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Why would society want a tax policy that favors human labor over machine labor? We want the machines to take over but we all want to be sipping Mai Tais on th
by wvenable 9y ago
Why would society want a tax policy that favors human labor over machine labor? We want the machines to take over but we all want to be sipping Mai Tais on the beach while it happens.
- kbenson 9y agoPossibly because people with more time than responsibilities to fill that time often end up stirring things up, especially when in close proximity to each other. Just look at college. Society does place a premium on stability, so too much of this might not be a good thing.
- and0 9y agoA lot of students are pretty busy. And what are these horrors of college dorm life you're speaking of? Aside from campus rape, of course, but that doesn't seem to be a result of idleness.
- kbenson 9y agoProtests, activism, etc. I'm not saying it's bad, just that a lot of calls for change happen when people are less occupied by putting food on the sable for themselves and their family. Change may be good or bad, but a lot of change, all at once, often has very negative short term consequences for most people, and there's no guarantee that with these negative consequences it's a better path than a slower change. Civil wars are examples of fairly negative consequences of massive change in a short time. I imagine there's likely a certain level of population that are activists under which a society is fairly stable, and over which makes society fairly unstable (possibly altered by the vehemence of belief). Personally, I would rather live in a more stable society with a good amount of activism for change (hopefully for the better) than in a society tearing itself apart.
- rrggrr 9y agoSelf-esteem = productivity for many people. I'm pretty sure we do not want the population on a permanent vacation.
- wvenable 9y agoI doubt that performing a job that a machine could do better merely because there is some kind of tax incentive would lead to a lot of self-esteem.
- maxxxxx 9y ago"We want the machines to take over but we all want to be sipping Mai Tais on the beach while it happens." I don't think this will happen. Only the machine owners will sit at the beach and complain about the freeloaders they have to feed through welfare or UBI. Otherwise we would already work 20 hour weeks.
- dragonwriter 9y agoThe trick is democratizing capital so that "the owners of the machines" is roughly equivalent to the population at large. (I'm not talking about ownership through the state, just democratizing individual ownership.)
- maxxxxx 9y agoThe trend seems to be going the other way though.
- dragonwriter 9y agoYes, that's a real problem.