THE EDITOR, Sir:
THE DEVOUT followers of the religion of Free Market Capitalism share a central article of faith: The more wealth you can create, the more wealth is sure to trickle down to the very poorest among us. That this is not so, that the gap between rich and poor is constantly widening is always greeted by the faithful with shock, even disbelief. It just cannot be true, for that would contradict the basic laws of economics and even the basic promise of democracy.
Still, the ugly truth will not go away; the rich are getting richer and fewer and the poor more numerous. The simple explanation has been made a dirty word never mentioned in neo-liberal circles. When I was growing up in the 1920's and 30's, even conservatives talked quite openly about "technological unemployment" as a simple fact of life. The invention of the cotton gin idled thousands who had been picking and carding cotton by hand.
We tried valiantly to save the jobs of machete-swinging cane cutters knowing full well that globalization was here to stay. Our competitors in Mississippi made no fuss over mechanized cane cutting. After all, those made idle were black; the white racist rulers of those states were happy to crow that they were idle because they were shiftless.
That much neglected economic theorist, Thorstein Veblen, explained it in one short phrase, "the inordinate capacity of the machine to produce." Whenever we modernise, mechanise and grow efficient, jobs are lost on a grand scale.
Right now, capital and labour the world over are agonising about unduly high unemployment as if it had just been discovered for the first time. The sly fact is that it has been going on ever since ships with sails replaced triremes - those propelled by three banks of 60 or more oarsmen.
I am etc.,
JOHN SEARS
Kingston 6
