#91 WORK Vs. JOBS

 Source

Dated 7/28/16, perhaps a more timely and revealing post could not have been written. Other pictures in the article are not included. Per usual, the original article is in blue, my remarks in black, any underlined emphasis where it occurs is mine. We will of course emphasis just how all of this is directly pertinent to this blog's alternative monetary proposal:

by Brett Stevens

Conservatives espouse traditional (or, more accurately, eternal) values including the importance of hard work and dedication. Few ask themselves, however, if this extends to jobs. It should not, mainly because

(1) jobs are not actually work in most cases and
(2) jobs are the antithesis of what the value of hard work is designed to foster.

I separated these for good reason. Jobs as they are often conceived are not actually work. Recall that we identified work as time out of the rest of your life in which you barter for your existence using the money paid to you as the vehicle for accomplishing that barter. I wish he'd continued to the logical conclusion after stating the second point; just what is hard work designed to foster? Bear that question in mind as you read on as he does get to it.

In modern Europe and the Americas, everyone — male and female — over the age of majority must attend a job. This means showing up every day from eight to five and being in the office, doing office tasks. Every person gets a cubicle or an office and a computer, maybe a title. They do this until they are sixty-five, then wonder what it meant.

If that life was spent in a “government” office or perhaps a firm that worked for the government, perhaps you could feel something like that you had a part in maintaining the government or the country or even maybe the public you supposedly served while being there. What was the truth? How much of it was sheer baloney?

In the average job, very little of actual import is done. This occurs first because most of the assigned activities are pro forma or “make-work,” but more broadly because most business activities are ill-advised or irrelevant, often through the creation of regulatory law. In this sense, jobs are not “work” per se, or the process of applying oneself to a task. They are the process of attendance, obedience and time-wasting.

I emphasized the truthful and positive: work is time out of the rest of your life applied to earning barter for your existence. The innate wealth that we all possess, either from nature or through our own deliberate application, provides us with a regular income stream. Through barter of education and tools, one's innate wealth increases. Therefore the common wealth one may wish to support for others is also enhanced directly by whatever you may do. Is this the case right now in any globalist, corporatist, job you have or may have ever had? Don't fool yourself, in very many cases, it wasn't and isn't.

This realization leads to the second point, which is that jobs are the antithesis of the “work” described by traditional values. In traditional work, the individual learns how the world works by applying himself or herself to tasks and achieving mastery. It is a method of understanding realism and gaining self-discipline.

I think it would have been more precisely stated as understanding reality and gaining self-discipline, so that answers the previous question as to the purpose of real work. But we are getting right to the importance of literally being paid in your own money through our proposed self financing of all labour contracts; knowing that the money one issued was based on a direct contribution you made to your community (your local friends and neighbours) through your own … application to a task at hand and achieving mastery of it; work. By far, by far the most money that shall enter our proposed monetary system will enter it as payment for labour (real work) that will be issued through self financing labour contracts. Valuns will begin as they are paid for each labourer's work, that money having been previously issued by him to his employer on his first day of work as specified on said contracts. The more of them you complete, the better your reputation becomes; you get rewarded as well as paid in your own money that all those in your business, the local IE, and anyone around the world enlisted to use the Valun system.

Jobs do the opposite. Jobs reward appearance, not actuality, except in a few rare cases. Even in professional fields, the goal is to keep abreast of what others have done and do the same in a certain specific case; and accountability occurs only when one deviates from the commonly accepted practice, regardless of results. Doctors lose patients, lawyers loses cases, and architects design junk all the time, but so long as these are competitive with what others have established as “safe” minimums, no consequences attach.

This is of course exposing the bare undergirding of the present globalist offer of a better life for acceptance of their compromise on life including the bases of so called jobs.

Green-lighted by social stupidity.

