7 Jobs and War
Chapter 7
Jobs And War
Territorial sovereignty societies divide the human race into classes. One class, called ‘the working class,’ does not have any significant source of income other than their wage earnings.
This is not a characteristic of all possible societies. Natural law societies, for example, divide the wealth that flows from the world differently. (Since no one owns the world, no one owns the things it produces. The people have meetings and make joint decisions about what to do with this wealth. Of course, they reward people who do ‘jobs’ that benefit everyone, to encourage people to do these jobs. But they do not divide their people into ‘classes’ and require one class to work to avoid death for themselves and their families.)
Unfortunately, quite often there just aren’t enough jobs for all of the people who need jobs. This leaves people ‘unemployed.’ If unemployment increases beyond a certain level, the economy collapses.
Since people must have jobs they can’t simply not work just because there isn’t any work for them to do. They compete for the limited jobs by offering to work for less. This drives down wages and the combination of high unemployment and falling wage rates causes spending to fall; people buy less. Producers compete to sell their products by reducing the prices and relatively high cost producers go out of business: they can’t afford to sell for prices lower than their production costs. They lay off their workers, increasing unemployment. The unemployed get increasingly desperate and offer to work for extremely low wages, causing a catastrophic collapse in wages that leads to a catastrophic collapse in spending. This leads a downward spiral that causes the entire system to collapse. When it gets extremely serious, even food production stops. (In the ‘depression’ of 1929-1941, so many farms were abandoned that giant dust clouds circled the globe, blotting out the sun for weeks on end; without any crops planted or native plants to hold the soil, it just blew way.) When this situation arises, there is only one thing that can create enough jobs to make the global economy of territorial sovereignty societies work again: a global war. (The leaders who started World War Two didn’t try t hide it: a war was needed to create jobs. The people knew it was true; they voted for these leaders and supported them as they started the largest war in history.)
The people who run the societies we inherited know this. The people who work for a living—estimated to be more than 90% of the global population—know it too. Wars create more jobs than any other human activity. In fact, we don’t need a ‘hot’ war for this: anything that increases military tensions drives up demand for things that would otherwise not be needed. (The global military industrial complex employs more people on earth than any other industry.)
Politicians running for office know they can get votes if they can show they are aggressive and will take actions that will drive up tensions between countries.
If we want to create a society that can function without war, we need to understand these things. We must know how to build such a society and make plans to move toward it. In the meantime, while we are in transition, we need to understand the forces the push toward war and mitigate them as much as possible, so that we can prevent the destruction of our world, from war, long enough to get to a sound society.