"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
This is a sentiment some people - republicans, objectivists, free-market economists, etc - use to defend their arguments for removing social government programs that provide benefits to the population, supposedly to encourage people to get jobs. But there's quite alot wrong with this line of thought.
First of all, you cannot just go get a job at your whim. That notion is ridiculous. To get a job you have to have a decent education and training. So, to ensure that everyone is able to get a job everyone must therefore have a decent education and training. But to get that education and training, you need to spend money, money that unemployed people surprisingly don't have. Their only options are to go into debt, or to go without. Encouraging method there boys!
The only way to comprehensively give everyone a chance at getting a job is to have everyone get a decent education and training, and the only way to do that is to provide that education and training. So, essentially this is advocating removing government programs when the only way to actually deal with the problem is to have government programs.
I certainly agree that having the government provide education and training at all levels would be a wonderful thing. This is not something the people who fling around the statement I posted at the top support though. Even if they were to support government provided education and training, they're still saying that you should remove programs like welfare and healthcare. Which shouldn't be done, because there it is near impossible to have everyone employed.
Which leads me to the second point. In a capitalist economy, full employment will never be achievable. Why? Because full potential output and the potential level GDP simply cannot match-up.
Let me elaborate -full potential output is the highest level of output able to be produced be an economy with all available resources. The potential level of GDP is the total level of value an economy is able to produce, which means full employment.
An economy can simply not produce as much as it has the ability to produce. First of all, there is a limit on supplies - there is not an infinite stock of resources available to us to use forever. Second of all, when something becomes unprofitable or less profitable in accordance to the laws of supply and demand, you scale production back. This is determined by the law of diminishing returns, where as the cost of labour goes past a certain point the level of output will decrease. The assumption that businesses would employ more people than they need is naive, and contradicts everything we observe about the majority of businesses in a capitalist economy.
For there to be sustainable economic conditions we use potential output, which is the highest level of real Gross Domestic Product output that can be maintained over a long period of time. Which means that Gross Domestic Product is unable to reach its full potential. Which means unemployment. Instead, the best possible result is for the economy to reach the lowest level of unemployment possible that sustains potential output. This can be called the 'natural' rate of unemployment, which some economists theorise lies between 2% and 4%. Not to mention the types of unemployment that occur naturally in an economy, such as frictional, structural, cyclical, etc.
The definitions of those aren't really relevant - you can look them up yourselves. Point is that it is impossible for there to be 100% employment in a capitalist economy.
Look at it like this - even during the world wars, where the majority of countries were using every available resource available to them, countries still had unemployment. The US had 1.2% unemployment at the height of WWII, the lowest in it's history. While it's quite a feat to have unemployment that low, it took a freaking World War to bring it that low and it didn't get under 1%. More than a million people unemployed at the height of WWII.
There are only two realistic ways for there to be zero unemployment that I can think of. One is another economic system, such as communism or a type of anarchy. The second option is a universal employment scheme, which requires very heavy government involvement in giving everyone a job inside a very complex new system.
Given that those two options are hardly something that'll get many people excited, we'll assume that they're going to go for the best possible option. Which means we simply need to keep social programs to support them. Removing social programs when people need them doesn't improve anything. Instead, it makes the problem much much worse. It creates poverty. This can be examined in the Miracle of Chile, where all government programs were removed and poverty became ripe until everything was reinstated. But that's hardly building a strong case. So, a second example would be the removal of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program to make way for the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program in the US by Clinton. Long story short - removing welfare didn't work. For further reading on the subject, look up "The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee" by Widerquist, Lewis and Pressman, 2005.
Some may opt to ignore all available evidence available to them, and make the bold claim that unemployment is instead a result of laziness. Which would of course explain why the unemployment rate consists of people actively looking for work, and why when the unemployment rate rises it has absolutely nothing to do with economic conditions at all, nor the vast fluctuations in unemployment over an economic cycle.
In the words of Dugger and Peach (2009) - "No one we know of has ever presented an argument that laziness is a kind of viral social infection that cyclically swings through the population, occasionally breaking out into huge waves of contagious laziness like a flu epidemic."
It's sheer insanity to say laziness is the cause of unemployment.
So, what have we established here? First of all, that full unemployment is unachievable in a capitalist-oriented economy. Second of all, that removing social programs doesn't, and can't, solve the problem. And lastly, that simply getting a job isn't easy without the necessary support systems in place, and even then it's difficult to get and maintain work.
