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Chapter 28
Social Efficiency and the Quality of Life

The word efficiency is often negatively associated with factory efficiency experts forcing workers to work ever faster and more robot-like. The word conservation is often negatively associated with Scrooges living second-rate, minimal lives rather than consuming more and more the red-blooded American way.

Efficiency and conservation are two of our best friends. In the long run, they have done more to improve the quality of our lives than any other actions that we take. Efficiency and conservation reduce cost and labor and increase leisure time and the quality of life. Efficiency and conservation are the best friends of every smart person, business, government, and society.

Along with the injustice and inequity of our current plutocratic society and its corrosive effects on the quality of all of our lives, particularly on the economic bottom half, another important complaint is that it is inefficient. The addition of a demos as the fourth branch of government along with the other suggestions made in this work would greatly increase our efficiency and our quality of life.

Here is just a brief list of some of the inefficiency and waste under our current plutocracy which would be corrected by the changes in our government and society discussed in this work:

  • In concentrating most of our nation’s power and wealth in the hands of the few we create a huge social imbalance and a host of disastrous and costly social disorders that can never be corrected no matter how much time, effort, and money are thrown at the problems.
  • Over-concentrated wealth requires a huge military and police force and every manner of wall, barrier, device, assurance, and insurance to protect it.
  • Millions of people in poverty, especially when concentrated into urban ghettos, requires an enormous constellation of resources to maintain order and to prevent rebellion and even revolution. The maintenance of this fundamental injustice also requires a huge judicial and prison system. Millions of potentially educated, productive, taxpaying people are instead turned into criminals that must be caught, tried, and imprisoned at enormous expense.
  • The vast difference between the perceived extreme luxury, security, pleasure, and happiness at the top of the social heap compared to the extreme poverty, insecurity, pain, and unhappiness at the bottom drives everyone clean out of their humanity and into a tooth-and-claw rat race and fist fight in which some will do anything to anyone to achieve ‘success’ while ‘losers’ litter the landscape. Both the ‘winners’ and the ‘losers,’ the carnage of our current system, overcrowd our overtaxed mental and physical healthcare systems. Anger, anxiety, angst, alienation, loneliness, and addiction reign supreme. We have become hardened, trivialized, dehumanized caricatures of our full potential capacity and humanity.
  • Billions of medical dollars are wasted extending for a few days or months and in a ghastly, mechanical manner the lives of the wealthy terminally ill while many millions of people left out of the healthcare system receive no proper preventive medical care and show up in emergency rooms with costly, advanced, medical problems. Many billions of potential healthcare dollars are thrown down a black hole, the for-profit health insurance industry, an industry which has never put so much as a single Band-Aid on anyone.
  • A several thousand page tax code, the principal purpose of which is tax evasion by the wealthy and which is understood by almost no one, causes uncountable hours of anguish and billions of dollars to be spent by businesses, individuals, and government.
  • A huge labyrinth of government processes and programs both in the legislative and executive branches having to deal with the fallout from our current unjust government and social system. An endless sea of impossible forms and hoops that people destroyed by the system must wade through almost as a way of life just to get a bit of help, people who would not be there in the first place were it not for the system.
  • An equally huge labyrinth of processes and programs in both government and industry designed to obscure the corrupt, often illegal, usually immoral wheeling and dealing, mutual back scratching, and self-serving actions of the elite.
  • A plague of often unscrupulous corporations, special interest groups, and PACs pumping a river of money into election campaigns and government, debasing and corrupting them and effectively disenfranchising the electorate. A dispirited electorate and a cynical populace throughout the land.
  • A world based upon plutocratic governance and unjust, opportunistic political-economic relationships within and among nations is forever at war. A huge portion of the resources of the world’s nations is consumed by military and security budgets depriving their use for the benefit of humankind. The American military budget is nearly equal to the military budgets of all other nations combined.
  • What is the emotional cost of the fear, anxiety, resentment, distrust, alienation, complexity, and diminishment that all of this brings into our lives?

Government, business, and each of our lives can and should be made much more sane and simple.

All of these problems and many more would be completely corrected or significantly reduced if our current plutocratic government were modified by the addition of a demos and consensus democracy and by the implementation of the other suggestions made in this book.

 

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