This is a letter regarding the series of articles on Owen Sound Hub called "Living on Minimum Wage"
The sad truth is that many people are living on minimum wage; many in our local municipalities are below the poverty line. The government is dealing with the situation by trying to react to problems by inventing social support programs instead of getting rid of the cause of the problems. Let's try to find the cause.
In the XXI century with the science and technology advancements and in one of a few richest countries this looks suspicious. Let's take a look at the reasons for having to survive:
1. People have no support from their extended family. Nowadays we have to pay for babysitters, for one or another form of prepared food, for taxis, and on and on. That has become the norm.
2. Low access to education and difficulty finding a sufficient source of income.
3. Typically a young family has no food source and no home of their own (a roof over one's head and a garden is a very cheap and easy price for a government to pay considering the problems it solves).
Now why there is no support from the extended family?
1. We have very low skill of living together and no skill of agreements (we don't know how).
2. We are spread far apart (living space design problem - we just physically can't do that).
3. We actually have a goal to survive on our own - or individualistic worldview (we don't want to).
Why do we have low access to education and difficulty finding a source of income?
1. There is no goal to get a good education: it is either too hard (that means poor quality of the basic education), too far, or too expensive. There is no goal to provide a good education from the government either.
2. The local businesses had been killed, so the money flow away from the locals to corporations often based outside the country. Try finding local food in a grocery store, or anything made in Canada in Canadian Tire for example. So it is now that hard to build a small family local business.
To summarize the reasons: the towns and our worldview both are designed in such a way as to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Who did it? The answer should be obvious - the rich! But of course that's not true. The amount of money has nothing to do with it. The designer of this is he who benefits from this situation the most. Individualistic worldview, the hunt for The American Dream, the view that goal is more important than means have all become the norm. And they all take us further away from community to individuals. Why? Separate individuals are weaker and easier to control.
This exact worldview also belongs to most corporations. If a corporation were a human being, that's what it would wish for: profit by any means possible. And that is why the mass media (that of course belongs to corporatocracy) and educational institutions work to establish that same individualistic worldview. Read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" to learn more on corporotocracy. To sum up: one single corporation owns all other corporations, banks, schools, institutes, hospitals, media companies, technological companies, etc. For instance, look up Apple, Microsoft, Google, Intel, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - you get the idea - they are all owned directly or through other investment groups by Vangard.
So what do we do now? Let's get back to the reasons and the reasons of these reasons.
1. Change your own worldview. Start from your own family - build a support team from your uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins and second cousins, and grandparents. Learn to argue peacfully and productively, strike agreements and say openly what you want and expect, ask them the same.
2. Support local businesses. Bad business is the one that has profit as the only goal. Good business is the one that has a goal... By the way what is a goal of a good business?
Leonid Belov