On The Money; An All-Cut Solution to the Budget Impasse

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

An All-Cut Solution to the Budget Impasse

While a strong consensus exists among the American people to tax the rich, the rich themselves have enough political clout to insure that they won’t pay any more in taxes, unless they also see drastic cuts to the social safety net, already the weakest in the developed world. So really, what’s the point?

If all of our tax dollars will go to pay for more cops, prisons, guards, bombs, soldiers, drones and high-tech surveillance equipment, while it leaves millions of Americans homeless and out in the cold, why bother? Why throw good money after bad? I say it’s time to cut our losses, cut the crap, and cut to the chase.

Yes, it’s time to cut to the bone, through the bone, the spinal column, the carotid arteries and the windpipe, and the time to do it is NOW!!! There’s never been a better time, and no one has ever deserved it more. It’s time to AXE THE RICH!!

Really, what have the rich ever done for you? If you work for them, you know those jobs suck, and that they will work you to death, and destroy the whole world just to take a little more for themselves. It’s time to rid the world of this sickness called greed, and to do it, we must cull the herd. We must exterminate those already terminally infected with this pathogen so they don’t infect others, and this bloodletting will help inoculate the rest of the population.

As long as we live in a culture that protects, rewards, and celebrates greed, we live in a culture bent on ecocide. Every sustainable culture on Earth punishes greed, and every culture that fails to do so, also fails as a culture, and fails to survive. If you examine the cultures around the world that have endured for more than, say, 40,000 years, without depleting their resource base, you will find egalitarian societies that maintain their equality by punishing greed.

Sustainable tribal cultures treat greed as a childish tendency, to be scorned. Those who refuse to grow out of their childish selfishness are driven out of the tribe, or killed, though this is rare, because the benefits of living in an egalitarian society, far out-weigh any benefits one can achieve living alone with their avarice.

That is how sustainable cultures deal with greed. They recognize that violence is a natural part of life, and while they do not undertake it lightly, they do not shy away from it when violence becomes necessary. For them, violence is sometimes necessary to feed and clothe themselves and to preserve their culture and way of life. Sustainable cultures embrace and celebrate this kind of violence, but they do not tolerate greed. If we wish to live sustainably on this planet, we should emulate the people who do it best, and have been doing it the longest.

We cannot afford to continue to coddle, cultivate and incubate the most virulent disease to ever afflict humanity. We must wipe greed off of the face of the Earth, and we need to do it now. We can learn to live differently, but we must first stop the spread of this plague. If we love our children, and want a better future for them, we must not shrink from this responsibility.

That, my friends, is a plan to solve our budget crisis, entirely with cuts, that’s On The Money.

On The Money; The Sick Ideas Behind Healthy Humboldt

On The Money,

Economic Advice for the 99%;

The Sick Ideas Behind Healthy Humboldt

 

Listening to Dennis Huber’s Monday Morning Magazine show on KMUD last week, I heard the voice of a representative of Healthy Humboldt talking about the thrilling conclusion of the Humboldt County General Plan Update. While the endless acrimonious bickering on this issue highlights the complete failure of county government and private enterprise to address the county’s housing needs, or provide good stewardship for the resources and lands of Humboldt County, Healthy Humboldt’s cheerful proclamation that they advocate for “sustainability” particularly irked me.

I know they mean well, and I understand their reasoning: If we encourage people to live closer together, and closer to jobs, services, and public transportation, we can lower Humboldt County’s carbon footprint. However, a lower carbon footprint does not equal sustainability, not even close. The county goes to great lengths to prohibit sustainable housing, and even greater lengths to encourage resource exploitation and consumption. Healthy Humboldt wouldn’t dare suggest the county operate in any other way.

So, whether you’re an egghead ecofascist, a greedy fuck-all real-estate developer or a blood-sucking dope yuppie, you’ve got your head up your ass when it comes to sustainability in Humboldt County. The same goes for the bureaucracies in Eureka who issue permits and enforce the reams of pointless and arcane regulations the county has already adopted. These people have already made an unholy mess of Humboldt County, and this GPU won’t change that one bit.

Face it, as a culture, we have no idea how to live on this planet sustainably. Most of our building codes and housing standards were established in the post WWII boom years, the period of the greatest increase in American consumption, and before the concept of a finite planet ever crept into the American psyche. Today, building codes still largely reflect the values and attitudes of that bygone era.

