For thousands of years, men toiled with nothing more than the work of human hands and draft animals. The vast majority plowed the fields and labored from dawn to dusk. Yet theirs was a life in tune with nature and they were well connected with their sense of God.
After 5,000 years of recorded history, man invented work through carbon based fuel. No longer was production bound by labor alone. Little by little, men’s minds were released from the drudgery of forging furrows in the fields. Year after year, the miracle of the industrial era happened upon us, and the minds of men multiplied output through new inventions of machinery.
Lives that at one time supposedly spanned centuries but that had devolved into just a few decades began to expand again as men were free to create new ways to increase life expectancy. And those lives, while freed from some of the past drudgeries and dreadfulness, were still filled with ever specializing forms of work.
As machinery thrust man into highly productive generations, items such as books that were once expensive luxuries became available to the common man, expanding his access to knowledge even more. And work that had once been deemed that of the most refined now began to thought of as the new drudgeries. These tasks would later be consumed in the information era. Yet, even as drudgeries continued to be eliminated from the workplace, more and more previous luxuries became commonplace, and the masses in wealthier countries began to live better than kings of old.
But they now provided to each other services that heretofore would have seemed frivolous luxuries of the wealthy. Life became ever more livable even while all continued to work. Only that periodically, sometimes without warning, economies would shut down and work would dry up for want of demand.
It seemed that economies were built on credit and that providers of credit could accelerate and decelerate the economy on their whim. They could also pick and choose to whom they would provide credit, and who would prosper from their decision. For when credit was available, man was ever increasingly finding new inventive ways of employment and services to expand livability of mankind. But when credit was pulled, these newly expanded, inventive forms of employment suffered.
Did machinery stop man from working? No, it allowed him to expand his portfolio of work. Did computers stop man from working? No, they exponentially expanded his capacity to devise new work. Did robots stop man from working? No, they eliminated new drudgeries and created opportunities to elevate livability to more of the masses.
Man will work to fill the limitless void of undiscovered livability upon the Earth. Yet the yoke of our capital system flaws must be lifted for that to occur.
Clif Carothers
Job Voucher Plan 