A Tale of Two Incomes

One of my favourite rants is about working women, not from a "Hah - Women..? Work..? Ridiculous !!!" Bullshit POV, but from an economic one. It doesn't matter which sex worked directly for money first, and which second, because it wouldn't ever have mattered anyway, the result is always the same: everyone gets fucked over.


Let me 'splain. Very simply, beacause I only do simple:

Let's say there is a society of psychotics. They get paid in happy pills. Each psychotic needs a minimum dose of ten pills a month in order to stay calm, and not go on a rampage of machine breaking, boss beating and general assorted mayhem. They are employed by people who give them benzodiazepines in return for work. Happy pills are expensive however, so they really want to pay the psychotics the minimum possible.


However, the psychotics usually live in clusters averaging three members. The tradition of this particular society is that only one psychotic in any particular cluster works for happy pills. Therefore the minimum monthly dosage doled out by the employers to any particular worker-psycho is necessarily not less than 30 pills.


However, over in another valley, each cluster, still averaging three members, is accustomed to having two worker-psychos out earning pills. Everything else is the same, each Psychotic still needs a minimum 10 pills a month to keep them on an even and productive keel.


Initially, when the first two income clusters appeared, they were better off, - earning twice the basic wage, 60 a month - happy as Larry with a few extra pills stuffed under the futon for a rainy day. Then the employers twigged they were paying too much, that the psychotics could put up with less income per capita, and still not go on the rampage, at least not en-masse. So the wages of a single psycho-worker gradually, over a period of years, fell, until it approached roughly 15 pills, totalling 30 per two-income cluster per month, just enough to keep them all sane.


One day, a psychotic from the one-income valley crossed the ridge and strolled through the two-income valley. When they got to talking shop with some of the people there, the one-incomer laughed. When the indignant indigenous psychotics asked why, the stranger said "One of you is working for nothing."


Then of course they killed him and ate his liver.

I don't care who the first income earner, or the second income earner, actually is, genitalia-wise, but I am really pissed off about the 'working for nothing' bit.

And although yes, it is a good thing that more potential earners can now pursue their particular dreams, and true that they can sometimes become doctors and professors and rocket scientists, and be happy and fulfilled (and not to mention rich) in those positions - moreso than they would perhaps have been should conditions have been different - it is also true that the greater majority fail in those dreams and aspirations, and find themselves paying heavily for the opportunities that, with hindsight, most of them were never destined to realise anyway.

This has been an exercise in restricted personal pronoun usage.