The constant obsession with staying abreast of standards makes work into an obsession. One must appear to be as devoted as one’s comrades, or be suspected of disloyalty. Further, the worker must demonstrate diligent emulation of public appearance as defined by others, which creates a neurosis of fears about what has not be done as opposed to what needs doing.

We're all aware of the effectiveness of “the master is not in the room but hears and knows everything so best to follow the rules and observe the norms” kinds of stories. They work very well, if one is intent on producing an ever nervous, ultimately chronically depressed, gaggle of slaves. What's the root of their slavery? The MONEY they are paid with and compelled to use, none of it is theirs. Here's a pic we'll insert instead:

In this way, jobs lead away from work, which is results-based. Instead, they present a flight from life itself: an escape from the world of actions and consequences into the purely human world of imitation and social reward. This adds a soul-killing dimension because the acts on which we spend most of our lives are entirely a waste of our time and potential. 

THIS is a whole wad of connected truth that I'd really like everyone to sit down and carefully digest. Just ask yourself to remember that there are people flinging around pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents and potentates on them that everyone chases and NONE of it has ever been nor shall ever be really yours. You supposedly earn it and spend it for your life, supposedly, but none of it was or is yours. In fact, they have invented all kinds of legal loopholes which enable them to come in and take whatever they want from you, up to and including your very life. Who is ultimately responsible? Shouldn't that be you? It starts with whose money it is.

Consider it this way: from the years of the early twenties through the mid-sixties, a person spends fifty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, preparing for or attending work. These are the best daylight hours and the most intense moments of their consciousnesses, devoted to something that is both unnecessary and demeaning. They never notice because everyone else is doing it, at least until retirement, where people tend to become aimless and bitter.

I want everyone to understand that 

1) they were deliberately and by concocted designs LED to this slaughter of their value and worth and 
2) while the sheep were led into such lives, the wolves lived as they pleased way above it all. 

(One reason the elite can never really admit anyone from the lower orders is precisely because they live as wolves and we are sheep. Kindly allow that to sink right in there.)

If Moses were around today, he would be saying “let my people go” while looking skeptically at a heap of TPS reports.

That's meant to be a joke, son.

Michel Houellebecq unveiled the conservative case against jobs in Whatever [a magazine]: jobs ruin our expectation that life will be good, and force us into desperate compensatory measures to feel good, almost all of which lead to destruction of hope for life itself. Jobs make us bitter, alienated and destructive, which mirrors the resentment inherent to Leftism, which is why jobs are a creation of the Leftist regulatory state and not the free market, which rewards performance over pro forma activity.

Who can or would argue with this?

Others have made this case before, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who showed how jobs took over the minds of people and turned them into near-automatons. Indeed, among conservative writers of the early twentieth century, the mind-enslaving specter of “Progress” was seen through the voracious expansion of industry, the collapse of small communities into cities, and the reduction of families into financial units driven by jobs.

This is what the present order and THEIR money has brought about. It was never for you because your money did not pay for it, though the idiots and ignorant among you still trumpet the causes of “the taxpayers,” etc. when all that is quite literally beside the point or erroneous and only the elites actually know this. They intended all this disruption and called it progress, sold a bunch of anxious people down the river into being led around by their progressive idealism … I can't imagine a ranker form of mass hypnosis, and it was all possible because THEY control the money, NOT you or I. Are any of you out there beginning to get it yet?

People ask, “What would our alternative be?”

The conservative answer is to remove all regulation of the job market and to allow reward to go only to those who can achieve results, which in turn limits labor to the necessary and also radically reduces costs so that people can live on less and be happier. This would lead to less time spent at jobs, because they would be task-driven and not appearance-driven.

The emphasized: can we remove the regulations? Relying only on THEIR money? No, we cannot, it's not possible. So that line of inquiry is temporarily discarded. All we can do is adopt a different attitude. If we decide to limit the amount of THEIR money required to only that which must be paid in it; taxes, utilities, debt contracted in that money, etc. then we begin to open ourselves to opportunities to do what we really want to be doing for ourselves and each other, our real work. In order to do that, we'll need our own money. You understand of course that since we consider all legitimate money to be issued by you, me and other human beings, not organizations, that it takes a community to make it happen. Money is definitely a social invention and a hallmark of civilization. We can't see a better case for this blog's existence than to save money from its present … management.

