Okay, as many people who read this have likely already figured
out, my work ethic is…abnormal to say the least. I see work as de facto
slavery, and generally advocate for being “lazy” and redistributing
wealth and giving it to people regardless of work ethic. This probably
looks bad to a lot of people, because work ethic is so ingrained in this
culture that we tend to demonize people who don’t abide by it. That
being said, I figured I should make a post to discuss how work should
work, and what my problems with the modern work ethic are.
Work from the perspective of functionalism
Work can be good. Work is needed to produce things. If no one worked, society should fall apart. Work CAN give meaning to peoples’ lives. However, we need to keep in mind precisely what work is. Work exists as a means to an end. It’s a necessary evil so to speak. Something that is unpleasant, but necessary for the smooth working of society. Until we make robots that can do it all for us, we need people to make things and sell them to us, to improve our lives. I am fine with work as long as we recognize that this is the end goal. Capitalism, by extension, is also a product of functionalism to some degree. By giving people a reward for work, and reducing their reward for not doing so, we create a system of incentives that cause people to want to do the work needed for society to survive and thrive. The problem is, as I will discuss in this post, work is far beyond this. Work isn’t just a means to an end, something we do for a better life. It becomes our lives, because the structures and power relations of capitalism make it so.
The problem with work is a problem with capitalism
Capitalism, left to its own devices, has a way of completely consuming your life. Plain and simple. The profit motive is like an insatiable beast. No matter how much you have, you always want more. There is no end. It literally behaves like a cancer would, just spiraling out of control. Capitalism puts the means of production in the hands of a few and expects the rest of us to work for bosses who have a vested interest in getting as much out of you as possible. Even if you avoid working for a boss, you still are pressured by the system to be an entrepreneur that will own their own means of production. If you don’t get a job from someone else, you must create your own, which puts you under immense pressure. Competition, which helps drive innovation, also subjects people to a process of having to work long hours for little pay. I already discussed the mechanisms by which this happens and the inherent imbalances. The only way to fix these problems is through labor regulations, unions, a generous welfare state, or moving to some form of mild socialism involving democratic control of the workplace (and even then such organizations would still be subject to market forces).
In addition, we require everyone work, while at the same time having a cultural opposition toward redistribution programs, meaning those who can’t find work are left to fend for themselves, even though this isn’t practical because not everyone can have a job in this system. It’s cruel and dehumanizing. And what happens when there are not enough jobs? We create more. Jobs aren’t simply about making things, work is a means to an end. Work carried social status and acceptability that collecting a check does not, and work becomes the only legitimate way to have a living, to the point we don’t say “have a living”, we say “earn a living.” We believe people should earn their worth, and if they don’t or can’t, then it is their fault and they deserve whatever condition they are in. It is sickening, it is disgusting.
The thing is, work can be good, but work, left unchecked, consumes you. The system, and its rational actors pit you against others in a darwinistic struggle for survival, in which the weak go without and the strong get rewarded. This is, to some extent necessary, but again, it needs to be controlled.
Work ethic is about control
Ya know, if you really want to control people, how do you do it? With whips and chains? It can work, but just creates resentment. Work ethic is about training people from a young age to want to work for employers, who profit off of them. What better way to control people than to have an army of people who beg you for a job and are willing to do whatever you want no questions asked?
The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
We can’t really have this discussion without discussing the protestant work ethic. Max Weber wrote a book about this a century ago called “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Essentially, modern work ethic is founded in Calvinism, in which people work for the glory of God. We have adopted this work ethic in capitalism, and while it has helped increase wealth, it also subjects people to the horrifying process I’ve been discussing and is also discussed in the article above. Work doesn’t simply become a means, it becomes an end in and of itself.
