That seems a long way from what people mean when they say “I am looking for work.” That has come to mean “I am looking for a regular pay packet, with a car, a generous expense account and as many bonuses as I can squeeze out of my employer – but don’t ask me to sweat for it.”
This is why NGOs are the most popular employers; they provide most, if not all, of these perks and you can get them without producing anything visible.
Now I am old-fashioned; I use words like “produce”. There can’t be many people left who remember when the way to get rich was to produce something useful. That was how our ancestors lived. They hunted, fished or farmed. The better they were at hunting, fishing or farming, the more useful goods they produced. That gave them more goods, mainly food or clothing, to exchange for anything they needed but didn’t produce themselves.
As society developed, more tools were needed to do the productive work, so some people specialised in producing tools, then tools to make tools, and eventually complicated machines. These needed materials like iron, and miners supplied these. All of these paid their way by producing.
But people who produce useful goods don’t earn the most money today. Henry Ford could say “If you produce a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door to buy it” and he got very rich by producing a better and more affordable motor car. But he needed employees to do the heavy work and they got a lot less for their trouble than Henry Ford did. That’s where things started getting unbalanced, and it didn’t start with industrial manufacturing.
It started as soon as anyone who wasn’t a producer got between the producer and his customers. Among the first were rulers and their soldiers, who took their cut for protecting the producers (farmers, hunters, fishermen and toolmakers) from thieves and foreign enemies. Traders also emerged very early, but for a long time these people, even if they managed to become a bit richer than the producers, were not so unreasonably rich that they became a burden on the producers.
Then as machines became more efficient, fewer producers were needed to produce all that everyone needed. New needs were invented; we are told we need lots of things our grandparents never knew, but still there aren’t enough jobs in producing all these goods.
More jobs had to be invented which were not directly productive, in processing, trading, administration and security. A class of people emerged who made money by looking after other people’s money – bankers. Now those people who make their money by handling other people’s money make the most money. Then the administrators, traders &c still make more than the producers.
Bankers created the world recession we hear about now. The world is going to have to do something about that, and we are part of the world; we are all affected. But we have an extra problem. We have traders who don’t know you can make more money by cutting your prices because a lot more people will buy from you.
We have administrators, politicians, soldiers and policemen who don’t, as their counterparts in other countries do, serve us in any way to earn their money. The police set up road blocks and rob people. Soldiers steal gold and diamonds from miners. Civil servants won’t do anything without a bribe. Politicians grab anything that isn’t screwed to the floor.
But they still eat. Is it too late for producers to teach them their job – maybe by refusing to feed them till they learn?
Post published in: Analysis