Blog 46 Boxing Day

Blog 46  Boxing Day, 2016

Unless you happened to get a set of stuffed leather mitts for Christmas, "Boxing Day" must have another meaning. Well, Children, I can tell you. Boxing Day was the day after Christmas Day, when all the boxes the gifts came in were packed away for use another year. You might call it domestic recycling. That was Step One.

Then, your boxes stored, you took your Christmas money and went shopping.

When the owners of stores checked the figures at the end of a Boxing Day, they found they were onto a good thing, and extended their pre-Christmas Sale prices another day, and advertised their Boxing Day Sale! That was Step 2.

Lately, I notice, it has become "Boxing Week Sale!" And surely we can predict a universal Boxing Month Sale! Wow! Then, the Boxing Year Sale, December 26 to December 24!!

Certainly the corporate chain stores, whose employees have forgotten that Sunday used to be called "the day of rest", will rejoice at Boxing Year. The shareholders will demand it, ecstatically.

But what about the money - what the Cogs Blog is all about?
Where does the money come from for a year-long Boxing Day? I should expect to see department stores, as long as they exist at all, to be manned (or womanned) by robots. (Shapely female robots for the Men's Department, of course.) Some wage-savings there will go straight to the bottom line. And the corporate bosses who work seven days a week anyway, will convince the government that its job is to provide the customers with money to spend. Governments will do as they are told as always and, instead of taxing, will just send out a steady flow of GAI payments. 

GAI? It's an old idea: Guaranteed Annual Income - for all citizens. Maybe, Baby, its time has come at last!

And where will the governments' money come from? Won't that be inflationary? 

Oh, come on, now, get with it. Government money (the kind with the presidents' pictures on it) is rapidly disappearing. And banks don't print money. Banks create credit, which already covers almost all of our money needs. So governments can create credit, too. Indefinitely.

As for inflation, so what? Even if it happens, the law of money will still operate: money goes where money is. It will still accumulate at the top. The Forbes Five Hundred listing of the world's richest people will simply list more billionaires and fewer millionaires, then more trillionaires than billionaires. Quadrillionaires? Sure. We might want to shorten the names of our monetary units to "bills", "trills" and "quads". Everybody will soon forget the zeroes. This is no pipe dream. (Some old folks can remember when a loaf of bread cost 12 cents. Really.) Inflation is just something we do already. Only, with GAI, everybody gets what they want. The poor get three meals a day. The management classes get do their satisfying, creative work. The shareholders get their dividends, and the accumulation addicts, accumulate.

All that sounds like an almost boringly good alternative to the world's current situation..

Happy New Year!

             Your devoted blogger.