To have a job or not should be a real choice

Spain, with a youth unemployment of 40 percent, knows how badly our definition of a useful economic activity can go wrong. The term 'lost generation' is being used. These young people will be more than lost. They will be bitter and violent. The breakdown in law and order in Mexico due to too many of its youth facing a life of poverty is there for all to see.

But the message from Mexico we are not reading. We prefer to fear that illiterate and dirt-poor men living 10,000 kilometers away in Afghanistan will somehow strike at our way of life - when the ticking bomb we are sitting on looks like it can only get bigger. In the days of tribal life, there was a place for everybody by the campfire. Now in our high-tech world, there must be a place for everybody at the table - or there will be no table.

Socialism which funds leisure at a level such that one has a genuine choice of having a full-time job, a part-time job, or no job at all, is the only salvation as I see it. Socialism which has people working because they like to work and not because they wish to amass wealth, is the only salvation as I see it. Absurd? How could any theory be absurd when no government has a clue as to how to prevent its youth unemployment from growing?

Naturally, there will be no reform - no rewiring of the man-in-the-street's brain. We will keep complaining and blaming as the ground steadily slides away under our feet.