Austerity has hardened the nation's heart

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One of the basic rules of business is that you can't sell things to people without money. I realised this many years ago in Egypt when I found a shop selling expensive toys that cost over one month's median average salary. The owner admitted that most items were for display to attract customers inside who might end up buying some mundane household products (like washing up bowls) and were purchased only by a tiny handful of wealthy families.



When disposable income falls the condition of your lawn falls down the list of priorities. In a recession the service sector is always the first to get hit. Businesses are more likely to survive if they do what few people can do rather than what many people can do. The money that would previously be spent on hiring someone to mow your lawn or iron your laundry is instead spent on fixing the fuel injection on your car.

When did I say I want to reward people for not working? Where do you get that I have an aversion to self-reliance? I would love to be self-reliant but I know the whole notion is BS. STOP straw-manning me. It makes come across as a dishonest ideological hack.

Being self-reliant has come to mean being a good hustler and nothing more. That's what businesses primarily do these days. They try to get people to give them money. What they actually produce and any benefit to society is a secondary side effect.

I also think you are very wrong if you don't think a small handful of people already control virtually all the energy and resources necessary for human survival. Most small businesses don't provide basic survival goods. They provide luxuries. Eating out at a mom-and-pop restaurant is a luxury. They also depend on large corporations that make the tools they use. Most small businesses don't have the resources to make things from scratch, and even if they tried there's no way they could compete with vast corporations that own the raw materials and mass produce the same goods much cheaper.

Also, if you're only goal in life is to win at the rat race and become wealthy to satisfy your ego so be it. The thing is people who are actually wealthy just use people like you. You'll never have the social skills to join their club and become one of them. They spoon feed you the cult of Horatio Alger to keep you down and laugh at you. If you ever find yourself in a bad situation such that you are forced to rely on benefits they love to shame you and tell you you are a worthless taker who would be better off dead. Shame ensures that you will never demand anything and can be left to rot at their convenience. They love to milk your weak docile subservient ideology for all its worth and then laugh at you for being such a fool. You are owned.

I'm finished with this topic.

Since this topic was about welfare and austerity, your gave the impression that there was an obligation to continue with welfare programs which undermine self-reliance in favor of dependency on the state. Since I don't consider defending a position unless they personally believe in it, I presumed it reflected your personal view. I apologize if that was wrong.



The economic reality of humanity is that to make a living, you must work for it. If you live in a wilderness, you need to cut wood, build a shelter, hunt or grow crops, etc. If you want to obtain something someone else makes that you need, you have to trade that which you produce or offer to work for them in exchange for the item you want. THIS IS UNCHANGEABLE.

Any business seeks to take something (either finished product or raw materials) and resell it at a profit. The end product is either a good people can not readily obtain themselves or a service they can't readily do for themselves. There is no crime or sin in this except perhaps if you choose to seek an insanely high profit margin. A business is just a person making a living for themselves rather than working for a specific employer. Don't like a person's business practices? Don't shop there. Encourage others not to shop there. Give your business to the competitor with better business practices.

You are envisioning a time when there are basically a handful of monopolies controlling everything...and, yes, this is starting to happen, but we can fight it. We had laws against it, but people got lazy and let the corporations gain the political clout to change the laws back in their favor.

The only way your world view holds true is when dealing with ignorant customers. I like to think people with AS are more immune to this than NTs as most all marketing is geared towards the NT's mind and not ours, but there is no evil in making a living selling products or services that people either need or legitimately want (e.g., lawn mowing). In contrast, yes, there are a lot of products you DO NOT NEED but advertisers work hard to manipulate you into either wanting or believing are necessities (e.g., iPhones).

If you want to castigate people who use Madison Avenue to con people into buying tons of useless crap, fine, but a lot of people make honest livings selling goods and services people really do want and need at fair prices, and they are undeserving of your contempt.

Was Ed Land who started the Polaroid corporation just a hustler? I think not. He was a top inventor. Unfortunately his company came to be run by people who did not see the imaging potential of small computers and large memories, so Polaroid Inc. went belly up. But it had a good 50 years or so.

What I want to know is whether it is possible to make money or whether it is only possible to move money. The banks are not lending which means that people and businesses are now almost completely reliant on the M4 money supply - basically all that's in cash and in bank accounts.

If we use the rat model, I would rather not encourage parents to kill their children.
In any case, such families are extraordinarily rare. There are only 190 families in the UK with 10 or more children, and they only receive £11m in benefits between them (£5000 per child- good luck raising a child on £5000, let alone feeding yourself). Having more children is a false economy.

The religious right work ethic is the problem. Work should be easier not harder.

I agree, but you have a double-edged sword with that attitude.

If you make work easier, you invariably are making things so more can be done with less. Machines, computers and automation DO NOT EVER produce more jobs than they replace. Anything a machine can do, it would take many humans to do the same task and volume. Yes, you do create SOME new jobs, but never in the volume you eliminate.

If you have a growing and evolving economy, you do find a way to employ the displaced workers, but if you keep growing the population and making work easier through technology, you reach a point where it's impossible to put everyone to work. At that point, what do you do with all the unemployed people?

Let the state support them? Why should they benefit while others have to work? If you get to the point that nobody has to work, what becomes of humanity? If you make machines sophisticated enough to do everything for us, why shouldn't the machines deem us unnecessary and start out to eliminate us?

A good article by NPR on the topic of disability and the USA.

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

Shorter work hours. perhaps?

If machines produce more with less people what to do with this "more"? Have the capital owners take it all? Automation was financed through public money, the whole public have the right to its benefits.