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My argument is "we don't live in a post-scarcity society, not even close". This is objectively true. There is nothing hypothetical about it.

michaelmrose 6y ago
We are objectively wealthy enough that everyone could have a place to live, enough food to eat, free medical care even to the point of expensive cancer treatment, free education if so much of our resources weren't directed towards enriching so few without sacrificing essential items. Even calculations about what is and isn't a reasonable expenditure are inherently polluted with the presumption that the current cost structure is an immutable condition as opposed to being the result of a system designed by the worlds dumbest,greediest,least worthy democracy to ever exist. To clarify what I'm trying to say is that because of the nature of physics warmth which is to say energy is a scarce quantity and will always be so but in the context of making sure everyone is warm its almost always very simple there actually IS enough to go around despite it being scarce. The same thing is true of food. We cannot afford infinite degrees of effort per patient but what we can afford is more than what most would consider sufficient.
- Frondo 6y ago
  For one of those -- homelessness -- the costs to society for not housing everyone exceed what it'd take to simply give everyone some fixed shelter. We still give medical care to homeless people, we jail them (at costs far greater than housing would be), we offer a variety of social programs that aren't housing, and it all adds up to much more than they had a stable place to live. We'd be jailing fewer of them, and their health care needs would be less if they weren't exposed to the elements through rough sleeping night after night. Why don't we? Because of so many people who point out the unfairness of someone who's not working at all getting housing for free from the government, when so many working people are struggling to house themselves. So there's perhaps other unfairness at work there that people are unwilling to look at how solve (why is housing so expensive, relative to wages? why do we expect people to work 2-3 jobs and have no leisure time, no time to relax, just to satisfy the basic needs of survival?), and that alone seems to have boxed people into a system where we're jailing people and leaving them out in the elements, even though it costs us all more in the long run. Where health care is concerned, what bothers me most is how outrageously expensive US care is for its outcomes, compared to every other western nation. That doesn't seem right, and doesn't seem like a good use of our society's money or human effort, expending so much money on systems that could easily be made unnecessary -- like medical billing and the mass of health care insurers. (And then I had an ex whose father is a doctor, a GP, who lived a very nice life, and insisted that he deserved that...when I asked him what he thought about how doctors in other countries aren't so richly compensated, he only responded, "hey I went to med school, I deserve this," and he too couldn't conceive of a different ordering of things, because...I'm guessing here...his mind went to the couple of new cars in the driveway of his massive house in a tony suburb of an expensive east coast city, and how, had he had less, he might have just one new car instead of two...but that's a speculation on my part. I wasn't inside his head.)
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Not sure why you've been downvoted, as this all tracks with what I've read. SF has been spending $5k per month per tent in the "sleeping villages" set up for homeless people during the pandemic[0]. That $5k could easily pay for a decent studio apartment, utilities, groceries, a phone plan, etc. [0] https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/05/san-francisco-paying-5000-per-month-homeless-tent/ https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/05/san-francisc...
    - fastball 6y ago
      That would require less NIMBYism in SF though, which doesn't look to be happening any time soon.
- fastball 6y ago
  > We are objectively wealthy enough that everyone could have a place to live, enough food to eat, free medical care even to the point of expensive cancer treatment, free education if so much of our resources weren't directed towards enriching so few without sacrificing essential items. I'd love to see your math on this.
  - grecy 6y ago
    At least a dozen counties already achieve basically all of this, today. They have done for a couple of decades. That's plenty of proof.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Care to name them? Medical care without limitations definitely does not exist in ~dozen countries, and education isn't entirely free in most of the places that have nationalized healthcare either.
      - grecy 6y ago
        Running through a filtered list of OECD countries: (here's 16) Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland
        Mandatum 6y ago
        Granted the line for elective procedures or medicine varies by country, but necessary medical treatment is very well covered in all of the above countries. Most will pay for travel to other countries for specialist treatment if it doesn't exist within its own borders and is approved within their own system.

