home

current article

submit an article

books

contact span

on living wages


on-living-wages
internet images

- what happens to a plant that is overwatered?
- in revolution things revolve around the same central element, like the earth revolving around the sun. people revolving around an idea, like the people arriving in the new world still live like the british.
- in evolution things constantly move away from wherever they originate.
- biological body does not distinguish between physical labour work and exercise.

this is a question to congress persons aoc and senator bernie sanders and all those who earn more than the living wage. they all propose raising the wages of the people who earn less, but not one of them has ventured to let go of the income above the amount they all consider to be sufficient for others to live on.

so let us ponder over the matter in its entirety in terms of what it is, who gives it, who receives it, and whether it is adequate. a wage is a payment made by an employer to an employee for the service performed. an employer may be a king or a dictator, an owner of a commercial establishment or any person who hires another person to do a specific work. thus an employer is one who has sufficient funds to pay to another person who performs the service for a pay; and an employee is a person who does not have sufficient personal funds to sustain oneself.

in a given state of socioeconomic setup the employer has acquired these funds by the way of force as king or dictator or with an unequal bartering favorable to one. and then his progeny acquires the funds in inheritance. an employee lacks the power of the king or gangster or the manipulative skill of bartering to amass wealth. an employee also lacks the socioeconomic stature to be seen as ecocentrically the same member of the human species as that of the employing person. in an autocratic setup an employee is simply reduced to a worker, not even on par with the nonhuman work animal like horse and other creatures. these work animals are at least provided for their biological needs like food, water and shelter. the human workers are given a fixed amount of money regardless of the fact that the cost of food, water and shelter, etc have increased since the time when the rate of the cost based amount needed for mere sustenance was thought out by the employer.

kings and tyrannical dictators, business tycoons and gangsters only gather money. they leave the management of money to their brainy servants. as it was inevitable, some brainy servants displaced their employers and named their new formation a democratic rule, calling themselves the servants of democracy in name, but living in splendors that rival any kingdom. calculative as these upper level servants of democratic nations and the commerce sector are, they use their decision making positions to periodically raise their own pay by calling the meeting of the board of directors of business and ministers or nations’ congress. the head employee of the east india company and the people in charge of the english outpost of the americas thus maneuvered their holdings into an indian raj, and the u.s.a., which were functionally independent, and then became fully independent of the royal command.

the non brainy servants of the queen and the democratic u.s., having no such brain power except their muscles could at the most go on strike, knowing that their employers could not run the factories by themselves. still, the employers managed to weaken the protest by the way of the union busting and bribing the labour union heads, as these union heads themselves are not the laboring workers, and are earning more than the membership paying workers. so are the servants of the democratic nations, including the u.s., whose president, the members of the two houses of congress and every other person in the employ of the nation are paid generously along with the periodic pay raise and perks. the president resides in a building that rivals in comfort with any royal palace of the world, with all the domestic and secretarial services paid for, and travels in an aircraft specially made for the president, as is a presidential retreat.

this american democratic arrangement that is an amalgamation of the practices of the english royalties and the state supported commerce sector, has servants of the nation earning more than the people who pay for it through their taxes. this arrangement worked without any outspoken objection to it until the general populace gradually began to see things differently: the servants of democratic nations are persons elected by the people, and that is the only power people have to force them to change laws governing the nation’s way of life. but until people exercise their rights, their elected people will continue to dictate the people rather than representing them.

the people at large, from the unemployed person to the president of the nation, need to accept the physical reality of the human existence is that the nature of things does not abide by the socioeconomic apartheid. so regardless of the nature of work, all workers and their employers need to nourish themselves alike. the only variation would occur due to their biological variations like gender, physical build and age. in this regard, both the poor and rich must have to acknowledge that existentially a human species is as much interwoven with the natural elements as are other living organisms. no status nor any plethora of bodyguards can set a human person apart from this fact.

as for the desire to be seen better than thou, it works only as long as the others around are conditioned to be impressed by someone’s one time only victory to be a lifelong success. besides, a real wholesome person in thought, speech and action experiencing nothing lacking in such a state of being needs nobody’s support for being what one is. being free from the promoted wants one lives minimally. isn’t this why the sense of freedom is equated with living like the wild?

as for the desire to be better than thou tendency, it arises from a learnt comparative worth of oneself in the eyes of others around one. it is this comparative worth of the human person that does not exist in the life of the wild. it is this absence of learnt and acquired identity of oneself that gives them the freedom of being. it is this natural inborn sense of freedom, which exists even in the animals that are bred and trained to be used in the races, like the dog race and horse race. these dogs and horses themselves are not racing, they are simply made to run. so at the end of the race these dogs and horses do not strutt as winners or feel depressed as losers. nor do they try to distinguish themselves from others of their kind as do the humans.

it is the sense of worth in which the human being is compared with currency. and it is not just the employee that is equated with the monetary worth of work the employee is producing, but even the richest are forced to compare oneself with the other rich. it is the wage slavery for the employee, and the economic status slavery for the rich.

do you feel free from this enslavement of this sense of economic worth?


additional articles:

on being female and feminizm

democracy in india? u.s.a.? anywhere?

nature and nurture

on living wages

the liberal arts

what is in a name?

language as the medium of aware interaction

on formal education: the formula of making a sub-human species

an awakening dreamer in a lucid dreamland

a letter to noam chomsky

the rich need the poor

a wholesome being: an experientially and emotionally motivated sense of being

on aging: like wine, or deteriorating

attention and distraction: ordered and personal

the urban humans: making of a subspecies

a letter to alexandia ocasio cortez

fear of socioeconomic survival of the self image

climate change is manmade; man is made up

on the world stage: dress codes from diapers to dress rehearsal

on being surgically reformed human: and ecologically uncomfortable perception

the i.r.s.: taxation and tax deduction

a letter to congressperson alexandia ocasio-cortez

nature: creator is the creation

expanding the limits

kalejaa, the heart

creating a subspecies: the urban human

sibling rivalry

whence and where to

the me, too, culture: the peer pressure

commercial cannibalism

buddhist economics

decentralization of power

counterculture in capitalism

of trust and trustees

within and without the picture frame

"Whiteman's burden"

life sustains on life

time

feminism

work and workout

on reading and writing

knowledge: intellectual property

mind over matter

medium of communication: english

one or many

economics of procreative organs

lopamudra

capitalist-kamasutra

selfless act

medal of freedom

rebel with subconscious cause

art: an expression of emotion, and a tool of many unsavory uses

literacy: revolution in the concept of education

on being an actor among pretenders

aging

on ecocentric parenting

between birth and death

police

meaning

justice

culture and counterculture

literacy: knowing what is read

utopia

the brains and their function

charity

no-mind: nothingness and no thing-ness

energy: purpose and conservation

poverty : inflicted by others and self imposed

rose by any other name: identity and the content relationship

geology and geo-politics: trails of the old and new world

the american way of life: from the eyes of a foreigner

on noninterference: interfered with the acquired ideals

web of maya: on possessions and being possessed

transfer of authority from infancy to adulthood

emperor without the clothes

laws of nature and laws of man

on science and technology

on being poor or rich

letter to barack obama

on seeing eye to eye

to be or not to be: the sense of being

on language

on seeing what is

on energy

on rearing the young

on education

understanding the place

a proposal for prison reform

individual is indivisible

on the imposed emnity

the social change; an ecological perspective

on education and philanthropy