Changes

Things will be what they will. No matter what anybody says, things that are true are true: cutting revenue (from, say, corporate taxes) is the same as spending without the benefits.

Imagine you invite somebody to stay at your house. The deal is that he can stay without paying any rent if he gives the people of the neighbourhood jobs. He, of course, can reap and keep as much of the profit as he likes, and do what he likes with it—send it home, send it to the Bahamas, give it back to his employees with some kind of profit sharing arrangement—anything.

The other homeowners of the neighbourhood decide this is a good idea. People from outside seem to want to set up businesses and bring jobs, so they decide to make it easy for them and offer them their homes rent free.

Now everybody is doing it and funding the infrastructure of the neighbourhood, garnishing their own wages to pay for the services and facilities they need and want. The rent free business owners also enjoy the quality of life they gain in the neighbourhood.

The people of the neighbourhood get together and decide that though the companies are making record profits and thriving in the neighbourhood, and because the lion's share of their profits is nowhere to be seen, that they must start collecting some rent to cover the costs of running the neighbourhood and maintain the quality of life that they have all come to expect. Some people in the neighbourhood with especially close relationships with the more or less permanent "guests" do not agree with this plan, though. These people say that if the neighbourhood starts charging these "guests" rent they will not come and will leave to start their businesses elsewhere.

Some of them will leave; but others will stay because they like the neighbourhood and came here in the first place because they liked the place anyway. The ones who leave, leave having taken the profit (that was paid by the people neighbourhood as consumers and with their labour anyway) and without any loyalty or feeling of indebtedness to the people of the neighbourhood.

If they leave, what's the problem? If new people don't come in because they won't accept profits if they have to pay rent, are they the kind of people the neighbours want to work for anyway? Do they want them in the neighbourhood? Would it not be better if the people in the neighbourhood owned the businesses and were the bosses anyway? Would they mind paying the rent if it meant that everybody in the neighbourhood would live better, instead of the lucky few working near the top of the "guests"' companies?

There is a saying: "that's the price of doing business." Why does that only seem to apply when business wants to take it to the neighbourhood?

Move on

The world is on the other side of a pane of glass; it haunts me without my being able to touch it. I watch helpless as the newspaper quietly spins its support for an unmandated candidate in stories that have nothing to do with her; I watch and feel as Japan tries its best not to panic in the face of the worst fear of the '80s; I see people in positions they do not appreciate, and who spend their time keeping others out; I watch as a thick fatty layer of administration insulates the public from its own educational institutions; and though the glass is there, I sit and hear nothing but a spiralling hellish vortex of a multitude of irrational ways to say no to reason through the receiver hung there by the window for me.

Time to concentrate on this side of the glass and live the life I have been given, satisfied and content in the crux of my own position and stance, my own potential and the warmth of that of those closest to me.