All this changes when you remember and then ensure that every individual is clearly part of a community. It is there that all these issues are properly eliminated. The one other concept is the base four hour shift which establishes base value around a safe night's sleep, access to prep services, and breakfast and lunch.
Every community establishes what all that means and unused labor shifts can be applied usefully to forest grooming.
What is critical a natural community provides natural support that makes poverty impossible. Poverty is the real need to devote all your time in an effort to merely survive. The natural community and the minimum shift makes all this impossible. .
The Cure for Poverty
[Chapter 20 of The Conquest of Poverty, 1996.]
https://mises.org/library/cure-poverty?
The theme of this book is the conquest of poverty, not its
"abolition." Poverty can be alleviated or reduced, and in the Western
world in the last two centuries it has been almost miraculously
alleviated and reduced; but poverty is ultimately individual, and
individual poverty can no more be "abolished" than disease or death can
be abolished.
Individual or family poverty results when the "breadwinner" cannot in
fact win bread; when he cannot or does not produce enough to support
his family or even himself. And there will always be some human beings
who will temporarily or permanently lack the ability to provide even for
their own self-support. Such is the condition of all of us as young
children, of many of us when we fall ill, and of most of us in extreme
old age. And such is the permanent condition of some who have been
struck by misfortune — the blind, the crippled, the feeble-minded. Where
there are so many causes there can be no all-embracing cure.
[Think community enterprise and natural credit support. - arclein]
It is fashionable to say today that "society" must solve the problem
of poverty. But basically each individual — or at least each family —
must solve its own problem of poverty. The overwhelming majority of
families must produce more than enough for their own support if there is
to be any surplus available for the remaining families that cannot or
do not provide enough for their own support. Where the majority of
families do not provide enough for their own support — where society as a
whole does not provide enough for its own support — no "adequate relief
system" is even temporarily possible. Hence "society" cannot solve the
problem of poverty until the overwhelming majority of families have
already solved (and in fact slightly more than solved) the problem of
their own poverty.
All this is merely stating in another form the Paradox of Relief referred to in Chapter 18: The
richer the community, the less the need for relief, but the more it is
able to provide; the poorer the community, the greater the need for
relief, but the less it is able to provide.
And this in turn is merely another way of pointing out that relief,
or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is never the true
solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift, which may mask the disease
and mitigate the pain, but provides no basic cure.
Moreover, government relief tends to prolong and intensify the very
disease it seeks to cure. Such relief tends constantly to get out of
hand. And even when it is kept within reasonable bounds it tends to
reduce the incentives to work and to save both of those who receive it
and of those who are forced to pay it. It may be said, in fact, that
practically every measure that governments take with the ostensible
object of "helping the poor" has the long-run effect of doing the
opposite. Economists have again and again been forced to point out that
nearly every popular remedy for poverty merely aggravates the problem. I
have analyzed in these pages such false remedies as the guaranteed
income, the negative income tax, minimum-wage laws, laws to increase the
power of the labor unions, opposition to labor-saving machinery,
promotion of "spread-the-work" schemes, special subsidies, increased
government spending, increased taxation, steeply graduated income taxes,
punitive taxes on capital gains, inheritances, and corporations, and
outright socialism.
But the possible number of false remedies for poverty is infinite.
Two central fallacies are common to practically all of them. One is that
of looking only at the immediate effect of any proposed reform on a
selected group of intended beneficiaries and of overlooking the longer
and secondary effect of the reform not only on the intended
beneficiaries but on everybody. The other fallacy, akin to this, is to
assume that production consists of a fixed amount of goods and services,
produced by a fixed amount and quality of capital providing a fixed
number of "jobs." This fixed production, it is assumed, goes on more or
less automatically, influenced negligibly if at all by the incentives or
lack of incentives of specific producers, workers, or consumers. "The
problem of production has been solved," we keep hearing, and all that is
needed is a fairer "distribution."
