right pays jobs lip service - what better way to keep the poor
busily subservient? But given the resultant rush hours, shriveled family
time and sterile communities, it's a Faustian bargain at best. J.W. Smith in
his "World's Wasted Wealth" (1994) suggested that if all the people now
producing illth - everything from war toys to planned obsolescence - were to
instead help produce wealth, we could cut the workweek in half.

This Labor Day, do remember our venerable organizers. But don't forget what
generates truly useful jobs organically, the levy on land. It's always
worked wherever tried, to the degree tried. Then take the rest of the day
off.
[image: Creative Commons
License]<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/>
 [5]

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States
License<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/>
 [5].
Jeffery J. Smith <http://www.truth-out.org/jeffery-j-smith/1312488826> [7]

------------------------------------
Colin Donoghue
This article hit on very crucial truths when mentioning how those living
more natural lives actually worked less than we do, and most importantly
here:
"...for a while, surviving aristocrats could not exploit farmers. The key in
both instances was access to bountiful land..."
That really is the key to understanding why we live in such an unnatural
destructive social system that harms our mental/physical health and the
Earth's ecosystem. We are being constantly exploited by not having the
option (mainly through taxation & land costs) to live free, self-sufficient
natural lives on the land as sovereign individuals, on sovereign homesteads,
making up voluntary gift-economy communities. In fact, instead of saying
farmers were being exploited by aristocrats (i.e. those calling themselves
"officials" and designating us "citizens" or "subjects") we could accurately
call the aristocrats themselves farmers, farmers of humans. That's what
"civilization" really is, a human farm that undermines individual
sovereignty and freedom, and the result is what you see around you and in
history books: mental illness, war, injustice, mass-exploitation, nuclear
waste/radiation, etc. It's all a product of the same root cause: forcible
disconnection from the Earth, control of the Earths resources by the few
so-called "elite"; being forced to comply with a social contract you never
signed, for "services" you never asked for; the age old "Devil's Bargain."
Until land & water is claimed as a human right by individuals and families,
the destruction of mind, body and ecosystem will continue. All reforms that
ignore this root cause will not bring the drastic positive change we need
and deserve. The Land is Ours campaign occurring now in England is an
example of people that see through the deception/illusion of "civilized"
society and are courageously and intelligently acting on this crucial truth.
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