Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Lemon-lime Kool-Aid: HG Wells' unemployment solution
In The First Men in the Moon, H.G. Wells describes the intelligent insect-like beings that live inside the Moon. Each "mooney" is educated and physically shaped to perform his destined job, the useful parts of his body stimulated and nourished, the rest of it starved. The result being machine operators with a specially shaped hand, messengers with long spider-like legs, and intellectuals who are almost all brain and need to be carried around by others. Unneeded workers are kept in a drugged stupor until they are needed,
To drug the worker one does not want and toss him aside is surely far better than to expel him from his factory to wander starving in the streets. In every complicated social community there is necessarily a certain intermittency in the occupation of all specialized labor, and in this way the trouble of an unemployed problem is altogether anticipated.
// posted by Erik @ 12/29/2004 12:00:00 AM
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