Abolish

"Will we be ruled by April fools?"
 
This is an interesting article on the debacle of the United States presidential election. There seems to be a fairly gaping issue regarding centrally organised welfare and government policy, that being that there grows a dissonance between what the electorate would like to be represented and the obtuse responses from the candidates running. It seems to be an accurate statement. Also, it is inaccurate to claim that the abolition movement succeeded because of a well-conceived tolerance/ acceptance or a well adjusted American population. If you were to look at further causation you would find that all of this has been founded in necessity, and maybe slightly more in retrospect. Hopefully Americans do not make the mistake of believing that in this election they have been given a reasonable choice, or that their choices are in any way instances of sense and long-term planning. I was struck by the Martin Luther King quote in the article:


"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective - the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

"… Now we realise that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.

"We have come to the point where we must make the non-producer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution. Though there have been increases in purchasing power, they have lagged behind increases in production. Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white and negro, the aged and chronically ill, are traditionally unorganised and therefore have little ability to force the necessary growth in their income. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society."

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