The Oil Drum: Campfire | Campfire and Human Capital

129 comments on Campfire and Human Capital - What Do You Want to Learn?

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oldfarmermac on June 18, 2009 - 5:44pm

Ardvark,

You can keep your good nature from overworking you by reading Animal Farm wnenever the urge to volunteer starts bothering you.

The biggest single problem with all socialist/welfare schemes I have knowledge of is that there is no easy solution to the free loader issue.The next biggest is that if ambitious individuals cannot accumulate property,they subliminate(?) thier urge to do so by accumulating power.

There is (so far as I know) a commune still running in Louisa Va that at one time used a points system to assign jobs.The number of points earned for each defined task was adjusted until all tasks were done.If you wanted a particular job,you got it by offering to do it for less points.Cooking breakfast might take four hours and pay fifty points.Cleaning the toilets might pay fifty pionts for only two hours as it was a much less desirable job.Everybody had to earn a certain number of points to pay his share of the communes expenses.

I visited the place back in the early eighties when I lived near there.

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Dryki on June 18, 2009 - 9:38pm

The biggest single problem with all socialist/welfare schemes I have knowledge of is that there is no easy solution to the free loader issue.

Oldfarmer, it has nothing to do with "socialist/welfare schemes" - at least not as they are commonly known. I suspect you are using the wrong knife because I doubt you include Wall Street and the Corpos generally on your welfare list. Nevermind that they are the welfare clients taking in most of the money, eh? What does it cost you to buy a bottle of Nestle's Poland Spring water? Bottled in Maine. They pay the state $0.005 per gallon [Range Pond contract]. The state pays to keep the water clean, for the roads, for the police to keep people from blowing up their trucks, yadda yadda. Of course, Nestle's isn't exactly a "freeloader"; they are a developer doing good things for Maine.

Yes, freeloading is part of the "human condition", but it is exacerbated by the current culture. Would it be different if cultural norms were different - bear in mind we put a criminal elite at the peak - that we train our "best and brightest" to be like the kleptocrats in power. Freeloading is a fitting systematic response. Get away with everything you can. I'm old enough that doesn't work for me, so I know it is not a fixed human "value".

Maybe only idiots plant seeds and trees. Certainly that's true by the Summers/Obama yardstick.

Anyway, you are right about the freeloading. Just don't blame it on the "socialists" and the welfare moms in the pink caddys. It's the corporations that have honed freeloading to the fine art. Hey, Wal-Mart, Hannaford and health care? What's the best chance US gets single payer health care? When the corporations can dump all the costs.

Freeloaders sure, but name them.

cfm in Gray, ME

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oldfarmermac on June 21, 2009 - 8:54pm

Dryki,

You are correct in that I was thinking mostly about income redistribution schemes and should have composed my comments to make that clear.

As far as corporate welfare goes I am in agreement with you.Corporate welfare spemding and subsidies probably dwarfs human welfare spending by a factor of ten at least,I'm just guessing,It might be a factor of one hundred.

You may be guilty of painting fast with a broad brush regarding the rest of your reply but that was my mistake too.Written communications are time consuming,and we aren't getting paid (in cash).

I was thinking about that old saw from Soviet days-they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.

I once knew a young lady who lived across the street from me who collected about eighty percent of my single guy take home pay(and I had a good job considering the time and place) in various ways for herself and her two little kids.She got a rent free house,free school lunches ,free books,nearly free doctor visits,food stamps,heating assistance and a cashable check every month.

She also had a steady boy friend to keep her well supplied with beer who more or less lived in and probably contributed maybe one third more to her income.

She would occasionally come over and work four hours or so cleaning my house for twenty bucks cash-this was forty years ago-but she seldom cleaned her own.She never had to worry about getting fired or laid off either.

She traded baby sitting with other local girls and lived as well or better than I did w/o putting in forty or commuting every week.You could find a party at her house at least twice a week.I had a standing invitation and attended most of them.

Otoh,one of my very elderly aunts who had worked her butt off could not get a nickel because she owned her old falling down house and five acres of scrub and rocks-which at that time and place were worth only about seven or eight times my free loading nieghbor's annual rent subsidy.

So nowadays it is not unusual to hear some guy who has worked his ass off all his life bitterly comment that he would have been better of to have spent his life drinking beer when he hears about his never-held-a-job nieghbor getting a couple of hundred grand free medical-which is pretty damn common-and which would have bankrupted HIM.

I have a life long friend who has collected ebough in salary and benefits making sure that landlords don't get over on rent assisted tenants to have bought and given a free house to at least fifty such tenants.

So it all cuts both ways.I am quite sure the corporate types are far,far ahead,and will remain so.
I could list up dozens of cases that have run into the billions each,but my typing finger is getting tired.

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