Diversity of Income Streams?

In Cottage Economy (1822), William Cobbett argued the case for hand-crafting within the household as a means of supplementing the family income. He saw the teaching of practical skills at home as providing sound learning opportunities for children. He deplored the mounting economic pressure for parents and children to sell their very souls into wage slavery in a factory, mill or coal mine:

“One of the great misfortunes of England at this day is, that the land has had taken away from it those employments for its women and children which were so necessary to the well-being of the agricultural labourer. The spinning, the carding, the reeling, the knitting; these have been all taken away from the [cottage out-workers], and given to the Lords of the Loom. But let the landholder mark how the change has operated to produce his ruin. He must have the labouring MAN and the labouring BOY; but, alas! he cannot have these, without the man’s wife and the boy’s mother, and little sisters and brothers. Even Nature herself says, that he shall have the wife and little children, or that he shall not have the man and the boy. But the Lords of the Loom, the crabbed-voiced, hard-favoured, hard-hearted, puffed-up, insolent and bloody wretches of the North have, assisted by a blind and greedy Government, taken all the employment away from the agricultural women and children. This manufacture of straw [Cobbett was describing the ease with which fine straw hats could be produced for the local home market] will form one little article of employment for these persons. It sets at defiance all the hatching and scheming of the tyrannical wretches who cause the poor little creatures to die in their factories, heated to eighty-four degrees. There will need no inventions of Watt; none of your horse powers, nor water powers; no murdering of one set of wretches in the coal mines, to bring up the means of murdering another sort of wretches in the factories, by the heat produced from these coals; none of these are wanted to carry on this manufacture. It wants no combination laws [by which trade unions were made illegal so that workers were rendered powerless to negotiate their terms of paid employment]; none of the inventions of the hard-hearted wretches of the North.” (Cottage Economy p181)



Cobbett’s basic argument holds true to the present day. Instead of going out to a place of paid employment, it could ‘pay’ to make a cost/benefit, time and motion analysis of the real value to each household of seeking paid employment in a place of work. Going out to a place of paid employment engenders costs, in terms of time, money and the real resources of the earth. Weighed, measured and balanced up, much of that expenditure could prove, on reflection, to be a waste of time, money and resources.

Going to work (i.e., into paid employment outside the household) normally involves travel and other costs. Be it car or public transport, that means money is spent by the worker, fuel and means of transport have to be produced by other workers, and the whole costs in terms of environmental wastes. Similarly, suitable clothing has to be bought, housing, leisure, sports, holidays and so on paid for, produced and consumed. The task is to evaluate the total ‘satisfaction’ gained within an individual household, when the total ‘disutility’ (dissatisfaction, waste) is taken into account.

Moreover - and this comes out elsewhere in Cottage Economy – children given responsible tasks to perform in a well-managed home derive lifelong advantage from acquiring practical skills, with their inherent satisfactions. Such benefits are denied the inmate of the formal school classroom. Cobbett himself was living proof of the argument that book-learning can come later, to great advantage.

However, for parents of today, the big question is how to put a roof over the head of their family. And that means going to work to earn the money to provide the necessities of life so that their children can go to school in their turn to learn how to go to work … etc, etc, etc.


See Home Economics Study Guide, by Frances Hutchinson (forthcoming).

To be free or to conform?

“We all need at times to discover again what is beautiful about ourselves. We stultify our beauty by trying to model ourselves on the images that are set for us by others – the way we think we should look, the way we should feel, the way we should dress, walk and talk.

“If we are to nurture our own particular beauty, we must nourish our bodies with healthy food and drink; nourish our minds with literature, art and good company; nourish our spirits with silence, stillness and prayer. This way we can rid ourselves of anxiety, anger and negativity, and replace them with peace and joy and positive energy.” Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, Gardening the Soul.


In all aspects of our lives today, the pressure to conform is all but overwhelming. It is just not worth the hassle to break conventions of dress, procedures or modes of thought in our places of work. At home at our leisure we are constantly drawn into the stories of politics, economics and personalities as they are presented to us by the electronic media. Even the seemingly spontaneous informality of Facebook and the like has its codes and conventions, offering the illusion of freedom. But it is all illusion. With our iPads and mobiles we are everywhere – and nowhere.
It is, perhaps, through children that we catch glimpses of the truth. As their bodies, minds and spirits are crammed into the classroom of electronic gadgetry the whistle blows – but nobody takes any notice. As parents and grandparents, who dares to hint at the possibility of saying “NO!” on behalf of the child’s future quality of life?
To be free is to claim the right not to conform. But to claim that right one needs more than a passing sense of unease.


To find out why things are the way they are, see the New Home Economics Study Guide (forthcoming).

