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Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome friends to welcome to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children, our prospects for the future, all that. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. Before jumping into today's updates, I I want to remind you to please make use of our 2rdWOLFF with 2F's com and democracy at work, all one word democracyatwork.info through them you can communicate to us your thoughts, your questions, your criticisms. You can follow us simply on Facebook and Twitter by clicking on the icons. You can sign up for our free newsletter that that will now be coming out quite often. And you can see all the work that we do to produce audio, video, written texts added every day to that website. So make use of it 247 no charge. It's what we do and it's a way for you to partner with us. I want to thank you again, several of you, for writing in with radio stations that you think might be interested in in carrying this program. We are always looking for more of those and likewise those of you who write in about places in the country where I'll be speaking in the weeks ahead. And once again, the list currently includes Tampa, Florida Houston, Texas Ames, Iowa Fresno, California Seattle and Bellingham, Washington, Berkeley, California and Farmingdale, Long Island, New York. So let's jump right into our economic updates for this early October 2015. Many of you write to me and wondering about how one could make a change in an economic system from capitalist enterprises owned and operated by small groups of shareholders and boards of directors on the one hand, to a cooperative economy where business enterprises are cooperatively owned and operated by workers in a democratic way, co respectively intertwined with similarly democratic residential communities where these enterprises operate. And so it was with great interest that I received a communication from through our website from one of you and I'm going to thank you publicly without using your last name. Jamie, you know I'm speaking about you sending in a remarkable story about something that was on the docket in Sweden back in the 1980s. There was a story and thank you Jamie, for sending it in, carried by the Christian science monitor of September 18, 1981. And it described a plan that was being adopted by the Social Democratic Party of Sweden, a major party in that country that has been the governing party many, many years over the last half century. And here was the plan for the transition that that party wanted to make Sweden, they would adopt, they said something very like our payroll tax, our Social Security tax, a tax on corporate that the corporation, the employer would have to pay, matched by a tax that would come out of workers wages, which is how we fund Social Security in the United States. So such a payroll tax in Sweden would however, be used for the following purpose. As the money accumulated, it would be used to buy out capitalist enterprises. They would have to sell at a price determined by the market. The government would have to pay, use this money and then convert these enterprises into cooperative enterprises run conjointly by the workers inside. One worker, one vote to all decisions, together with local and regional governments who would also have democratic rights over making decisions representing the democratically elected communities in which those enterprises operated. But the key idea was to use and to take 10, 20 years, if it took, raise the money by taxing business and the public workers and the private workers. Everybody's wages would be taxed, enterprises would be taxed to achieve a socially desirable transition to a collective, cooperative, democratically organized economy. Here was a simple, straightforward way. The business community of Sweden opposed it, yelled every name in the book, hoping that it would not have to pay for all of this. Didn't work. The basic plan was adopted by the Social Democratic Party. It was not for all kinds of reasons put into effect. That was the power of those against it. But it was something which I think most of you would agree merited an enormous amount of attention and is certainly something we can think about here as an interesting method of transition from one kind of economic system to another that could be done slowly, gradually, and allow for maximum adjustment along the way. Next update here. I want to borrow a story from the Consumer Reports magazine. Indeed, it's the Consumer reports magazine for September 2015 last month. And they carry a story that caught my eye. It turns out that poor people in America are required, like everybody else, to carry car insurance in every state. Except if I remember one, I believe New Hampshire is the only state that does not mandate that if you drive a car you have to carry car insurance. But the interesting thing for poor people is that they can't afford it, that there are problems with that. And what some poor people do is allow their insurance to lapse a month or two when they can't afford it. For example, if they're really tight and don't have the money, often it's because they can do without driving their car for a month by having a friend drive them to and from work. By walking or using a bicycle to do minimal shopping, they can kind of make an economy by not paying their insurance for a certain period of time when they're not actually using their car or not using it a great deal. My point is not to discuss whether that's reasonable or not, but if you're a very poor person, paying car insurance, especially when you're not using your car very much, is a real burden. So that's how poor people have handled it. They've interrupted it. But then they discovered that insurance companies have used the intermittent not paying for a period of time, not being insured and not paying the price therefore, for it as an excuse to raise rates. Notice the rates