The whole point of building codes was not to make homes “safer” or whatever, but to make them cost more, use more stuff, keep more people busy, and waste more water, energy, space and resources. In other words, building codes were established to spur growth in the economy. The entire regulatory system was designed to make housing less sustainable, and it has been fantastically successful. They gave us suburban sprawl, gridlock, and homelessness. They’ve made homes so expensive that most people can no longer afford one.

As a result, people have become slaves to their homes, if they haven’t already lost everything to their home, through foreclosure. They’ve successfully turned “home”, which should be a place of comfort, security, and sanctuary, into a source of stress, anxiety and endless toil. This is a remarkable achievement, even if it is not exactly something to be proud of.

We should acknowledge the county government, land developers, the construction industry, real-estate agents, appraisers, bankers and mortgage brokers for their role in generating an enormous amount of unnecessary economic activity by making life suck for so many people. They really deserve more than a token of our appreciation.

If you are homeless, facing foreclosure, struggling to make payments on an underwater mortgage or throwing your money away on rent in an overpriced housing market, you should know that it’s not by accident. Some people believe that it is more important for them to make more money, that it is for you to have a place to live, and those are the people bickering over the Humboldt GPU.

No, no one at the table at the GPU wants to see hillsides dotted with cabins, shacks, yurts and teepees. No one involved with the GPU wants to return to the days of out-houses and pit latrines, but that’s what sustainability looks like. That’s what home should look like, simple, tidy, and homemade. That is what the Humboldt County General Plan exists to prohibit; sensible homes built by hand, from local materials by the people who intend to live in them. Instead, the county employs a small army of personnel to insure that everyone in Humboldt County, lives up to their unrealistic expectations born in an era of unrestrained, bewilderingly wasteful consumption.

They all want housing costs to continue to rise because they all want more money for themselves, more money for their land, more money for their existing homes, more expensive new homes, more grants for Healthy Humboldt and more revenue for Humboldt County bureaucrats. They don’t care whether or not you have a home, or what kind of torture you endure to keep it.

Everyone involved in this seemingly endless saga with the GPU deserves your contempt, as does the GPU itself. You deserve a home, and not one that you have to spend half of your waking hours at work to afford. There’s a view of the Humboldt GPU that’s on the money.

On The Money, The Problem of the Middle-Class

On The Money,

Financial Advice for the Working-Class

The Problem of the Middle-Class

 

I hear a lot of the talk about the poor, put in terms of a problem to be solved, for example, the homelessness problem, the problem of poverty, or the problem of income inequality. On the other hand, I never hear anyone talk about the middle-class in such terms.

 

You never hear politicians talk about helping people break out of the cycle of income and consumption that keeps them locked in a middle-class lifestyle. You never hear this kind of talk, even though the middle-class is, by far, the bigger problem, both globally and locally. This is undeniably the case.

 

The reason we, here in the US, representing about 5% of the world’s population, consume roughly 30% of the worlds natural resources, is that we have a lot of middle-class people. Sure, our middle-class consumes much more, per-capita, than middle-class people elsewhere in the world, but the dream of a middle-class lifestyle, and the resources consumed in the process of realizing it, or at least trying to, lies at the heart of our current global environmental crisis.

 

In the same way that suburban sprawl degraded the countryside by leveling forest and farm for millions of tract homes in the US, the growing global middle-class will happily plow under everything that makes life sustainable on planet Earth, for an attractive, but illusory, high-consumption lifestyle. The middle-class is an idea not founded in reality, so it cannot be made sustainable. It’s a disease, a mental disorder, a social disorder, a cultural disorder. This disease makes life more difficult for everyone, especially the poor, and soon, unless we can stop it, this disease will render the entire planet uninhabitable.

 

Clearly the middle-class is a problem, if not the problem. But it’s important to realize that the middle-class is composed of people, suffering people, confused people, people who need our help. They didn’t ask to catch this disease, and they can be cured, so we need to address the problem of the middle-class, compassionately.

 

People infected with Middle-Class Syndrome require pretty substantial incomes to support their high-consumption lifestyle, this often requires them to work long hours at stressful jobs. Many of these people took out huge student loans to get the education that helped them land those salaried positions, and/or have mortgages and other debt commitments that keep them trapped in a high-stress, high-income, and high-consumption pattern of behavior, and they see no way out.

