Sunday 5 April 2009

Green Socialist Thinking: As All-American As......

A poster called Sandwich Man on Econospeak reveals Benjamin Franklin to be an unexpected devotee of the green and simple life. Yeah, that Benjamin Franklin - him on the $100 dollar bill. Apparently, our Ben was no fan of the injunction to 'accumulate, accumulate':

"It has been computed by some political arithmetician, that, if every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful, that labour would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life: want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and pleasure.

What occasions then so much want and misery? It is the employment of men and women in works that produce neither the necessaries nor conveniences of life, who, with those who do nothing, consume necessaries raised by the laborious...

Look round the world, and see the millions employed in doing nothing, or in something that amounts to nothing, when the necessaries and conveniences of life are in question. What is the bulk of commerce, for which we fight and destroy each other but the toil of millions for superfluities, to the great hazard and loss of many lives by the constant dangers of the sea?...

A question may be asked; Could all these people now employed in raising, making, or carrying superfluities, be subsisted by raising necessaries? I think they might....

It is, however, some comfort to reflect that, upon the whole, the quantity of industry and prudence among mankind exceeds the quantity of idleness and folly....

One reflection more, and I will end this long rambling letter... Our eyes, though exceeding useful, ask, when reasonable, only the cheap assistance of spectacles, which could not much impair our finances. But the eyes of other people are the eyes that ruin us. If all but myself were blind, I should want neither fine clothes, fine houses, nor fine furniture.
"(letter to Benjamin Vaughn, dated July 1784)

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