Day 247: Only in a Broken System does Misery equal Profit

Growing up and living in a First World Country where your Basic Human Rights are actually ‘met’ (albeit through considerable compromises) – you are made sure to be reminded of the many places and many people who are not in the same fortunate position as you’re in. “Empty your plate, don’t you know there’s starving children in Africa who don’t have anything to eat?”, “You should be happy going to school, in country XYZ they don’t get even get to go to school because there aren’t any”, “Stop whining, in country SomethingSomething you’d be living on the street by now”.

The message that gets ingrained is “Don’t complain, you should be happy – out there it is HELL”. So not only is one molded into an obedient citizen, made sure to ‘not bite the hand that feeds it’, we also get imprinted with immense guilt for having the niceties we have – knowing fully that if we had been born somewhere else, things would look a whole lot different.

So, what do we law-abiding-guilt-bearing-citizens do? Once in a while, as we get some ‘time-off’ from being a wage-slave – we want to go and do some ‘good’ in the world. We sign up to take care of the poor people, the less fortunate, the parentless, the hopeless, the marginalized and abused ones ‘out there’. We grab together our hard-worked savings and pay some travelling company to go work somewhere for free.

We are getting our holiday, we’re helping those poor people – it’s a Win-Win situation, right?
Is this ‘voluntourism’ phenomenon an expression of our altruism and good hearts? Or is it just another way devised by a crooked system to make money out of whatever will tickle our fancy?

In fact, 'voluntourism', as it's been dubbed, is the fastest growing travel sector, worth an estimated £1.3 billion globally.

Let us have a look at how the market responds to our demand for Guilt-Relief and Exotic Holidays:

'I thought, even if I can make a jot of difference, it's got to be worth it. So I started looking on the internet. Eventually, I came across an orphanage called the Dream House on the borders of Thailand and Burma, which rescued children at risk of being trafficked. There were videos on the website and it all looked amazing.'

A Thai charity, Starfish, was offering two-week voluntary placements at the orphanage for £400, with basic accommodation included.
Caroline paid in advance, and in January this year she travelled to Thailand. On arrival, she met other volunteers, many of them teenagers on their gap years, all signed up to help at the orphanage.
But within days of starting the placement, Caroline sensed that something was seriously wrong. 'I was pretty shocked at the conditions,' she says. 'The children slept on the floor - although there wasn't even a floor, just carpet underlay - with no beds or blankets. The youngest was only two years old.
'At dinner, they had one chicken between 29 children and a few vegetables. All the volunteers were coming in and giving £200 a week. So where was all the money going?'

Ah… the ways of Supply and Demand: you wish to relieve your guilt – and so we shall provide you with the opportunity to do so. The ways of the free market are cold; the market does not look at your intentions, the market does not care about the repercussions of serving demands – all it does is reek money and provide the quickest and best way to cash it in.

We end up with fake orphanage centers with children trained to act according to our idea of what ‘poor orphans on the other side of the world’ act like – because that is the experience we desire, and our money bring to life such an attraction.

The shocking revelation has been that volunteers, who have intentions to give some love back to children in real need, are tragically and inadvertently having the opposite effect.'

Not only are we maintaining the atrocities we would like to see eradicated within the world, we are in effect enhancing them and not in any way whatsoever addressing the very system, the very design which is responsible for them in the first place. After all, what this ‘voluntourism’ point illustrates, is that we cannot address the symptoms of a broken system through utilizing the same broken system as medium towards a solution.

'One volunteer I heard of turned up to teach at a school, and wondered why he didn't get a very warm reaction. Towards the end of his time there he discovered the local teacher had been fired because a Westerner was coming in to teach for free.'

In a world driven and moved by profit only, we cannot expect to alleviate poverty or alleviate the hardship of people through a profit-driven medium, as it is the very profit starting point, the worshipping of profit/money over Life/People – that lies at the heart of the problem, that pumps and thrusts its poison all throughout the body, leaving no area untouched.

While we see the hardship of remote places on our television screen, we want to travel to those distant places in the belief that the problem and solution lie in the same place. There is actually little that can be done by travelling to the other side of the world for a few weeks / a year and trying to alleviate the symptoms of a much darker dis-ease. It’s not by coincidence or genuine will to ‘work hard’ that we’ve created a Safe First World Bubble for ourselves. We need only to flip through history to see that we’ve acquired our wealth and security through the exploitation of others. In the past in direct forms, through conquest, through colonization – and today indirectly through economic ties whose nature and flow had already been determined, shaped and solidified within the previous Era of exploitation, now merely extending the same relationship in a different form – but really, nothing has changed.