 

Our capitalist economy dictates that everything, including workers lives, even salaried workers lives, be managed for maximum productivity, to remain competitive in the marketplace. A person managed for maximum productivity, really doesn’t have the energy left at the end of the day to genuinely contribute to society. So, instead, the middle-class consumes products, substances and services to compensate for the emptiness that characterizes the life of someone managed for maximum productivity.

 

They buy stuff. The merchants who sell them stuff, the enablers, of course, tell the middle-class that they are great people, and that they shouldn’t waste their energy contributing to society, when they can just “vote with their dollar”. In this way, the merchants become dependent on the middle-class ‘s addiction to consumption, and the middle-class become dependent on the merchants for their self-esteem, social interactions and sense of well-being, leading to a vicious cycle of income and consumption that characterizes Middle-Class Syndrome, and maintains the flow of cash into the pockets of the super-rich.

 

While a person with this disease may consume three or five or ten times the resources of a person living near the poverty line, there’s no evidence that it makes them any happier than even people living deep in poverty. In fact we have quite a bit of evidence that most people with Middle-Class Syndrome live in real misery, far beyond that endured by most of the world’s poor.

 

Besides the fact that a very large percentage of the middle-class abuse alcohol, prescription medications and illegal drugs, far more than the poor and working-class, addictions to substances like oil, coal, gold, jewels and plastic blobjects full of high-tech circuitry, also plague those afflicted with Middle-Class Syndrome. Most can no longer control their own behavior, and so they slip further and further into self-degradation, taking the neighborhood, the community, and the natural world down with them.

 

So, we need to address the problem of the middle-class, not only as an environmental issue, and a social justice issue, but also as a public health issue. We need to address their mental health issues. We need to address their substance abuse issues. But, we absolutely must find a way to change their abhorrent behavior.

 

We need to educate them about how to behave respectfully. Because many middle-Class people grew up middle-Class, they never learned to respect themselves, other people, or the community of life. They simply know no other way of life. As tempting as it is to blame the middle-class for all the harm they do, we must recognize that they are caught in a trap and are simply too stupid to find their way out of it, and have forgotten how to function effectively in the real world.

 

Meanwhile, nearly all of the world’s resources, including the life-force of most of the world’s people, gets sucked up and destroyed, to fill the increasingly empty lives of the middle-class, and the already overstuffed pockets of the super-rich, for whom the middle-class mostly work. Yes, if we as a species, and an ecosystem, hope to survive this century, we need to find an effective, permanent, and final solution to the middle-class problem, right now.

Welcome To The SoHum Community Blog

Welcome to The Southern Humboldt Community Blog

 

Welcome to the newly renamed, Southern Humboldt Community Blog.  If I’ve learned anything from the good people of Southern Humboldt, that is how to turn a private enterprise into a publicly supported non-profit, and vice-verse. Here in Sohum, people have learned to blend private property, local business interests and the non-profit sector in many new and unique ways, that I find absolutely fascinating, and inspiring.

 

Hence the new name for this blog. I sure would appreciate some community support for all of the great work I do here at www.lygsbtd.wordpress.com. So, not unlike other insular, self-serving, cliques in the area, I have skillfully inserted the word “Community” into the name of my personal pet project, and filed for non-profit status. Now you can make a tax-deductible donation to the SoHum Community Blog, by making a deposit to account # 13339 at the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union, or you may send check or money order to P.O.Box 2301 Redway, CA 95560.

Let me remind you of some of the great work I’ve done here at the Southern Humboldt Community Blog. I’ve been a tireless advocate for the homeless, writing several articles addressing the challenges faced by this community’s most vulnerable citizens. I’ve provided unique coverage of Humboldt Co. elections. I’ve covered arts and entertainment, and I’ve written numerous provocative editorials that challenge this community to face the important issues of our time, with a fresh perspective.

 

How much is this priceless gem, the Southern Humboldt Community Blog, worth to you. At least a hundred bucks, right? So that’s what I ask of everyone in this community. A $100 donation will make you an official supporter of the Southern Humboldt Community Blog, entitling you to special privileges, and invitations. Specifically, you will receive invitations to special fund-raising events in the future.

 

Will you, as a community member, and supporter of the Southern Humboldt Community Blog, be able to participate in providing content to the Southern Humboldt Community Blog? In a word, “No”.

 

Of course your comments are always welcome here at the Southern Humboldt Community Blog. I very much value and appreciate your input. I sincerely hope you will comment on every piece that I post, but don’t expect to post anything here yourself.

