Political Systems Seen As Restaurant Business Models. My Choice: The Cover-Charge Society
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
In restaurant terms, there are three basic social systems:
- All-You-Can-Eat (Communism)
- A La Carte (Libertarian/Anarchism) and
- Cover Charge (Pragmatism)
A Smorgasbord Society — Communism
The communists thought that everybody was entitled to whatever they needed just by reason of existing. Under Communist theory the government would control all aspects of society and run it sort of like a buffet restaurant where everyone could fill up their plates with whatever they needed without having to worry about how much they were taking or what it might cost.
They thought that redistributing the wealth was fair.
In practice their system never worked as the theory promised and as a social model the communist system was a spectacular failure.
An A La Carte Society — Anarchism
The anarchists think that no one should have anything that they don’t individually pay for, that means no public schools, no municipal services, no public hospitals, no food stamps.
A true anarchist thinks that even things like municipal police departments, fire departments and water departments are wrong.
Under right-wing theory society should operate like an a la carte restaurant. If you want bread you pay for the bread. If you want a baked potato you pay for the baked potato. If you want to use the bathroom you pay for the bathroom.
If you want medical care, you pay for it. If you want an education, you pay for it. If you want to use the roads, you pay a toll.
And if you don’t pay, you do without.
They think that not redistributing the wealth is fair.
The Cover-Charge Nightclub
A night club charges a cover charge to keep out the riff raff and the hangers on, to make sure that the people who get something give something.
But, once you pay the price of admission and get through the door in a cover-charge club you can listen to the music, take a twirl on the dance floor, grab a handful of pretzels and a glass of ice water. You can use the bathrooms, have some bar peanuts and generally enjoy yourself just like everybody else.
Of course if you want champagne or a steak dinner, that’s extra, but once you pay the cost of admission and get into the club, you get the basics that you need to have a good time.
A Cover-Charge Society — Pragmatism
Pragmatists think that in order to have a high-functioning society (low crime, prosperous, educated, socially mobile, creative and free) all citizens need to have access to a basic standard of living if they pay a basic price, a cover charge.
The price of that access is that everyone who can work must work.
Pragmatists think that “fair” is irrelevant. They only care about what type of system will produce a society that works the best.
The Societal Cover Charge Is Holding A Job
In the pragmatists’ Cover-Charge Society, the cover charge that is imposed as the cost of earning a basic standard of living is working a full-time job.
How would a full time job function as a societal cover charge?
All Jobs Pay A Living Wage
No matter how unskilled the work is, every job earns every employee a basic standard of living.
Every job would be required to pay
- A living wage
- A percentage of the cost of medical insurance and disability insurance such that if you worked half time the employer would pay half the cost of the insurance
- A number of hours of paid time off for each 8 hours worked
In the Cover-Charge society the cost of that basic standard-of-living wage is not paid by taxes collected by the government as part of a plan to re-distribute the wealth.
No, the incremental increased cost of paying each employee a basic standard of living wage is baked into the price for the goods and services that each employee creates.
Under the Cover Charge system consumers pay the incremental increased cost of providing each employee with a basic standard of living in the form of higher prices for that business’ goods and services.
What If There Aren’t Enough Low-Skill Jobs?
There won’t be enough low-skill jobs.
Tools increase the number of goods and services each employee can produce per hour worked. This makes products cheaper and increases profits. It also reduces the number of employees required per unit of goods produced.
More and better tools make businesses richer because they reduce the number of employees needed to produce the same quantity of goods.
Essentially, tools trade fewer jobs for higher profits.
To balance the system, the government will need to tax those higher profits to get the money to replace the lost jobs.
How Will The Government Replace The Missing Low-Skill Jobs?
[NOTE: This section of this post is drawn from my article: A Guaranteed Minimum Income Is The Wrong Answer To The Right Question. The Solution To The Shortage Of Living-Wage, Low-Skilled Jobs Is Publicly Funded, Non-Profit Corporations That Will Pay A Living Wage]
Not every job worth doing can be monetized on a use/fee basis.
Clean air and clean water are not profitable or even monetizable in a fee-for-service model but they are vital to a worthwhile society.
The national parks are not profitable on a fee-for-use basis. The Grand Canyon cannot be operated at a sufficient profit to pay for itself. Does that mean that Yosemite and Yellowstone aren’t worth having? Of course not.
What are these new, living-wage jobs? Who will employ these unskilled workers and pay them a living wage? Where will the money come from?
Publicly-Funded, Nonprofit, Public-Benefit, Corporate Employers
City streets are filled with trash. Buildings are covered in graffiti. There’s plenty of work there that needs to be done. Enter “Clean The Streets, Inc.” a publicly-funded, nonprofit corporation.
