I invite you to consider, with me, a small, densely populated, yet highly prosperous nation I’ve named Angeln.
Angeln’s prosperity had initially been built up by it’s large, almost world dominating, ‘heavy’ industries – coal mining, steel making, shipbuilding, engineering.
Over the last few decades however, these wealth earners have faded in the face of overseas competition.
Mind over muscle
In their place has emerged a new range of industries – financial services to the world, computer design and manufacture etc. All requiring a highly skilled and highly motivated workforce that uses reasoning rather than muscle.
So successful has been this transition, that the majority of Angeln’s citizens now enjoy a standard of living most other countries can only dream of. And some – those engaged in the high-specialisation fields – number among their ranks an almost incredible number of multimillionaires.
Left out to dry
There is a problem however. Left high and dry by the collapse of the manufacturing that once cried out for their services, a large section of the population are now permanently unemployed.
And it is a section that has grown, generation on generation. So that Angeln now sports whole streets of families where neither grandfather, father nor son has ever worked or expects to work.
A strange new, topsy-turvy social arrangement in fact where the rich work long hours while the poor do nothing at all.
Dishing out the dole
It is a problem that was foreseen quite early on in the transition period however, and it was answered by gifting to the unemployed sufficient of a weekly wage to keep them free from destitution.
This arrangement has proved reasonably acceptable to the wealthy employed as the answer to a social problem that might otherwise prove troublesome.
But recently the nation’s prosperity has declined – just a little.
Enough to make the second and third holiday of the year, the decision to buy eldest son his own car now he’s a teenager, the need for yet another designer outfit, just a little more doubtful.
And as a consequence enough of a problem to make the wealthy employed to begin to get a little resentful over the ever-swelling ranks of unemployed.
He said, she said
“Why should we work twelve or fourteen hours a day, six days a week and more, and have the government hand large chunks of our earnings over to these layabouts?” they grumble.
To which the poor respond “hold on, we didn’t ask to be out of work, to live in shabby houses and watch our kids roam the streets in unruly gangs. We’d like holidays in Turkey, brand new cars every year and some spare cash in our pockets just like you lot.
“But you won’t allow that because you want to keep all the goodies for yourselves. You made us unemployable, not us. You made the bed we all have to lie on, not us. So leave us alone.”
The question for you, fellow blogger, is who is right?