 

After all, I founded this blog. I’ve put in hundreds of hours of volunteer time on this blog. I currently serve as the President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer. I also hold the remaining three seats on the Board of Directors. All in all, a truly grueling commitment of time and energy, but I ‘m happy to make the sacrifice for my community.

 

No, what I need from this community is support. I need financial support. This blog costs money. I go through one of these 3 subject spiral notebooks every month. I can’t tell you how many Pilot G2 refills I’ve drained putting these pieces together. My laptop computer, almost entirely devoted to producing this blog, occasionally requires service. But by far, the biggest expense I incur, as a result of providing this valuable service to my beloved SoHum community, is all of the bad food I have to buy, and eat in order to get enough “free” wifi time to post this gem of the Emerald Triangle, to the internet.

 

So I need funds. I need internet access. I need good organic food, and I need someone to wash my truck once in a while. I don’t need your drivel. Not unlike other local non-profit community groups, I generate plenty enough drivel to keep this non-profit going well into the future.

I just need this community to step up to the plate with the kind of support it takes to keep this vitally important community service alive. Thank-You for giving generously.

SoHum Town Attempts Bold Makeover

SoHum Town Attempts Bold Makeover

Gargleville Merchants to Hold Auditions for Classier Townsfolk

 

In an effort to spruce up the image of the small rural Northern California town, the Gargleville Chamber of Commerce has decided to hire a completely new set of townspeople and shoppers.

“We were really sick of all of the skuzzy dirty hippies hanging around Gargleville.” Lake Blamin of the Gargleville Chamber of Commerce said this morning in a press conference at the Gargleville Chamber today.

“They’re missing teeth, have terrible complexions, smell bad and they’re disheveled. That’s not the image that we want to project. We’d really like to cash in on what’s happening in Wine Country, and we’d like that upscale clientele to feel more at home here.”

Blamin continued, “So, we’ve decided to hire people to pose as shoppers, park patrons and restaurant goers in Gargleville. Each day they will have to pass inspection before they report to work. They will have to be clean, dress fashionably and smell nice. They will spread out through the town, posing as urban professionals,

well-to-do retired people,

and college students.

The kind of people we’d all like to see shopping in our stores, eating at our restaurants and enjoying our parks.

This town employs very few professionals, has no college, and our old people look grizzled and haggard. We realized that Gargleville would never live up to our dreams unless we took drastic action.”

Blamin explained, “So, now we will pay 200 actors to play the parts. We’ll give them a clothing allowance, comp their meals, and provide a nice lounge with restrooms and showers. Because, you can’t expect someone to spend all day in town without letting them use the restroom. Also, it’s often very hot or very rainy in Gargleville, and we want them to look their best.”

Won’t that get expensive for a small rural town with a remote location, few employment opportunities and all the charm of a suburban strip mall?

Blamin responds, “Look, half of the residents of Gargleville subsist on Social Security, SSI or veteran’s benefits. They don’t bring in the big piles of cash that have made our registers ring for the past 25 years. We’ve grown accustomed to having large quantities of untraceable cash dumped in our laps by the marijuana industry thriving in the hills from Blocksburg to Whale Gulch.

Now, we take those piles of $100 bills for granted, but we’ve never liked the people we take them from, especially the people who bring the money into this area. These lowlife, dirt-wad street and mid-level pot dealers often hang around town for days or weeks before they work out a deal. And in general, an underground drug based economy attracts problems like addiction, exploitation and lawlessness. But that’s not my problem.”

Isn’t Gargleville already pretty crowded?

Blamin explained, “From now on all traffic coming towards Gargleville on Bedwood Drive will feed directly onto 101 North. That way, all the traffic from Bedway and points West, and Boulder Point and points East get funneled North to Eureka. Chamber of Commerce Police Officers stationed on 101 at Leggett will direct all Northbound: hippie buses, dusty pickup trucks, vans, old RVs and cars with bumper stickers to use Usal Road. Officers at Salmon Creek will direct the same miscreants through Honeydew. This way we can enjoy the benefits of a thriving underground industry without inviting it in through the front door.”

How will Gargleville merchants continue to benefit from the underground industry if you divert all of their business to Eureka?