We don’t need everyone working
In the past, we needed everyone working just to survive. The whole “if you don’t work you don’t eat” mentality had a totally different meaning than it does today. If everyone didn’t work, there wasn’t enough to go around. In capitalism, we have large surpluses and ever expanding living standards. Most jobs are not about basic survival. They’re about adding more and more goods and services endlessly. While these services and goods help people, if they are not necessary for survival, I don’t think that people should be forced to work them just to survive. We have evolved as a society somewhat here. Again, work is a means to an end, not an end. If we can produce for everyone with only 20% of the population working, then we only need 20% of people working. If 60% or so want to work, that’s a different question altogether, and there should definitely be opportunities for those who choose to do so, but they should be voluntary. This isn’t to say we remove all financial incentives. I firmly believe that in a society where a significant portion of people work, that financial rewards are necessary. As such, the profit motive doesn’t need to be eliminated, we just need to ensure that basic needs are taken care of, with people working to the extent that they want to to earn beyond that.
If the basics were taken care of, many people would continue to work
We had studies of the kinds of guaranteed income programs I would like to see implemented and their sister policy, the negative income tax done. They had some work ethic reductions, but not to a disastrous extent. The fact is, the amount people would work depends on the amount of money given, and the extent of the rewards. If you give someone $1 a month, no one will quit their jobs. If you give them $1 million, a lot of people probably will. Not everyone, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but let’s say 50-80% would. If you give them $1000, people still won’t quit probably. If you give them $5000, maybe a handful will. If you give them $10,000, a little more will. If you give them 50,000, a lot more will. The real issue here is finding the best amount of money to give people to survive on, without destroying work ethic to such a large extent the functional aspects of the system I mentioned above fall apart. A little freedom and breathing room can be liberating, too much could be a disaster. The same applies to tax rates. Few will quit being taxed at 1%, but the incentive is destroyed at 100%. The incentive is to find the right tax structure to ensure people continue working as society requires, and let voluntary effort take it from there.
We also need to take into consideration this video, which discusses motivation outside of money. People can often be motivated better by a sense of purpose or something similar to that, than by money. Why do you think I do this? Because I’m motivated to. This is what motivates me. I feel like my opinions are important and make a difference. Well, people can find their own things that motivate them, and seek to make the world a better place in their own little ways. I’m a political science/social science geek, some people know hard sciences, others know history, others know philosophy. Some people are extroverted and seek working with others, while others, like me, are highly introverted and hands off. People have different strengths, and if anything, the coercive need for “work” as it exists often “alienates” us from that work. Work becomes about money and making a living. It stops being about purpose. A huge reason this economy sucks for me is because my motivations and the like are so out of sync with the structure of the economy, the profit motive, and the kinds of work available. When I was a Christian, I was told I couldn’t serve both God and money. I’m no longer a Christian, but I still have that mentality of wanting to act in ways that have a purpose in and of themselves outside of the profit motive. While I criticize the profit motive, I also admittedly recognize its need to an extent. You know, a lot of great ideas are done by those who didn’t have to work, or could choose the kinds of work they wanted to do more freely than most people. Slaves almost never change the world in a positive way. People who are free to act in ways they want to do. How many prodigies are slaving away at crappy jobs because the structure of the economy is out of sync with their motivations and what they would spend time doing if they had the ability to do so?
We should strive toward less mandatory work over time
Rather than focusing so much on “creating jobs” to “earn a living” off of, I think we should seek to minimize jobs and work, while still maximizing productivity. We often talk about the threats of automation and the $15/hour minimum wage like it’s going to destroy jobs, but if a robot can do a job a worker can, is that not a great thing? Perhaps the problem is our system that requires work to survive. You know, other countries like in Europe are experimenting with 30-35 hour work weeks, while we still have 40, and much more for some people. We only have 2 week vacations and our crazy work ethic makes us proud of it, but other countries, they give a month or even more. I don’t know about you, but I want to take August off like that guy sneers at in the commercial. Other countries have mandatory paid leave, we don’t. Some other countries are making it illegal to check work emails outside of work so that there’s more work life balance.