Renunciation will come. When that time comes, we can say bye-bye to them and THEIR money. It's what more and more people want and mistakenly think its the money itself; all money, that is to blame, when that would be walking away from a tool that we maintain is everyone's natural right to use, BUT it also happens to be the one tool that requires recognition from everyone that uses it; a naturally cooperative effort.

The second emphasized; what everyone has actually always wanted is to be paid for what they want to do and do best. They do not have the means to even try anything they really want to do in this monetary system, but they would with Valuns. All sorts of useful work that everyone wants to be doing would be getting done paid in Valuns. Limiting labor to the necessary, the third point, cannot reasonably be argued against, but it has its limits, again based on the diminishing returns to scale laws for each and every human enterprise. We don't care whether you can over produce to the point where you have to force your over production on resistant markets, etc. We will be looking for increasingly greener, more sustainable everything and reducing costs is a matter of noticing all sorts of improvements and products that appear that become apparently available only in Valuns. The last emphasized would gradually go away.

In addition, the regulatory state creates a need to keep up with standards to avoid legal liability and government intervention. This directs the focus of management from making things happen to dealing with labor and legal issues. Most managers are not very good at what they do, in part because their real job is to find a way to work with the regulatory state, not get their workers to perform.

This is a summary likely to get some crass comments from those who could know better but are the most scared to face the truth; they are habitual shirkers themselves, have no motivation to do much of anything, with or without some pharma support, usually have other borderline mental illness issues, and one really needs to ask whether this was the fault of this person who was just trying to follow along and do what they were told by their superiors? Was anything they contributed to anything really any good or not? What meaning did it provide over and above the barter for necessities and the rest of their life? These considerations really do matter.

If a conservative took over with absolute power, the intermediates between worker and employer like unions, regulations, and legally-defined liabilities would vanish and be handled instead by civil courts. Workers would find themselves as more like contractors, hired to make a certain function happen and rewarded for it. They would have greater pride in their work and most of it would be necessary, as opposed to the current scheme where most of it is not necessary.

The first sentence betrays the statist solution perspective, the politically labeled perspective, especially when there are just as many on the Left who want what he's describing. Everyone, regardless of their political stances, rushes to the conclusion that state involvement is required to give whatever it is some legitimacy, when as we and many other researchers have attempted to show as obvious, that the present order is itself in every conceivable way illegitimate as well as crooked and criminal. We don't want their help or their permission! When it comes to taking care of our own, our “natural socialism,” we will take these matters back into our own hands in every country around the world so that each country and each people will be able to have whatever future they want, not what some bloated oligarchic cartel of self serving thugs demands as the savage babies that they are.

What will that take to accomplish? It will take concerted action. The emphasized above is what this proposal intends as the heart of it, and to make it unique, it is the labourers themselves that would issue the money they would eventually be paid with, on completion of their contract of course. The more completed contracts, the higher the rating, the higher the reputation, one builds a society based on merit not special favours and privileges, etc.

Existential concerns would come into play here. When work is not a mandatory time period, but a question of achieving results, people can see the time value of labor and conversely, the monetary value of time. This encourages them to go home, spend time with friends and families and on cultural activities instead of attending extra hours for the sake of appearance.

We like this, time as an opportunity to earn money, except that it can also be interpreted to make claims for money that we reject without reservation. There are some laws that are above the lusts of men and one is that regarding whether idle money deserves to be rewarded. This is what we have precisely defined on this blog as capitalism. It is conspicuously identified with usury, which occurs only in the renting of money by demanding back more than was created. The way to render this situation of no concern would be to 

1) disallow any but 100% reserve lending; you cannot lend what you do not have and 
2) force the borrower to pay forward to the lender the rental cost of the money. 

