Socio-Economics Is Like Soccer

Socio-Economics Is Like Soccer

economics is like soccer

We understand and accept this fact in sport. I tell my kids all the time “every member of the team is important”.

The same is true in socio-economics. The CEO can’t run a billion dollar company without the rest of the employees. The brilliant entrepreneur can’t bring that new gadget to market without the people who sweep the streets, pick up the garbage, grow the food, staff the supermarket, wait tables, and manage the petrol station. It’s all a giant web of interrelation. If we all need each other to make the whole damn thing work, then we should share the profit as well. This whole bizarre idea that the people who run companies or invent something deserve the 1% because they worked harder or are smarter is complete bullshit and easily falsifiable. I love Ayn Rand’s book, but the premise of Atlas Shrugged works both ways. Yes – when the entrepreneurs pack their bags and move to an island, society feels their loss. But if the rest of society up and left the entrepreneurs alone on the mainland, how long do you think they would survive on their own, without anyone to sweep the streets, grow the food and, by the way, BUY THEIR WONDERFUL PRODUCTS?

We all need each other. As Lester Freamon might say “All the pieces matter”.

No Illusions Notes 20/06/2011

  • Iraq hunting $17 billion missing after U.S. invasion – “The missing money was shipped to Iraq from the United States to help with reconstruction after the ouster of Saddam Hussein….. All indications are that the institutions of the United States of America committed financial corruption by stealing the money of the Iraqi people, which was allocated to develop Iraq, (and) that it was about $17 billion,” said the letter sent to the U.N. with a 50-page report.”  That’s what these wars are about, folks – theft. Plain and simple. Theft of money from the U.S. taxpayers and theft of the natural resources of the Iraqi and Afghani people. Everything else they throw at you – Saddam, Bin Laden, the Taliban, etc – is just smoke and mirrors. It’s all about the rich stealing from the poor and the gullible. It’s the oldest trick in the book, a magnificent sleight of hand even Hypnotist Kenny would be proud of.
  • Another day another pedophile Catholic priest & cover-up by the Church – remembering, of course, that the key message here isn’t about the pedophiles themselves, it’s about the Catholic Church’s systematic and deliberate cover-up of the crimes to protect their cash. (See my earlier posts on the topic – GDay World 382 – Dr Wayne Chamley on Catholic Sexual Abuse in Australia, G’Day World Video – Peter Kennedy, Rebel Priest, part one, The Irish “Child Abuse Commission”).
  • WSJ has a brain aneurism when it learns the The Dalai Lama is a Marxist – “Earlier this month, the Dalai Lama told a group of Chinese students at the University of Minnesota, “I consider myself a Marxist . . . but not a Leninist.”” The author, philosopher Carlin Romano, then goes on to say “It’s an old, familiar position in Western secular intellectual life: Marxism wasn’t a God that failed, and the Soviet Union and Mao’s China don’t count against it, because Marxism was never tried—Communism perverted it.” That’s actually not the argument at all, Carlin.  The argument is that the Bolshevik’s perverted socialism. Had the Menshevik’s managed to wrest control of the Communist Party, we might have seen a very different 20th century Russia.

No Illusions #12 – Ewan Saunders, Socialist Alliance #AusVotes

Ewan Saunders is the Socialist Alliance’s Brisbane candidate in the upcoming federal election. I caught up with him recently to talk about socialism, climate change, indigenous communities, and the Socialist Alliance’s policies on subjects like Iraq, Afghanistan and immigration.

As I mention during the show, if you’re interested in hearing more about “participatory democracy”, then listen to my 2008 interview with Richard Moore.

Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

In 1949, 16 years after he migrated to the USA, Albert Einstein, probably the most brilliant mind the human race developed in the 20th century if not of all time, wrote a pamphlet endorsing socialism.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Read the rest of his pamphlet here.

Those people who think socialism is bad, need to put together a better case against socialism than Einstein put forward FOR it. Who are the leading intellectuals that have spoken out against socialism and what were their arguments?

Instead of these simplistic rants that I’m seeing bandied about, I’d love to see some intelligent discussion, IF you’re all capable of it.