The
modern 'working' family, whether one-income or two-income, is, by most
standards, a lousy business model, with poor, fragile margins and a
terrible (sometimes negative) 'return on investment'. If you presented
your household budget to an accountant without describing what it
represented, he/she would probably tell you it wasn't viable and to
close up shop. For the average Canadian family (multi-person) household
in 2003 per Stats Can, here's what the 'Income Statement' would look
like (for single-person households, these numbers would be modestly
lower):
| Work-
Related | Fixed | Total | Revenues:
Sales
Government Aid |
66,000
7,000 |
|
66,000
7,000 | | Total | 73,000 |
| 73,000 |
Cost of Sales:
Food
Shelter
Utilities, R&M
Furniture
Clothing
Transportation
Health Care
Personal Care
Recreation
Tobacco & Alcohol
Education
Games of Chance
Child Care etc.
Income Tax
Insurance, Interest
Gifts & Donations |
4,000
12,000
1,000
1,500
2,500
9,000
-
500
3,000
1,000
1,000
300
1,200
13,000
4,000
3,000 |
4,000
-
2,000
500
500
2,000
2,000
500
1,000
500
-
-
-
-
1,000
- |
8,000
12,000
3,000
2,000
3,000
11,000
2,000
1,000
4,000
1,500
1,000
300
1,200
13,000
5,000
3,000 | | Total | 57,000 | 14,000 | 71,000 | | Net Income | 16,000 | (10,800) | 2,000 |
I
have broken the expenses down into 'work-related' (extra costs you
incur because you are working) and 'fixed' (costs you would incur
whether you worked or not). Work-related food costs are the costs of
fast-food and other restaurant meals, and pre-packaged and prepared
foods. I have called all shelter costs 'work-related' because the
average family has $120,000 in equity, and if that were invested in an
all-season cottage far enough away from expensive cities, the rent and
mortgage costs would disappear. In addition, if you didn't work, you
could spend time making your own clothing and furniture, providing a
significant part of your own recreation, looking after your children's
education and care, and you would eliminate the cost of income taxes
and insurance.
What this table suggests is that the average
family has 1.7 people working (often fierce hours doing something they
hate) to bring in $73,000 per year of which $57,000 goes for expenses they wouldn't have if they weren't working.
Or, to put it another way, those 1.7 people work about 3,300 hours
between them for an after-tax, after-work-related-expense return of
$5.00 per hour. No wonder the average family spends more than they can
afford -- they figure they've earned it.
Yes, I know that
'average' numbers are nonsensical and that you could quibble with many
of these costs and allocations, and that the numbers outside Canada
will necessarily be quite different, but in general we
incur a great deal of extra expense just because we work, and even more
when both spouses work, to the point that the benefits of working so
hard, and even of working at all, become dubious, especially when you start to factor in non-financial considerations (like quality of life).
Now
ask yourself: How much would you have to do for your wage-slave
neighbours (making clothing or furniture for them, doing renovation
work, lawn maintenance, child care, driving them around in their car,
picking things up for them, educating their kids, running a
bed-and-breakfast for their visiting family and friends) to earn a
paltry $14,000 a year (or that plus your rent or mortgage interest if
you choose not to move to an inexpensive community)?
And suppose
instead of just moving out yourself, you got together with nine other
wage-slave families and pooled your resources and started an Intentional Community?
Now you've got $1.2 million to invest between you, which is plenty to
build an efficient and very comfortable place in the remote country to
accommodate 17 adults and 8 children. Now you get some economies
working for you: You can share vehicles, meal preparation, education
and other duties, and the space needed for these activities (which make
up much of the modern 'single-family' home, and which space is unused
most of the day). You can wi-fi the place for the whole group. You can
grow some of your own food and use solar and wind to take the place off
the grid. By doing these things you could probably halve the per-family
fixed cost in the table above to $7,000, and then create one or two
small enterprises to earn the $70,000 per year the whole community
needs to live on. Maybe work an hour a day, or one day a week each, for
outsiders, and the rest of your time would be your own, to spend with
those you love doing things you love doing.
And suppose your
Intentional Community provided useful services to other ICs in a
'network' that could give you things you can't provide well for
yourselves (food you can't grow, say, or health care, or recreation) in
return for you providing things that they don't know how to do (say,
carpentry, or sculpture, or technology education). It's not
inconceivable that after trading money for awhile and trying to track
who's done what for whom, you might decide the accounting is not worth
the bother, and just stop using money altogether.
So now instead of your day per week working for 'outsiders' you spend
that day helping those in your 'larger' community. Imagine living in a
society where the value of an hour of everybody's time is exactly the
same, and where a Gift Economy prevails because the old Market Economy is viewed as miserly, nitpicky and unnecessary!
Of course it's not that easy. My point is that it's possible.
And perhaps worth thinking about. So many of the things we aspire to do
in our lives remain undone because we think they are too risky, too
expensive, or impossible, when they are none of these things.
What
they do require is three qualities that our modern world seems to try
to crush in us as aggressively as it tries to break our individuality:
courage, self-confidence, and trust in each other. If we had these
things we could live without
money, and without wage slavery. Is it any wonder that the politicians,
big businesses, the elites of the rich and powerful, work so hard to
make us fearful, full of self-doubt, distrustful, and 'just like
everybody else'?
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