On William Cobbett

By seeming chance, last year I came upon William Cobbett’s A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland. It completely changed my understanding of the political economy of the twenty-first century. Although written in the 1820s, apparently on the subject of the religious changes following from the reign of Henry VIII, it is in fact an economic history of the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions of the modern era. In turn, seeming chance led Cobbett, in his early youth, to study read Swift’s Tale of a Tub. At that time, two centuries ago, the enduring relationship between faith positions and political economy was more clearly understood. This is what Chesterton had to say in his 1926 biography of Cobbett:

“The critics were all wrong about Cobbett. I mean they were especially wrong about what he represented. Cobbett was not what they have always represented him as being; not even what they have always praised him as being. Cobbett was not merely a wrong-headed fellow with a knack of saying the right word about the wrong thing. Cobbett was not merely an angry and antiquated old farmer who thought the country must be going to the dogs because the whole world was not given over to the cows. Cobbett was not merely a man with a lot of nonsensical notions that could be exploded by political economy; a man looking to turn England into an Eden that should grow nothing but Cobbett’s Corn. What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist but rather an Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses whose very homes are homeless, the terrible necessity of peace and the terrible probability of war, all the loading up of our little island like a sinking ship; the wealth that may mean famine and the culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of Damocles. In a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it was not there. And some cannot see it – even when it is here.” (William Cobbett by G.K. Chesterton, p5).

That was written nearly a century ago. And still, to this very day, Cobbett is dismissed as a dreamer longing for a bygone age that never was, rather than the prophetic figure of the times to come, if the trends he noted towards resignation of the powers of self-determination to the powers-that-be were to continue apace.

Working for Godot

 A series of pictures of a brand new prison gave rise recently to comparisons between the prison environment and that of the workplace.

In Prison you spend the majority of your time in a 10X10 cell.

At Work you spend the majority of your time in an 6X6 cubicle/office.



In Prison you get three meals a day fully paid for.

At Work you get a break for one meal and you have to pay for it



In Prison you get time off for good behaviour.

At work you get more work for good behaviour.



In Prison the guard locks and unlocks all the doors for you.

At Work you must often carry a security card and open all the doors for yourself.



In Prison you can watch TV and play games.

At Work you could get fired for watching TV and playing games.



In Prison all expenses are paid by the taxpayers with no work required.

At Work you get to pay all your expenses to go to work, and they deduct taxes from your salary to pay for prisoners.



In Prison you spend most of your life inside bars wanting to get out.

At Work you spend most of your time wanting to get out and go inside bars.



In Prison you must deal with sadistic wardens.

At Work they are called line managers.



When one considers that “Poverty, wars and environmental desecration continue unchecked because people are paid to produce those results” (Blog motto, top right hand of screen), one must ask WHY do people voluntarily enter into contracts of employment?

It would seem we are all content to continue working for Godot, beyond rhyme or reason.

Government Explained

Every day a barrage of information pours into our homes and workplaces via the internet. Some of it is trustworthy. However, a great deal of the informal news is suspect. The following was sent on a circular message from a trusted source in Australia, but I cannot vouch for the set-up from which it originates.

The video is about an inquisitive alien who visits the planet to check on our progress as a species. He gets into a conversation with the first person he meets. The alien discovers that we live under the rule of a thing called "government", and wants to understand more about what "government" is, what it does, and why it exists.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUS1m5MSt9k

Quite thought-provoking, and highly discussable.

Real Economics versus Finance

The Question

Some time ago a colleague asked me to spell out, clearly and simply, the difference between Social Credit and Monetary Reform. To which I gave the following answer: To every difficult and complicated question there is an answer which is simple, easy to understand – and wrong. Nevertheless, after long deliberation, I think I may be able to give a better response.  

The Answer

Social credit theory draws a clear distinction between the real economy and the financial economy. Since there is no necessary, i.e., proven or scientifically established, relationship between the two, it follows that reform of the money system will not, on its own account, result in reform of the real economy.

Comment

Although the answer is not wrong, it may be difficult to understand. So steeped are we in the ways of the world as we are taught in schools, colleges and the experiences of everyday life, that it is difficult to sift fact from pure fiction. The fact is, there are two economies, the real economy and the financial economy. When we are told by the news media that ‘the economy’ is doing well, it means that the financial economy is doing well. Hence we are led to assume that the real economy is doing well, when it may well be doing very badly indeed.

The real economy consists of all the goods and services available to humanity within a given area on the earth’s surface, in a town, a county, a province, a country or the world as a whole. Material goods produced for sale on the market form a part of the real economy. But they form only a small part of the real economy as a whole, an economy which comprises the land, the seas, the sky, the rainfall, the minerals under the earth, and all plant, animal and human life forms. Although the real economy can exist without the financial economy, the reverse does not hold true.

The financial economy is the money-value economy. It accounts only those things which are exchanged for money. Thus the gifts of nature, the forest trees, the growing plants, the sunlight, have no value unless or until they come into the supply chain of the financial economy. Two curious facts follow from this. Firstly, the financial economy fails to take into account the existence of certain goods and services vital to its survival. These include not only the gifts of nature, enormous in themselves, but also the vast swathes of the labour of human hand, eye and brain which falls outside market forces. And secondly, the financial economy does put a high money value on certain ‘financial products’ which have no real value whatsoever.

Monetary reform which does not reform our understanding of the true relationship between the real and the financial economies is a waste of time and can only result in frustration.

Abortions on Labour Wards –the Law

News, Midwives must take charge of abortion says court

29 February 2012: Judgment was handed down today in the case of two senior midwives from Glasgow who have a conscientious objection to working to procure abortions. The midwives have been told that they must accept the decision of their hospital management that they must oversee other midwives performing abortions on the labour ward.

Read on…

http://www.spuc.org.uk/news/releases/2012/february29a

From website of Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child.

Note also SPUC's recent campaigb to publicise the nature and extent of sex education in junior schools.