Quantum Apostrophe: Who builds and maintains a social model where everyone has to work despite all the technology and "productivity" we have?
Greedy power-trippers.
But you know the reason the USA can maintain an economy where the numbers of people who are not working or being productive is many times the official "unemployment rate" is super-exploitation of the proles and peasants in "less developed" countries. Sweatshops in Bangladesh, for example. The "major job creators" don't need Americans to grow coffee, sew clothes or dig cobalt; they need us to consume stuff produced elsewhere. And they can sell us lots of cheap stuff because they pay their actual producers so little, while they've got to sell a lot of cheap stuff because there are so many of us to buy it. Unlike former ages where a small group of rich nobles were the primary consumers of most imported and/or nonessential goods (and the poor ate turnips all winter).
As for those Americans employed in "the service sector," do we really need several hundred fast food joints and a few dozen "big box" stores in a city of 250,000 people? For that matter, do we really need cities with 250,000 or more people in them?
If Americans bought fewer cheap imported things and paid more for those goods we do consume the "job creators" would feel less pressure to pay so many actual workers so little, while their profit margins could be maintained by going back to the days of $300 pocket calculators. One problem with that is that instead of paying their workers more to produce fewer goods of higher quality they'd most likely "downsize" immense numbers of workers right into starvation, while squeezing the workers they do keep just as hard as ever; another is that needing fewer of us to buy their stuff means far more of us would be reduced to genuine desperation. Eventually the enlarged numbers of very poor here and overseas would die off from hunger, disease or wars of last resort, while the very rich would stay very rich -- and seem even richer compared to everybody else.
The "traditional" answer was for hoi polloi in "the West" to overthrow the rich and create more equitable societies, which could then reduce the burden on "the colonies" while encouraging revolutions there. But that became a long shot in 1918 when the only revolution to even half-way succeed was in backward and peripheral Russia: the German revolution was crushed by the "Social Democrats," while revolutions failed to even start in the rest of "the West." Which led to Stalinism in the USSR, and hyper-inflation and then the Great Depression in the rest of the "more developed" world; which gave us Hitler, WW2, the Holocaust, and then the Cold War.
In the USA there was potential for revolution in the Great Depression, but the New Deal kept that down and "the Good War" put paid to it. By 1955 revolution was practically inconceivable, and these days -- when everybody's full of junk food and busy twiddling their thumbs on hand-held electronics -- that's just crazy talk.
It's time for a strategic "sea change," a rather drastic one, toward a kinder, gentler imperialism. The "broad masses" in the USA should push our "leaders" toward ever further conquests, liberating one country after another from their local oppressors, the petty warlords, greedy industrialists and "Islamofascists" who do the heavy labor of keeping them down, so that one people after another can join in the global cause -- so that one people after another can share the undeniable benefits of "The American Way." Though the USA is hardly a truly free and democratic society we are much better off then the people in Pakistan, let alone DR Congo; because we owe what we have to the rest of the world we ought to pay them back by raising them up too.
The USA, armed and militant, is irresistible, and the peoples of the world are eager and ready to share what we've accomplished. In which process, by the way, the American people will gain new strength and confidence to push for a better deal and a more just society here in "the homeland" -- which we can then share with our sisters & brothers overseas.
Even a "New World Order" where the whole world is run like the USA currently is would beat the lives that so many millions have now, such as having their hands chopped off for not digging fast enough or being thrown in jail for getting gang-raped. Let's get off our fat asses and stop twiddling our thumbs: it's time we did our part for the rest of humanity.
USA! USA! USA!
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