Re:E Pur Si Muove
by youdontknowtho on Monday December 18, 2017 @12:59PM
(#15953648)
I'm not, and I don't think most other people are, advocating for total equality. There has to be democratic push-back against the drive towards massive accumulation in capitalism or you don't get to have functional capitalism. It's a catch 22. Without some non-capitalist institution with a lever of power to redistribute, capitalism has a built in tendency towards self-destruction.
Workers can't afford to buy the products and businesses lose demand in a downward spiral.
That's what worked about the New Deal. If capitalist's want to continue getting to be capitalists, they have to sacrifice large amounts of profit to the common good. They still get to be wealthier than every one else, just by a smaller amount.
I really just consider life extension a wealthy vanity project. All of them contribute some money to defeating death, just in case...It really makes you think you should be in the business of promising immortality to wealthy people.
I disagree as to inequality. You just can't get equality; get over it. But life extension can still be problematic. E.g., life extension w/o extension of working years is a tremendous burden on everyone else, especially if such life extension is/becomes low-cost, and the only way out is to automate more and more so that we might provide for enormous elderly populations. On the other hand, we'll end up automating as much as possible, so it may be that this is a non-issue. Life extension w/ extension of working years would certainly be better. Another issue is whether we can correspondingly extend fertility years, otherwise we might risk negative population growth (which might or might not be a good thing anyways).