are not raised because these people are having accidents. The rates are not raised because they're costing the insurance companies a significantly larger amount of money. Canceling and reinstating an insurance policy is a minor bureaucratic thing done automatically by computer. And yet some states, understanding this problem, don't charge poor people more. For example, California does not allow there to be any increase in rates. Other states do. And the worst performer, Michigan, charging an extra as much as an extra $834 according to consumer Reports, for people who allow their insurance to lapse. Well, of course, as any idiot would understand, if you raise the price to poor people because they've let their insurance lapse, you only increase the incentive for them to, you guessed it, let the insurance lapse because they can't afford. They couldn't afford to pay the insurance before you jacked it up, and now they have an even harder time. They're torn between fear of the penalty if they get caught and paying something they couldn't afford to begin with and, and that is now, as in Michigan, much more expensive. But the bottom line is this is outrageous. Insurance should be something you get based on your record of driving, how risky your driving is, and not on your ability to pay. Adding to poor people's difficulty by a grotesque penalty when the cost to you of lapsing and reinstating an insurance is trivial is an outrage, and it ought to stop. Our next update has to do with the famous, or perhaps infamous, town of Ferguson in Missouri. Ferguson, whose fame or infamy, if you like, had to do with horrible shooting of a young man back then, Michael Brown, few months ago, and with the riots that happened afterwards and the police violence and so on. One of the key things that provoked all of this was the pattern in Ferguson, Missouri, that led that town to raise more and more of its revenue in a very peculiar way by Having the city levy fines on its citizens. And that meant often that a largely white police force issued huge numbers of tickets for minor infractions to a largely African American driving population. You can see where that led. Well, with the Justice Department's investigation, with the governors looking in on what is going on there, Ferguson can't do that anymore. And guess what? This last week, actually two weeks ago, the Moody's Investor Service lowered the accreditation or the valuation of the bonds issued by Ferguson. In other words, it said to investors that these bonds are risky. And why? Because Ferguson's revenue base is shrinking. And why is that? Because they can't do what they were doing, which is having the police and other city officials raising money not by taxing, let alone taxing those able to pay, but by using tickets and fines as a way to, to raise money, not to punish misbehavior, but to raise cash. An awful procedure. And now it's going to cost Ferguson because their bonds are going to have a harder time being sold. It's not good for the city's finances. They're beginning to have to pay the price of something they shouldn't have been doing all along. The next topic I want to deal with has to do with questions you sent in. The first set of questions followed from last week's discussion of the scandal around vw. And we noted there, if you recall, that VW knowingly put a defeat device into millions of their cars, particularly their diesel engine carswe know it about them. Basically a device designed to fool anti pollution tests into thinking the car wasn't polluting. But that then allowed the car to have speed and sportiness because the anti pollution device didn't work for normal driving on the road. This we turned out to be a device that had been used by the Ford Motor Company where it got caught at it some years ago by Volvo, by Caterpillar, and so on and so on and so on. Well known nothing new about what VW is doing. They obviously thought they could get away with it. They probably did for quite some years, but now they've gotten caught. And I made the point last week which led to your question, those of you who've written in about it. I made the point last week that if a public company or public enterprises that did something had a record of illegal death, dealing pollution, worsening dishonesty like Ford, Toyota, gm, vw, you name it, there would have been cries to privatize such dysfunctional public enterprises. But I was struck by the silence of, as I put it last week, that here we have the betrayal, dishonesty, death, dealing, pollution, worsening behavior of private auto companies. And there's not a peep in the media that discuss or describe all of this about what it would mean to solve this problem and what would a solution look like? If privatization and is the solution for dysfunctional public companies. Well then what is the solution for dysfunctional private companies? And if you have no answer, then you are telling us that we just have to live, or rather live and die with the behavior of these private companies. I don't think so. And let me make the point clear. Profit is the problem. Automobile companies are first and foremost profit seeking, profit driven capitalist enterprises. What they did helped their bottom line. It made them more profitable. VW could claim that German engineering made their Jettas and Golfs and so on more peppy, more speedy than other cars. We now know that's because they had a device that didn't let the anti pollution controls designed to save us from losing our lungs operative when those millions of cars were on the road. They subordinated our safety to their profits. That's what they did. And that's what capitalist competition leads companies to do. That's why Ford did it with the Econoline van years ago. That's why all the other companies did what they did. That's why GM took 10 years to fix a faulty ignition or Toyota took outcry of mangled bodies before they dealt with their safety bill problem from their subcontractor and so on. So