In 1930, John Keynes, you know, the guy who made Keynesian economics, wrote an essay on “The Economic Possibilities of For Grandchildren.” He discussed how, 100 years from then, in 2030, that the average American should only have to work 15 hours a week. We should be so productive that we could work a lot less. Instead, our work ethic that acts like a cancer toward infinite growth, and our need for constant job creation, has made this difficult to accomplish. We have a work ethic that forces us to work more, and more, and more, and an economic system that coerces it, that we can’t even begin to see the possibility of less work. We look at a future without work with horror, wondering what we would do with our lives if we weren’t forced to go some place we hate and do stuff there for half our waking lives or more. This is cultural, and it’s a sign that our culture has a problem. You know, looking at science fiction, at stuff like the Jetsons, Star Trek, etc., there isn’t a lot of work, and there isn’t a lot of need for work. People are kinda free to do what they want, and if they do work, half the jobs seem like bullcrap anyway, like repetitively pushing a button for 9 hours a week. It’s like, our imaginations, in pursuing the future, imagine that we’ve somehow evolved beyond capitalism and our current system, and found a much better way to organize our economies. Capitalism still seems to exist, but it seems either highly controlled, or more voluntary. We need to move in this direction for the future. The way things go, with our society’s prevailing ideology, we will always have the problems we have now. Sociologists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, discussed a lot of these problems well over a century ago. They will exist well over a century from now if we keep the same ideology toward work that we have now. Poverty will still exist, involuntary work will still rule our lives for 40+ hours a week, and we will still be discussing whether we should raise the minimum wage or whether it will destroy business. Income inequality will still be a problem, and all the stuff that Bernie Sanders and others are discussing now will still be up for debate. We will never progress as a society continuing as we are. We simply won’t.
What my future would look like
In 20 years, it’s estimated 47% of jobs will be done by machines. Mainstream economists will just point out the luddite fallacy and point to all the new jobs we can create, but this seems to be part of that same ideology I’m railing against. Amazing how we have unlimited needs, but the need for leisure and freedom is off limits and unfulfilled. So, say we implement a guaranteed income. We start around poverty level, with a tax system of about 40-50%. This sounds crazy, but it seems possible based on research I’ve done before. I might discuss some of this in the future at some point. I already did discuss some of it in terms of the mincome and negative income tax studies, since this is well within tested parameters. So, we implement this, with the labor participation rate sticking around 60%. Say, in the future, we need a labor participation rate of 30%. So say we bump up the guaranteed income and tax system a bit to find an equilibrium between jobs that need to be done, people willing to do them, the living standards of everyone else, and how tolerant owners of the means of production and workers are of the tax structure. People are better off and the work is still done. Keep in mind, I only suggest implementing these ideas as long as work that needs to be done, is done. I’m not interested in imploding our economy under ideology, I’m a pragmatist here. We give poverty level incomes with our current system, we get more generous as the labor participation rate goes down and people work less and less. I suspect we will never hit 0%, and I’m not necessarily interested in hitting zero. Some people WANT to work, and some people derive meaning from work. I have no issues with people choosing to do things. As a matter of fact, this whole paradigm of mine relies on the vast diversity of choices and inclinations of people and different attitudes toward work that a system of people voluntarily choosing to do what they want leads to functional results. Just like we don’t need every male to join the military, and just like we dont need every couple to have children, I believe we don’t need everyone working, and that people choosing to do what they want will lead to results that are functional enough for society to survive. Will this perhaps dampen growth a bit? Maybe it will. But it is worth it if it leads to a freer society in which people are more able to pursue their own goals.
The only problem I see: neoliberalism
Say we implement a guaranteed income and reduce the labor force? Will those who pay the taxes, most notably those who own the companies, tolerate this? This is a problem. We are living in a neoliberal globalized economy where capital has a lot of freedom of movement, and may be able to abandon the US and take the wealth with them if they reject our taxation. Still, I see this as a problem in general, not just for my policies for but all left wing policies. Neoliberalism threatens to throw us into being a third world country, with wealth and income inequality growing even more extreme than it already is. It threatens to lower wages and taxes and undermine social services. Quite frankly, I think it’s a long term threat to US prosperity regardless of what we do.