The crux of subjects like philosophy, economics, politics, sociology and business is rationality. However, they all depend on the rationality of humans, which has left me with a question floating around my head for a while. That is - are humans rational?
In short - yes and no. We're capable of logic and rationality, but we are also capable of completely illogical and irrational behaviour.
Quick question. Have you ever done anything on just "a feeling"? Have you ever impulsively thought, said or done anything?
If you've answered yes (and it's highly unlikely that you didn't), you've acted irrationally. It's highly likely that you'll act like this on a day by day basis, perhaps hour by hour. Of course, these are only tiny events. But what about larger events? Look at current events in the world. The implementation of free-market economic theory in the lead up to the Global Financial Crisis - it could all have easily been avoided if the guys at the top had fixed the problem instead of going along with the misguided belief that the "invisible hand" of the market would fix things.
Well, that invisible hand didn't fix shit. It was completely irrational behaviour on their behalf - hell, they encouraged irrational behaviour in the public arena by telling everyone it was ok when it clearly wasn't.
All too often in these big subjects there are always people who ignore contradicting evidence to what they believe. They'd rather act irrationally, under the guise of rationality (we've all heard people justify irrationality by making the claim "it's just rational") than confront the flaws in their thinking. The very fact that some people will believe something that's unproven or in some cases proven wrong than admit that they're wrong about that particular topic is completely irrational.
A significant portion of the worlds population is religious. Many of it is completely unfounded belief. Again, cases of complete irrationality. It simply doesn't make sense when you really think about it, yet still they believe.
It's my opinion that emotions are at the heart, or atleast a very large contributor, to irrationality. Anger, pride, sadness, fear, hope - all things that cause people to act irrationally. It's not rational for me to hit something that isn't working when I get angry enough, yet I still do. It's not rational to go out and think that maybe i'll meet the love of my life, to hope I will, but I still do. Feelings interrupt and corrupt rational thought and skew quite plain and simple thoughts. It's not rational for a drug addict to continue to consume drugs until they're a bag of bones, yet the phrase "did you miss the elephant sitting in the corner?" exists for a reason.
However, it is also very important to note that humans are very capable of rational thought. It's abundant. The fact we can think critically and act on the logical and rational ideas that come from that is testament to human rationality. Look at the progress of the human race as a species - it would almost disprove the idea of humans as irrational. That is, until you notice the fuck ups we make.
Humans are not stupid - all too capable of stupidity, certainly, but not stupid. The exponential growth of our knowledge base, technological progress, on-going trade, an increasing push for equality among all people (atleast in some societies and schools of thought). These can only be a result of rational thought.
The Australian government has managed to avoid recession because of a huge spending package. Out of all the industrialised countries, we've fared the best during this economic crisis. While I disagree with the way some of the money is being spent, it wasn't because of reckless, idiotic, irrational action that this result was achieved - it was because of rational, logical thought.
All of this leads to another question - is this balance of rationality and irrationality a good thing?
In a sense, it is. While there are certain issues that certainly do require serious thought and rationality applied to it, we need not apply our rationality to every aspect of our lives. At the start of this blog I talked a bit about making seemingly irrational thoughts on an hour by hour basis. While it may be irrational to make such choices, it's irrational to attempt to be rational about them. You'd waste large portions of your time thinking about insignificant crap. A life without irrationality would be awfully dull.
Some things require split-second decisions, some things aren't significant enough to require anything more than a moments thought.
In the end, no humans are not entirely rational, but sometimes that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Welcome to "The Game". You are now playing! The rules are simple:
- You are always playing the game.
- You cannot win. You can only lose.
- You lose whenever you remember The Game.
- Whenever you remember the game, you must announce out loud "I just lost the Game."
- After you lose, you have 30 minutes during which you can remember the game without losing, and during this time you must "forget" the game.
- The goal of The Game is to have as many people as you know playing.
I have 3 guitars. A 7-string (currently in for repairs ), a 6-string hollowbody and a 6-string solidbody. They're all Ibanez guitars, of which i'm a fanatic.
The 7-string is an Ibanez RG1527. It has a good fast neck, double locking trem, floating trem and 5-way pick up switch. It truly is an amazing guitar, although the pick-ups aren't as good as I want them. But that can be changed.
