Who Is 'Productive'?
by John de Graaf
June 26, 2010
So what I hear you saying is that you would take money away from the productive people and give it to the unproductive people?
In other words, the student suggested, I would take cash from John Galt and give it to John Lazy.
My response to this charge goes something like this:
Oh, and what I hear you saying, young man, is that those people who grow your food, harvest it in the fields (without even minimum wages) and transport it to the stores, those people who clean your streets and take away your garbage so you don't have to live in filth, those people who will teach your children if you have any, and take care of your infants and toddlers while you do your productive business, those people who build the cars you drive in, who work overtime without pay at big box stores for $18,000 a year, whose backs turn to jelly after years of driving the trucks that carry your products to you, those people whose work benefits you every day of your life--those people who have seen almost zero improvement in their real wages during the past generation of policies favoring John Galt--those are the "unproductive" people whose survival only the Galts make possible.
And meanwhile, those other people, the ones who have seen their incomes mushroom and their taxes wither, those "self-made" people with expensive educations whose brainpower and hard work have created such wonders as exploding derivates and credit default swaps, whose "products" never affect your daily life except when you have to bail out the disasters they create, those "best and brightest" people who earn more in a day than your child-care providers will earn in a year, whose year-end bonuses are often greater than the lifetime earnings of ordinary workers--they are the "productive'' people.
And you, young man, have a problem with taxing those "productive" people to provide a little more security for the ones you consider unproductive. Well, I have news for you. I see no possible moral justification for labeling the first group unproductive and the latter productive--quite the contrary, in fact--unless you automatically assume that Group B is more productive solely because its activities earn more in the market as it presently exists.
Indeed, I believe that in a moral world we would offer greater compensation to those whose labor actually makes life better. In which case, there is absolutely no moral argument at all against greater equalization of incomes. In fact, I find the distribution of earnings in this economy to be morally obscene.
Please read the full article at:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/26-6
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