>Date: Thu, 21 May 1998 00:26:25 +1000
>From: Richard Mochelle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: How to assure economic security?
>X-MDaemon-Deliver-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>S. Lerner wrote:
>
>> FWers - If we think it's important to ensure basic economic security for
>> all citizens of the industrialized 'have' nations, what suggestions do you
>> have as to how this should be accomplished?
>
>In an increasingly globalised world whose dominant economic actors are
>market-crazed transnational corporations without allegiance, the idea of
>a state-centric arrangement which guarantees basic economic security for
>a passive, no-responsibility citizenship seems as impossible a prospect
>as the perpetual motion machine. Where citizens are conditioned from
>childhood by the pre-conventional, tit for tat morality of the market,
>by the coercive work experience of compulsory school as preparation for
>a lifetime of compensated toil, by the deluded ethic of a fair day's pay
>for a fair day's work, by an ethic of mutual dispensibility, it cannot
>be expected that they will simultaneously accept and reliably enact the
>incompatible morality of an unconditional guarantee of mutual economic
>security. One must give way to other.
>
>If you want a club (call it a corporation, religion, nation, family or
>whatever) whose members will enjoy guaranteed basic economic security,
>this can only be sustainably accomplished, it seems to me, where there
>is a reciprocal norm and promise of mutual responsibility. The
>maintenance of a sustainably secure right to basic economic support
>within that club must presume an arrangement whereby every player (save
>infants and the infirm) wanting that guarantee would be required to
>declare a commitment to assure that right for all players who enter into
>the arrangement. It would need to be a firm constitutional
>arrangement, not revocable by everyday law-making. To be an enduringly
>reliable guarantee of economic security, the norm of lifetime mutual
>responsibility would need to be firmly embedded in the integrity or
>character of each member. It would require every member to be fully
>attentive to, ie., decide their priority time-investments (work choice)
>in regard to, the basic needs of all other members. Because of the
>volatility and insecurity of monetary value in the current global casino
>game, the required guarantee would not be pegged to a monetary figure,
>but to a parcel of primary goods qualified by regionally appropriate
>performance standards. Ensuring that every member was guaranteed
>services and goods in accord with agreed standards would entail a
>priorities-responsive mindset, a self-organising capacity whose exercise
>would need to be demonstrated to children and encouraged from early
>education on. With the internet, information concerning priority needs
>and minimum standards would be accessible to all, allowing for a fully
>self-organising and truly free-enterprising (everyone their own boss)
>global civic culture, rendering the idea of central planning largely
>obsolete. Such an economic and civic arrangement would constitute what
>I would call 'priactivism' - a political economy only possible with the
>Internet, promising a way out of the old and collapsing left-right
>tunnel. ('pri' from priority)
>
>What is very clear is that while each continues to decide their work, as
>is the norm today, without regard for priority needs, while it is
>regarded as morally acceptable that skills and resources be directed to
>the construction of casinos rather than homes for the homeless, no one's
>economic security can be guaranteed. No coercively-based redistributive
>mechanisms (eg taxes) can be relied upon to sustainably compensate for
>the general practice of priorities-negligent work.
>
>We should ask the question:
>
>If work has little to do with servicing priority needs, what is ethical
>about the work ethic? Why OUGHT we work?
>
