An often overlooked aspect of the modern western economy is what I call the private welfare state. We all know about public jobs programs, handouts and benefits, but its dwarfed by the private one.
This is something I noticed early on during the covid pandemic. Even as the bulk of society stopped going to work for several weeks, civilization didn't fall apart and the economy ran fine.
There are millions of people who work jobs that are completely unnecessary and society would function better if they didn't come to work from tomorrow on. NGOs, think tanks, HR, diversity officers, the endless mass of university admin,medical admin, the 5000 different media outlets, the hundreds of different entertainment industries, task maters, ''project managers'', endless mass of consultants and so on.
A combination of capitalist competition, elite overproduction, usury and dysfunctional liberal democracy has led to this impasse. We have a society where simultaneously people work more than any other time in history and where the market shelves are overflowing with consumer goods thanks to automation.
Automation and technological advance has greatly increased agricultural and industrial production. It has reduced the need for labor. The steel mill that required 10,000 workers in 1940 now needs 500. For the first time in history, more people die of obesity and old age rather than hunger and disease. Housing has become more easier to build than ever before due to construction machinery and the ease of making steel, concrete and wood.
Logically this should mean a society where less people have to work for fewer hours. Instead we have a society where a larger proportion of the population work than ever before in history and do so for longer hours. Retirement is vanishing and home ownership is becoming ever more difficult.
If you look closely, a vast portion of jobs in modern society effectively amount to a form of private welfare or corporate jobs program.
For eample, take NGOS and think tanks. What necessary function do these institutions perform other than producing privately funded propaganda and doing social engineering at the behest of billionaires? All planning and projection they do is already done by state institutions and NGOs engage purely in (often malevolent) social engineering that society could do without. We don't need groups advocating for trans children and drag queen story hour after all.
The same is true for ''watch groups'' like the ADL, SPLC, NAAC and a thousand other political organizations, PACs and lobby group like PNAC, AIPAC, Zionist congress of America among many others. All of these employ large numbers of full time staff. If they were all shut down tomorrow, society would face no critical shortage of anything. The same is true for the huge hordes of unviersity and medical admin who for the most part have nothing to do with educating or treating people.
Currently, many western universities have reached a state where there are two admin personnel for each teaching personnel. Its expected that this ratio will grow to 3-1 over the years. An amazing development considering the advent of computers and automation that reduces the need for bureaucratic work.
All these jobs effectively work as a sort of private welfare state. They provide well paying jobs to huge hordes of university graduates that can't cut it in actual productive fields like industry and agriculture. There are simply too few jobs that truly require university level education.
Highly technical fields like engineering, medicine, scientific research and finance justify the requirement of studying at a university for 4-5 years. There's no real need for millions of english and gender studies graduates. Reciting shakespeare won't make bread fall out of the sky after all.
The NGO-Think tank-PAC-private bureaucracy serves as an employer of last resort for these people. It saves the wastrel sons of the upper and upper middle class from the indignity of unemployment or physical labor.
Its ironic in a sense. We've all seen blue check marks on twitter who work at an NGO, think tank or some other private welfare job with a liberal arts degree, making fun of blue collar white conservatives as losers and rednecks. But in reality, those men in ''loser'' professions like construction, agriculture, mechanics, electrician or factory workers acutally produce something of value.
If they all stopped coming to work tomorrow, society would cease to function. The same is not true for the private welfare jobs.
Another class of useless jobs are created by needless competition of the capitalist system. There is really no need for hundreds of different media outlets, ad agencies and entertaiment studios.
If there only 5 media outlets and 12 ad agencies and one or two movie studios, society would not face any critical shortage or decline of life standards. In fact, the culture could improve. Excessive competition leads to a degradation of quality as corners are cut and the producers are forced to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to capture audiences.
Hollywood is a great example of this as there is a veritable arms race nowadays as to who can show the most obscenity, gore, CGI and over the top action. This is the inevitable result of a market that produces hundreds of movies and tv shows every year. The same applies for media.
This argument is applicable to a much lesser extent for fast food companies, electronics manufacturers and hotel joints. If people have a demand of buying a million smart phones a year, they will buy a million smart phones a year. It won't matter much if there's only apple or there's apple, oppo, samsung, vivo, Huawei and others.
However, there is some mushrooming in regards to distribution however. There really is no need for so many grocery stores and supermarkets and online retail. Modern economies simply have too many service jobs.
The last pillar of the useless jobs edifice is held up by liberal democracy. The lack of an authoritarian abritrator and the dominance of the court system has led to a culture of hyper litigation. This in turn has led to a proliferation of legal firms and lawyers. One could argue that the whole ecosystem of PACs, lobbies and ''commiunity organizers'' have arisen due to liberal democracy. After all there'd be little reason for their existance in a dictatorship.
Then there's the commissar class of diversity officers that arise thanks to the cultural marxist shiboleths of the modern liberal world.
And last but not least, there's the FIRE(Finance Insurance Real Estate) sector, the home of usury, the ancient king of parasitism. Today every modern economy is dominated by the enormous and overpaid finance sector. They sell debts, buy and sell stocks, short stocks, bonds, make derivatives on stocks, make derivatives on derivatives, speculate currency, buy, restructure and resell companies....they make trillions in these ventures and do not produce a single tangible good.
The entirety of the FIRE sector comes off as a sort of legal scam but on an industrial scale. Hundreds of thousands of people are employed by this sector and they do not produce anything of value at all. They don't make food, steel, products, advance science, make art, defend the nation or do anything productive at all. They merely massage and move around money, and make money from the act of moving around money.
Yet, this uttelry unproductive sector of the economy has also ended up as the richest sector o the economy. In fact, the banking sector owns the rest of the economy through their ownership of shares. Three banks, blackrock, vanguard and State street combined manage at least 16 trillion dollars worth of assets, equivalent to almost half of US market capitalization.
You can go on yahoo finance and check the top stockholders of any fortune 500 company and you'll see these three names in the top three shareholders in some combination or the other.
In summation, my view is that society could probably do without bulk of the jobs that exist today. The jobs that are really important to maintaining society are those related to agriculture, industry, mining, defense, the electric grid, the supply chain and trade.
There is also need for government, police, the justice system and education. But their numbers should be limited according to society's needs, rather than be allowed to musushroom to ridiculous proportions as it has today.
Ultimately, in this age of automation, computers and industrialization, man should be enjoying a golden age. Society could run perfectly with just 40% of the adult population working. Work days could be reduced to 4 days a week and work hours could take a haircut as well. Even with such limited work hours, industry and agriculture could easily produce all the goods we need and supply chains could distribute them.
That is the very essence of automation. Its supposed to reduce your workload, not increase it. You use tractors so that you won't have to pull a hoe for 12 hours a day.
I think as a society, we could work far less and enjoy greater leasure and peace of mind if we replaced the needlessly competitive capitalist system, the obsolete stock market system and more importantly the unproductive and predatory fiance sector.
There'd be no need for companies to work people to death as there would be no pressure from long nosed stock holders breathing down your neck for greater quarterly earnings.
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