michaelmrose 6y ago

We are objectively wealthy enough that everyone could have a place to live, enough food to eat, free medical care even to the point of expensive cancer treatment, free education if so much of our resources weren't directed towards enriching so few without sacrificing essential items. Even calculations about what is and isn't a reasonable expenditure are inherently polluted with the presumption that the current cost structure is an immutable condition as opposed to being the result of a system designed by the worlds dumbest,greediest,least worthy democracy to ever exist. To clarify what I'm trying to say is that because of the nature of physics warmth which is to say energy is a scarce quantity and will always be so but in the context of making sure everyone is warm its almost always very simple there actually IS enough to go around despite it being scarce. The same thing is true of food. We cannot afford infinite degrees of effort per patient but what we can afford is more than what most would consider sufficient.

Frondo 6y ago
For one of those -- homelessness -- the costs to society for not housing everyone exceed what it'd take to simply give everyone some fixed shelter. We still give medical care to homeless people, we jail them (at costs far greater than housing would be), we offer a variety of social programs that aren't housing, and it all adds up to much more than they had a stable place to live. We'd be jailing fewer of them, and their health care needs would be less if they weren't exposed to the elements through rough sleeping night after night. Why don't we? Because of so many people who point out the unfairness of someone who's not working at all getting housing for free from the government, when so many working people are struggling to house themselves. So there's perhaps other unfairness at work there that people are unwilling to look at how solve (why is housing so expensive, relative to wages? why do we expect people to work 2-3 jobs and have no leisure time, no time to relax, just to satisfy the basic needs of survival?), and that alone seems to have boxed people into a system where we're jailing people and leaving them out in the elements, even though it costs us all more in the long run. Where health care is concerned, what bothers me most is how outrageously expensive US care is for its outcomes, compared to every other western nation. That doesn't seem right, and doesn't seem like a good use of our society's money or human effort, expending so much money on systems that could easily be made unnecessary -- like medical billing and the mass of health care insurers. (And then I had an ex whose father is a doctor, a GP, who lived a very nice life, and insisted that he deserved that...when I asked him what he thought about how doctors in other countries aren't so richly compensated, he only responded, "hey I went to med school, I deserve this," and he too couldn't conceive of a different ordering of things, because...I'm guessing here...his mind went to the couple of new cars in the driveway of his massive house in a tony suburb of an expensive east coast city, and how, had he had less, he might have just one new car instead of two...but that's a speculation on my part. I wasn't inside his head.)
- kelnos 6y ago
  Not sure why you've been downvoted, as this all tracks with what I've read. SF has been spending $5k per month per tent in the "sleeping villages" set up for homeless people during the pandemic[0]. That $5k could easily pay for a decent studio apartment, utilities, groceries, a phone plan, etc. [0] https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/05/san-francisco-paying-5000-per-month-homeless-tent/ https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/05/san-francisc...
  - fastball 6y ago
    That would require less NIMBYism in SF though, which doesn't look to be happening any time soon.
fastball 6y ago
> We are objectively wealthy enough that everyone could have a place to live, enough food to eat, free medical care even to the point of expensive cancer treatment, free education if so much of our resources weren't directed towards enriching so few without sacrificing essential items. I'd love to see your math on this.
- grecy 6y ago
  At least a dozen counties already achieve basically all of this, today. They have done for a couple of decades. That's plenty of proof.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Care to name them? Medical care without limitations definitely does not exist in ~dozen countries, and education isn't entirely free in most of the places that have nationalized healthcare either.
    - grecy 6y ago
      Running through a filtered list of OECD countries: (here's 16) Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland
      - Mandatum 6y ago
        Granted the line for elective procedures or medicine varies by country, but necessary medical treatment is very well covered in all of the above countries. Most will pay for travel to other countries for specialist treatment if it doesn't exist within its own borders and is approved within their own system.