What is disheartening about all this is that the popular ideology on
all these matters shows no advance — and if anything even a
retrogression — compared with what it was more than a hundred years ago.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the English economist Nassau
Senior was writing in his journal:
It requires a long train of reasoning to show that
the capital on which the miracles of civilization depend is the slow and
painful creation of the economy and enterprise of the few, and of the
industry of the many, and is destroyed, or driven away, or prevented
from arising, by any causes which diminish or render insecure the
profits of the capitalist, or deaden the activity of the laborer; and
that the State, by relieving idleness, improvidence, or misconduct from
the punishment, and depriving abstinence and foresight of the reward,
which have been provided for them by nature, may indeed destroy wealth,
but most certainly will aggravate poverty.1
Man throughout history has been searching for the cure for poverty,
and all that time the cure has been before his eyes. Fortunately, as far
at least as it applied to their actions as individuals, the majority of
men instinctively recognized it — which was why they survived. That
individual cure was Work and Saving. In terms of social organization,
there evolved spontaneously from this, as a result of no one's conscious
planning, a system of division of labor, freedom of exchange, and
economic cooperation, the outlines of which hardly became apparent to
our forebears until two centuries ago. That system is now known either
as Free Enterprise or as Capitalism, according as men wish to honor or
disparage it.
It is this system that has lifted mankind out of mass poverty. It is
this system that in the last century, in the last generation, even in
the last decade, has acceleratively been changing the face of the world,
and has provided the masses of mankind with amenities that even kings
did not possess or imagine a few generations ago.
Because of individual misfortune and individual weaknesses, there
will always be some individual poverty and even "pockets" of poverty.
But in the more prosperous Western countries today, capitalism has
already reduced these to a merely residual problem, which will become
increasingly easy to manage, and of constantly diminishing importance,
if society continues to abide in the main by capitalist principles.
Capitalism in the advanced countries has already, it bears repeating,
conquered mass poverty, as that was known throughout human history and
almost everywhere, until a change began to be noticeable sometime about
the middle of the eighteenth century. Capitalism will continue to
eliminate mass poverty in more and more places and to an increasingly
marked extent if it is merely permitted to do so.
In the chapter "Why Socialism Doesn't Work," I explained by contrast
how capitalism performs its miracles. It turns out the tens of thousands
of diverse commodities and services in the proportions in which they
are socially most wanted, and it solves this incredibly complex problem
through the institutions of private property, the free market, and the
existence of money — through the interrelations of supply and demand,
costs and prices, profits and losses. And, of course, through the force
of competition. Competition will tend constantly to bring about the most
economical and efficient method of production possible with existing
technology — and then it will start devising a still more efficient
technology. It will reduce the cost of existing production, it will
improve products, it will invent or discover wholly new products, as
individual producers try to think what product consumers would buy if it
existed.
Those who are least successful in this competition will lose their
original capital and be forced out of the field; those who are most
successful will acquire through profits more capital to increase their
production still further. So capitalist production tends constantly to
be drawn into the hands of those who have shown that they can best meet
the wants of the consumers.
Perhaps the most frequent complaint about capitalism is that it
distributes its rewards "unequally." But this really describes one of
the system's chief virtues. Though mere luck always plays a role with
each of us, the increasing tendency under capitalism is that penalties
are imposed roughly in proportion to error and neglect and rewards
granted roughly in proportion to effort, ability, and foresight. It is
precisely this system of graduated rewards and penalties, in which each
tends to receive in proportion to the market value he helps to produce,
that incites each of us constantly to put forth his greatest effort to
maximize the value of his own production and thus (whether intentionally
or not) help to maximize that of the whole community. If capitalism
worked as the socialists think an economic system ought to work, and
provided a constant equality of living conditions for all, regardless of
whether a man was able or not, resourceful or not, diligent or not,
thrifty or not, if capitalism put no premium on resourcefulness and
effort and no penalty on idleness or vice, it would produce only an
equality of destitution.
Another incidental effect of the inequality of incomes inseparable
from a market economy has been to increase the funds devoted to saving
and investment much beyond what they would have been if the same total
social income had been spread evenly. The enormous and accelerative
economic progress in the last century and a half was made possible by
the investment of the rich — first in the railroads, and then in scores
of heavy industries requiring large amounts of capital. The inequality
of incomes, however much some of us may deplore it on other grounds, has
led to a much faster increase in the total output and wealth of all
than would otherwise have taken place.
Those who truly want to help the poor will not spend their days in
organizing protest marches or relief riots, or even in repeated
protestations of sympathy. Nor will their charity consist merely in
giving money to the poor to be spent for immediate consumption needs.
Rather will they themselves live modestly in relation to their income,
save, and constantly invest their savings in sound existing or new
enterprises, so creating abundance for all, and incidentally creating
not only more jobs but better-paying ones.
The irony is that the very miracles brought about in our age by the
capitalist system have given rise to expectations that keep running
ahead even of the accelerating progress, and so have led to an
incredibly shortsighted impatience that threatens to destroy the very
system that has made the expectations possible.
If that destruction is to be prevented, education in the true causes
of economic improvement must be intensified beyond anything yet
attempted.
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