The Left Does not Reason

[Okeefenokee]

As for the guy risking plasma burns, who would do that job for less than it's worth if they already have a mincome?

Indeed.

Why would anyone do anything if they get their needs met for free?

/scratching my chin.

Why? Mostly the same reasons as now, for extra income, to possess more things, to improve life for your family, and most importantly, for glory.

In the mincome society, the achievements and figures of the past will be fetishized, and only one who invents, creates or conquers will be considered glorious.

By providing a mincome the fear of dying will be replaced with the fear of not being immortal. Leading to bold risk-taking, insane ambition, and cut-throat competition.

You don't know shit about people on welfare.

[JohnDonne]

Indeed.

Why would anyone do anything if they get their needs met for free?

/scratching my chin.

Why? Mostly the same reasons as now, for extra income, to possess more things, to improve life for your family, and most importantly, for glory.

In the mincome society, the achievements and figures of the past will be fetishized, and only one who invents, creates or conquers will be considered glorious.

By providing a mincome the fear of dying will be replaced with the fear of not being immortal. Leading to bold risk-taking, insane ambition, and cut-throat competition.

You don't know shit about people on welfare.

Me? I grew up on welfare? Did you? I have also risen above it, so I know a thing or two about the power of ambition. The reason I have ambition is because I love the great people of the past. (Most of them were aristocrats who didn't have to work, not peasants digging potatoes, by the way.)

But a big difference between welfare and mincome is that mincome has the unique quality of being constant, so there is no incentive not to work to keep the benefits flowing, like with welfare.

[Alexander PhiAlipson]

Aaaaaand hit the cv!

[JohnDonne]

Nah, it would be boring.

[Okeefenokee]

Why? Mostly the same reasons as now, for extra income, to possess more things, to improve life for your family, and most importantly, for glory.

In the mincome society, the achievements and figures of the past will be fetishized, and only one who invents, creates or conquers will be considered glorious.

By providing a mincome the fear of dying will be replaced with the fear of not being immortal. Leading to bold risk-taking, insane ambition, and cut-throat competition.

You don't know shit about people on welfare.

Me? I grew up on welfare? Did you? I have also risen above it, so I know a thing or two about the power of ambition. The reason I have ambition is because I love the great people of the past. (Most of them were aristocrats who didn't have to work, not peasants digging potatoes, by the way.)

But a big difference between welfare and mincome is that mincome has the unique quality of being constant, so there is no incentive not to work to keep the benefits flowing, like with welfare.

Like I said, you don't know shit about welfare. People on welfare still find ways to make money off the books. Primarily, they get pain pills through medicaid, and sell them for cash. You might have grown up on it, but you weren't paying attention to it. The number one killer, in regards to drugs, is prescription pain pills, and those pills are provided to welfare recipients, who then sell them for cash.

I didn't grow up on it, only surrounded by it. No car, no phone, no hot water. When I wasn't in school, I was at work with my dad, not pulling any hours, just there to help. What were the neighbors' kids doing? Learning the trade of welfare dependence.

One of the earliest lessons I remember learning from my old man was of the reality of the people around us. Small town economies across the country are bolstered by the monthly checks. The first of the month in just about any small town in America is marked by an influx of welfare funds being deposited. At the end of the month, before the checks come in, entire communities become despondent.

You rose above it? Good for you. I would say I did as well, except I was spared from ever falling into it and having to rise. You been back home lately? You seen a large portion of your old home also rise above it? I haven't. They're still where they were when I left. Still scamming medicaid. Still dealing pain pills. Still on the track to nowhere.

That's what your mincome scheme will bring to others. The deterioration of the welfare state. Crime, ignorance, and despondency. Only individual initiative can achieve success. Welfare only brings despondency.

[KerningChameleon]

That's what your mincome scheme will bring to others. The deterioration of the welfare state. Crime, ignorance, and despondency. Only individual initiative can achieve success. Welfare only brings despondency.

If this is true, then I suggest you start coming up with alternatives to welfare or jobs, because there is a lot of money and technical talent aimed at making all forms of human labor obsolete. You can whine and moan and pontificate about the "dignity and necessity" of the sweat of a man's brow, but the ruling business class would now very much like to remove that from the equation entirely. Unless you think paying a man to dig a ditch and fill it in everyday is an acceptable compromise.

The clock runs faster and faster towards Labor Judgement Day with each passing year. The longer you deny it, the harder it will hurt when it finally comes.

[Okeefenokee]

That's what your mincome scheme will bring to others. The deterioration of the welfare state. Crime, ignorance, and despondency. Only individual initiative can achieve success. Welfare only brings despondency.

If this is true, then I suggest you start coming up with alternatives to welfare or jobs, because there is a lot of money and technical talent aimed at making all forms of human labor obsolete. You can whine and moan and pontificate about the "dignity and necessity" of the sweat of a man's brow, but the ruling business class would now very much like to remove that from the equation entirely. Unless you think paying a man to dig a ditch and fill it in everyday is an acceptable compromise.

The clock runs faster and faster towards Labor Judgement Day with each passing year. The longer you deny it, the harder it will hurt when it finally comes.

I, and others, have already said this is an issue we will have to confront. I wrote my last thesis on this very topic. It is inevitable. Something will have to be done. A paradigm change is coming.

Who knows what the solution is? We are talking about a Fermi window. The answer is not likely to be something that our minds are conditioned to accept.

The easy path that is posited is that we will all get free money. I strongly oppose that course. That will never work. Old work is dying. New ideas about work will need to be considered.

Ancient groups, that existed along egalitarian lines, were rendered obsolete upon the emergence of complex societies.

We could very well be on the cusp of a new era, that like those of the past, rendered old ideas obsolete.

Individual value hasn't been a defining value for some time. People have been able to get along while being not all that valuable. That might be drawing to a close.

