Whats Wrong With America Today: Part 2 - The Commodity of Need

Part 2 of this series covers the problem of privatizing ones needs. So we should start off by citing what are our basic needs.

1. Food
2. Water
3. Shelter
4. Heat (in the winter)
5. Cold (in the summer)
6. Clothing
7. Energy
8. Health care

What covers these needs? Farming covers most of your food. Livestock and vegetables and fruits are all functions of farms. Water companies cover the purification of your water that you must have to live. Shelter, well, thats covered by who ever you rent or buy from. Heat and cold and energy all come from private companies mostly. And clothing is covered by stores. Of course health care is mostly covered by private enterprise.

People die from lack of food, lack of water, lack of shelter, of over heating, of freezing to death, lack of clothing, and no energy. It is hard to argue that these are not needs in todays modern world. Its hard to argue that one doesn't need electricity to have their basic needs met. Its hard to argue that you can live a healthy productive life without good health care.

These things are basic needs. I would contend that all needs are in fact rights! In todays modern world, in the richest country in the world, built on the backs of our fore fathers and ancestors, has the obligation to provide for the needs of its population. We have a right to live in such a way. Our fathers and grandfathers broke their backs to make the top 1% in this country extremely wealthy with almost nothing to show for it. Entitlement? Hell yes!

It is the right of the people to benefit from the fruits of their labor. But what do we get? What do we get as a result of our labor? The "right" to pay for what we NEED, what we MUST have, to the great profit of someone else. Our country has effectively made our NEEDS, what we MUST have have, a commodity, an industry for making profit off the people.

They can and do raise their prices for what we needed based on that very need! They raise prices on food because they know we MUST have it. They raise energy prices every single year simply because they know we must have it. Health insurance goes up every year, and we must pay it or we will remain sick and even die! And if we don't have money for it, they we are out of luck. Sure, we have to be treated at the emergency room, but then they can indebt you for life, and even force you to go somewhere else after stabilization, and you don't have to be hospitalized if they can stabilize you.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that allowed rampant profit off of what you must have to live. There is something fundamentally wrong with a country that glorifies the man who finds a way to charge you for the gas to heat your house, then demonizes the man who gets upset because he can't afford his gas bill and gets his heat shut off. The people on the right are fond of blaming the victim for such things!

When you make the needs of the people a commodity, you necessarily set up a system that WILL drive the majority into the ground. You will necessarily create a poverty class that will always be behind, that will always be just to poor to pay for all their basic needs. These people are not people who are simply lazy or simply won't pull themselves up by their boot straps. They are people that have been charged into a permanent poverty class by spending all their money on their basic needs until they have nothing left, then they are constantly using every last bit of money to catch up with their bills to keep water or heat or electricity or food on the table until they finally collapse.

Making the provision of basic needs a profit industry, we have created a permanent poverty class, a permanent lower middle class and poor class. Having been poor and known many poor people, I can say that the ability to get out of the poverty situation is extremely difficult and most definitely not promised by hard work. Its not like the majority of those impoverished can get out of their situation by hard work. Why? Because we aren't guaranteed higher education. We aren't even guaranteed our basic needs in life. With basic needs and education guaranteed, the average person would be able to pull themselves out of the gutter and make a decent living for themselves.

But instead, we have created a situation in which people simply cannot work their way up. And all the while, people are forced to continue to work under near slave conditions simply so they can provide SOME of their basic needs. The money they get from slaving away all day goes to fund the fat cats making themselves extremely wealthy by charging you exorbitant prices for what you must have to survive! Do these blue collar poor worker less hard than you? Are they less important than anyone else? Is their value or even the value of their work any less? If you cannot do without them in your business, then the answer is no, its not worthless than you. If your business cannot survive without a specific position, then they are much more valuable than you likely pay them.

The striving goal of the wealthy is not to benefit society but to take advantage of it. By under paying people, paying them less than the value to the over all company. They make sure to transfer wealth from the lower classes to themselves. Example. The value of a worker is the value of the product he makes. But that is not what happens. A worker makes 15 20 even 30 dollars per hour making a good. A good that he will likely buy. So he is paid his wages, buys the product, thus putting his wages back into the company. So while he is making wages per hour dollars, someone else, or many someone elses, are making the equivalent of thousands per hour. The real value of the labor is chronically and deliberately understated as to make the wage worker believe he is getting paid well when in reality, in relation to the wealth received for the product, he is well under paid to the benefit of a few upper classmen.

For those unfortunate to make even less money, they are taken advantage of even worse. Consider the example of McDonalds. You say someone flipping burgers gets the pay they deserve. Do they? The value of ones labor is the value of the product they produce or the service they give. If a store makes 5,000 dollars in sales during one lunch period, not uncommon for McDonalds, then you must consider that the value of the wage associates during that period must be worth 5,000 dollars. Yet, during that lunch hour, that one hour pay comes out to likely less than 50 total dollars in labor for the store. Their value has thus been reduced, in total, to 1% of the value of the product they produce or the service they provide.

Which brings me to closing. Where ever the wages or pay of a person do not equal in total, the value of the product or the service they provide, then that person is under paid. Combine this with charging them to much for the product they produce, and charging them for basic things they need to survive, you create a class of people that cannot and will not ever get to the point where they can move up in live or class. This is by design to prevent any threat of wealth distribution from those who horde it to those who produce it!

What is wrong with this country? Needs being made into an industry for profit. Your basic needs be sold off to you at what ever price they can squeeze out of you. And there isn't a thing you can do about it. To make things worse, they convince you that you some how have a grand deal while your labor earns a few millions, and you barely enough to buy back the products you made from them. Thus giving them even more of your earnings. Until this problem can be addressed, life will never resemble the equality it should in this country.