we have to deal with that fact. What would be the alternative? The alternative would be to run companies democratically. To have all the decisions made by workers and the communities in which they work together. Those people would be concerned not just with producing the car, but also with the safety of the car they drive. And knowing what they know as workers, they would take care not to kill themselves as drivers. There would be voices heard so saying wait a minute, this isn't good. You wouldn't have a tiny number of people at the top making profit driven decisions willing to look the other way. And how do I know it? Because we have this long history of cases proving it. VW only one of the worst and the most recent. So there are alternatives. Public companies, companies that are part public, part private. Where the private part are worker co ops. We want a lot of people in on the decision making so no few if they are driven by profits at the expense of people's safety, that they won't have as easy a time as we now know they have in private companies when they get to the top to do what they have done. It's time to question private capitalism, private enterprises, competition and face the enormous social costs they represent and alternatives that might serve us much better. The other question we have time for on today's program has to do with the terrible drought in California. And indeed it is affecting other states too. But California has been in the news a great deal because it is suffering. Enterprises are suffering, individuals are suffering. There's bitterness as different people and communities and enterprises wonder about whether competitors are cheating and therefore getting an advantage on them, and so on. It's a mess. It's a climate mess. It's a political mess, it's an economic mess. It is turning Californians down and others against one another. This is a social disaster. What is it we can say about it? Well, there are two major issues that lie behind this drought that we simply haven't dealt with in this country. And that's why I'm going to focus on them and leave the details to what it is. The press tends to prefer to talk about anyone anyway. The first one is obvious. Climate change. Either we face it or we don't. But if we don't, then we block ourselves from thinking about what that change is, what fuels that change, what it means in terms of rain, rainfall, water supply, water level, reservoirs, all the rest of it. We haven't, as a nation done it. We've allowed private enterprises, particularly in the energy sector, who don't want to see their profits suffer because we don't use energy the way we did because of global warming and climate change results. They don't want that. So they throw sand in everybody's face. They buy scientists to write questioning articles about all of this. They want us to take the daring road of imagining it isn't problem rather than the safe road. Even if the safe road later shows itself to be based on science, that has to be changed, as all science always has. It's better, as my mother told me, to be safe than sorry. Let's take the steps that are needed so we don't have the climate change, which is one root cause of the drought. But there's an even more important problem that is also an economic problem. This is called economic planning. And economic planning hasn't been neglected, vilified, demonized in our country for a long time. Planning is something that has to be done by a public authority. It has to try to represent the diverse interests and constituencies in a community, whether it's a town or a state or a region or a country. So it has to Be a public event that allows for public input and for diverse voices to be heard. Okay. Planning has been opposed by private enterprises. Why? Two reasons. One, they think that the planning by the public can and might interfere in their freedom as private enterprises. And they're absolutely right. It might. Indeed, it ought to. Because if what's good for the public clashes with what's good for the private profits of private enterprises, it is the public's needs and wants which should prevail. That's what a democracy would mean. So for private enterprises to resist on the grounds that the public process could overrule and impede them, that's to misunderstand what democracy is, which is what they are doing, isn't it? But there's an even more important dimension and lesson here. Public planning knew, public authorities knew years ago that there was a water problem. The history of the Colorado river, the history of water supplies for a long time has pointed in the direction that there's an imbalance if you locate industry and residences too much where there's water is scarce and relatively less where water is abundant. And that therefore the logic is, if you can't change scarce water into abundant water, that you plan on communities and jobs and interests that go with them to be located where the water is available and not where the water is scarce. This is not rocket science. We don't allow that when we should. We don't foster it when we could. We don't permit the planning to unfold with public input, scientific advice going in the best direction we know for our communities. We subordinate all that to the private profit seeking of individual capitalists. This is neither necessary nor, nor advisable, nor in the people's best interest. It's another area in which private capitalism and democratic needs clash and drought is the price we pay for not dealing with that problem. We've come to the end of another half hour of this program. Please stay with me for the next half, which will occur after a short break. Do stay with us for the second half of today's economic update. Lam it. La. Ram. Welcome, friends, to the second half of today's economic update program. In today's second half, we're going to deal with two major topics. The first is almost a theoretical topic, but I think it will engage your interest and speak to your own