Productivity Leads To Liberty

[Speaker to Animals]

LOL

I guess that means you won't defend it.

[Martin Hash]

And the broad choices arrayed before you:

(1) Some form of progressive. A utopian, or marxist, or some other person who choose centralized states that dole out your "liberty" by the barrel of a gun.

(2) Some form of conservative. A guy who likes his centralized state just the way it is, thank you so much.

(3) Some form of reactionary. A guy who is saying, hey now, this didn't go well, maybe we need to back the fuck up and start from where it worked.

(4) A libertarian. A guy who wants his cake and to eat it too. i.e. the guy in the guillotine when the utopia is realized.

I assume you intentionally left out traditional Liberals like me, but you're forgiven because there aren't enough of us to do anything anyway, but we DO have the answers you seek, Young Luke.

[Speaker to Animals]

And the broad choices arrayed before you:

(1) Some form of progressive. A utopian, or marxist, or some other person who choose centralized states that dole out your "liberty" by the barrel of a gun.

(2) Some form of conservative. A guy who likes his centralized state just the way it is, thank you so much.

(3) Some form of reactionary. A guy who is saying, hey now, this didn't go well, maybe we need to back the fuck up and start from where it worked.

(4) A libertarian. A guy who wants his cake and to eat it too. i.e. the guy in the guillotine when the utopia is realized.

I assume you intentionally left out traditional Liberals like me, but you're forgiven because there aren't enough of us to do anything anyway, but we DO have the answers you seek, Young Luke.

(2)

[Martin Hash]

Oh, in the lower-case conservative sense. Yeah, as oxymoronic as that seems, I'm a conservative liberal that wants change. (High progressive taxation, confiscatory Inheritance Tax, corps are not people).

[Speaker to Animals]

Oh, in the lower-case conservative sense. Yeah, as oxymoronic as that seems, I'm a conservative liberal that wants change. (High progressive taxation, confiscatory Inheritance Tax, corps are not people).

Conservatives and liberals are basically the same thing, with slight differentiation. You are the Enlightenment people. The progressives are the Marxist folks.

A libertarian is a person who claims to love the Enlightenment but hates everything it produces.

[C-Mag]

It's not technology that's the problem. It's the people themselves. Their values. Their mindset.

I agree.

There is a distinction between living in a bountiful society and individual productivity.

[Hwen Hoshino]

Oh, in the lower-case conservative sense. Yeah, as oxymoronic as that seems, I'm a conservative liberal that wants change. (High progressive taxation, confiscatory Inheritance Tax, corps are not people).

Corporations are not people. You mean what by that?

[Martin Hash]

U.S. Constitutionally guaranteed Rights only apply to the people behind corporations, not the piece of paper.

[Fife]

Address the obvious and fatal standing problem that therefore obtains, inescapably, in NYT v. Sullivan.

Except it didn't IRL. Why?

[BjornP]

Robots imply increased productivity, and increased productivity implies less work for the same Quality-of-Life, so presumably a huge chunk of the population could live a satisfactory life with little expenditure. Star Trek economics seem attractive & inevitable.

The reason all of mankinds greatest ideas came from people in history who were either noble or in some other way had their all their basic needs met by the common people's taxes/tithes, is that those people were afforded enough leisure time to create ideas, visions, art and litterature without needing to worry about starving to death or ending up in lender's prisons, or going further back in time, slavery. Today, this former privilege, is now most Westerners right, regardless of which parents they have.

Not having to work to survive, frees the mind for other pursuits. That was true of the European nobility (and higher merchant classes)...oooooor..... (*devil's advocate hat on*), it only freed up that very few percent of nobles and clergyman, who used the extra time given to them to create great works of culture, scholarship, theology or philosophy? It does take care of that whole; angry, resentful starving people wanting to kill all the succesful people conflict, though.

Less work for same quality of life is only a guarentee, if those major tax contributing businesses that no longer need human labor to the same extent they used to, contribute more to the state coffers. And if government is efficient in its redistribution, i.e. knowing where to prioritize to improve overall quality of life.

In any case, though: Even if a society went full Star Trek, it would still only be those who did something with the greater amount of spare time on their hands, who'd rise to the top of society. It would also be them, by virtue of simply being the only ones desiring to getting involved in science, politics, anything, who would shape society, who would create better opportunities for themselves and those like themselves.

So, yes... greater productivity would leave to more liberty. But the opportunities would still remain in the hands of those with the desire to do things. No matter if those people are scientists, engineers, academics, priests, artists, inventors or whatever they may be. And that's as it should be, and probably always will be.

Slavery was outlawed in medieval Europe, Martin.

Not really. Enslaving, owning and selling fellow Christians as slaves was outlawed. Look up the Venetian Slave Trade. Even the selling of Christian slaves was still legal, though frowned upon, in early medieval Europe (up untill Charlemagne). And that's just Western, Catholic Europe. The Byzantine Romans, while also only keeping non-Christian slaves, didn't outlaw slavery as an institution, either. The early African slave trade didn't spring up because of racist sentiment, after all, it became lucrative because they provided a lucrative, alternate source of non-Christian slaves (Slavs either became Christianized, or Muslim subjects in which case their emirs and sultans wouldn't allow selling them as slaves.