The other day I bought a pair of headphones with a microphone to use with my laptop computer. The main reason for the purchase was to dictate into the computer - as I am doing now - rather than typing.
The problem was that I could hear nothing back, nor could I hear the music I had filed on to the laptop. At the IT Class I attend to hone up on my limited skills, the computer expert teaching and I spent 30 minutes trying to solve the problem. He went into sound cards and all sorts of things I just didn't know existed and finally, exasperated, he said he would spend time on the Internet and see if he could find a solution for the following week.
A woman sitting near to us commented "why don't you turn on the volume on the knob attached to the headphones." I hadn't noticed the thing previously and did what she suggested. Sound came out and the problem was solved. My IT instructor exploded. My fellow pupil's observation was "It takes a woman".
The solution was simple, but the IT expert and I tried to find a way to solve a problem by intricate esoteric manipulations of the convoluted programmes on the computer.
Martin Luther King in his 1967 book Chaos or Community consider the problems of poverty. ... We have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative; fragile family relationships which distorted personality development. The logic of this approach suggested that each of these causes be attacked one by one. In combination these measures were intended to remove the causes of poverty.
While none of these remedies in itself is unsound, all have a fatal disadvantage. The programs have never proceeded on a coordinated basis or at similar rates of development.
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.
For many years we have addressed the problems of poverty through the handout benefit system and, to ensure that money goes to those whom people in government believe are worthy of taxpayer funded largesse, tests are imposed. Various benefits are introduced to cover every conceivable case of perceived and electorally acceptable worthiness. Hundreds of public servants spend time considering applications, encouraging applications, interviewing people, and inputting data on to computers. Several are occupied as spies to make sure recipients obey the criteria for qualification. Is she living with him? Do they cohabit? Can he actually walk?
The whole welfare business is a business in itself costing taxpayers millions of dollars not only in paying financial benefits, but in the administration itself.
And yet the simplest way of overcoming the problem of financial poverty is the cheapest to operate. Give everyone a basic income as of right sufficient to help them and through taxation take it from those whose income indicates that they don't really need it. The financial savings of this method would run into millions.
The Tobin tax scheme has recently occupied much press coverage and gained attention by calling it the robin hood tax. The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Archbishop of Canterbury have been proponents of an international robin hood tax of about 0.05% on currency speculation and this it is said could raise $550,000 million a year. The idea promoted is that 50 per cent of money raised would go to domestic governments, 25 per cent go to help poor countries deal with climate change and 25% to reduce global poverty.
The Archbishop of Canterbury and a writer Richard Curtis [London Sunday Times 14-3-10] said we are asking those people who have for years used their brilliance to devise complex ways of generating money to benefit the banks to help devise a new structure of taxation on banks that would benefit the world.
In my opinion the likelihood of the idea being successful is nil. The banks and currency speculators don't want it.
But again the way of achieving what the Archbishop of Canterbury seeks -to help others-should be the simplest.
Don't let the private banks create the money supply. Don't go begging to these creators of money to help the poor. Don't bail out the banks when their schemes go pear shaped. And this is likely to happen again. Instead, take control of the creation of money to use it to benefit all people of the country without debt accumulating and the burden of compound interest crushing initiative and effort.
Simple solutions usually bring quicker and better results.
- contributed by Mortimer Russell, UK-based economic analyst and commentator