desire to understand what's going on in our economy better. It's an analysis of the concept of class. What does it mean? What does it mean to say upper class, lower class, middle class, working class, all those uses of the term and the second major topic we're going to deal with is the notion of a guaranteed income and the notion of a guaranteed job. Ideas that are floating around and that therefore deserve some attention. So let's turn first to the idea of class. What does the word mean? Well, here it's very interesting. The word class as a noun comes from the verb to classify. All that class means is you take a population of anything and break it down into parts. You classify members of a group into one or another type. For example, we could classify all the people sitting on a bus somewhere into those that are above five and a half feet tall and those that are below. We could call them the tall class and the short class. We've classified members of the community on the bus into two classes, the tall and the short. Okay, so classifying, breaking down populations into subgroups is as old as human beings. All right, let's turn to the notion of economic class. Has it been true for a long time that people looking at a community of, of their fellow human beings have classified them into subgroups? And the answer is yes, they have. By the way, at least as far back as ancient Greece, 5,000 years ago, what people there did, and they still do, is divide people in a community, whether it be a village, a city, a state, a country, the world, whatever size you want. You classify people into those who own a lot of things and those who own next to nothing, and you call them the propertied class or the property less class. Or to be simple, the rich and the poor people have been doing that for thousands of years. They've been, for example, explaining the problems of a society by referring to the fact that, for example, a tiny number of people are very rich and a vast number of people are very poor. And they, for example, said we would think it would be a better society if there were more rich people and fewer poor people. And then others come along and say, you know, even better than that would be fewer rich people, fewer poor people, and most people somewhere in the middle. So you have a rich class, a poor class, and a middle class. And it's all measured in terms of how much you have your wealth or if you like, your income. That's a very old concept of class. It's been around a long time. People today, for example, some of our politicians running for president, Republicans and Democrats, talk about the disappearing middle class, by which they seem to mean the disappearance of people who don't make a lot of money and who aren't poor in the sense of earning nothing, but are somewhere in between that, they're having a harder and harder time, and these politicians say they want to help them, they want to restore them, and so on. So one idea about class is that it's about rich and poor and how societies are divided between rich, poor and those in the middle in different ways. Some with a few rich, some with quite a few rich, some with a small amount in the middle, some with a large amount in the middle, and so on. But there's a second and different idea of class that's equally old, goes back to ancient Greece too. Here you classify people not according to the wealth they have or the income they earn, but in a completely different way. You classify people according to the power they wield. Do they give orders or are they order takers? Do they have authority or is authority wielded over them? Are they rulers or are they the ruled, powerful or powerless? And you can divide a society according to how much power people have. And yes, there can be the powerful and then the powerless and then some in the middle. A middle class not defined by the wealth or income it earns, but instead by the fact that it takes orders from some and gives orders to others. This too is a concept of class we see in the world for thousands of years. Not only do we see people using these concepts of class, and by the way, not infrequently confusing them one with the other. And I should say something here which is simple but important. To have wealth doesn't mean you have power, and to have power doesn't mean you have wealth. Barack Obama as President of the United States has an enormous amount of power, but he's not so particularly wealthy. Hardly a poor man, but he's not in the top of our wealth class. And likewise, you can have a lot of wealth but live like a hermit with it and not wield much power at all over other people. So it's a difference that you want to keep in mind. Even more important is to recognize something that is going to lead us to another different concept of class. Here's what I want to for the last 5,000 years, there have been enormous efforts made year in and year out, sometimes in big dramatic ways, other times in small ways. To move from a class structure where a few were rich and the mass were poor to one where we were more or less all in the middle. It's called egalitarianism. It's called equality. It's something that the French and American revolutions were about. It's something that struggles were about. We didn't want there to be people who had nothing and a few people who had everything. We've tried to create not everybody exactly the same, but much less of a variance. And most of us crowded pretty much in the middle. And likewise, for thousands of years, we've wanted to distribute power in an egalitarian way, too. We have a name for that. The name is democracy. Democracy is everybody has the same amount of power. One person, one vote. Not some people, like a king or an emperor or a czar. And everybody else is the subject of no, no, no. That's as horrible for most of us as having one person or two, very, very rich and everybody else with nothing. So we have struggled for equality and democracy, and the human community has made