The hollowbody is an Ibanez Artcore model, and it too is a great guitar. It has a slower neck, but it's got the neck raised about half a centimetre higher than on your standard guitar, with the pick-ups pushing out about the same distance. This adds a bit more tension to the strings, and I love playing it when I play blues, jazz, or some more soulful instrumental pieces.
The electric is an Ibanez SZ520. I've had it for 2 and a half years now, and I plan to always have one with me for the rest of my life. Apart from the input jack being a bit loose, it is without a doubt the best guitar for the price ($900). The range of styles I can play on it, the fast neck, the pick-ups, the inlays... I love everything about this guitar.
Then, there is the amp behind the guitar. Fender FM65R. It has an amazing clean channel, an amazing dirty channel, great reverb, a middle switch to get two different dirty sounds. This amp is a keeper, even if I eventually get a Mesa Boogie cabinet, I will have this amp.
Ah, and the pedals. Acoustic Simulator (i'm not cheap enough to use this instead of a real acoustic, just for the middle of songs and until I have an acoustic), Distortion, Chorus and Wah. These pedals are all great, and although their use might be minimal, they all add another level of style to my playing.
It's the first guitar I got when I began to take my playing seriously.
I use Dava control picks. They're excellent and my playing has improved immensely since I started using them, they improve both lead and rhythm playing. The concept with the control picks is that there is a soft part in-between the tip and base of the pick, making it flexible for rhythm playing, but the tip is rock hard so when you move your fingers up the pick to play lead errors are taken out of the equation unless you hit the wrong string or have bad timing. For $2 each, benefits are worth it.
Anyway, that looks like i've covered everything. I just needed to talk about it.
1 blog seemed just a tad poor for the juggernaught that is my profile.
Anyway, every gig I have seen since the last blog has been awesome. Rage Against the Machine, Dream Theater, Iron Maiden, Paul Gilbert. All were amazing, Pablo Gilberto was a small gig in a local music store and everyone there got 6 or 7 playing exercise sheets.
Upcoming gigs, are Joe Satriani, Disturbed and Def Leppard/Cheap Trick. Satch is on Monday, can't wait.
As far as playing, I got a second teacher who has helped my playing and theory knowledge immensely. Anyone who wants some exercises, just PM me and i'll pass on some stuff.
I'm also looking at getting into some advanced rhythm playing (my teachers focus alot on lead), so if anyone has any excercises about it, or a chord chart for Joe Satriani's chord exercises, i'd be mighty grateful if you PM'ed them to me or just left a comment where to find them.
Now, there seems to be a dilemma with my song-writing. My riffage is, if I say so myself, decent. I've got 3 riffs I want to use and 2 half-song ideas down, but there just always seems to be some other shit come up, or i'll practice for a couple of hours and not bother with it.
With my HSC trials coming up, i'll be focusing on studying in the upcoming weeks, then practicing my 4 music pieces (1 of which i've composed, not going to bother uploading it cos it's just wankery and I don't want to set-up for recording) with 4 weeks between my trials and music prac. After that, study again for the HSC.
After that finishes (late October), i'll have around a month to get something done. So, hopefully, i'll have alot more to work with then.
Going to bali from the 26th November to 5th December. It was going to be lots of drinking and clubbing, but the two people I was planning on meeting up for a period of time had to re-schedule, so I miss them completely. So, if anyone else is going to be there and wants to go surfing for 10 hours a day, leave a comment or something.
/wall of text
Well, I guess that's it, anything worth mentioning is there. Special kudos to 'Leviathan', who is the one and only subscriber to my blogs. Well, maybe another blog in 6 months time.
Well, my first blog. My names Matt, I like long walks on the beaches at sunset and romantic dinners.
Currently doing year 12 in high school, my final year, then im out and into the big wide world.
My daily routine consists of pretty much the following: wake up, school, gym/go home, play a bit of guitar, go to tutoring/tennis training, watch tv and play guitar for atleast an hour.
I go to a few gigs each year, upcoming bands im seeing are RATM in January, Dream Theater in January and Iron Maiden in February. Past that, gunna have to wait to see if anyone else is coming.
Im looking for some programs that I could record with that are good, simple and allow mixing, send me a PM.
Anyway, cheerio for now.
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dann_blood's blogs, last updated : October 14, 2009
), a 6-string hollowbody and a 6-string solidbody. They're all Ibanez guitars, of which i'm a fanatic.