We might be entering an age in which capitalism grows obsolete as an economic system, as the main tenets that made it successful in the mid 20th century, like states being able to adequately intervene to fix problems, no longer exist. The 21st century threatens to look more like the horrors of the 19th every day. The rich simply don’t want to share. They want to squeeze everything they can out of everyone else, and not give an iota themselves. If we are going to have my idea work, nay, if we are going to continue to have any prosperity in the US at all like we are used to, we need to do something to even the playing field. Neoliberalism is a race to the bottom, toward lower taxes, lower pay, worse working conditions, and a return to the gilded age. As automation becomes a thing, we might need to do away with capitalism, as it begins to completely fail people. We have lots of productive capacity, but little ability for people to buy what it has to offer, and a huge underclass that both works themselves to death without being able to afford products they make. With the kind of anti work, high tax guaranteed income regime I would like to see, we might see the rich just leave to a low tax country like China or something and leave the US to whatever comes next. Still, I believe we are screwed even if we don’t take that path, and that laissez faire economics have little to offer people in terms of a good life anyway. We might need to think about some form of socialism or syndicalism in the long term, in which hierarchical corporations are replaced by cooperatives or something. Or maybe we can reach an understanding in which corporations recognize that people need to afford their products, so they willingly pay taxes. Or maybe we will reject neoliberalism in the coming decades and make it harder for capital to dodge taxes. These are hard problems to deal with, but they are problems whether we implement my ideas or not.
Conclusion
As you can probably tell by now, I’m not opposed to ALL work. I’m just opposed to being forced to work to survive in jobs we hate in this capitalistic system, and this right wing individualistic approach toward wealth redistribution that leads to social darwinism. My ultimate goal is to make work voluntary, and to minimize the amount of MANDATORY work that is fine. I’m fine with people pursuing their own goals voluntarily and believe that the great diversity in human talent, inclination, etc. will cause us to continue to have a population willing to work and make the world a better place. However, I do see some difficulties in implementing my ideas, since neoliberalism may allow corporations to defy their parent states by avoiding taxes, regulations, and other attempts to rein them in.
Work from the perspective of functionalism
Work can be good. Work is needed to produce things. If no one worked, society should fall apart. Work CAN give meaning to peoples’ lives. However, we need to keep in mind precisely what work is. Work exists as a means to an end. It’s a necessary evil so to speak. Something that is unpleasant, but necessary for the smooth working of society. Until we make robots that can do it all for us, we need people to make things and sell them to us, to improve our lives. I am fine with work as long as we recognize that this is the end goal. Capitalism, by extension, is also a product of functionalism to some degree. By giving people a reward for work, and reducing their reward for not doing so, we create a system of incentives that cause people to want to do the work needed for society to survive and thrive. The problem is, as I will discuss in this post, work is far beyond this. Work isn’t just a means to an end, something we do for a better life. It becomes our lives, because the structures and power relations of capitalism make it so.
The problem with work is a problem with capitalism
Capitalism, left to its own devices, has a way of completely consuming your life. Plain and simple. The profit motive is like an insatiable beast. No matter how much you have, you always want more. There is no end. It literally behaves like a cancer would, just spiraling out of control. Capitalism puts the means of production in the hands of a few and expects the rest of us to work for bosses who have a vested interest in getting as much out of you as possible. Even if you avoid working for a boss, you still are pressured by the system to be an entrepreneur that will own their own means of production. If you don’t get a job from someone else, you must create your own, which puts you under immense pressure. Competition, which helps drive innovation, also subjects people to a process of having to work long hours for little pay. I already discussed the mechanisms by which this happens and the inherent imbalances. The only way to fix these problems is through labor regulations, unions, a generous welfare state, or moving to some form of mild socialism involving democratic control of the workplace (and even then such organizations would still be subject to market forces).
