Public opinion follows policy... "ruling class strategies." Manufactured consent could become manufactured understanding if the left could rise to the occasion. Smart people can still be, as Carlin said, full of shit and fuckin nuts. However hard it may be for them to "get it," they might be open to persuasion and new insights. What else offers any hope? It's not so hard as it is scary and beyond the pale.
Dear Denizens,
I wish someone would write more about how a robot economy would have no wages and if a few people owned everything their tax rate would have to be 99%+. (see Vonnigut's Player Piano.) The entitlement of welfare would have to provide most income.
Entitlement might be seen in all ownership. Holding a title to assets that yield an unearned income stream is hardly different than getting welfare. Entitlements are not bad except when most people are entitled to nothing more that being wage slaves in a world that doesn't need them, having an equal opportunity to suffer, and the freedom to sleep under the bright night sky.
An employer of last resort policy implies if you don't work you don't eat (unless you are rich). It aims to preserve wage dependence, just at the time that we need to end wage dependence. Should the extra labor force have to do fake jobs? How much wasted consumption would be involved in running around to do last-resort busy-work... better to stay home and do the the much more important unpaid work for your family and community.
Unearned income it the key to making an automated economy sustainable, because most human labor would be redundant. Getting wages for work should never end one's right to a basic unearned income... why demotivate work by cutting the unearned income of those who work?
Since nature is a gift, capitalism has unearned income, and we have a labor surplus, why must we obsess over income for work being the only respectable way of life? People will just not let go of their assumptions, however crazy they may be. The last resort in economic imagination is unearned income, except for those who would imagine anything to keep it all for themselves.
Could we assume that whether one commutes to work or not eating will still happen? There must be some base level of consumption that everyone wants. If one goes to work there must be additional consumption involved with that work, which is only acceptable if the work is really needed to provide our wants.
If we don't need full employment and we "create" full employment then we have created additional unnecessary consumption.
With the elimination of a job the multiplier effect becomes a divider, and all the support for the unnecessary work would also become unnecessary... imagine real conservation.
With our help robots can produce much more that we need. The limitations on production are due to political/finance problems and the finite available resource inputs available at any moment. Labor is no longer the main limiting factor on production. As labor becomes surplus and resources become scarce the work-ethic must become the conservation-ethic if we want to maximize our wealth and economic security. Like human labor, all robot labor involves some consumption, and it should not be used to make or do stuff we don't need.
It's true that we have vast human labor capacity that could be used without consuming significant additional resources above basic needs, and we should understand that we can "afford" to provide abundant labor-intensive services, like education or health care. However, even work that is not resource-intensive still requires some resource consumption, and using that kind of work to keep "workers" busy (wage-dependent slaves) would be a waste of their time and whatever other resources were involved. Anyway, services can be automated too.
Isn't there something very wrong (lost perspective) about replacing the proper economic goal of providing goods and services with the foolish goal of providing jobs. Jobs are just a means to the end of providing goods and services. Why must an economy that already has unearned income still cling to wage-dependence?
Use of durability to conserve, along with population stability would allow vast wealth to be inherited with very little production, consumption, or work. How can one deny that that is a good idea? Folly marches on, blind to the road not taken. Getting to the root of problems is the meaning of radical, and being radical requires an end to our proud pretense that we are creative producers and an acceptance of the plain fact that we are parasites on the planet.
We move stuff around and build things with what we have been given, or what we just take. The idea that we create wealth is not new or radical. It is the root of our problems. It is the opposite of radical to see wealth as something we create, instead radical would be seeing wealth as something we have been given, taken, or inherited.
OK, I have overstated my point. "Given" may not be the whole truth, but it is the part of the truth that we are blind to, and the part we need to accept before we will have a clue about how to dodge overshooting the planet's capacity for giving a free-ride to its human parasites.
So, feeling insecure about taking the game from the forest, we might try to placate a few of the gods by offering a bit of what we have taken back to them. It seems that our distant ancestors we not so full of shit as we are. All we have is Thanksgiving, which has failed to make us thankful or stopped us from pretending that we earn our livings.
Whatever is the essence of human beings is, it is hard to pin down. We are not just anything. We are not properly thought of as workers, consumers, creators, or even just parasites, but we have so overworked the first three that it is time to embrace number four.
We should forget defining over-consumption and just focus on not being wasteful. If we want to do more unpaid work unearned income would make that fit very well with an economy in which wages were only a supplement to a basic income.
Following any ism is folly, because the truth will not live in captivity.
Willie-nilly and unforeseen consequences have heavy hands for those who aren't in control and those who only see what's in front of them. What magic will transform local adaptations and personal struggles into long-term system-level planning? We have created a hyper-consuming overshooting monster of an economy. Was that conscious? If so, it is unforgivable.
It is almost taboo to talk about ending growth on most TV(>99.999% excluded). We need to point out that making jobs is the real reason we need growth. The excuse for so much we do that is wrong is that "it makes jobs." Without growth rising productivity would have made wage-dependence impossible long ago. Growth preserves both class greed and obsolete ethical prescriptions assuming a shortage of labor going back at least to the bible in Matthew 9:37.
Ending economic growth will require radical measures, the most important being an end to using wages as the main/wish-only way to distribute money to normal people. What else could end growth? We have already been forced into using hated transfer payments to prevent economic collapse.
Radical is not a goal; it is just a method, a method that would have us treat the causes instead of just the symptoms... like wage-dependence instead of un-employment.
Is conservation compatible with producing as much as possible? It is the opposite! Real conservation implies, and really amounts to, producing as little as possible.
Barry Brooks http://home.earthlink.net/~durable/