In every city thousands of working parents need low-cost day care for their children. Those centers can be staffed with workers supplied by “Free Day Care, Inc.” a nonprofit corporation.
In every county thousands of adults need some kind of assisted living. We can staff the assisted living facilities with “free” workers whose wages are paid by “Assisted Living Staff, Inc.” a nonprofit corporation.
With much of the retirement home’s labor being supplied for free by the nonprofit, the retirement home’s monthly charge to its residents can be much lower.
There are many types of work that need doing that could be performed by unskilled or easily trained workers. This isn’t “make work.” It’s real work that has real value. It’s just work that can’t pay for itself on a usage/fee basis.
Why A Nonprofit Instead Of Employment Directly By The Government?
Why not have the government directly employ these people?
Because:
- The substantial fringe benefits paid to government employees are more expensive than the basic living-wage benefits paid by a private employer.
- Government employees are difficult to fire or discipline
- Government agencies are not subject to limitations on executive salaries or overhead and these nonprofits will be.
- Government employees are more likely to be used as a political voting block.
- The rules under which a government department operates are much more complicated and much more difficult to change than those that govern the operation of a private corporation.
Why Not Let The Losers Look Out For Themselves?
The advocates of the A La Carte society tell us to just ignore the whole thing. If some people have no money, no medical care, no job, no future, that’s their problem, not ours. We, the winners, don’t have to do anything.
They tell us that if sixty percent of the country is surviving OK then to hell with the forty percent that isn’t. The losers’ problems are their problems, not ours.
But there’s a practical difficulty with that, namely, the losers’ problems spill over onto us.
Poverty In America Today
Today the top 20% of the U.S. population owns over 85% of the country’s privately-owned wealth.
The middle 40% to 80% of the population owns only 15% of the country’s wealth.
The bottom 40% of the U.S. population owns a net ZERO percent of the country’s privately-owned wealth.
Half the adults in this country have no savings. Half the adults in this country are broke.
These numbers aren’t telling us that 40% of the population is lazy and doesn’t want to work.
They’re telling us that the A La Carte social system does not provide an opportunity for a decent life for 40% of the population.
That’s not only unacceptable. It’s a total system failure.
Those numbers are telling us that the A La Carte social system doesn’t work.
What happens when a large percentage of your population has nothing, has no future, has kids with no future, and they know it?
How Poverty Affects The Rest Of Us
Poverty generates crime, drugs, gangs and political instability. Perhaps you’ve noticed the crime, gangs, drugs and political instability in the United States.
Crime is more expensive than providing jobs.
It costs almost $50,000 a year to keep someone in prison and that doesn’t count the cost of the crime itself, the cost of the police to catch criminals, the cost of the lawyers and judges to try them and the parole officers to supervise them.
Who pays for that? Everybody.
It’s far cheaper to employ people to perform useful work than turn people into part-time criminals and then try to catch, try them and imprison them.
Does anyone really think that we can have a society that’s enjoyable to live in where 20% or 30% or 40% of the population cannot earn enough to feed, house and clothe themselves? Today, with under 5% unemployment, over 45 million Americans are receiving food stamps, that’s over 18% of the adult population.
Does anyone really think that we can have a society that’s worth living in where 20% or 30% of the population has no access to medical care?
Why do you think people join gangs? Because that’s the only future they see available to them.
We don’t have an Australia where we can ship people off to. We don’t have a frontier that can absorb the bottom third of the population.
Don’t tell me, “They just need to work harder. They just need to work two crappy jobs or maybe three crappy jobs.” They won’t.
Don’t tell me: “They just need to get smarter and more industrious.” A major part of any population isn’t very smart or talented. They just aren’t, and punishing people does not make them smarter. And they’re not going away.
What Do We Need?
We have to have a system that will provide access to a decent living for the people who do not have the skills, intelligence, talent, training or stamina to work two jobs or build web sites or design self-driving cars because they constitute thirty or forty percent or more of the population.
If we don’t deal with them, they will deal with us.
Simply ignoring the impoverished, untrained, and under-employed bottom third of the population will give us a society that nobody will want to live in.
It’s incredibly stupid to just close our eyes and try to fool ourselves into believing that 20% or 30% or 40% of the population with a low to average intelligence, with a low to average level of talent, with a low to average level of energy and determination, no savings, no training, no medical care, no access to a job that will pay them enough to live on, and no future for their children are going to just sit quietly in a corner and not cause the rest of society many, many very expensive problems.
They won’t.
We need to turn the corner and embrace the idea that we’re going to have to provide all citizens with a job that will pay them a basic standard of living.
We’re going to have to abandon the failed A La Carte society for the Cover Charge society.
–David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