In addition, we require everyone work, while at the same time having a cultural opposition toward redistribution programs, meaning those who can’t find work are left to fend for themselves, even though this isn’t practical because not everyone can have a job in this system. It’s cruel and dehumanizing. And what happens when there are not enough jobs? We create more. Jobs aren’t simply about making things, work is a means to an end. Work carried social status and acceptability that collecting a check does not, and work becomes the only legitimate way to have a living, to the point we don’t say “have a living”, we say “earn a living.” We believe people should earn their worth, and if they don’t or can’t, then it is their fault and they deserve whatever condition they are in. It is sickening, it is disgusting.
The thing is, work can be good, but work, left unchecked, consumes you. The system, and its rational actors pit you against others in a darwinistic struggle for survival, in which the weak go without and the strong get rewarded. This is, to some extent necessary, but again, it needs to be controlled.
Work ethic is about control
Ya know, if you really want to control people, how do you do it? With whips and chains? It can work, but just creates resentment. Work ethic is about training people from a young age to want to work for employers, who profit off of them. What better way to control people than to have an army of people who beg you for a job and are willing to do whatever you want no questions asked?
The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
We can’t really have this discussion without discussing the protestant work ethic. Max Weber wrote a book about this a century ago called “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Essentially, modern work ethic is founded in Calvinism, in which people work for the glory of God. We have adopted this work ethic in capitalism, and while it has helped increase wealth, it also subjects people to the horrifying process I’ve been discussing and is also discussed in the article above. Work doesn’t simply become a means, it becomes an end in and of itself.
We don’t need everyone working
In the past, we needed everyone working just to survive. The whole “if you don’t work you don’t eat” mentality had a totally different meaning than it does today. If everyone didn’t work, there wasn’t enough to go around. In capitalism, we have large surpluses and ever expanding living standards. Most jobs are not about basic survival. They’re about adding more and more goods and services endlessly. While these services and goods help people, if they are not necessary for survival, I don’t think that people should be forced to work them just to survive. We have evolved as a society somewhat here. Again, work is a means to an end, not an end. If we can produce for everyone with only 20% of the population working, then we only need 20% of people working. If 60% or so want to work, that’s a different question altogether, and there should definitely be opportunities for those who choose to do so, but they should be voluntary. This isn’t to say we remove all financial incentives. I firmly believe that in a society where a significant portion of people work, that financial rewards are necessary. As such, the profit motive doesn’t need to be eliminated, we just need to ensure that basic needs are taken care of, with people working to the extent that they want to to earn beyond that.
If the basics were taken care of, many people would continue to work
We had studies of the kinds of guaranteed income programs I would like to see implemented and their sister policy, the negative income tax done. They had some work ethic reductions, but not to a disastrous extent. The fact is, the amount people would work depends on the amount of money given, and the extent of the rewards. If you give someone $1 a month, no one will quit their jobs. If you give them $1 million, a lot of people probably will. Not everyone, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but let’s say 50-80% would. If you give them $1000, people still won’t quit probably. If you give them $5000, maybe a handful will. If you give them $10,000, a little more will. If you give them 50,000, a lot more will. The real issue here is finding the best amount of money to give people to survive on, without destroying work ethic to such a large extent the functional aspects of the system I mentioned above fall apart. A little freedom and breathing room can be liberating, too much could be a disaster. The same applies to tax rates. Few will quit being taxed at 1%, but the incentive is destroyed at 100%. The incentive is to find the right tax structure to ensure people continue working as society requires, and let voluntary effort take it from there.