Unless we change the values and principles of the system at home that we live by, we are not going to be able to bring about change ‘out there’. We are the power-center that maintains the problem, if we want to bring about change – we are right where we need to be.

The first step towards a global effect is to put into place the values and principles we want to live by and that we want to see others live by. A good place to start, would be the enforcement and safeguarding of Human Rights which can practically be employed through the implementation of a Living Income Guaranteed. Since the Right to Life has been historically linked to the ownership of money, making sure that everyone has enough money/funds available to live a dignified life is an absolute must.

To find out more about the Living Income Guaranteed, please visit:
http://livingincome.me and http://livingincomguaranteed.wordpress.com

All quotes from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2418074/Fake-orphanages-Bogus-animal-sanctuaries-And-crooks-growing-rich-Western-gullibility--gooding-gap-year-holidays-horrifyingly-callous-con.html

Related articles

• A Living Income Guaranteed is the BIG Issue
• Will the Living Income Guaranteed cause Inflation?
• Living Income Guaranteed and the Rise of the Machine
• BIG Pilot Project Namibia: a Perspective
• Day 244: Transforming Currency into Money with Living Income Guaranteed

Read More

Day 243: Living Income Guaranteed and Communism

Whenever a new way of organizing society and our economic system opens up, one of the comments that comes to the surface is :"But isn't that communism?"

Now, communism in itself as a word has become a word of Terror. It is used specifically to instigate fear reactions within people, where you do not want to be linked or involved in anything that may be deemed 'communistic'. But what is communism really? Nobody knows anymore. It's one of those terms -- just like the Inflation concept -- that has taken on a life of its own. In the case of communism, it's become a boogieman story. I mean, when people talk about communism and 'fighting communism' it is done from an assumption that communism is 'one clearly defined thing' and ‘it’s clearly evil’. Truth is, there were many various different concepts that developed that could be deemed 'communistic'. It's the same with Religion, you can talk about for instance 'Christianity' but then within that you have various variations and adaptations of Christianity. Forms of communism were adopted in Spain in the 1930s which were highly effective, yet you don’t hear about it anywhere.

So when you talk to people and ask why they are against anything that could closely be related to communism, they go "oh but just look at Russia, and all those people that died it was a total failure, it’s never going to work". What is not being done is putting communism that took place in Russia (or what actually would be more correct is to say 'the communism that DIDN'T take place in Russia) into context.

What must be understood is that Communism as an idea and Communism as ‘what happened in Russia’ are two different things. You see, people were angry, people then had an idea and then they went into a Revolution to try and implement that idea. The thing is that once they were in power – they had no practical plan or way of implementing their idea in a way that would actually work. They had no knowledge of things like politics and economics and were completely inadequate and incompetent to actually run a country. So, they tried things out, it failed, they went into fear and established a form of authoritarianism and all in all the story did not have a happy ending.

To go back to the Christianity example – the way Communism is treated is the same way the Jesus message and Christianity is being treated today. We have what Jesus said, being one thing – as principles of ‘Love thy neighbour’ and ‘Give as you would like to receive’, which is very much a principle of Equality and Harmonious Living. And then you have Christianity in all its various ways as what is ‘supposedly the Jesus message’ – but when you look at what is actually being lived out, is a message of fear, hate and inequality. So just like ‘what Jesus said’ and what ‘Christianity does’ are two completely different things – you can’t say that ‘Communism as an idea’ and ‘How communism took place’ are the exact same thing.

If you look at what happened in Russia, this is exactly one of the reasons why we never promoted any type of ‘Revolution’ to bring about change within any of our proposals, because they are impulsive and short-sighted. So yes, communism in Russia failed because there was no practical common sense reasoning or research that had gone into what they were doing. And because they failed big time, communism now has forevermore been branded by the mark of the Devil, and we should fight it in any way we can.

So now, each time something comes up that even in the slightest way could disturb the way things currently are and can in the slightest way be interpreted as ‘communistic': fear rises and it gets boxed away. All communism has been reduced to in this day and age is a form of fear induced superstition to keep people from actually thinking for themselves, kind of the same way Parents will tell their children that the boogieman’s gonna come for them if they don’t eat their veggies. Come up with any idea that will bring about a change in the way the current system works and people will come at you with the big C-Word to scare you into shutting up and conforming.

