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>Sure. But solving that involves a complete overhaul of the current capitalist system The current capitalist system, maybe, but I think it is perfectly workabl

>Sure. But solving that involves a complete overhaul of the current capitalist system The current capitalist system, maybe, but I think it is perfectly workable within some flavor of capitalism. In fact, I think that having a solid social safety net would push capitalism to even greater heights of efficiency. With the notable exception of the taxation to pay it people would be making transactions that are guaranteed to be a net positive. That assumes, of course, that paying for such a system isn't an overall negative which is debatable (but more and more plausible with productivity gains over the last century or two).

vertex-four 10y ago
> In fact, I think that having a solid social safety net would push capitalism to even greater heights of efficiency. I live in the UK. We have a solid social safety net. The issue is that it exists to support a capitalist understanding of wages - i.e. that your wage is a result of a market, which is more-or-less unrelated to the value that you create through your work (except insofar as an upper limit is created) and more to do with how many people and companies you're competing with to do the work. A "safety net" which somehow ensures, in perpetuity, that people are able to work for a wage which has some relation to the value they create winds up looking a lot like certain forms of socialism. But as with all real-world politics, it winds up being blurry.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  > that your wage is a result of a market, which is more-or-less unrelated to the value that you create through your work ... and more to do with how many people and companies you're competing with to do the work. That's how supply and demand works. The wages are low because the more people are looking for a particular job, the more people there are willing to do it for less than others. In a well functioning society, this is a signal saying "we have enough people doing this job, go do something else". The problem is that our society doesn't make it easy for people to do something else. Generally people get one chance at education, and if they make a bad choice, they're screwed. And beyond that, there's nothing that ensures that there will even be enough demand for labour that everyone can earn a decent living.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Yes. Supply and demand as applied to compensation for labour is a capitalist idea of how society should work, and results in all sorts of issues, including the ones discussed in this thread and the fact that the value people create gets siphoned into the capitalist class by way of the companies they're forced to work for to survive, for less compensation than the value they create. The solutions to this lie in the ideas of worker-led organisations of varying kinds, mutual aid, and more generally the reduction of the role a capitalist class takes in the production of value. And yes, accessible education to all.

vertex-four 10y ago

> In fact, I think that having a solid social safety net would push capitalism to even greater heights of efficiency. I live in the UK. We have a solid social safety net. The issue is that it exists to support a capitalist understanding of wages - i.e. that your wage is a result of a market, which is more-or-less unrelated to the value that you create through your work (except insofar as an upper limit is created) and more to do with how many people and companies you're competing with to do the work. A "safety net" which somehow ensures, in perpetuity, that people are able to work for a wage which has some relation to the value they create winds up looking a lot like certain forms of socialism. But as with all real-world politics, it winds up being blurry.

aninhumer 10y ago
> that your wage is a result of a market, which is more-or-less unrelated to the value that you create through your work ... and more to do with how many people and companies you're competing with to do the work. That's how supply and demand works. The wages are low because the more people are looking for a particular job, the more people there are willing to do it for less than others. In a well functioning society, this is a signal saying "we have enough people doing this job, go do something else". The problem is that our society doesn't make it easy for people to do something else. Generally people get one chance at education, and if they make a bad choice, they're screwed. And beyond that, there's nothing that ensures that there will even be enough demand for labour that everyone can earn a decent living.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Yes. Supply and demand as applied to compensation for labour is a capitalist idea of how society should work, and results in all sorts of issues, including the ones discussed in this thread and the fact that the value people create gets siphoned into the capitalist class by way of the companies they're forced to work for to survive, for less compensation than the value they create. The solutions to this lie in the ideas of worker-led organisations of varying kinds, mutual aid, and more generally the reduction of the role a capitalist class takes in the production of value. And yes, accessible education to all.