For quite a long time now, the technical means have existed to provide the basics of life to every human being on the planet at a modest cost. And yet we don't – instead the vast majority of us continue to work hard to provide that global elite their "due".
Institutionalized theft? How about economic and social justice?
The tiny global elite you impugne does not hoard anything relevant. They are just a hose thru which a lot of high velocity money flows, most of their income flowing right back out to others. Without them, the structure for working for that $12,000 average income would collapse and you'd be working a lot harder for a lot less net return.
Take that high density money away from that elite, and you'll discover two things happen. One, you'll be out of a job and relegated to living exactly as a large percentage of world population does: eking out a meager existence from the land to paltry returns; that elite holds the high-wage system together because they profit from it, and without those returns there is little incentive to make such systems work. Two, averaging out all income & wealth so everyone has the same would soon coalesce back into the distribution we have now: those expecting a no-effort living wage produce nothing and get nothing for it, while those enticed by work*risk=profit will find a way and earn that which the others will give to survive.
Yes, institutionalized theft: those who work and take risks having their earnings taken by threat of force by those having no moral & economic interest therein or beyond what was contracted for in a competitive market. Go live off the land for a year, excluding any connection to "the elite", and then tell me about the justice of someone taking the fruits of your labors from you simply because they exist (choosing not to produce).
With less than 5% people employed in agriculture [1], it must be possible to allocate resources in a way that does not require most people to waste their lives in jobs. The universal basic income, for instance, would achieve that without abolishing capitalism.
The only problem are people who glorify employment.
[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?order=wba... (I speak of developed countries only)
Glorify employment? The socioeconomic world is as good as it is because most people are employed, doing something which contributes to maintenance and advancement of society & technology. By glorifying unemployment, you're proposing removing the efforts which maintain our socioeconomic position & direction, soon leaving us with insufficient effort to even maintain a status quo.
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" - Alice In Wonderland
The resources of which you speak are, on the whole, perishable consumables. Remember: any society is 3 food-sparse days from violent breakdown. We have to work hard to keep things as they are, and twice as hard to get to where we want to go. Cutting workforce in half means the remaining workers must work twice as hard just to keep everyone as they are, and four times harder if any real progress is desired. Universal basic income means those not earning it are supported by those who do - reducing the incentive to work at all. You say "*it must be possible to allocate resources..." - it isn't, short of incentivising tremendous work times high risk with expectations of huge payoff.
Can you justify this? If we use the US as an example and look at the most common jobs, we find that over 4 million people are employed as salespersons, another 3 million as cashiers, followed by 3 million people employed serving food (including fast food), etc. [1]
As the population has been moved away from agriculture, and recently manufacturing, they have become increasingly employed in the service sector. These people are not creating and advancing the technology of tomorrow, they are preforming basic tasks that could easily be done by the customers themselves (eg. automated checkouts).
What's more, there is now millions of people employed in areas such as advertising and sales, where people are essentially tasked with manufacturing wants and increasing the amount of money people spend, which not only defeats the entire basis of a functioning economic system (rational consumers making rational choices), but ensures that additional numbers of people are employed in the manufacture of superfluous goods that people are deceived into buying.
Is there any indication that if we seriously consider what is and isn't necessary in our society, the working population couldn't easily be cut by half without any kind of imminent collapse?
1. http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/Screen%...
edit: spelling
I dislike human-clerk checkouts at stores. Nothing against people per se, but as a high-tech introvert I'd rather do it myself - exactly as you suggest. Sure, the technology is there; heck, Walmart even has a phone-based self-scanner so you can do 95% of checkout before you even get to the self-serve register for final payment. The technology sounds great on paper and in rhetoric, but in reality it sucks (despite my valiant concerted efforts to be a automation-supporting customer). Standard self-checkout chokes on the bottle of wine ("Human clerk, is customer over 21?" Uh, yeah, I'm greying with two kids in tow, of course I'm of age). Phone-based on-the-go checkout is time consuming (stop, turn on phone (again), tap Scan, point camera, wait for slow auto-focus, wait for crappy in-store wireless connection to function, get to payment station, get selected for another 15-minute "you've been selected for a compliance check" which confuses human staff every time). Never mind shoplifting, mis-scans, and a host of other problems. Those ten million "technology replaceable staff" are still employed because they're better at the work than technology, and relieving them of their duties does NOT make their freed-up wages available for confiscation & redistribution as "living wages" to the now-unemployed former workers (it's going to technology costs and high-tech maintenance staff). That's 10M people "contributing to maintenance of society".