It’s come to a point that anything that doesn’t fit and support the status quo is labelled ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ and anything that does support the current system is called ‘democratic’ and ‘free’. It’s just a word used as one pleases – if you don’t like it, call it communistic – if you do like something, call it ‘democratic and free’. I mean, you can have two countries who both to some extent operate within a form of Nationalization – but depending on how much they threaten the status quo the one will be called Communistic and the other one won’t. It’s just a word of convenience. Take Chile for instance whose economy is based on the nationalization of copper, copper being one of their main exports. They nationalized it and they did it effectively – and yet Chile is not deemed communistic. In fact, the World Bank will tell you that they are very proud of Chile and that Chile is an example for other South American countries in terms of adopting the Free Market System. But if you’re a different country and you nationalize say your oil and you adopt policies that are unfavorable to the United States = now you’re communistic = You are evil, your president is the Devil, you must be stopped.

It should actually become a rule that you can’t use the word ‘Communism’ in any form of argument or way to make a point, because the word has gotten abused so much that it’s just a joke. If you can’t make a point without resorting to terms like Communism as a form of Propaganda to terrorize people, then you just shouldn’t bother.

Related articles

• Day 330: Inflated Egos, Deflate Reality.
• Day 252: The Rich Be Cursed, The Rich Be Blessed
• Day 226: Living Income Guaranteed will Prevent Destruction of Homes
• Day 246: Green Economics - the Newest Fad?
• Day 227: The Myth of Conscious Buying

Read More

Day 239: Sustainable Pricing with Living Income Guaranteed

When we have a look at how prices have been determined throughout history, we can see that that for most throughout time (up to until the last 50-100 years), prices were set in the interest of the owner of the product / service, whereby those who labored on the products were given miniscule wages. Back in the day, we had so many people living in absolute poverty and hardship that any wage – even if it was next to nothing – was ‘good enough’ for them to take the job.

When people would start getting tired of their ridiculous wages and crappy working conditions, the business owners could always just fire them and replace them with people who were worse off and thus wouldn’t ‘complain as much’. With our tendency within society towards division and discrimination, there was always some form of group lower on the ladder, whether they were from a different race, newly emigrated, different gender, lower class,… -- there’s was always some chap in a more horrible condition that would take the job – and so never any real change came about in terms of everyone together standing for a living wage. Much of this same scenario is still taking place in the world – where it is taking place ‘out of sight’ and thus ‘out of mind’. Where slaves and minorities have now been replaced with alienated workforces abroad. As long as it’s ‘not us’ and ‘not in our face’ – we don’t seem to care.

If we have a look at the minimum wage concept, this is a fairly new concept when placing it into context of our entire history. Not so long ago, the idea of a minimum wage was even ruled to have been ‘unconstitutional’ In the United States, because it limits the scope of ‘freedom’ within contracts. So the freedom involving someone entering a contract, was deemed more important than the freedom to one’s Life, to the freedom of earn a living wage whereby you can sustain yourself.

So even though we now have certain protection points in place like the Declaration of Human Rights, and all sorts of Bills that are supposed to safeguard and protect our dignity and well-being – we still seem to shift in our ‘old way’ of doing things, where we care more about the freedom of contract, the freedom of the business environment than we do about the freedom of our own Human Rights. After all these years of so called ‘progression’, we have still failed to see and understand the simplistic connection that exists between prices and wages.

Many of us who do earn some kind of wage, still have to be careful about our spending. Because our wages are not secured, and very likely to be lower than what we’d like – we are picky with our spending and will look for the ‘cheap stuff’. The more cheap stuff we buy, the more stuff we can get for our money. It seems like a rational decision, following that ‘since I have so little money, I better buy things that cost little money, so that I can at least ‘maximize’ my purchases with the little I have’. Because we are purchasing and buying from a starting point of fear, a starting point of lack – we look for what is cheap. Yet, we fail to see that things can only be ‘cheap’, if somewhere down the production line, other things were made ‘cheap’ – which in most cases would be = the wages. So because we have cheap wages we buy cheap stuff and maintain our cheap wages because that is what we are supporting through buying cheap things. It’s a cycle that feeds itself.

When we do our shopping and purchases, we only look at prices in relation to our own pocket. We forget that there is another party involved as those who participated in its creation process, whose wages are to be paid and included within the price of goods and services. We only care about ‘getting the best deal’ where we are happy when we got something very cheap, and then feel cheated if we find out we paid more for something, where we could have paid less. We don’t get that for us to have our happy/winning experience when getting a ‘good deal’, someone else has to be cheated on --- where they are now being paid less than their actual value as a living, breathing, laboring, contributing human being.

