Take, for example, public employees. It is said that the number of public employees increases at a fixed rate. Even that illustrious, tyrannical dictator Hitler met with defeat when, in an effort to streamline the government, he ran up against the firm resistance of the bureaucrats, so there is no reason to believe that today's pusillanimous cabinet members or boneheaded Government Reorganization Committee members would be able to change anything no matter how many handstands they perform.
The overpaid bureaucrats, in order to increase their staff and expand their territory, are continually planning new "services" and getting their politico friends to appropriate money for them. It is the citizens who have to put up with these nuisances. Fill out this form, cooperate in this survey — there is no end to their worthless, time-consuming services.
Private service enterprises are no different in that they hard-sell services. These days we see the emergence of strange, previously unheard-of services, and there are numerous instances of their swindling the innocent public for all they can get.
There is no saying where all this will stop. According to 1982 employment survey results published by the Gifu Prefectural Statistics Section, a mere 0.9 percent of all youths 15 to 24 years of age are employed in primary industries (this figure has shown a steady yearly decline). This means that the other 99.1 percent are making a living in the spiffy secondary and tertiary industries. Let us take careful note of the fact that the present urbanizing social structure allows only 0.9 percent of the young to feed the other 99.1 percent prodigal sons.
8. The City as Warmonger
The eighth is that the city is a warmonger.
Both guns and ammunition are made by the city. And nuclear weapons go without saying.
Needless to say, those who directly manufacture and sell weapons for killing people are the merchants of death, but a careful look reveals that the cities are chock full of merchants of death. If I may be allowed an extreme statement, I would say that it is not an overstatement to say that those who engage in the secondary and tertiary industries are all merchants of death. For example, those who manufacture and sell such harmful things as food additives, agricultural chemicals, cigarettes, automobiles, and jet planes, and make money at it, are all merchants of death. But this hardly bears mentioning.
"But surely…not me!" However, even the sacred profession of teacher, those relieved because they believe they are innocent, are just as guilty as the merchants of death as long as they engage in any kind of education, for all education teaches "progress," "development," "improvement," and "prosperity," i.e., destruction and contamination.
And physicians, practitioners of the benevolent art of medicine, work in tandem with the drug companies, dribbling, injecting, inserting, and popping huge quantities of drugs into their patients, bringing about iatrogenic diseases; they are but epigones of the merchants of death.