As for manufacturing wants and increasing money spent vs. consumers making rational choices? I'm watching a startup put serious money into marketing staff; the product is [r]evolutionary and WILL "advance society & technology", but isn't going anywhere without convincing a lot of people to buy it, and the staff IS earning their significant wages by doing so. Oh sure, there's a lot of sales of superfluous goods out there, but even that helps fill out & support an infrastructure which gets vital goods to a broad clientele: Walmart isn't going to get five pounds of bread flour on a shelf for $1.89 without the delivery system greased with the profits from the "cheap crap" they're famous for; in comparison, that same sack of flour would cost about $5 at everything-is-perfect Whole Foods.
Indication that considering what is and isn't necessary in society could "liberate" half the population? Yeah: every society that tried it, like the Soviet Union (hint: they'd kill people for trying to leave).
So yes, these people are "contributing to the maintenance of society", but there are conceivable alternatives that would give these individuals (and society as a whole) more liberty, and would only require some small inconveniences.
The anecdote you give of your startup which needs advertising to get off the ground is beside the point. Perhaps your startup is revolutionary, and perhaps it needs some advertising to get off the ground, but this doesn't change the fact that most advertising is simply misinformation. Television commercials which make use of lush landscapes and half-naked women to sell cars don't create rational consumers, and without rational consumers you cannot have a functioning market. If advertising was simply a way in which companies communicated well-reasoned facts about products, and came with a balanced analysis of a product and its competitors, then we could argue that advertising was working towards creating a functioning market system. Until then, advertising will simply favour those with the largest advertising budgets and those who are best at disinformation, and so it's difficult to argue it is contributing to society.
> Indication that considering what is and isn't necessary in society could "liberate" half the population? Yeah: every society that tried it, like the Soviet Union (hint: they'd kill people for trying to leave).
This is really cheap rhetoric -- and not even accurate. If I'm arguing for a society where people are liberated from work, why are you using the Soviet Union, a dictatorship where everyone worked all the time, as some kind of counterpoint? Not everything that contradicts the status-quo is totalitarian communism, you know.
Besides, the points I'm trying to make aren't even original. There are serious proposals that have been made for why society should move to a 20-hour work week to address things ranging from rising levels of depression to climate change. [1]
You can live on a very very small income right now. I figure an intelligent frugal life can suffice at $10/day. But you don't, because you won't give up what you don't need.
Explain how this works logically. Do you honestly believe that if you simply took most of the money from rich people, that you would be able to sustainably feed everyone else? Have you considered all, if any, of the potential consequences of this action?
> For quite a long time now, the technical means have existed to provide the basics of life to every human being on the planet at a modest cost.
Again, explain how this works. A major issue with food, for example, is not one of production but instead transportation and distribution. How would making the rich poorer solve this problem?
> Institutionalized theft? How about economic and social justice?
Define justice.
And who on Earth do you trust to take and do well with all of the money taken from rich people?
At least a setup where right to live is actual right to live and does not degrade to right to not get killed.
Does that mean that you also don't support kicking renters to the curb during winter months if they don't pay?
Charity has its place, I advocate and facilitate it, and am not under any delusion that it comes from compelling others to contribute.
There are a lot of people such as you that think that right to own things and do whatever you like with the things you own trumps pretty much every other right. Including the right not to get killed of the people who'd try to steal your stuff. Fortunately lawmakers in lots of first world countries got passed that barbaric notion. In my country for example you can't hurt the thief. You can try to hold him until the police comes, but if you beat the shit out of him or set a booby trap to harm him you will be prosecuted because you endangered his life and health, a value more important than your petty stuff. Same way you can smash the window of a car parked in the sun on a hot day if you see dog left inside. You are violating less important right to protect higher value.
