>Obviously it wouldn't pose any technical problem to put Doug on a
>publicly financed salary. But how would you decide whom to put on
>the salary and whom to reject? Resources are finite, demand
>infinite. That is a technical question.
Well, as to resources being finite, in some cases that is itself manufactured. We can easily see that there could be infinite copies of many intellectual products copied, using modern technology. But the economic system cannot cope with such a thing, so artificial scarcity must be created, by patents and copyright etc. This is a systematic requirement.
It isn't hard to find examples of artificial scarcity being systematically maintained in many spheres of society, in order to prop up the economic system.
This should come as no surprise, it is obvious that the market system cannot operate efficiently, or indeed at all for very long, in an environment where the means of life are in surplus. Wherever abundance threatens, it must be artificially eliminated.
>I'm not saying there's no technical solution. Only that, if there is
>one, it's not so obvious. It's not solely a political problem.
The technical problem is not scarcity, but potentially, catastrophically destructive, abundance. Creating artificial scarcity is not, as should be obvious, a solution to the problem of scarcity, but a solution to the technical problem (for the capitalist system) of a lack of scarcity.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas