Posted on 12/01/2012 7:30:13 PM PST by combat_boots
A group in the Midlands are pooling their income and distributing it according to needs. Andrea Smith reports Share
Part-time management consultant Guy Simmons earns £322 a week - yet every time he needs a new shirt for work, he has to get the agreement of five other people.
Guy, 52, is a member of an East Midlands group called Snowball, which opposes capitalism and consumerism. The five adult members and one child pool every penny of their income, redistributing it according to need.
Youth worker Katy Wright, 36, says: "Really, we are a little welfare state, but we are people-sized. People can see in their own lives that sharing resources works."
The group - called Snowball because they hoped that it would - grew out of the London squatters' movement in the 1970s. Now more than 20 years old, it is one of about half-a-dozen formal, income-sharing pools in Britain.
Each has its own system. Snowball meets fortnightly. Everyone declares his or her income and requirements for cash. The first call on the kitty is for cash for food, rent and household bills. Added to this, each adult receives £17.50 pocket money a week. The youngest member, 11-year-old Hertha Taverner-Wood, receives a pound for every year of her age.
Requests are then made for childcare costs or non-NHS medical treatment, for example. These are usually agreed without question. Next people ask for cash for expenditure such as clothing - often second-hand - or conference fees.
This category of outgoings is more open to debate, but disagreements are rare as each member tries to be mindful of the others in making requests. Perhaps it is this openness that has deterred free-loaders. Wright explains: "Basically, people self-select."
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Idiots!
Earth to snowball....if it wasn’t for capitalism, you wouldn’t have anything to redistribute.
In time, those in need will get lazier and find new ways to justify/increase their “need”. Those who produce will find no incentive to increase their productivity (and actually get less productive so as have less to get looted).
TRAGEDY_OF_THE_COMMONS_PING!
bump
bump!
So they can't even scrounge together $50 for a basic DVD player? Yeah, they're really living the high life.
But the group does believe that income-sharing alone is a powerful tool for social change. Wood says: "If the 6 million or 7 million people who supported the striking miners in 1984 had income pooled with them, then each individual's income would have dropped by just a penny - and the strike never would have been broken."
6 million x 1 pence = 60,000 pounds per month. So either they only had a couple dozen miners on strike or someone failed second grade math class.
Oh there will be rumblings and wars and rumors of wars but the book of Revelations is all the warning we need.
But nobody knows the time or date it will happen, it will be like a thief in the night.
and most professed Christians will likely follow the anti-Christ until it is too late
lol
Good catch.
They think that math works?
#27- wrong thread, lol
Exactly. Earth To The Snowballers——It’s called a FAMILY!
Reminds me of the Hutterites(religious group) series on tv. They all had to pool their money and decide what to spend it on.
I saw one or two of those.... didn’t look very real to me.
Pretty much how it works in my house, I give the wife my check, and I have to clear all my purchases with her.
Probably not but entertaining.
The problem is when idiots attempt to apply the principal to a larger social unit. Then the disaster expands and the sky is the limit for how bad it gets.
Next comes "The Lottery" (Actual story at the link)...
I think it's a good thing - it will help prove (once again) that socialism/communism doesn't work because it goes against Man's nature.
I remember when folks decided to start communes in the 60s to live the good life where everyone benefited from everyone else and all shared equally. The communes fell apart for the same reason Russia fell apart and why Europe 9and now the USA) are falling aprt - too many decided not to actually do their fair share of work and just lived off the sweat of the others. The moochers would have been content to go like that forever - the producers decided that they didn't want to work hard to end up in the same place as the non-workers. It has failed time and again and will continue to fail - government force is the only thing that holds it together until the workers have finally had enough and decide to take their place in the dole line - no workers = no dole.
It won’t happen per year, though, this lottery. Culling the very young, the old, the weak and disabled, will have direct correlation in numbers to killing off all those categories mentioned in the DHS memo of 2009.
We are the enemy of these people. They want us dead.
I agree that too much of a consumerist culture is bad, but a consumer culture also enabled the rapid developments in technology.
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