Post
by Speaker to Animals » Wed Apr 12, 2017 11:32 am
We are faced with two negative potentials argued from each side: (1) automation will result in the vast majority of people being disenfranchised from jobs. (2) If people have access to a universal income, then a lot of people would choose not to work, innovate, or contribute to society in any way. That's what each side is basically arguing.
But if the ability to feed yourself, raise a family under a roof in a safe neighborhood, and so on, remains contingent upon access to a job, then most people will essentially be told to die or shuffled to a welfare state where you have to spend money on them anyway. So argument (2), in my opinion, is rubbish from the start if you accept automation as inevitable.
Furthermore, (2) does not comport to historical evidence in which aristocratic or otherwise very privileged classes still chose to work on their own pursuits, increasing culture, science, and even medicine on their own. Most of the Enlightenment aristocracy, for example, devoted themselves to intellectual pursuits. Jefferson, who lived off the labor of slaves, spent his time in political, scientific, and philosophical pursuits.
The reason you don't see that in the welfare state is because: (A) the welfare state actually requires that people not work in any way. If they show any aptitude for innovation or work, the rug is pulled from beneath them and they starve or find work (which in our near future is not going to be possible). (B) the welfare state creates further disincentives by drastically cutting welfare/disability funds if the person can manage part-time work. It's not economically feasible for people on these programs to work part-time even when they can or want to do so. The system is designed top-to-bottom to keep people out of the workforce and dependent upon the bureaucracy. (C) most of the people in the welfare systems were already compromised by a corrupt and useless government school system that denied them in many case of even literacy. (D) Other government policies encourage some classes of people (especially women) to become totally dependent upon the system in order to farm them for votes, further increasing the cancer of the welfare state.
If we continue down this current path, we are going to get a fuck ton of (1), with increasingly ignorant people driven to hopelessness and despair (and likely to crime). (2) Has it's pitfalls, but it's not an obvious dead-end like (1).
