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The
Economy
- American capitalism today advertises itself as the Welfare State. Many of
us comfortably expect pensions, medical care, unemployment compensation, and
other social services in our lifetimes. Even with one-fourth of our productive
capacity unused, the majority of Americans are living in relative comfort
-- although their nagging incentive to "keep up" makes them continually dissatisfied
with their possessions. In many places, unrestrained bosses, uncontrolled
machines, and sweatshop conditions have been reformed or abolished and suffering
tremendously relieved. But in spite of the benign yet obscuring effects of
the New Deal reforms and the reassuring phrases of government economists and
politicians, the paradoxes and myths of the economy are sufficient to irritate
our complacency and reveal to us some essential causes of the American malaise.
- We live amidst a national celebration of economic prosperity while poverty
and deprivation remain an unbreakable way of life for millions in the "affluent
society", including many of our own generation. We hear glib reference to
the "welfare state", "free enterprise", and "shareholder's democracy" while
military defense is the main item of "public" spending and obvious oligopoly
and other forms of minority rule defy real individual initiative or popular
control. Work, too, is often unfulfilling and victimizing, accepted as a channel
to status or plenty, if not a way to pay the bills, rarely as a means of understanding
and controlling self and events. In work and leisure the individual is regulated
as part of the system, a consuming unit, bombarded by hardsell soft-sell,
lies and semi-true appeals and his basest drives. He is always told what he
is supposed to enjoy while being told, too, that he is a "free" man because
of "free enterprise."
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