Charity

Voluntary charitable donations of time/goods or money don't make any sense. Our current economic system upholds work for income - for survival, yet people voluntaily give their time/money to those who need it more than they do.

Is there any reason why the money, or preferably the actual resources, should not go direct to those who need it, rather than via a donor, or do we like the feeling of control we get from choosing how much to give, and what causes are deserving?

Sponsored events oddly require someone to endure some ordeal or undertake some in itself pointless venture in order that others may give to charity. Perhaps this is the work ethic intruding again. I will save the life of a straving child in the third world if you wear a plastic red nose for the day.

Those who give to charity realise that the work for income system fails most markedly at the extreme poor end of society, where people have no real possibility of work, but where is the line to be drawn between those who for one reason or another really cannot work, and those who can (though of course the distinction is not so sharp as there are people who do lots of work and people who do little, and every shade between)?

Yet charitable donors are prepared to give something for no direct return, which demonstrates that they are not motivated by money, as our current economic system holds that they should be.

The logic of an RBE seems inevitable. Let everyone have what they need (or a fair share of what's available), and share out the work that needs doing amongst those that can and will do it.

Just listen to yourself

On the Today programme this morning, a woman was interviewed about people in this country who didn't have enough food, and were being given it by charity. A disgraceful state of affairs. But she said the people didn't have enough money to buy food and didn't have enough money because they didn't have a [well enough paid] job. (That may just be the gist of what she said). What is this long chain for? You can't have food without money, you can't have money without a job, you can't have a job without work being found or created for you. Rewind.

Why aren't we growing as much food as we sustainably can on this planet and feeding everybody at least enough for their healthy survival. Why not - what's our excuse? Why are we allowing our fellow humans to starve and die? It isn't good enough. The work we do should be for the benefit of the planet and especially humanity. If it isn't, we should be doing it. In your house you don't find work for people to do, you keep it to a minimum and share it out. And you don't let anyone in your house starve while the others waste food, either. Well not if you're sane.

We're so used to this job/money paradigm that we take it as read, but it's silly. Bo it's not silly, it's criminal. We have to stop.

Food waste; the value of work

There's an article in today's Metro (London) about Foodcycle, a charity that uses food destined for the bin to cook meals that it then sells at budget prices in its cafes, one of which is near Crouch Hill Station, not all that far from where I work.

At the moment, the cafe at The Station House only opens on Friday lunch times and at the moment they're only using food from two supermarkets and a Marks & Spencers. Don't get me wrong, this is a brilliant enterprise, but let's just take a step back and look at it critically.

• Food shops throw edible food in the bin. Read it again. Food shops throw edible food in the bin. (Individuals also waste food, I know).
• This charity - heavily reliant on volunteers - is stopping this on a small scale, and this is referred to as shops 'donating' food.
• There are people/families in this country who cannot afford the time and/or the money (and or do not have the skills) to source, cook, and eat sufficient healthy food .

One of the ideas of an RBE mentioned by Peter Joseph in a recent talk, is that eating out uses, or can use, food more efficiently. There is, or should be, less waste. Of course, without money, people would go to a restaurant / cafe and eat what they wanted (no more than they needed) and wouldn't feel constrained to gorge to get value for money. It seems likely that eating would be primarily through communal eating places. But it's surely fundamental to any sane economy that edible food should not be thrown away. This admirable charity is saving some, but where is the national effort to conserve this vital resource.

The Metro article also speaks well of the enterprise because it provides work for people to do. Again and again this casual assumption arises. There is no value in work in and of itself. It is only what the work achieves that can be valuable. Think about it, suppose there were some organised system for collecting unwanted but still edible food. Suppose it was a robot of some sort and no human labour were needed to operate it. Wouldn't that be profoundly sensible, even though it didn't create jobs?

This casual, wrong assumption is revealed in the call out section of the article, where one key point is "young people lack the skills that are needed to find gainful employment and affect their community positively". This is ambiguous - it could mean that they lack the skills to find gainful employment and they also lack the skills to affect their community positively, but I think the point being made might be that finding gainful employment is how you they will affect the community positively. I can expose the wrongness of the casual assumption by deleting part of the sentence, and rendering it:

"young people lack the skills that are needed to affect their community positively". This speaks of the need for training and education, and not of the spurious merits of work in and of itself. If people devise a way to make it so less human labour is needed to achieve the same outputs, that is a good thing, even though it is the opposite of creating jobs.

There is a sentence in the article that would suggest, if it weren't for the rest of the article, that they do get it. "Volunteers collect the unwanted[!] produce and turn it into nutritious meals in unused professional kitchen spaces. Meals are then served to those in need in the community, thereby helping to address issues of food poverty and poor nutrition while furnishing young volunteers with valuable skills."

• Edible food cannot be described as 'unwanted' while there is malnutrition and starvation anywhere. They mean 'unsold'. The shops can't get money for it. Good old money, eh?
• The food (a physical thing) is nutritious, not the meal (an abstraction), but I'm probably just being picky, here.
• Unused kitchens - yes a wasted resource is being used validly in this project. More please!
• There shouldn't be any food poverty and poor nutrition. A rich country like the UK is well placed to eradicate this easily, but it is true of the planet.
• Yes - upskilling (forgive me) people by having them do something constructive is exactly right. But I'm not talking about future employment, because there is no value in work in and of itself. It is only what the work achieves that can be valuable.

Zeitgeist Movement Newsletter

Issue 2 of the Zeitheist Movement's newsletter is out, and you can download it here:
http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=642&Itemid=100101

There's some very engaging writing in the articles and it's hard to cherry-pick, but one particular passage stand out more than others:

"‘the basic economic problem’ causes 34,000 people to die every day because of poverty, and forces around 3.4 billion people (half of all people on earth) to survive on less than $2 per day. How anyone can be aware of these statistics and still refuse to seek alternatives is nothing short of a disgusting and unsane [sic] disregard for human life."

The 'basic economic problem' is the theory that resources are limited (true) whilst human need/want is infinite (premise questioned by the article).