Blamin is optimistic, “For years Gargleville merchants have charged more money for less goods and services than anyone in the area. Considering that history, I don’t think it will be difficult to make them hand us piles of cash, and in return, we’ll give them nothing at all. That’s the next logical step really. And this way, we won’t even have to look at them.”

So Long, Old People

Sometimes Old People Just Suck

 

This letter appears in this weeks edition (8-9-2011) of our local weekly newspaper. I wrote it in response to a letter by Loreen Eliason, who used her letter to complain about homeless people in Garberville.

Dear Editor,

I thought wisdom came with age. Isn’t that why we call old people “elders” and respect them, even though they don’t do much but suck up social-security and medicare dollars.

They’re supposed to be smart, right? At least smart enough to retire before the economy collapsed, smart enough to buy homes before the housing bubble and smart enough to take jobs back when they paid enough to afford one. They were smart enough to arrive before ravenous locusts destroyed the environment and wrecked the economy.

Actually, they bear some resemblance to those ravenous locusts of the Populux age. I refer of course to the people who lived at the pinnacle of American post-war hyper-consumption. Yeah, today’s old people look just like those ravenous locusts, only older, fatter and crankier. The people who drove 25 ft long cars, dripping with chrome,

put redwood decks on their above ground pools,

and filled our landfills with every imaginable consumer product, also gave us global warming, nuclear waste, smog, and the most insanely unsustainable lifestyle in the history of humanity.

They also profited from the housing bubble, sold out the unions and take advantage of cheap labor by shopping at Wal-Mart and hiring day laborers. They skimmed the cream and then sucked up the foam too.

They should write a book titled “How to screw your planet and your progeny for the next ten generations” That’s some serious wisdom there. No one in the history of humanity has ever been so qualified to write that book, and no one in the future will ever have the opportunity again, thanks to them. If we ever find a new planet to pillage, we’ll need that book. Until then, maybe we don’t need to hear so much from them.

At least that’s how I felt after reading the words of Loreen Eliason in The Independent last week. This woman has the nerve to complain about how young people are ruining this town for her granddaughter, that young people don’t deserve a place to use the restroom and should be driven out of town. She calls them “homeless by choice.” Thanks to the aforementioned locusts, young people today don’t have the same choices they once did.

No longer do we have blue-collar jobs that pay decent wages. No longer do home prices reflect local wages. No longer can we say “fill er up” at the gas station for under $10. No longer can poor hippies afford to buy land here. We live in a different world.

While she admits “sure I did drugs back in the day, and I still love my cocktails” she condemns young people for doing the same. Was there a particular day when drug use was OK? Does that make it OK to condemn anyone who uses drugs on a different day? Her generation went shirtless, back when they were skinny, every bit as much as young kids today, and crotchety old drunk ladies complained then too. Some things never change

These kids got a raw deal, and it gets rawer every day. Until you old people are ready to sell your homes for something like what you paid for them, you can expect to see lots of homeless people around, and I wouldn’t count on them dressing for you. They don’t owe you anything, and if I were you, I wouldn’t give them any more good reasons to resent you.

On the Money, Work.

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

Work

We sure do work hard don’t we?  American worker productivity has risen 106% in the last 20yrs.  At the same time, real wages have fallen by 6%. Clearly we don’t mind working harder even when we ‘re not getting paid for it. The average American, even after the economic melt-down, still works more than 50 hours a week, or about half of all waking hours. Far more than the average medieval peasant. Don’t we have anything better to do?

 

I know they call us the working-class, because we work, but why do we work? More importantly, why do we work for them? By them I mean “the job creators”, the multimillionaires who have engineered our society. Specifically, why do we hope to work for them so much that we excuse them from paying their fair share of taxes, in the hopes that they might create a few jobs? We talk about these jobs like they were angels from heaven, but if you’ve ever worked at one, you know that most jobs suck.

 

We treat work as a moral obligation. We call it “the work ethic”. It doesn’t matter if the work has any meaning to you, does any good in the world, if it’s work, by golly you should do it, whether you get paid or not. Why should we feel this way about work?

 

Many people feel a strong moral obligation to their family, but they don’t despise people who don’t have a family. Some people feel a strong moral obligation to to their church, but they don’t hate me for sleeping-in on Sunday. They just want to share “the good news.” Work is different. People with jobs resent those without.

 

That’s always the first insult hurled at the poor…They’re lazy. They don’t want to work. If they had a “work ethic”, they’d go get low paying jobs, doing hard labor, under dangerous conditions. We resent the poor for not working, even though most of them do work, because we all resent working so much, ourselves.