It's a common trope of sci-fi that that the starfarers do all the intrepid work, and the commoners are simply dragged along. That might not be the reality we face.

We might face a future where only the exceptional are carried along. Why carry the dead weight in a world where economic considerations are irrelevant? If robots and computers do everything, why do we need dumb consumers? Silicon and microchips carry the economy. What use are consumers in a galactic experience?

[SuburbanFarmer]

.....let them eat cake? Man, you are helbent on seeing some food riots.

[Okeefenokee]

.....let them eat cake? Man, you are helbent on seeing some food riots.

Speaking of which, you haven't met your quota.

[KerningChameleon]

I, and others, have already said this is an issue we will have to confront. I wrote my last thesis on this very topic. It is inevitable. Something will have to be done. A paradigm change is coming.

Who knows what the solution is? We are talking about a Fermi window. The answer is not likely to be something that our minds are conditioned to accept.

The easy path that is posited is that we will all get free money. I strongly oppose that course. That will never work. Old work is dying. New ideas about work will need to be considered.

Ancient groups, that existed along egalitarian lines, were rendered obsolete upon the emergence of complex societies.

We could very well be on the cusp of a new era, that like those of the past, rendered old ideas obsolete.

Individual value hasn't been a defining value for some time. People have been able to get along while being not all that valuable. That might be drawing to a close.

It's a common trope of sci-fi that that the starfarers do all the intrepid work, and the commoners are simply dragged along. That might not be the reality we face.

We might face a future where only the exceptional are carried along. Why carry the dead weight in a world where economic considerations are irrelevant? If robots and computers do everything, why do we need dumb consumers? Silicon and microchips carry the economy. What use are consumers in a galactic experience?

Exterminism, then:

But what if resources and energy are simply too scarce to allow everyone to enjoy the material standard of living of today’s rich? What if we arrive in a future that no longer requires the mass proletariat’s labor in production, but is unable to provide everyone with an arbitrarily high standard of consumption? If we arrive in that world as an egalitarian society, than the answer is the socialist regime of shared conservation described in the previous section. But if, instead, we remain a society polarized between a privileged elite and a downtrodden mass, then the most plausible trajectory leads to something much darker; I will call it by the term that E. P. Thompson used to describe a different dystopia, during the peak of the cold war: exterminism.

The great danger posed by the automation of production, in the context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources, is that it makes the great mass of people superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling elite. This is in contrast to capitalism, where the antagonism between capital and labor was characterized by both a clash of interests and a relationship of mutual dependence: the workers depend on capitalists as long as they don’t control the means of production themselves, while the capitalists need workers to run their factories and shops. It is as the lyrics of “Solidarity Forever” had it: “They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn/But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.” With the rise of the robots, the second line ceases to hold.

The existence of an impoverished, economically superfluous rabble poses a great danger to the ruling class, which will naturally fear imminent expropriation; confronted with this threat, several courses of action present themselves. The masses can be bought off with some degree of redistribution of resources, as the rich share out their wealth in the form of social welfare programs, at least if resource constraints aren’t too binding. But in addition to potentially reintroducing scarcity into the lives of the rich, this solution is liable to lead to an ever-rising tide of demands on the part of the masses, thus raising the specter of expropriation once again. This is essentially what happened at the high tide of the welfare state, when bosses began to fear that both profits and control over the workplace were slipping out of their hands.

If buying off the angry mob isn’t a sustainable strategy, another option is simply to run away and hide from them. This is the trajectory of what the sociologist Bryan Turner calls “enclave society”, an order in which “governments and other agencies seek to regulate spaces and, where necessary, to immobilize flows of people, goods and services” by means of “enclosure, bureaucratic barriers, legal exclusions and registrations.” Gated communities, private islands, ghettos, prisons, terrorism paranoia, biological quarantines; together, these amount to an inverted global gulag, where the rich live in tiny islands of wealth strewn around an ocean of misery. In Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti makes the case that we are already constructing this new order, as climate change brings about what he calls the “catastrophic convergence” of ecological disruption, economic inequality, and state failure. The legacy of colonialism and neoliberalism is that the rich countries, along with the elites of the poorer ones, have facilitated a disintegration into anarchic violence, as various tribal and political factions fight over the diminishing bounty of damaged ecosystems. Faced with this bleak reality, many of the rich — which, in global terms, includes many workers in the rich countries as well — have resigned themselves to barricading themselves into their fortresses, to be protected by unmanned drones and private military contractors. Guard labor, which we encountered in the rentist society, reappears in an even more malevolent form, as a lucky few are employed as enforcers and protectors for the rich.

But this too, is an unstable equilibrium, for the same basic reason that buying off the masses is. So long as the immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that it may one day become impossible to hold them at bay. Once mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor. Many have called the recent Justin Timberlake vehicle, In Time, a Marxist film, but it is more precisely a parable of the road to exterminism. In the movie, a tiny ruling class literally lives forever in their gated enclaves due to genetic technology, while everyone else is programmed to die at 25 unless they can beg, borrow or steal more time. The only thing saving the workers is that the rich still have some need for their labor; when that need expires, so presumably will the working class itself.

Hence exterminism, as a description of this type of society. Such a genocidal telos may seem like an outlandish, comic book villain level of barbarism; perhaps it is unreasonable to think that a world scarred by the holocausts of the twentieth century could again sink to such depravity. Then again, the United States is already a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency revels in executing the innocent, while the sitting Commander in Chief casually orders the assassination of American citizens without even the pretense of due process, to widespread liberal applause.

Sadly, I've come to much the same conclusion. We're entering a future where the ideal global human population level... may very well be the one that held somewhat constant before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Ours may be an age remembered as an unusual but relatively brief "spike" in number of concurrently living humans.