In modern society, most of us are both the consumers and the workers. We are the ones feeling like we’re winning when we can buy cheap things and we are the ones feeling like we’re losing / being cheated on when we get our paycheck.

The only way for us to have a healthy relationship towards consumption and our own dignity as a human being as being intricately involved in the creation of products for consumption – is by directly connecting prices to sustainable living wages. Prices should not be set first, where only afterwards we give the ‘leftovers’ and ‘scraps’ to the workforce. Living wages should come first, and not be up for negotiation when setting and calculating prices. It should become downright illegal to price any product or service in a way that diminishes the wage level of an individual to lower than that of a sustainable / minimum living wage – because this would be a direct infringement on someone’s Right to Life.

As part of the implementation of a Living Income Guaranteed, Prices should thus firstly serve to sustain living wages and should only secondarily (if at all) be used towards the purpose of furthering competition in the name of business. If everyone lives on a Living Income or at least a Minimum Wage, everyone can afford this form of sustainable pricing (unlike in the current system, where for many households ‘fair trade’ products simply exceed one’s budget) and we can have system where we support others’ labor as a contribution to society the way we would like to be valued and

Related articles

• Day 252: The Rich Be Cursed, The Rich Be Blessed
• Day 246: Green Economics - the Newest Fad?
• Day 226: Living Income Guaranteed will Prevent Destruction of Homes
• Day 247: Only in a Broken System does Misery equal Profit
• Day 251: Living Income Guaranteed and Market Mechanics
• Day 260: Slavery was GREAT! Why did We Abolish It, again?

Read More

Day 219: Equality and Human Rights

While Maite will be walking the Justice point as a blog-series, I will be walking the point of Equality at the same time within a series of blog-posts.

We’ll be investigating and walking the various dimensions from which people interpret the word Equality, and practically walk the process of establishing a definition and perspective on Equality which we can practically apply and live by within this world.

Some of the points will be looking at are:

• The ‘natural inequality of human beings’
• Equality as a Moral Ideal
• Equality of Opportunity vs Equality of Outcome
• Economic Equality
• Justifications for Inequality
• The ‘Problems of Equality’

Within walking and exploring these points we want to show how our current definition and understanding of Equality is contradictory and inadequate (and sometimes even plain preposterous) – and debunk some of the most common arguments that justify human inequality.

Where does this ‘Natural Inequality’ Story come from?

When we go way back in history, there is account of claims of natural human inequality as far back as the Classical Period. Both Plato and Artistotle stated that humans were naturally unequal, as well as being unequal in the functions or tasks that they perform (which is mostly what the claim of ‘inequality’ is founded on).

Since then, when people reflect on the concept of Equality, it is mostly done from the starting point of what characteristics we as human exhibit, and what functions we perform. From there, a connection is drawn that since we are different, we must be unequal. Note that within such a statement, an implicit assumption is made that equality and sameness is somehow closely related, especially in terms of “empirical” characteristics.

When we look at Equality and the relationship of Humans to the concept of Equality, in terms of what we ‘derive’ our Equality from, we are in essence making a value judgment. Back in the day, it is obvious within how Equality was viewed, that a value judgment was made which regarded one’s characteristics which would define one’s function in society as ‘important’, and used that variable as the baseline from which each one’s Equality was ‘measured’. Philosophers like Plato placed much value into ‘reason’ and ‘wisdom’ which enabled the philosopher to determine what is ‘good’ and ‘virtuous’, and were supposedly the ‘only ones who knew reality’. Within doing so, a distinction was made between ‘the people’ and ‘the philosophers’ which regarded philosophers as ‘more than’ a “normal” person, because their reasoning and insight were inadequate and incomplete. In modern times, this idea still sticks but can be translated into a more capitalistic notion where “those who are smart, ambitious and industrious are ‘more than’ those who aren’t”. Plato’s and Aristotle’s statements on Human Equality were never really questioned, and to this day – the same reasoning is still being applied to justify unequal treatment of Human Beings, and any other Life Form for that matter.


A statement was made that because ‘we exhibit differences, we must be unequal’ – and everyone just went with it.

Within the next blog we’ll be questioning this statement and explore where our Equality comes from, if it does not lie within the capacities we exhibit – then what or where do we derive our Equality from?

Stay tuned!

Related articles

• Day 363: Basic Human Rights and Crime (Part One)
• Day 367: Investigating Human Rights
• Day 218: Justice and Human Rights
• Day 364: Basic Human Rights and Crime (Part Two)
• Day 365: Is God a Fundamental Human Right?
• Day 368: "Please Save a Child"

Read More