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In a democracy, if the majority of the population is unable to earn a living they can just vote themselves a living. Such a system also happens to be in the in
by bdw5204 3y ago
In a democracy, if the majority of the population is unable to earn a living they can just vote themselves a living.
Such a system also happens to be in the interest of the haves because they need consumers to purchase their products that they generate with machines.
If you can mass produce the production machines to the extent that everybody can have them, you can create a post-scarcity society[0] which is the only condition under which communism is a workable system.
Another possibility would be that the market simply produces other jobs that currently don't exist for all of the people put out of work. So far, that's what has happened after ever "job destroying" technological innovation.
[0]: Post-scarcity means the price of everything falls to 0 or very close to 0 because it is trivial to create.
- chongli 3y agoThere’s never going to be post-scarcity. Resources are finite, land is finite, energy is finite. These things may become ever-more concentrated into the hands of a few, but they’ll never be infinite. New sources can always be captured and monopolized. The alternative to people voting themselves an income is wealthy people taking away the vote. If they can defend their holdings with robotic drone armies and AI-powered mass surveillance then democracy will collapse along with the economy. We need look no further than Eritrea for a real-world case study of what I’m talking about. A country with vast slums of people in absolute destitution kept separate from the wealthy aristocrats by walls and armed guards. Replace those guards with robots and there’s no reason that couldn’t happen here.
- drewcoo 3y agoScarcity doesn't mean "limited," it means "not enough." Enough but still limited is not longer scarce.