considerable progress. For example, along the way, we got rid of slavery. Slavery is when one person not only has all the power, but literally has the power of life and death over another person because he owns the other person. A human being can be the property of somebody else. That is the extreme opposite of democracy. That's all power in one hand, no power in the other. We've gotten rid of that. We've gotten rid of kings. We've made a progress in the direction of less inequality and relatively more democracy. But it would be naive and dishonest not to face the fact that while we've made progress, we remain a long way away from a society characterized anywhere by equality and democracy in the real, full sense of those terms. And that requires asking and answering the question, why not? Why haven't we made more? For example, I like to use the example of the French Revolution. The slogans of that revolution were liberty, equality and brotherhood, Liberte, egalite and fraternite in French. That revolution was made to achieve those things. If you read the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had pretty much the same ideas in his mind. Indeed, he got them in some sense from the same intellectual traditions that fed the French Revolution in that century. So why, we might ask, haven't we made much more progress towards genuine equality of people with one another, economic particularly? And why not more progress towards democracy and again, in the economy as well as everywhere else? And I think the answer lies in yet another concept of class. Or to put it differently, I think the people who struggled for equality and democracy missed something. They missed something that was going on in their society that they should have, could have, and need to address if they want to make more progress to equality and democracy than the human race has so far achieved. What is it that they missed? What is it that needs to be done? And there we need the Insights, Karl Marx as always when you introduce Marx, you have to say the following, sort of silly. Is everything Marx wrote correct? No. Did Marx make mistakes? Of course. Is this a use of Marx that is based on thinking through the complexity of what he wrote? Yeah, but it's neither slavish to or in other ways a kind of breakdown of rational thought. It's rather the attempt to utilize and learn from a serious social thinker. Here's Marx's argument very briefly. Society can move further to equality, democracy, liberty, fraternity, by changing the way it organizes production. And it didn't understand that before. What does he mean? In every kind of production that the human community has ever undertaken, Marx points out, you can see very quickly that there's part of the community that uses its brains and muscles to produce goods and services. Chairs, shirts, software programs, you name it. That part of the community, not everybody that part. For example, the adults, not the children, the able bodied adults, not those that are sick, those that are not too old at retirement age. The adult working age population, which is only a part of the population, always uses its brains and muscles to produce. And here comes Marx's clever insight. It always produces more goods and services than itself consumes. In other words, the working people produce more shirts than they themselves have in their bureaus. They produce more food than they themselves eat, more software programs than they themselves use. Or to use the language that has come to dominate in English, workers in all economic systems produce a surplus. They produce more than they need to consume in order to continue doing their work. And so Marx then immediately asks the question, what happens to this surplus? What is done with it? Who gets it and who decides what is done with it? Those are the obvious questions to ask once you recognize that every society, whether it's conscious of it or not, produces a surplus and has to decide who gets to decide about using it and what it's used for. So here comes Marx's argument. In a slave society, he says, it's easy to see the slaves do all the work, they produce the goods and services, everything is taken by the master because the master owns the slave as well as therefore the products of the slave's labor. But the master has to give something back to the slave, food, clothing, shelter, or else this economic system, this slave system, would collapse because the slaves would die. So the surplus is the difference between what the slaves produce and what the slave master gives back to them for their consumption. Now, in a society of our type, capitalism, the insight of Marx is it has something in common with slavery. Even though People can't be anybody else's property. In capitalism, even though there are no slaves, something of the slavery has stayed with us. And what is it? Yep, it's this business of the surplus. And here's how it works in when you go and look for a job, you speak with your employer or your prospective employer, and you discuss the work that this employer wishes you to do. You're to come Monday through Friday, stay from 8 to 5, whatever it is. And then you get to the little delicate part about your pay. And let's assume, just for simplicity, that what you're going to get paid is $20 per hour. That is, the employer agrees to give you $20 for each of the 40 hours of the week that you come and use your brains and muscles, working with the tools and on the raw material that your employer supplies to you. Now, at that point, Marx says everybody knows, even if they've never been conscious of it before, reading what I, Karl Marx, am writing. Everybody, in fact, always knew what I'm about to tell you, which is this. The only reason the employer will pay you $20 for every hour you work is if your hour produces more of whatever that employer sells than $20 worth. Let's suppose it's an employer who makes shirts. He'll pay you $20 an hour if during every hour you add to the