But because they have so much money they can hoard resources. And they do to earn more like so: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/goldman-sachss-alu... They also hoard food: http://www.dw.de/germanys-dz-bank-ends-food-speculation-trad... They also can hoard companies. Buy them and harm them. This happens to most acquired startups.
The problem is not that they have a lot of money. The problem is what they do with the money. Of course it's not all bad. There are things that rich people made that benefited everybody, but I'm guessing most such things were created on the way to getting rich.
The problem is just that people want to live in the cities, and there just isn't a lot of space in the cities.
If you spread population of the world to occupy all the land evenly it would be only 300 feet from each person to its closes neighbors. So it's not that much free space.
> The problem is just that people want to live in the cities, and there just isn't a lot of space in the cities.
And this makes the problem of price elevation from hoarding real estate even more pronounced.
People will live where they can find jobs, and the very concentration of people brings in even more jobs to cities. As much as some cite the amenities of large cities to stay, a very large portion of the retiring population move away as soon as they don't need to work anymore.
And that reduced demand doesn't come from people needing less real estate to live. Just from the fact that real estate reached prices that most people can't afford even if they pay with slaving their whole life for mortgage.
Reasonable price for apartment would be what most people could save up during the time they still live with their parents. But since real estate backed credit is legal that's not gonna happen. Such credit allows people to sell their future work in a manner almost perfectly safe for the bank. Thanks to this since you need place to live to have a life it can cost huge part of what you earn in life.
> For quite a long time now, the technical means have existed to provide the basics of life to every human being on the planet at a modest cost.
Are you sure we have all the fuel and land to feed, house and clothe everyone? And if so, who's going to work for that? If everyone gets food and shelter for free, I'm not working to provide that.
The reality is, food needs to be grown, clothes made and houses built. Some people need to work for that. In exchange for that work, they ask some sort of compensation from others, in the form of other services or goods. This has nothing to do with the "global elite", this is just the nature of trade. I think giving someone stuff for free without getting anything in return is a greater injustice than this "instutionalized theft" you speak of.
That's not life. It's just a rule that comes out of the fact that people won't care about you if you give them no benefit. It's only natural but is it right or humane?
You won't have life if you don't work - or coerce it from others.
World average income equals the USA poverty line. That doesn't give much room for the productive to support the unproductive. Charity, yes indeed, but there's an unsupportably growing number who are quite capable of supporting themselves but demand others do instead.
The "right and humane" step is choosing to give to others freely, not to put a gun to someone's head and demand what's not yours.
There are some exceptions. You don't have to work a single day in your life if:
- you inherited wealth.
- you are homeless and sustain yourself with whatever you can get without paying.
- you commit crimes and are put in prison.
- you are a woman and merry well.
- you build something as a hobby and it makes big.
> That doesn't give much room for the productive to support the unproductive.
That would be true if people were source of wealth. But source of wealth for many years now are the machines, and this wealth increased disproportionately to increase in population. If on average we are coming out of poverty at slower rate than the growth of wealth our machines produce then something is wrong.
> The "right and humane" step is choosing to give to others freely
Almost no one gives anybody anything freely. Do you think your employer would give you anything for your work if he didn't have to?
The ones that have more have it often because they exchanged something worth less for something worth more. The ones that have less have it often because they exchange something worth more for something worth less.
Why they do it? Because exchange often is not free. Lot's of people have no choice but to exchange good that is very valuable for them and irreplaceable (such as hours of their life) for something as plain, abundant and worthless in our modern world as food.
Excuse me, but you're an idiot. (Unless your whole comment is meant as a joke.)
People exchange things that are worth less for things that are worth more. In such an exchange, both parties profit, always. In the case above, you exchange hours of your life for food so that you can live another day.
