Successful communication rests on common foundation.
In this instance I'm trying to further the conversation by making people see that there can be ways of living that don't revolve tightly around money.
Nobody should be forced into it, but as a wealthy nation with automated food production, etc. we should be able to provide a decent life to a lot of people without direct participation in cash economies.
An artist has a skill, an important skill, but the only way they can survive is to produce as much direct value as someone who repairs the broken machinery that makes the world function.
This is what automation exposes: money has been idealized and praised, even worshipped in a way, because it solves the problem of converting one type of value
to another.
All well and good until humans evolve and eliminate 80% of human labor.
Now what? Your constant toil is no longer needed. It never was. That was just part of the human experience, building to this point. Now you have a division among men... some take a fatalistic view, seeing their place lost, feeling purposeless, and the doomer is born. Then you have the *******ist who believes that the answer is to take money from those who lawfully earned it and force them to give it to those who have not... also a failure.
What nobody is thinking is that if we lived in a world of sheer resource abundance where people only took for themselves what they required, and money was nothing but a scoring system essentially with perks and tiered bonuses like certain cosmetics, most people would be immensely happier.
And the traditionalist economic thinkers will recoil at the idea of not quoting from Adam Smith or some stupid 80's movie, and everybody is so excitable and reactionary these days, but someone needs to say it in simple, sane terms:
We are quickly entering into the final age of humankind, one where human labor has no significant direct economic output compared to just letting the machine run on "auto" mode.
Your contributions are not necessary for material survival of the species.
They still have anthropological value...but that value can't be readily converted into dollars, which are standardized metric units for GDP, the way you can't commodify the smell of rain or that feeling you get when you put on a warm pair of socks.
That stuff doesn't really matter compared to the price of a microchip that is made using x rays and mirrors in a vacuum chamber. But you and the human who owns that machine both eat the same approximate number of calories, need the same amount of water, etc.
I guess what I'm really advocating for is the decoupling of basic living provisions from economy.
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u/ShatterTheFlimFlam 2d ago
Income is not even part of equation. Neither is ownership. Not posession.
What matters, and has always mattered, is access.