We also need to take into consideration this video, which discusses motivation outside of money. People can often be motivated better by a sense of purpose or something similar to that, than by money. Why do you think I do this? Because I’m motivated to. This is what motivates me. I feel like my opinions are important and make a difference. Well, people can find their own things that motivate them, and seek to make the world a better place in their own little ways. I’m a political science/social science geek, some people know hard sciences, others know history, others know philosophy. Some people are extroverted and seek working with others, while others, like me, are highly introverted and hands off. People have different strengths, and if anything, the coercive need for “work” as it exists often “alienates” us from that work. Work becomes about money and making a living. It stops being about purpose. A huge reason this economy sucks for me is because my motivations and the like are so out of sync with the structure of the economy, the profit motive, and the kinds of work available. When I was a Christian, I was told I couldn’t serve both God and money. I’m no longer a Christian, but I still have that mentality of wanting to act in ways that have a purpose in and of themselves outside of the profit motive. While I criticize the profit motive, I also admittedly recognize its need to an extent. You know, a lot of great ideas are done by those who didn’t have to work, or could choose the kinds of work they wanted to do more freely than most people. Slaves almost never change the world in a positive way. People who are free to act in ways they want to do. How many prodigies are slaving away at crappy jobs because the structure of the economy is out of sync with their motivations and what they would spend time doing if they had the ability to do so?
We should strive toward less mandatory work over time
Rather than focusing so much on “creating jobs” to “earn a living” off of, I think we should seek to minimize jobs and work, while still maximizing productivity. We often talk about the threats of automation and the $15/hour minimum wage like it’s going to destroy jobs, but if a robot can do a job a worker can, is that not a great thing? Perhaps the problem is our system that requires work to survive. You know, other countries like in Europe are experimenting with 30-35 hour work weeks, while we still have 40, and much more for some people. We only have 2 week vacations and our crazy work ethic makes us proud of it, but other countries, they give a month or even more. I don’t know about you, but I want to take August off like that guy sneers at in the commercial. Other countries have mandatory paid leave, we don’t. Some other countries are making it illegal to check work emails outside of work so that there’s more work life balance.
In 1930, John Keynes, you know, the guy who made Keynesian economics, wrote an essay on “The Economic Possibilities of For Grandchildren.” He discussed how, 100 years from then, in 2030, that the average American should only have to work 15 hours a week. We should be so productive that we could work a lot less. Instead, our work ethic that acts like a cancer toward infinite growth, and our need for constant job creation, has made this difficult to accomplish. We have a work ethic that forces us to work more, and more, and more, and an economic system that coerces it, that we can’t even begin to see the possibility of less work. We look at a future without work with horror, wondering what we would do with our lives if we weren’t forced to go some place we hate and do stuff there for half our waking lives or more. This is cultural, and it’s a sign that our culture has a problem. You know, looking at science fiction, at stuff like the Jetsons, Star Trek, etc., there isn’t a lot of work, and there isn’t a lot of need for work. People are kinda free to do what they want, and if they do work, half the jobs seem like bullcrap anyway, like repetitively pushing a button for 9 hours a week. It’s like, our imaginations, in pursuing the future, imagine that we’ve somehow evolved beyond capitalism and our current system, and found a much better way to organize our economies. Capitalism still seems to exist, but it seems either highly controlled, or more voluntary. We need to move in this direction for the future. The way things go, with our society’s prevailing ideology, we will always have the problems we have now. Sociologists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, discussed a lot of these problems well over a century ago. They will exist well over a century from now if we keep the same ideology toward work that we have now. Poverty will still exist, involuntary work will still rule our lives for 40+ hours a week, and we will still be discussing whether we should raise the minimum wage or whether it will destroy business. Income inequality will still be a problem, and all the stuff that Bernie Sanders and others are discussing now will still be up for debate. We will never progress as a society continuing as we are. We simply won’t.
