Behind the Wall Street Protest

Free social services won't necessarily devalue the dollar, or lead to an imbalance in trade -- not if the whole point is that you need to do it because all the work is being done by robots now.

The taxes needed for it probably aren't excessive, if the level of support you're offering is minimal. And by 'not excessive' I mean 'we had them in the past and it worked out okay'.

Human dignity and immigration are real concerns, though. Especially since the first turns into crime pretty easily.

OTOH telling people to go fuck themselves in the hopes that they'll get desperate and come up with some new worthwhile thing to do (which is the default option if you *don't* provide services, and is what has actually been working pretty well until recently, and I think it's a bit early to go all gloom and doom on its prospects) also leads to crime.

Anyway -- the optimistic viewpoint would be, if people didn't need money to live, they might be willing to work for lower wages. The pessimistic viewpoint is that if people don't need money to live NO ONE is going to do certain jobs which are just that unpleasant. x.x

Maybe those are jobs for robots?

A lot of the problem seems to be about wealth distribution.

If we provide a basic subsistence level income for 80% of the population and 20% still have jobs then we continue to have unacceptable levels of wealth distribution.

Wealth is the accumulation of income over time: someone who makes very little and can save very little will save it in a low-income-producing vehicle like a savings account or maybe their house. Someone with more income will save in those places PLUS a pension plan. Someone with even MORE income will save in both those places PLUS some riskier stocks.

Over time, the rich get richer just by mathematical progression: if you all start out with the same $4,000 to invest and one invests it at 5% and the other invests it at 10% this will happen.

Same story with someone who makes $20K/year and another person makes $120K/year. The rich will get richer every time, even if they spend every dime they have, because inevitably some of their spending will be on tangibles that they will continue to have.

I don't think anyone is REALLY all that upset about the amount of money one person can acquire in their lifetimes, though: I think they're mostly upset about dynastic wealth. (I could be wrong.)

I feel quite gloom and doomy about people wanting to solve wealth disparity. It isn't a problem that can STAY solved. The highly skilled or higher risk-taking will get richer again by next week.

But I like that you are okay with waiting for the creative destruction to work its way through. I like that idea. We really do need to have some new energy solutions and perhaps that bubble of spending will inflate our middle class again. That would be nice.

I think we've been sick so long now that we've forgotten that we can ever be well again.

I'm not even mad at millionaires. I'm angry at people whose wealth does nobody any good, and those entities (mostly corporations) refusing to support the societies which spawned them, instead drawing off as much wealth as possible while directly intervening to remove and alter laws that require giving any back.

The rich will always be rich, as long as they learned how. But you can't stay rich forever, neither individually nor dynastically, in a society that's otherwise starving. The people will demand what you have.

I could be happy with a hundred thousand dollars. I could support myself for almost ten years on that if I had to; with a few good investments, perhaps much longer. But nobody's going to outright give that to me. I don't mind working for it, but what does it mean when I don't live in a society where I'll ever be able to earn it?

I believe that people have a right to do something productive and to be compensated accordingly. Nobody should be shut out of the job market. Nobody should be forced to be poor and unemployed. It's destructive for people to be made to feel useless and denied a chance to participate in society.

This is a really difficult concept for me to wrap my head around. Honestly, it triggers some dark stuff in me.

Is someone MAKING you sit on your couch? That happens? Is this like when fat people say they're victims because corporations forced them to overeat? Really, you had NO INFLUENCE on the fork?

We ALL struggle with the issue of how to earn our keep, what we're going to be when we grow up. No one GETS this GIVEN to them. In my case I came up with a plan, saved up money, quit my job and went to graduate school, studied as an apprentice for four years, then opened my own business. It was ten years from inception to execution.

But when was it EVER different? When in this history of humankind have people become skilled tradesmen without some period of scut work and training and apprenticeship?

You DO have the right to pursue happiness. I personally guarantee it. You have a right to make contracts, agreements, on what your compensation will be and a right to have those agreements enforced. I also guarantee that. But do you have a right to make more money than anyone is willing to pay you? Does that lawncare guy have a RIGHT to MAKE ME HIRE HIM at $200 when I'd rather go without his services than pay $200?

This is where you start triggering me. You have a right to ASK for what you want to get. You have a right to NOT PERFORM services if you find the terms being offered as unacceptable. But you do not have a RIGHT to get compensation at a level higher than the market will pay for the goods and services you are offering.

Personally, I think artists are someone whose pay can't be negotiated fairly because the service they are providing is to the commons and patrons of the arts are scarce to find who are willing to step up to offer to pay for their music or murals or whatever. I think that fellowships ought to be offered as selected by a jury of citizens. The state poets, state musicians, state artists. We sort of do that now with graduate school fellowships. But these things are JURIED. You don't just DECLARE you are an artist who needs to be supported. Someone ELSE declares you to be one who is good enough to deserve community support.

But, yeah, I do think there are some jobs that should be GIVEN, I guess.

But nobody is forced to be unemployed. It's hard to figure out how to make money, it's true. But you are a human living on the skin of the planet earth and you are no different from any other human living on the face of the planet earth. It's a hardscrabble life. Figure something out.

One job might be 10 times harder than another job. Nobody's job is 350 times harder than anything.

A career with enough star power to get 350x the base salary is a career that doesn't have a lot of earning years in it. You spend your twenties in graduate school. You spend your thirties working your way up. You get a good salary in your forties and hit the big time in your fifties and really only make that for three or four years of the Big Time contract. Only a handful of people are stars like that.

Sort of like basketball players.

The reason they get that sort of money is because of a bidding war: one person is in great demand and their unique (or nearly unique) skillset and rolodex is what is being requested. No other substitute will do, because no one else has spent the past thirty years grooming for this one job.

You know who determines whether a CEO is worth that money? The board of directors, who represent the owners. If the OWNERS of the company paying the salary are okay with it, why would you object?

This is a bit of a trope. There are only 500 Fortune 500 companies. Most CEOs are not stars. They make a couple hundred thousand, yes, but they were in graduate school about the same length of time as doctors. They are responsible for hundreds or perhaps thousands of people's jobs. Yes, their job is 350 times harder that a machine operators, where the machine operator shows up and presses a button and concern and responsibility never wrinkle their brow, whereas the CEO has responsibility 350 days in the year.

What makes someone's labor valuable is an interesting question. In the most fundamental element it has to do with a person's ability to transform energy into something someone else wants to buy. A knowledge worker consumed a lot of energy to get their brain trained: years of growing and eating and being heated and cooled waiting until the Problem they were Trained To Solve comes along. Another person might have less of a time/energy/life investment in their labor and generally be replaceable by anyone who ate breakfast this morning.

We've been changing how we transform energy quite a lot in the past two centuries. Harnessing extracted hydrocarbons allowed us to transform a LOT of energy. A lot a lot. Our society grew rich burning coal then oil then gas. We also extracted quite a lot of other stored up wealth: depletable resources like metals and renewable resources like timber and fish that weren't stewarded well.

Now we're growing rich with our brains. Well, some of us. And it's not leaving a lot of choices for those who don't work like that.

But, yeah, I can see how someone's brain could be worth 350x more than someone's brute labor.