The sad tale of the unemployed

Why do so many tax-payers berate the unemployed so much, as if their being unemployed is solely and 100% their own fault? There are so many factors which contribute to unemployment, most of which are actually caused by the tax-payers themselves, and so it must be based on sheer ignorance of what it actually takes to allow a tax-payer to even be a tax-payer with all the burdens it carries.

Just for clarification, a tax-payer is someone who exchanges their time for money for the purpose of accumulating and owning private wealth and pursuing self-interests, and which requires a government to exist to support, regulate, and maintain all the systems which need to be in place in order to pursue these self-interests.

One of these factors is actually the central banks mandate to keep inflation stable which is coupled with their mandate of full employment; but full employment does not actually mean, 100% employment, it usually means somewhere around 95%, and the reason for this is because 100% employment carries a huge risk of creating runaway inflation. This creates a problem for government, because tax-payers do not want the purchasing power of their money to be whittled away by runaway inflation, and so the government needs to keep some level of unemployment. I wonder if many of those tax-payers who berate the unemployed are actually aware of this fact, that it is the unemployed who actually contribute to the stability of the purchasing power of their wealth?

I actually think that many if not most tax-payers are aware of this fact but rather choose to ignore it and rather pin their hopes on government eventually devising a way where 100% employment is possible without runaway inflation. But this is impossible because of the following factor which contributes to unemployment and is caused by the tax-payer; and this is personal debt.

Most families and households today have personal debt, as if for some reason it is now impossible to actually get out of bed let alone fulfill one’s duties to society without it. Because I don’t wish to knock people having a dream to own their own home, I’m not going to go into household debt as a ratio to income, but rather just focus on the personal debt and more importantly the so called ‘bad debt’. Here in Australia (and no doubt around the world it’s probably similar in many countries), on average each person has personal bad debt equaling $20,500, or as a ratio to income averaging 25%. This is mind boggling to say the least but even more disappointing when one considers that in order to service this extra but unnecessary debt, one needs to work more hours, but work hours are finite.

For every hour you work as a tax-payer, is one hour of work that someone else can’t work, and so if some of your working hours are dedicated to servicing unnecessary debt which usually exists purely to satisfy emotional needs, then is it really the unemployed who are to blame for the shortage of working hours available to them or is it yours and everyone else’s debt fueled consumption that is to blame? If every full time worker reduced his bad debt by even half enabling them to free up at a minimum 3 hours a week, this would create in excess of 21 million available working hours per week, which if divided by the unemployment rate would equal nearly 30 hours per week per person currently without a job, and yet not one new job needed to be created. How unbelievably ridiculous!

Of course, to ask people to reduce their personal debt is simply nonsense, I mean this is the whole crux of capitalism isn’t it, free-will, self-interests and all that? But worse is that our economy is actually extremely dependent on consumption and so the idea of reducing debt would not be good for a consumption fueled economy, and worse, if everyone attempted to pay off their debts all at the same time we would see the mother of all crashes that would make the GFC seem like a car-park bingle.

I’m not going to go into other factors which also contribute to unemployment and which are primarily caused by the tax-payers themselves, such as the monopoly tax-payers have over resources, the housing market, and superannuation to name a few, I shall leave these for another day, but it would sure be nice if tax-payers were a bit more educated about the ramifications of their desires for instant gratification and to pursue wealth instead of treating it as the only noble thing on earth whilst at the same time berating and ridiculing all the unemployed and less fortunate who are actually contributing to the tax-payers desires and pursuits and helping to make them possible, especially when you add in a further fact which is that every dollar spent by an unemployed who receives welfare is income to a tax-payer.