Re: Large families suck


Cheeze wrote:
> > > Can you tell us what's wrong with
> > >
> > > 1) greed,
> > > 2) personal success, and
> > > 3) personal achievement?
> >
> > Read my post: If they become more important than caring for your fellow
> > man, it will destroy society.
>
>

But wait, there's more:

"there was something that happened at the plant where I worked for
twenty years The Twentieth Century Motor Company.

It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. ... They let us
vote on it too, and everybody -- almost everybody -- voted for it ....
The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his
ability, but would be paid according to his need. ... they made it
sound like that anyone who'd oppose the plan was a child-killer at
heart and less than a human being.

.... Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people?
Try pouring water into a tank where there is a pipe at the bottom
draining it out faster than you pour it in and each bucket you bring
breaks the pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is
demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week,
then forty-eight, then fifty-six -- for your neighbor's supper -- for
his wife's operation -- for his child's measles -- for his mother's
wheelchair -- for his uncle's shirt -- for his nephew's schooling --
for the baby next door -- for the baby to be born -- for anyone
anywhere around you -- it's theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures
-- and yours to work, ... with nothing to show for it but your sweat,
with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your
life, without rest, without hope, without end ...

>>From each according to his ability, to each according to his need ...
It took just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars
--rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could
claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no
earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to "the family,"
and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them
was his "need" -- so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs,
like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to
his patched drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that "the family"
would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because its
miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm -- so it
turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming
that his need was worse than his brothers... what sort of men kept
quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

.... What was it that they'd always told us about the vicious
competition of the profit system, where men had to compete for who'd do
a better job than his fellows? Vicious wasn't it? Well, they should
have seen what it was like when we all had to compete with one another
for who'd do the worst job possible. There is no surer way to destroy a
man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his
best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job day after day.

.... Amusement was the first thing they dropped. Aren't you always
supposed to be ashamed to object when anybody asks you to give up
anything, if it's something that gave you pleasure? ... There was a man
who'd worked hard, all his life, because he'd always wanted to send his
son through college. Well, the boy graduated from high school in the
second year of the plan -- but "the family" wouldn't give the father
any "allowance" for the college. They said his son couldn't go to
college, until we had enough to send everybody's son to college -- and
we first had to send everybody's children through high school, and we
didn't even have enough for that. The father died the following year,
in a knife fight with somebody in a saloon, a fight over nothing in
particular -- such fights were beginning to happen among us all the
time.

Then there was an old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby:
phonograph records -- "personal luxury", they called it. But at that
same meeting, Millie Bush, somebody's daughter, a mean ugly little
eight-year-old, was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck teeth --
this was "medical need," because the staff psychologist had said that
the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if her teeth weren't
straightened out.
The old guy who loved music, turned to drink instead.

.... But the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it. They
bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every
worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried
pregnant sister, for an extra disability allowance, they got more
sickness than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing,
their furniture, their homes -- what the hell, "the family" was paying
for it!

They found more ways of getting in "need" than the rest of us could
ever imagine -- they developed a special skill for it, which was the
only ability they showed.... Yet this was the moral law that the
professors and leaders and thinkers had wanted to establish all over
the earth.

If this is what it did to a single town, where we all knew on another,
do you care to think what it would do on a world scale? ...To work --
with no chance of an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed
and the Patagonians have been sent to college. To work -- on a blank
check held by every creature born, by men whom you'll never see, whose
needs you will never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or
fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question -- just to work
and work and work -- and leave it up to the Ivys and the Geralds of the
world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and
days of your life.

And this is the moral law to accept? This -- a moral ideal? ... Our
agony took four years, from our first meeting to our last, and it ended
the only way it could end: in bankruptcy.

Ivy Starnes made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she said
that the plan failed because the rest of the country had not accepted
it, that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a
selfish, greedy world ..."

.