Re:Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
by logfromblammo on Monday November 03, 2014 @01:26PM
(#8552478)
Using only the statistics skimmed from elsewhere in the thread, a 1% workforce participation rate feeds everyone in the US, and several other countries that import from the US. A 9% rate does that plus manufacturing all goods. I think it is not unreasonable to think that 10% of all people able to work might just do so because they want to do something meaningful with their lives.
If everyone takes the basic income, they will spend their 16 free hours a day doing things that they find value in, but not necessarily valuable enough to others to support their basic needs.
In the degenerate case, a self-sustaining automated economy produces a massive surplus for human consumption. Robotic slave labor, programmed not to want anything or complain, will serve all your basic needs.
A good portion of the robotic production army is already in place, but it still requires human maintenance and operators. All that is required is a sub-economy that produces more than it consumes, and requires zero inputs from anyone outside it.
Autotrophic organisms already do this. Everything else on the planet eats them. If you want to feed more people for free, you just design a better algae or plankton, and they build themselves. The rest of the ecosystem simply builds on top of them.
If everyone takes the basic income, they will spend their 16 free hours a day doing things that they find value in, but not necessarily valuable enough to others to support their basic needs.
In the degenerate case, a self-sustaining automated economy produces a massive surplus for human consumption. Robotic slave labor, programmed not to want anything or complain, will serve all your basic needs.
A good portion of the robotic production army is already in place, but it still requires human maintenance and operators. All that is required is a sub-economy that produces more than it consumes, and requires zero inputs from anyone outside it.
Autotrophic organisms already do this. Everything else on the planet eats them. If you want to feed more people for free, you just design a better algae or plankton, and they build themselves. The rest of the ecosystem simply builds on top of them.