total amount of shirts he has to sell more than $20 worth, let's say $25 worth. That way he can sell the extra shirts you help produce. Get his $25, pay you 20, pay one for the cotton and other stuff needed to go into the shirt and keep $4 for his profit for himself. Or to say the same thing in simple English, the only way capitalism works is if the workers who do the work produce more a surplus that the capitalists get. They get it and they decide what to do it. If you work in a place where there are thousands of workers, they all help to produce a surplus, known in the company's books as the profit and the board of directors, a tiny group of people at the top, or the capitalist who owns the enterprise, an individual, a family, whatever it is, that tiny group gathers into their hands the surplus produced by all the workers, and that tiny group decides what to do with it. The workers get back what they need to consume. That's the wage. They get the profit. That's what the workers produce over and above what they get back. The surplus workers produce is what the corporation gets as its profits. And it decides whether to give itself big salaries, whether to give Its shareholders, big dividends, whether to invest in another company, whether to move production abroad. All those key decisions are made by a tiny group of people at the top. And here now comes Marx's powerhouse insight. If you allow the surplus produced by the many to flow into the hands of the few, you will not get liberty, equality, fraternity or democracy. The few who gather that surplus into their hands will use it to keep themselves in that position. They're not going to allow democracy because if everybody really had a vote, one of the first things they'd really do is get rid of a capitalism. That means the mass of people produce a surplus for a tiny minority. There can't be democracy if capitalism is going to survive. And likewise, the people who get the surplus into their hands, the boards of directors and major shareholders, not surprisingly, take a large part of that surplus to give themselves the very wealth we observe in modern capitalist societies, that is in the hands of such a relatively small number of people, they give the surplus to themselves. You're not going to get equality if you leave in place a system in which the mass of people produce a surplus for a minority. It doesn't matter whether the mass are called slaves and the minority masters, or the mass are called serfs and the minority are landlords, or whether the mass are called wage workers and the minority capitalists or employers. It's the same story. And therefore the conclusion Marx draws is want the economy to produce liberty, equality and democracy, then the people who produce the surplus have to be the same as the people who get it. No tiny minority gathers it into its hands. Worker co ops, collective worker, domestic democratic enterprises, enterprises where the workers are their own board of directors are the only way to go. If what you want is to overcome the failure so far to get equality and democracy, because we went after them without understanding Marx's notion of class as being the difference between those people who produced the surplus and those who get it. That additional concept of class has to become part of our ways of thinking and strategizing if we're going to finally reach the promised land of liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. That our forefathers and mothers and we have been working for a little bit of time, remains the second question. We can only broach it. Guaranteed income. Switzerland has voted on it. Other countries are thinking about it giving everybody a kind of minimum, whether you have a job or not, irregardless or irrespective, if you like old struggle about those words of what you get paid. And that has been put up against the notion of, of a guaranteed job. I have to admit I much prefer the guaranteed job. My fear is that a guaranteed income will never last, that the tension between those who earn an income by working and those who might choose not to is not a sustainable social arrangement. There's important work everybody has to do. Whether you're old or young, there are tasks. You can do your part, and it's good and healthy that you do. We just have to guarantee to everybody that there's a job for you, that the community takes it as its responsibility, not yours as an individual. Your job is to do a job, but which job and where? It's the job of the community to figure out what is needed, what are most important. You can decide among a range of alternatives, but the community should decide what the things are that need to be done. And you plug yourself into it. If we had a guaranteed job, much in our country would change. Just to give you one example that we have time for one of the oppositions of massive people to having a public transportation system in the United States and other countries that we need, because public transportation is the way to get rid of the private car, the largest single cause of air pollution, the waster, the worst waster of energy that we have, an institution, the private car that kills and maims more people than all the wars we fight, and so on. Public transportation, mass transportation, is the way to go. But the fear of many has been, my goodness, if we do that, then workers will lose their jobs. There's many more things to do. If our society guaranteed everybody a job, we wouldn't hold back progress, technical and otherwise, for fear that somebody would lose their jobs, because we'd be living in a society where that person would get another job and that that would be done quickly and efficiently. We've come to the end of our program for today. Please remember to make use of our websites rdwolf.com and democracyatwork.info for all the different purposes that they made available to you at no charge, at your convenience. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. It's it.