Who Does No Work, Shall Not Eat

Joe R. Golowka joeG at ieee.org
Sun Jan 20 13:14:22 PST 2002



> 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.

Like what? In Anarcho-Communism legal briefs would be more worthless then listening to Jazz.


> 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.

That misreading isn't surprising since you havn't explicity defined what you mean by work, so everyone uses their own definition. If I write a story for the fun of it, that's not usually considered work. But if I get paid to go to some building and write the same story, then that's work. Why should the later be considered more valuable then the former?


> 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.

So we'll all be capitalists? What are you going to do with people who don't want to live in your statist market socialist society?


> 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.

Well, since you obviously consider this immoral you wouldn't be terribly likely to do it in real life, would you? Especially if your friends get mad at you for being a parasite. And after a while you'd get bored and do something productive, though you probably wouldn't consider it work.


> 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.

Nah, at worst we'd just stop sharing our stuff with you.



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