Posted on 09/18/2013 12:32:00 PM PDT by MichCapCon
Protesters rallied in Michigan and nationwide recently to claim that wages at fast food restaurants are too low. Here’s an alternative compensation schedule.
These workers should be paid as much as doctors and lawyers and executives. Those in turn should all get the same salary. Every member of their staffs should make that amount too. The same principle should prevail in government: A receptionist at a state agency would make the same as the governor; a custodian cleaning a public university’s toilets would be paid exactly what the university’s president gets.
Everybody gets equal pay. All across the board, throughout the economy, wherever and whoever and whatever, everybody’s wage is exactly the same as everybody else’s.
The author of this scheme was the celebrated Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. He was also the most prominent member of the British Fabian socialist movement — “the highly respectable Fabian Society,” as he called it — and one of its leading economic theorists. In 1928 he published, “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.” It had more than 450 pages devoted to capitalism’s defects in causing “the evil effects of a division of the people into rich and poor” and to socialism’s virtues as a corrective. At the core of true socialism, Shaw maintained, was “equality of income.” He was serious that such a policy would work.
Fabianism’s unique socialist twist was gradualism, a slow and steady conversion from private ownership of production to public, in contrast to the explosive worker revolution predicted in “the so-called Scientific Socialism of Karl Marx,” as Shaw put it. Great numbers of government workers — all paid exactly the same, of course — would manage the Fabian transition and ultimately the publicly owned industries and businesses.
Shaw lived until 1950 and so witnessed the early implementation of his theories. Fabian infiltration of the British Labour Party converted it into a de-facto socialist party, which gained political control in 1945. Its nationalization of industrial sectors was undone by later governments, but its National Health Service lives on.
A similar single-payer health care system for America is the goal of many Fabian-influenced advocates. Other socialist notions also abound here. For instance, “equal pay for equal work.” The only equal work is identical work, so any “equality” of disparate jobs must be determined subjectively. Shaw-style public workers (but with superior compensation) would execute that assignment.
The so-called “living wage,” defined as how much a person must have to pay for basic necessities, is also a bureaucratic calculation. The concept is founded on the ancient socialist principle of “to each according to his needs.”
Many of the aggrieved fast food workers are unwitting socialists, complaining that they should be paid more money because they “need” it.
As a playwright, George Bernard Shaw spent a career in make-believe, which also is the foundation of his economic visions.
In the real world of fast food, economics looks like this: If the workers sell their services to their employers for $15 an hour, the businesses will have to adjust their prices upwards. Potential customers will then assess whether their higher costs represent enough value for making a purchase there. Loss of sales, loss of jobs.
That ancient proverb — even older than the utopianism of socialism — applies to those demanding the $15 an hour for their fast food employment: “Beware lest you get what you want.”
Pshoot!
I’m not so sure Shaw even subscribed to his own ideals in practice... maybe he reasoned that because he was one of the knowledgeable elites, then it was okay for him to get a prettier price for his plays than the janitor got for his mopping of the theater. But hey, consistency is not a hobgoblin of these elites.
I’m sure a lot people with high pressure jobs would rather be flipping burgers for the same pay, for them it would be paradise to get paid the same in a laxidasical position of taking fast food orders or stocking shelves.
But then the high stress pressure jobs would not get done cause no one would want to do them.....
Marxists are morons of the highest order
True enough.
Elitists like Shaw never really wanted people to be equal to him, only equal to each other beneath him.
Shaw also supported eugenics
bump!
and he is still loved by leftists
So he denied it and then said the way to fix what he denied was happening was more of the same. great logic. lol
See “The Chekist” for the full expression of that sentiment. Warning: It’s not for the weak of heart or stomach. There are several full, subtitled versions floating around on YouTube.
The book describes the experience of a Boston resident who, in 1887 goes to see a "Mesmerist," who puts him into a deep sleep from which he awakens in the year 2000. Written in first person, the narrator describes the perfect Utopian society that exists in the Boston of the future.
There may have been some excuse for the preposterous future scenario that this book presents, given that Progressivism had never been tried before at the time it was written.
But it amazing to see that virtually all modern progressives still seem to be pursuing the absolutely unworkable model that this book describes.
Definitely worth a read, if you haven't already done so.
In an edition of this book that I no longer have in my posession, the preface mentions that in in 1937, a number of then prestigious magazines named http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward "the most important fiction novel written in the last 50 years." (Not an exact quote, but that was the gist of it.)
One prediction that sort of turned out right -- in Boston in the year 2000, money had been replaced by credit cards. Actually, a government-issued credit card that everyone was issued, and when you bought something with it, the government would subtract your credits from the card.
Which can mean a lot of different things in principle but generally it ends up baleful and inhumane in practice. They’re trying to tell the proverbial Cupid whom to shoot or not to. That is a game that mankind never has been able to control, other than by the general institution of marriage.
I did an essay report on that book when in high school (I picked it myself from a list in the World Book encyclopedia because it sounded intriguing). At that time the social aspect just went whooshing past me, but what intrigued me as a geek in the making was the tech vision. They were using the recently invented telephone to do what now the Internet makes possible. Not all those capabilities are bad things. One could have telecommuted, in a manner, in Bellamy’s world. And the telephone was used for other things that could be good, such as transmitting music. Libraries were online, if I remember correctly (the librarian would have to find your book and read it to you). I doubt if Bellamy envisioned “adult” services. Too bad he didn’t mention gospel preaching which would have set the entire enterprise on the right foot. It wasn’t really clear where the center of morality was in this world.
Yes, and I remember that they also had a network of piping connected from people’s homes to some sort of public building, where chamber musicians would perform and the sound would travel through the pipes so that people could listen to the music in their homes.
Everybody worked for the government (no private employers at all), and when you got paid for your job, you didn’t get paid directly. The price would be “paid” in credits to the government, which would then add credits to your account. As I recall, everybody got the same amount of credits, no matter what job they did.
People would go to school for free until they were 25, and then go to work in a job of their choosing until age 45, at which point they would retire to a leisurely life of personal contemplation, pursuit of mental enrichment and self-improvement.
It’s been around ten years since I read that book, but that’s what I recall.
Without a distinctly Christian vision, that would definitely deteriorate into a dystopia in this fallen world.
People with such ideas should, I believe, not be upbraided out of hand, but boldly reminded of how they are an echo of an actual heaven overseen by an actual God. Even our gainful earthly employment is only a picture of the arrangements in heaven. It is a picture that can’t be pressed too far or idolized. In general, heaven rewards efforts. However heaven is also marked with radical sharing because nobody does wrong any more and never will cheat, the glory of God now being foremost in their heart and soul (and spirit if thinking in those terms). The picture that God has given us of that element is the willing yet obedient charity of believers. To put a godless government that is vulnerable equally to every political pull in charge of the charity business is to make a mockery of charity.
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