I oppose fundamentally dystopian stuff like artificial scarcity. Completely made up stuff like intellectual property doesn't belong in the 21st century. However, the same logic cannot be applied to the physical world where everything is finite and therefore truly scarce. That will continue to be true until someone invents Star Trek replicators.
The real economy is function of ecosystem, raw materials, energy availability, and collective intelligence.
That's the economy we live in.
But the economy we're told we live in is a fiction designed exclusively for the perpetual growth of hierarchy and privilege.
I don't think anyone knows what would be possible in a reality-based economy.
But it's hard to belive that much broader access to health and education, better social protections, tamed monopolies, plural distributed media, and support for original invention and research, would be less stable and successful than the suicidally short-sighted manic depressive business cycles we have now.
Still, the concept of an economy is not made up at all. Economies arise naturally wherever there is scarcity and people gotta figure out who gets the limited amount of resources available. Some metric is going to be used to decide that.
Do they actually need that? They don't… most are empty and unused.
So you can oppose all you want, doesn't make it any less true.
This stuff isn't based on "need". That's a socialist idea. Do I need to explain the consequences of socialist nonsense?
"rob", lol :D
> Why stop at you?
I do think that ownership taxes should go up exponentially… so almost nothing for your home, but if you have 6-5 it should be considerable. The church doesn't even pay any ownership taxes, so in fact it is them who are robbing me.
> Do I need to explain the consequences of socialist nonsense?
Right to education? Right to healthcare? Right to have a home? Which of these is exactly making you so angry?
In this context "scarcity" does not mean "There is not enough stuff", though that can be implied. It means there is a fundamentally limited amount of stuff and the aggregate demand is greater than the aggregate supply.
Given that the demand for resources is functionally infinite, I think this is basically accurate. Your objection to the existence of rich people is an objection to part of the aggregate demand, rather than to the description of resources as scarce.
I don't know if I agree that post-scarcity cannot exist. I know that imagining a way to get there is very challenging. Knowing that scarcity is real certainly informs my politics, though.
On the other hand, we can try to move it around some, so that the poor have access to somewhat more of the stuff, even if that means that the well-off have less. But the well-off have to have less for this to work - "we'll help the poor, but it won't cost you" is a lie.
On the other other hand... just giving them stuff isn't likely to change things for many poor people in the way that they really need things to change. (Which is back to the point of the article.)
Nope. What good is money if everyone has it? If you give everyone one million dollars, all you've done is turn one million dollars into the new one dollar bill. And that's being generous, it will probably be worth even less.
I have no idea why people think the government is some evil entity which refuses to give money to the poor out of spite. That's not how an economy works. Even worse is the fact people who believe this get to vote into power politicians who put it into practice. It's literally happening in my country right now and the economic distortions are already observable. It can only be sustained if you subtract money from others via taxes. That money's gonna run out eventually because why be productive when you can apply for government benefits? There are little cities in my country where almost everyone is sustained by this.