You eliminate most economic bubbles by sticking to the first rule and eliminate the natural tendency of usury to shrink available money by sticking to the second rule. He goes into a Dutch digression; interesting, but not necessarily relevant:

We need only look at the Dutch model to see how less job means more happiness. One Dutch woman explicitly states that less time at the job means more liberation and ability to have a positive life. As Macleans reports:

“Every woman in Holland can do whatever she wants with her life,” says Van Haeren, 52, who lives just outside of Rotterdam and rides her bicycle or the train to work three days a week at a police academy, where she counsels students. She has worked part-time her entire career, as have almost all of her friends—married or unmarried, kids or no kids—save one or two who logged more hours out of financial necessity. Van Haeren, who wasn’t married until last year and has no children, says she’s worked part-time “to have time to do things that matter to me, live the way I want. To stay mentally and physically healthy and happy.”

Many women in the Netherlands seem to share similar views, valuing independence over success in the workplace. In 2001, nearly 60 per cent of working Dutch women were employed part-time, compared to just 20 per cent of Canadian women. Today, the number is even higher, hovering around 75 per cent. Some, like Van Haeren, view this as progress, evidence of personal freedom and a commitment to a balanced lifestyle.

The article goes on to show what a world without job mania might look like:

Ellen de Bruin, who patterned her book after Mireille Guiliano’s bestseller French Women Don’t Get Fat, began by defining the stereotypical Dutch woman: naturally beautiful with a no-fuss sense of style, she rides her bike to fetch the groceries, has ample time with her kids and husband, takes art classes in the middle of the week, and spends leisurely afternoons drinking coffee with her friends. She loves to work part-time and does not earn as much as her husband, but she’s fine with that—he takes care of the bills. The book went on to note that Dutch women rank consistently low, compared to those in other Western countries, in terms of representation in top positions in business and government—and rank consistently near the top in terms of happiness and well-being.

Of course, we aren't so sure there aren't plenty of people in Holland who might be stuck in jobs they don't particularly like. I doubt its wise to assume any place right now is a paradise for all.

As an article in The Economist amplifies, this is a prioritization of existential concerns and lifestyle over the demands of commerce:

“When I talk to women who spend half the week doing what they want—playing sports, planting gardens, doing art projects, hanging out with their children, volunteering, and meeting their family friends—I think, yes, that sounds wonderful. I can look around at the busy midweek, midday markets and town squares and picture myself leisurely buying produce or having coffee with friends. In a book released several years ago called Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed—a parody of French Women Don’t Get Fat—Dutch psychologist Ellen de Bruin explains that key to a Dutch woman’s happiness is her sense of personal freedom and a good work-life balance. But it’s hard to transplant that image to the United States, where our self-esteem is so closely tied to our work.”

Most people I think would like to believe that what they can do to achieve a better standard of living would be more rewarding if it is doing something they really enjoy and can do really well; what they were made for or felt called to be doing.

Conservatives owe it to ourselves to look at the root of tradition, which is reverence for life itself, including the natural environment and the existential need to find excellence and joy in existence.

Again, this is a political appeal, obviously. We honestly can't say that there aren't as many good tie backs into tradition on the Left as on the Right formed by happenstance and family histories of making it in various places and under various conditions around the world. The state and statist solutions remain the same, arguments that actually prove nothing and amount to evading the real work of doing it ourselves rather than crying like babies that the state should or must be doing it for us as some kind of parent. Here's the finish:

Jobs obliterate this and replace it with Soviet-style grim obedience and grueling time expenditure on the doomed. It is time conservatives got off this chain and began fighting for life itself over the pointless obligation of jobs.

We too would certainly like to honour and reward real work with what we value it in OUR money thank-you very much!