What my future would look like
In 20 years, it’s estimated 47% of jobs will be done by machines. Mainstream economists will just point out the luddite fallacy and point to all the new jobs we can create, but this seems to be part of that same ideology I’m railing against. Amazing how we have unlimited needs, but the need for leisure and freedom is off limits and unfulfilled. So, say we implement a guaranteed income. We start around poverty level, with a tax system of about 40-50%. This sounds crazy, but it seems possible based on research I’ve done before. I might discuss some of this in the future at some point. I already did discuss some of it in terms of the mincome and negative income tax studies, since this is well within tested parameters. So, we implement this, with the labor participation rate sticking around 60%. Say, in the future, we need a labor participation rate of 30%. So say we bump up the guaranteed income and tax system a bit to find an equilibrium between jobs that need to be done, people willing to do them, the living standards of everyone else, and how tolerant owners of the means of production and workers are of the tax structure. People are better off and the work is still done. Keep in mind, I only suggest implementing these ideas as long as work that needs to be done, is done. I’m not interested in imploding our economy under ideology, I’m a pragmatist here. We give poverty level incomes with our current system, we get more generous as the labor participation rate goes down and people work less and less. I suspect we will never hit 0%, and I’m not necessarily interested in hitting zero. Some people WANT to work, and some people derive meaning from work. I have no issues with people choosing to do things. As a matter of fact, this whole paradigm of mine relies on the vast diversity of choices and inclinations of people and different attitudes toward work that a system of people voluntarily choosing to do what they want leads to functional results. Just like we don’t need every male to join the military, and just like we dont need every couple to have children, I believe we don’t need everyone working, and that people choosing to do what they want will lead to results that are functional enough for society to survive. Will this perhaps dampen growth a bit? Maybe it will. But it is worth it if it leads to a freer society in which people are more able to pursue their own goals.
The only problem I see: neoliberalism
Say we implement a guaranteed income and reduce the labor force? Will those who pay the taxes, most notably those who own the companies, tolerate this? This is a problem. We are living in a neoliberal globalized economy where capital has a lot of freedom of movement, and may be able to abandon the US and take the wealth with them if they reject our taxation. Still, I see this as a problem in general, not just for my policies for but all left wing policies. Neoliberalism threatens to throw us into being a third world country, with wealth and income inequality growing even more extreme than it already is. It threatens to lower wages and taxes and undermine social services. Quite frankly, I think it’s a long term threat to US prosperity regardless of what we do.
We might be entering an age in which capitalism grows obsolete as an economic system, as the main tenets that made it successful in the mid 20th century, like states being able to adequately intervene to fix problems, no longer exist. The 21st century threatens to look more like the horrors of the 19th every day. The rich simply don’t want to share. They want to squeeze everything they can out of everyone else, and not give an iota themselves. If we are going to have my idea work, nay, if we are going to continue to have any prosperity in the US at all like we are used to, we need to do something to even the playing field. Neoliberalism is a race to the bottom, toward lower taxes, lower pay, worse working conditions, and a return to the gilded age. As automation becomes a thing, we might need to do away with capitalism, as it begins to completely fail people. We have lots of productive capacity, but little ability for people to buy what it has to offer, and a huge underclass that both works themselves to death without being able to afford products they make. With the kind of anti work, high tax guaranteed income regime I would like to see, we might see the rich just leave to a low tax country like China or something and leave the US to whatever comes next. Still, I believe we are screwed even if we don’t take that path, and that laissez faire economics have little to offer people in terms of a good life anyway. We might need to think about some form of socialism or syndicalism in the long term, in which hierarchical corporations are replaced by cooperatives or something. Or maybe we can reach an understanding in which corporations recognize that people need to afford their products, so they willingly pay taxes. Or maybe we will reject neoliberalism in the coming decades and make it harder for capital to dodge taxes. These are hard problems to deal with, but they are problems whether we implement my ideas or not.
Conclusion
As you can probably tell by now, I’m not opposed to ALL work. I’m just opposed to being forced to work to survive in jobs we hate in this capitalistic system, and this right wing individualistic approach toward wealth redistribution that leads to social darwinism. My ultimate goal is to make work voluntary, and to minimize the amount of MANDATORY work that is fine. I’m fine with people pursuing their own goals voluntarily and believe that the great diversity in human talent, inclination, etc. will cause us to continue to have a population willing to work and make the world a better place. However, I do see some difficulties in implementing my ideas, since neoliberalism may allow corporations to defy their parent states by avoiding taxes, regulations, and other attempts to rein them in.
No comments:
Post a Comment