 

So, lets face that fact. Work sucks! We need good reasons to motivate us to work. We need to get paid. In the last 30 years, the calculus of work has shifted a lot. Wages have declined substantially. Fewer jobs offer health benefits, and fewer still offer long term security. After a decade of hyper-inflated home prices, fewer workers see home ownership as a realistic aspiration. As the method-actor might say, “What’s our motivation?”

Do we treat the people who really work hard, for low wages, like fruit pickers, farm workers or food service people, with reverence? Do they gain social standing for their obvious strong moral character? Hardly. We do everything we can to make them invisible. We don’t want to see poor hard working people any more than we want to see poor unemployed people. So, if you can’t afford a decent place to live and a healthy diet on your salary, and society is going to treat you like the scum of the earth anyway, why work at all?

 

When your job doesn’t pay enough to cover all of the expenses of having a job, which include a phone, transportation, wardrobe, decent housing, and a healthy diet, your job slowly consumes you. The longer you work those jobs, the more your quality of life suffers, and the more you subsidize your employers business with your own life force. Do you really feel morally obligated to sacrifice your life for capitalism, while your boss pockets the profits? This makes no sense. So, you can’t really blame people for not wanting to work, especially when the pay is low and the conditions suck.

 

So, maybe people don’t really need to work so much. Back in the ’70s I visited Tomorrowland at Disneyworld. Back then they promised a future full of leisure time, thanks to the proliferation of labor saving technology. The animatronic “Father” of the futuristic family of the “year 2000” only worked about 25 hrs a week, to enjoy a futuristic approximation of ’50s era material wealth. What happened to all of this leisure time we were supposed to have?

 

According to Disney, “Dad” spent that 25hrs in front of a computer screen at home. Today “Dad” probably does spend 25hrs in front of a computer screen at home, but that’s in addition to, not instead of, the 50+ hrs he spends at the office. That Disney experience influenced me a lot. I prepared to enjoy a life of leisure. I cultivate a lot of rewarding hobbies, and value my time quite highly.

 

On the other hand, most of what passes for work in this culture should really be best left undone. For instance:

Every single huge industrial accident, like the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, or the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, happened at work. A lot of unemployed people fish in the Gulf for direct sustenance, working people ruined that. People do all kinds of crazy shit at work, just because they get paid. Including…

 

Deep water oil exploration and nuclear power plants. Talk about crazy shit we could all live without.

If we stopped all oil drilling and closed down all of the nuclear power plants, the planet would thank us, and our quality of life would undoubtedly improve. We really wouldn’t miss that energy either. They would have just used it for a lot of other work better left undone. Like:

Defense industry jobs. Do we really need more bombers, guns and missiles? We’ve got hundreds of B52 bombers sitting out on the desert in Arizona, thousands of tanks, trucks and military vehicles of all sorts, packed in cosmoline, filling cavernous warehouses all over this country. We have tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, millions of tons of bombs, and thousands of nuclear warheads. God help us if we even come close to using up all of this stuff.

 

The Military. “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” We have a hammer. We hammered Vietnam. We hammered Iraq. We hammered Afghanistan. Has it done us any good? Maybe we don’t need such a big hammer. Maybe we’re all such hammerheads, that we don’t need a national hammer at all.If we just gave all of those leftover weapons to the American people,  No one would dare fuck with us!

 

Advertizing. Try to imagine a world where no one tried to sell you anything you didn’t need. This would take out 95% of the entertainment industry as well. No more TV, except community access, no more commercial hits, just your local musicians., actors and artists doing work that means something to them. Marketing, data mining, consumer behavior research even most psychology jobs would disappear. Some people get paid to design advertizing that helps your kid overcome your objections to sugary cereals and fad toys. Those people really should find something else to do with their lives, don’t you think?

 

Teachers. No one in this culture knows how to live sustainably on this planet. Why waste so much of our children’s time conveying a bankrupt culture to them? They couldn’t possibly screw up as bad as we have, and shouldn’t think of their elders as anything more than a cautionary example of what happens when you spend too much time in school and not enough time living in the world.

Now you might think, “Those are good, high-paying professional jobs.”, but in fact we would inhabit a much better world if these people just spent the day drinking cheap booze in the park. So when you see someone drinking cheap booze in the park, remember, it could be worse. They could be at work.