Or: How Can We All Contribute to a Healthy Economy and Ensure that the Fruits of our Common Labor Are Justly Shared by All Humanity?
With fewer and fewer jobs available for an ever increasing number of people worldwide, it’s actually easier to start up a business today than to find a job that pays a living wage. The reason for this is simple: Our global economy is based on the myth of endless natural resources, endless market expansion and endless economic growth. In reality, however, we live on a planet that is limited in size with limited resources and a limited potential for market expansion. Consequently, the demand for all life necessities, including jobs, continues to grow with our growing population, although the natural capacity to supply these demands was surpassed several centuries ago, when our global population exceeded the sustainable limit for an optimal development of human life in harmony with nature. Since then, our natural resources have been depleted to a level that no longer sustains the once great diversity of floral and faunal life on earth and also threatens the existence of numerous other life forms, including the very planet we live on (see ‹Stirbt unser blauer Planet?› by Heinz Haber).
Unending economic growth is not a law of nature but rather a man-made principle rooted in the desire to accumulate wealth and power. This unnatural principle has led our economy into a state of stagnation, in which 20 percent of the global population now owns 86 percent of humanity’s wealth. Such a system naturally defies the laws of logic and is destined to fail, because the profits produced, which are the fruits of the working population, are largely restricted to a privileged minority. Consequently, only the very wealthy are growing wealthier, while nearly half of our global family is sinking into poverty and subjugation. These conditions, by the way, provide an excellent breeding ground for tyrants and dictators.
Work, on the other hand, is a necessary component of human progress and is the root of health and pros-perity. Without it, no life form and no social or economic system can sustain itself for long. That’s why it’s important in this era of great social change to re-examine the meaning of work in our society. Work is a natural right and duty of every human being, through which the individual applies his acquired knowledge and skills to fulfill important functions in society. In so doing, the individual not only promotes his own development and well-being but also contributes to the progress and well-being of society.