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I think you're missing an important factor. Consider how many classes of jobs can be automated away over the next 50 years. Boat captains can easily be one of t

I think you're missing an important factor. Consider how many classes of jobs can be automated away over the next 50 years. Boat captains can easily be one of those. Pervasive automation changes the argument, and the fact is, it's already happening across many industries. I think it's about time to start thinking about a society where employment is only available to a small fraction of people. It would be much better to have a controlled, thought out transition than to deny the possibility until we end up with mass unemployment.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> I think it's about time to start thinking about a society where employment is only available to a small fraction of people. It would be much better to have a controlled, thought out transition than to deny the possibility until we end up with mass unemployment. The key, as I see it, is to aggressively pursue a more broad distribution of capital, and to move old age/disability safety net programs (and non-elite health insurance) away from the premise that those who will need them will be people whose income is derived largely from labor. In a sense, this is the "ownership society" that Republicans liked to talk about around the first term of the second Bush Administration, but the actual policies that they pushed (which rewarded current holders of capital and increased the burden on current laborers) were pretty much the exact opposite of what is needed to get there.