I said: > > What I don't understand is
> > why some of you think it is wrong for the rich to exploit the workers
>but OK
> > for the merely lazy and idle to do the same. Tell me, you don't really
>
> > resent it when others do not do their share? It's just fine by you to
> > support me while I play video games? As Jordan sid, while you are up,
>bring
> > me a pizza.
>
>Jeez Justin, relax!
>Its almost like your haunted by paranoid right-wing fantasies about
>armies of welfare moms and pothead slackers doing nothing come the
>revolution but sitting around making babies and cruising for porn on the
>internet all day while you're stuck toiling in a bauxite mine.
>Lighten up man.
>
>-pradeep
>
So, Pradeep, what's your solution to the free rider problem? Note that you do not need to assume that people would rather do nothing and have infinite desires to get this offthe ground. All you need is to assume that they would rather do less rather than more of relatively unpleasant but necessary work. I myself would rather tour European museums and hang out in cafes listening to jazz than even doing relatively pleasant work like writing legal briefs. Of course in the ideal communist world there would be now laws and no lawyers, so you can imagine my analytical skills being in demand for something ideal communists would like, whatever that might be. But the fact of the matter is that if any signifigant percentage of the populaution is like me,a nd I think, as a matter of fact thata lmost everyone is, but suppose it is only one third, then there will be a really significant free rider problem.
By the way. I am really frustrated with those people on the list who persist in misreading my remarks on the necessity for a work requirement to mean that I don't count traditional women's work as working, or that I see the work requirement as a requirement to do wage labor. Last point first: I would abolish wage labor. I want to see workers worka s cooperators who share ownership and, in the private sector, take profit shares, not wages. Outside the government sector, I would prohibit hiring workers for wages.
Now the first point: I expressly stated that we need to expand our definition of socially useful work to include what has been tarditionally unpaid women's work. I don't know how much clearer I could have been. But since much such work is fairly unpleasant, it wil face the same problem as any sort of unpleasant work, namely the free rider problem. My examples of idle drones were people like me who'd rather be boulevardiers, Malibu surfers and the like.
To those who say we'd do little harm, I say that we'd be parasites, and a society of parasites is unlike to survive. I preduct that the anarchist coercion free utopia would survive about six months before the people who did care about working organized a police force and swept us goof-offs out of the museums and off the beaches into the factories under the slogam heading this thread.
jks
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