The proposed Valun, right now:

V½ = $1.33
V1 = $2.65
V2 = $5.31
V5 = $13.27
V10 = $26.55
V20 = $53.09
V50 = $132.73
V100 = $265.46
V500 = $1,327.31

1oz Au = V771.01
1oz Ag = V8.89
1g Au = V20.17

The proposed Valun is up in fair trade 23% since inception on 11/2/2011. We intend to pay nothing for idle money as we think money is to be used, not shuffled in and out of various needful business situations at the whim of capitalists playing games with more money than they gained from honest work. Yeah, we're calling some things as we see them: capitalism; making money on money without actually doing anything; rewarding idle money, banking as we have known it, all of it, we condemn as dishonest at its core. But we are wise enough to know we will never do anything about what they do, and we shouldn't, because that's showing a disrespect that we wouldn't want for ourselves. We simply leave their sinking ship, do better, that's all, else we wouldn't be here advocating an alternative now, would we?

So the immediate vision is to get far more reaction to what we have posted here than we have to date. We want people to see what we see, to understand the Valun proposal and the self financing of labour and all of the valid ways Valuns would be issued. We want to attract those who want a future for themselves, their children, grandchildren, etc. We want to interact with community organizers who know their own communities very well.

It takes three people, a triad, to decide to start an independent exchange in your area. Your area might be a county, a village, town, part of a city, or an entire city. You understand that it is to be private. You understand that everyone that becomes a member is a part owner with a vote. Riegel was a democrat who believed in individual rights as the basis for all true democracy. You understand that you are looking for people who have jobs as well as those who don't. You are looking to interact with those who have not lost hope in themselves to become something better than a slave. You understand that there will be some that will be computer illiterate. This isn't about computers, the internet or anything like that, it's about people and it's about money and that has usually taken some physical form that most people recognize as money.

You do not have to sign anyone up for anything. You announce a local meeting to discuss it. Keep it short; under an hour. Briefly cover these topics:

> The proposed Valun – a transaction based money rather than the usual commodity based money.
> The proposed private organization – not open to just anyone.
> Self-financing of all labour under contract – where most of the money in the system will issue from.
> Natural socialism – we take care of our own – where the rest of the money in the system shall issue from.

Perhaps at the end of the meeting, after you tell them it will cost them nothing to join as long as they are qualified to do so, then you begin exchanging names, business cards, etc. [8/31/16: UPDATE: A local discussion indicated that a membership one pays for is worth more to anyone than something they don't pay for and in any case we would need some of THEIR money to get this thing off the ground.  A dues of the local equivalent of V1 per year was suggested.  This is how grass-roots democracy gets started.  Right now, that would be a yearly membership fee of $2.67 which isn't that much.] 

It is better to let everyone know about the idea than to sign anyone up for anything. People are VERY hesitant to join anything they have to sign up for right now, with the seemingly senseless exceptions being the mainstream media supported and spied upon social media.

But you see, this isn't about the internet, some crypto-currency only available for use by compu-nerds, or the elites, social media, no. A private social media we might all use could be identified, like the one in Iceland perhaps.

This effort is about building a monetary system alongside theirs from the ground up, person to person and people to people around the world. People who will never get a chance to interact with the internet and do not want or need to, have to benefit, or all this is meaningless, or just like someone else's utterly useless ideas.

The only possible way to restore what we want everywhere locally is to take back the split-barter valuation machine upon ourselves, as we assert we have every right to do. Until we do, we are slaves, simple as that, and we will participate in the consequences of what “the masters of THEIR universe” have decreed for most of us, THEIR “hunger games,” etc.

So you see, your freedom does depend on the freedom of everyone around you and that includes their right to issue money. It seems to me beyond reason at this point in time and history, that the brightest and boldest among you out there can continue to neglect to understand the importance of this blog's proposal. It isn't a complaint either, it's a warning. Time is running out.

David Burton
dpbmss@mail.com

Hypothetical Value of a Hypothetical Value Unit