(Un)Employment

Remember how last post I mentioned it would be a double post day?

I lied. Unfortunately I had ladder games to lose and coaching to endure from a Masters Zerg. And it was endurance, I lost a lot of PvZ's.

So today I shall post the post you probably haven't been waiting for.

Once upon a time when I was still leaching off my dad in their seemingly upper-class conservative house I believed all that came from my Dad and hell even my stepmum's mouth was gospel. And when they ranted about dole bludgers being a worthless drain on the system I wholeheartedly believed them.

In fact I distinctly recall my best friend Shane and myself (Shane came from a similar socioeconomic background) discussing ways of eliminating this wastage. Like forced labor death camps. Or killing the dole bludgers, cooking their remains and feeding them to all the starving kids in Africa. Thus killing two birds with one prion-infected stone.

In time however, I learnt that my old man and my stepmum harboured unjust and harsh prejudices.

Nevertheless I couldn't help feel like I WAS a worthless drain on the system during my brief jobless stint. Among other things.

If you are unemployed and you do feel like this then... just don't. Because any well thought out socioeconomic analysis will tell you that you are in fact of great and vital importance to the economy.

 Consider the three main states the general labour market can reside at. There can be high unemployment, labor shortages or a perfect balance where unemployment sits at 0% and there are no labor shortages. In practice though you can get both labor shortages and unemployment and the unemployment rate is very rarely at exactly 0%.  Furthermore it is nigh impossible to ascertain a perfect 0% unemployment and no shortageof labor unless the nation in question is communist and even then t still is difficult.

So if the system must either err on having some unemployment or a shortage of labor, which is preferable?

If you answered, "labor shortages" then you are completely and utterly wrong. No workers means no work gets done and even being short a 5th of a person can slow productivity to a snail's pace. Labor shortages also mean that employers cannot afford to lose a single one of their staff lest their snail pace production slow down to to a complete stop, leading to a plethora of unreasonable demands employees can make of the hand that feeds them.

Benefits like holiday leave or maternity leave become liabilities that can render small business's bankrupt when labor shortages are already crippling productivity.

Then there are the effects of governmental intervention to solve labor shortages, such as mass immigration.

I'm sure I don't have to spell it out (but if I do, post below and I'll give you some historical examples), labor shortages can be devastating.

High unemployment is bad too, but the worst effects of high unemployment are on the unemployed themselves. If there is no welfare system to take care of them they tend to starve to death along with their families. If there is a welfare system in place then they just become a drain on taxpayers.

A little bit of unemployment though (2-10%) is perfect.... in a nation that has welfare to take care of the unemployed. The reason being that, businesses can operate with the best workers at their disposal and can use the "slack" of the labor market to readily expand their business or to fire and hire better workers. In a 0% unemployment labor market this is not possible; it is impossible to expand a business when there are no extra workers available to do so.

So If you are unemployed and suffer under uppity working class plebs brown-nosing you, then promptly tell them the truth followed by some "french". The cold hard economic truth is that your nation's economy cannot grow without you and all the other dole bludgers handing in their forms to centrelink/welfare every month.

Types of Government in Modern Society Part 2

Last week I covered all the types of government we humans have tried and broadly categorised them into representation, autocracy and oligarchy. The rule of representatives, the rule of one and the rule of a minority, respectively. And sadly that's really all we have had success with.

But this is the 21st century, surely we can do better than our ancestors' attempts at nationality, peace and prosperity?


That's right Obama, yes we can.

But will we? And will we succeed?

In my most personal, humble and cynical opinion, I think not. Representation is as good as we are going to get. Hopefully I am utterly wrong. In which case we have a whole variety of possibilities.

Ok so let's play a game guys. Go grab your greek dictionary! Don't have one? That's ok, just use the internet! Go find a greek prefix like demo- or klepto- or nympho- etc. Then simply add the suffix -cracy to the end of it and there's your system of government.

For example:   demo -is the prefix for people so democracy is rule by people.
                         klepto -is the prefix for thievery so kleptocracy is rule by thieves (this term is               colloquially used in real life to describe corrupt governments)
                        nympho- is the prefix for sex so nymphocracy would be rule by sex. I have no idea how that would work in real life, so I will let you use your imagination here.

Now go do it and post your futuristic form of government in the comments below. :P

In the meantime, notice anything peculiar about the last two previous examples? They are all oligarchies. Oligarchies dressed up in a dominatrix outfit, promising you to rule for eternity if you can just keep going for another 5minutes, in the case of the last example. But they are oligarchies nevertheless, simply because they all involve the rule of a minority (now I'm not so sure about the last example).

There really is only one form of government we haven't tried. The government everybody claims our beloved western nations have when in reality we don't.

Democracy.

Rule by the people. Not to be mistaken by "rule by the representatives of the people" which is the prevalent system of government in first world countries. A democracy is where the people themselves make executive decisions. So if a citizen thought it would be a good idea to go to war with New Zealand because they hate Kiwi accents then every single citizen of the nation would vote for or against and based on the vote the nation would either declare war on New Zealand or remain at peace.
Essentially all political decisions are decided by citizen initiated referendums. Love it or hate it, that is democracy.

Perhaps it is not such a good form of government. It gives the ignorant masses a direct chance to mess up the country's future by virtue of their own stupidity. But then, the problem isn't the form of government but the education of the masses. Once the nationwide literacy is resolved then educated and responsive decisions get made.

We live in a unique era in that, for the first time ever, we actually have the infrastructure to support this kind of government. There is a good reason democracy has never existed and that is because there has never been infrastructure that allows for it. Voting by paper all the time over trivial political matters is expensive and a downright nuisance. Now, however, the whole world is connected by fibre optics and radiowaves. And of course we have the computing power to compile and count billions of votes in a matter of picoseconds.

If there is ever been a time in our history for each and every human being on the planet to directly change the direction humanity is heading it is now.