Letter to the Editor: A glaring contradiction

DEAR News Of The Area,

IN the years since the Global Financial Crisis, one contradiction has quietly persisted at the heart of modern economic culture – a contradiction so glaring that it should unsettle anyone who still believes our systems reward contribution and punish harm.

We shame the unemployed.

We mock them, dismiss them, and treat them as though they are the dead weight of society. And yet, in the same breath, we raise interest rates because “too many people are working.”

We are told inflation is rising because the labour market is “too hot”, because wages are “too strong”, because ordinary people have “too much spending power”.

In other words: the system requires some people to be jobless – and then blames them for it. This is not an ideological argument. It is a structural fact.

Central banks openly state that unemployment must rise to cool inflation.

Economists describe job losses as “necessary adjustments”.

Markets cheer when workers lose bargaining power.

But the individuals who bear the brunt of these “adjustments” are the very people society already looks down upon.

The irony is almost painful.

During the GFC, it wasn’t the homeless man under the bridge who collapsed the global economy.

He didn’t gamble with derivatives.

He didn’t inflate housing bubbles.

He didn’t siphon wealth upward or destabilize markets.

He simply existed – quietly, harmlessly, consuming almost nothing and harming no one.

If value were measured by harm avoided, he contributed more to the wellbeing of the planet than the executives whose decisions triggered a worldwide collapse.

Yet he is the one we shame.

We call him lazy. We call him a burden. We call him “unproductive”.

But when inflation rises, we suddenly discover that unemployment is not a moral failing – it is a policy tool.

A buffer. A pressure valve.

The unemployed person becomes the shock absorber for the entire economic system.

And still, we treat them as though they are the problem.

Perhaps it is time to rethink what we mean by “value”.

If a person harms no one, consumes little, and destabilises nothing, why are they treated as worthless?

If a person’s absence from the labour market helps cool inflation, why do we not acknowledge the role they play?

If the system depends on a certain number of people not getting jobs, why do we shame the very people who fill that role?

Maybe the truth is uncomfortable: our economic narratives are moral stories disguised as mathematics.

We reward those who cause the most visible activity, even when that activity is destructive.

We punish those who cause no harm, simply because they do not fit the mythology of productivity.

But the planet does not care about productivity. It cares about impact.

And sometimes the person doing “nothing” is doing far less damage than the person doing “everything”.

It might be time to stop shaming the unemployed – and start questioning the systems that require their suffering in the first place.

Regards,
Calvin BARTLETT,
Coffs Harbour.