Also, people are the only source of wealth. Right now, machines are not capable of producing anything on their own, that is why there are no completely automatic factories and nothing gets created without human help, design or at least supervision. Once we create such a world, great! But capitalism dictates that once this happens, the price of goods will drop tremendously. The fact that this has not yet happened tells you that this spot has not yet been reached.
There are some goods that have so high a value it will be worth trading almost anything for it. Eating is one, medical care is another. This fact is routinely exploited so that those not in danger of losing those highly valuable things get more out of an exchange. The execs that run McDonald's don't have to worry about acquiring food or health care, they have the class advantage to securely have those things. And yet this same company puts out a spending guide to the workers that get low wages suggesting they have 2 jobs and that they put no money towards health care or heating their apt/homes. Those low wage workers can't simply stop working there, their ability to live and eat is in direct danger from losing that work. Is that a fair exchange?
> Also, people are the only source of wealth. Right now, machines are not capable of producing anything on their own, that is why there are no completely automatic factories and nothing gets created without human help, design or at least supervision.
It doesn't matter if machines are 100% automated and don't require humans. What matters it that as machine automation gets more efficient and requires less humans to operate, the more previously employed human workers lose their ability to work and therefore their ability to eat and have shelter. And yet the ownership classes don't suffer from this advancement, they still continue to consume and funnel money and resources into themselves. Is that a fair exchange?
2) However, the question whether this is socially or even globally fair is not a question of capitalism, but of politics/government. If things continue this way, sooner or later there will be too many unemployed people and there will be a revolt/class revolution. I believe the elite will work hard to prevent it, by introducing some kind of wealth/capital tax that will redistribute wealth to the not-haves.
You are an optimist then. I think more popular sentiment seem to be rather that elite will use its advantage to develop surveillance, law and prison system to detain whoever opposes them. After all they had one communist revolution to learn such things have to be actively mitigated.
You might argue that keeping poor in prison is a way of providing for them. And since less and less criminal people will go there it might some day become some sort support center for homeless/jobless.
Someone puts gun to your head and tells you to cut off your left hand in exchange for him not pulling the trigger. Both parties benefit from such exchange. You get the rest of your life, and he gets his amusement. Wouldn't you agree that such exchange wouldn't be exactly just and free?
Let's assume that this trade is unfair even though you might see it as benefiting both parties in some way so unfair trades exist. One might say that it would be illegal and all legal trades are free. But if law can so perfectly tell fair trade from unfair trade then why the law changes over time? And how do we know that now the law is perfect, not like it was 100 years ago or like it will be 100 years in the future?
My comments were serious, so I guess I'm idiot, at least from your point of view.
Also, you are imprecise to say that "people" are the source of wealth. If we go with your claim, labor is the source of wealth, in which case capitalism is indeed systematized exploitation and theft from the true source of all wealth: workers.
i dont believe this to be true (tho i'd like to see any reliable sources).
I find it more likely that a small number of people control so much "productivity" that the majority must either be "coerced" into cooperating in order to get some of the crumbs, or that they lack the basic resources to dig themselves out of the poverty hole. Its true that they aren't productive enough to support themselves, but i would imagine they would if they had the chance.
Yes, Bulkowski observed that most people are in unfulfilling jobs, and he was happy to escape that life to pursue what pleased him. He failed to note that to leave those jobs would be a terminal move because they had nothing they found fulfilling which would at the same time create livable productivity. He was lucky enough to have notable talent in doing something fulfilling to the point that someone else was willing to exchange a "living wage" for it, and he was happy as a result. I'm happy too, having found my equivalent combination of joyful productivity coupled with a satisfying fair wage for writing (iOS code instead of English prose).
Yes, we lament those who toil to unsatisfying ends. So ask each and every one of them: what do you want to do? Most answers you receive, alas, would be either "I don't know" or something not rising to the exchangeable equivalent of sustenance farming. Natural reality being that you do not get fed & clothed just for mere existence, all have a natural obligation to produce enough for themselves & dependents to survive on, and if they can't find a pleasant way to do it then they must find an unpleasant way as charity (while morally obligatory) can only go so far.