CELEBRATE THE ORDINARY

It might also be said to be the professionalisation of normal.

When I was applying for a building permit in 2013 I was advised after some considerably problems with Golden Plains Council that there was no way a mere mortal could ever succeed in getting everything approved without professional intervention and that intervention cost money. D.I.Y? Preposterous.
What am I rabbiting on about this month? You may recall in the Christmas Edition of the Linton Astonisher the story of Robert Ingersoll, the free thinker.

“Each man is responsible in making a living for himself and his kin using all his knowledge and skills”

Oh! How true that may have once been. Once upon a time there used to be ‘General Practitioners’ and not just in the medical profession. They were called general as they covered a wide area of expertise and could advise you what you needed to have, or do, or go through to achieve a certain end. Most adults did their own legwork, filled out their own forms to lodge and even did their own tax returns. It was called personal responsibility and it was a learning curve to take you into an independent future.

Somehow, someone, somewhere made the decision that as clerical workers would begin to decline with the advent of computers so new jobs had to be created to fill the void and to maintain low unemployment. In some ways this meant that it would be an advantage for specialists to emerge, high priests of pen and ink.

The nomenclature of government changed to collateral and leverage, potential university students could no longer understand their own educational applications ending up in a situation where teachers colleges are turning our educationalists without full literacy and numeracy skills.

Where will this drive to have someone else do it for you ever end?

WHERE HAS CAPITALISM GONE?

As a committed Socialist and a firm believer in balance and fairness for all I am often referred to by the disparaging description of 'red ragger'. On the contrary I am surprisingly a keen supporter not only of true democracy (representing the electors not the party) and true capitalism (the free market opportunity).

Capitalism:

I buy something from your shop which you buy from a manufacturer, who pays workers to make the product I buy. They, the employees in turn, with their wages, buy my product which I pay someone else to deliver from a factory of workers making my whatnots. That is a manufacturing economy.

I walk into a Sandwich shop which makes me a salad roll. They made up the roll from ingredients, hopefully, sourced locally, grown by small farmers producing high quality fruit and vegetables which they sell to the roll-maker. The grower then buys my product and the cycle starts again. This is an agricultural economy.

My car breaks down and I take it to a garage and engage, hopefully a skilled mechanic, to make the necessary repairs they identify. I pay the mechanic either with my product (bartering) or with the money you gave me when you bought my whatnot. This is called a service economy.

In a way all of these different activities interact with each other and an advanced economy produces everything its population needs and sells the surplus overseas.

Communism:

If you take all three examples given above and change that free choice to ownership by the state, where the government controls how much is made, when it is made, where it is sold and at what price. They determine how much workers will be paid, the hours they work, the holidays they don't get and set the rate for bribes. It's like Animal Farm everyone is equal, some are more equal than others and we will determine how equal you are.

The only good side to Communism is the governments ability to direct entire economies and populations, see also China, unlike the exciting mess of capitalism, in to producing things faster to the detriment of the quality that competition creates.

Socialism:

This is where I stand. Socialism is really Capitalism with the exception that the investors, the shareholders, the management and the future of the company are all determined by the members or employees. In a sense we already have a form of socialism with the RACV or Credit Unions, members joining together for a common cause, or Dairy Farmers who, as individuals cannot provide both supply and distribution themselves so join together as a group to market their product.

Socialism is NOT Communism. Socialism is those who create the economy should share in the economy, reward for hard work and dare I say it, nothing for the slackers and some social help for those who can neither work nor malinger.

Look at our planet peoples. We all stuck on this rock together so we should work together. The rich are getting richer through corporate tribalism and as we see, tribalism (Corporations) destroy everything in their path and entire economies for the sake of a few Boardroom Emirs.

CAPITALISM IS DEAD, LONG LIVE GREED

If you know of Stalin, Hitler, Mugabe and Murdoch get ready for the unparalleled evils of Woolworths, Coles, Apple and Google.

Far for it for a socialist to preach on behalf of capitalism but I have, and still maintain, a certain respect for the free enterprise system of times past. To me true capitalism is the right for every individual to make his or her way in the world as they see fit, to produce things, to sell things, to make profits and to employ others to do the work for them. I think I have said before that capitalism is really a system of ‘perpetual motion’ each action in turn producing another action which, in the fullness of time, brings us back to the start and the process begins again.

Each complete cycle hopefully adds just a small amount to the domestic product of the nation which should be enough to allow the population to grow and be gainfully employed, for wages and conditions to slowly improve and bring an entire nation into a state of comfort, and lay the groundwork for our future generations. Control of wages and subsequent prices while still remaining free and competitive is important to avoid unreasonable inflation which eats away at wages and conditions and begins to create poverty rather than prevent it.

I would have thought it fair that an owner should be compensated ten times more than his lowest paid worker. If a standard wage for the worker was $800.00 a month then it is reasonable that an owner be allowed to earn $8,000 in the same period. After all the owner is the one who puts up the money and takes the risk so they should be compensated accordingly.

In recent decades however we have seen owners (or at least the Executives on behalf of the owners) earn in excess of 200 times more. If the average wage was still $800 a month an Executive can now rip off

$ 160,000 before it reaches the bottom line and subsequently what the owners or shareholders will receive. This has meant owners still receive about the same as they did before except a fortune has been redirected, almost fraudulently, before the benefits flow on to the workers or even the purchasers of the product.

What we see in this new century is no longer benefiting from the sweat of your brow or the result of your intelligence but the acquisition of wealth through acquisition. Take the supermarkets. They have not benefited from good business or even fair trading. They have not sought to be faster, provide a better product, a better service or to fairly compete on the open market. They have borrowed from the Financiers and bought out their competitors or subsidized prices below cost to their competitors, they have acquired wealth by bribery and stealth and not through good business acumen.

A former Woolworths Executive decried the fact that the producer of a product no longer decided on the price it would sell for to make a fair profit, but that the supermarkets now dictate to the producer, even to the point of driving them out of business, the price which the supermarket will pay regardless of the value it will eventually sell for. This tactic of course drives out competitors who try to buy and sell in a fair trading environment.

Cashed up supermarkets then buy up huge swathes of other businesses as well, adding to their outlets for distribution and putting further unfair pressure on the rest of the engine of the economy, smaller businesses. hotels, service stations, distribution systems, credit cards, telephone companies and advertising agencies, hardware stores, liquor sales, chemists, newspaper outlets and dozens of other ‘hidden’ acquisitions which will force out their competitors. The Australian supermarket system, as with its media ownership, is the most noncompetitive in the world, little wonder shoppers now look overseas for their purchases and deny our local economy the opportunity to engage in true capitalism.