[georgewsinger]

I am a capitalist libertarian, with anarcho-capitalist sympathies, and I too support the long-term abolition of "work" as we know it.

Ending toil is, in principle, impossible with our current level of societal wealth. We will need major, non-trivial technological innovation in order to truly escape our toil (through capitalism, of course :). Teams of innovators will need to build out AI & robotic infrastructure (among other things) in order to make this happen.

I hope that humans will look back on us thousands (if not hundreds) of years into the future and look in horror at how hard we had to toil for our basic necessities.

The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today. It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.

[eyelidlessness]

> The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today.

What even is wealth if such abundance exists? I think you may misunderstand the left’s goal of redistribution. It isn’t about divvying scarcity equally, it’s about sharing and enabling the bounty you seem to be describing.

> It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.

But not all oxygen or dirt is equal. Some people experience a greater abundance of safe, clean air and rich, profitable soil. They tend to be the same people who experience a greater abundance generally.

[AshWolfy]

> The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today. It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.

This is hopeless naive. There are more houses than there are homeless people, and yet the prices of houses continues to rise. Dirt and oxygen are not hoarded because they are impossible to hoard, anything that can be hoarded will be hoarded.

[sparkie]

> yet the prices of houses continues to rise

Or, the value of the money continues to decline.

If you measure house prices in bitcoin over the past 10 years, then house prices have been in decline relative to bitcoin. This trend is likely to continue for some time.

Under disinflationary money, houses will become a consumable rather than an attempt to store wealth. The cost of housing will decrease over time (although wages will also decrease over time). Having a home sat there not collecting rent will cause you to lose money.

The desire to redistribute wealth will hit a hurdle when the wealth owners can store it in their heads and have it be completely unseizable, plausibly deniable and undetectable anyway.

[AshWolfy]

Bitcoin isnt money, you cant pay for almost any house with bitcoin. Deflation also isnt good because that will cause debts to rise relative to wages. If houses cease to be a source of wealth that will mean ruin for million. What does storing wealth in your head even mean?

If this is how low your understanding of economics are then i understand why you are a libertarian

[sparkie]

Bitcoin is money. The best money that has ever existed because it can't be debased and is more difficult to steal.

That it isn't widely accepted as a form of payment yet is nothing to worry about. It will come. It is inevitable.

Deflation is good because things get cheaper over time. The solution to debt is to stop getting into it.

Houses have already ceased to be a source of wealth. All house prices are declining in value w.r.t bitcoin. You can't stop this. Complaining won't get you anywhere. You can choose to ignore or accept this reality.

Storing wealth in your head means you can memorize a passphrase or BIP-39 seed phrase and recover access to your bitcoin anywhere on any machine, without having physical backups of your private keys which might get stolen.

How much do you understand about economics? Have you read any of the Austrians or are you just a fiat economist who ignores them?

[PurpleFoxy]

Homelessness is largely not a housing supply issue. In my country you can quite easily get government welfare payments for an unlimited time which can realistically cover housing and all essentials. And yet we still have a load of homeless people.

The problem is these people don’t need a house, they need a full time caregiver to manage their addictions and mental illnesses. The government and people are somewhat happy to give welfare payments but not cover the expense of giving the level of care these people need.

[tao_oat]

> The problem is these people don’t need a house, they need a full time caregiver to manage their addictions and mental illnesses

Housing may only be one part of the picture, but housing-first policies have proven to be the most cost-effective way of solving homelessness: https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/sep/14/less... and https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housi...

[AshWolfy]

over half of homeless people in america have jobs, sixty to eighty percent dont have an addiction, seventy five percent dont have a serious mental illness and fifty five percent dont have any mental illness at all

im sure for some people thats the reason, but it is clearly not all

[Bakary]

>The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral)

While not a leftist per se, I've always found this concept of redistribution immorality to be a little strange. Much wealth is already regularly redistributed from value creator to rent-seeker. Laws can be optimized to serve the needs of corporations. Much of wealth creation also depends on the previous work of others in the same environment, whether it's infrastructure or even the work that goes in having a decent place to live where people can afford to be a healthy consuming market. Would your typical software engineer have been as successful in Sierra Leone?

The flipside of that concept is to have privatized profits but collectivized negative externalities. That's not to mention entire industries consisting in intelligent and skilled workers spending their lives redistributing wealth from a wealthy person to another (traders, corporate lawyers, etc.)

That's why injecting the concept of morality feels misplaced: if the there already is redistribution, then workers taking a share through governmental action is just an actor exercising whatever power they had, where they previously did not and other actors did.

[chordalkeyboard]

> That's why injecting the concept of morality feels misplaced: if the there already is redistribution, then workers taking a share through governmental action is just an actor exercising whatever power they had, where they previously did not and other actors did.

My perspective is that people who allocate capital see this effort as workers becoming rent-seekers. So there are capitalists, and a capitalist rent-seekers; and there are workers, and worker rent-seekers.

> if the there already is redistribution,

So if people are opposed to the rent-seeking, they might fell that the correct decision is to avoid increasing the amount of rent-seeking.

> The flipside of that concept is to have privatized profits but collectivized negative externalities.

This exists and is terrible.

> That's not to mention entire industries consisting in intelligent and skilled workers spending their lives redistributing wealth from a wealthy person to another (traders, corporate lawyers, etc.)

So some of this is actual productive work that allocates capital or resolves disputes, and its not always easy to draw the line between parasitic activity and productive activity in these domains. Even if the line can be drawn in theory its not clear how to regulate it. And the regulatory effort is itself vulnerable to parasitism, rent-seeking, and capture by the object of regulation.

[Bakary]

>My perspective is that people who allocate capital see this effort as workers becoming rent-seekers. So there are capitalists, and a capitalist rent-seekers; and there are workers, and worker rent-seekers.

Out of these two phenomena, which do you think is the most problematic when it comes to making a less hellish society? Usually capital allocators have captured massive surpluses without giving equivalent productivity in return, and the work of allocating capital is romanticized by those same allocators to be far more productive than it probably is in reality. In reality, the concept of privatized profits and collectivized externalities is so central as to erase most other concerns. Not to mention that the work that actually generates capital or labor itself will logically be far more important in aggregate to work that merely allocates capital they did not generate, even if of course that work can have positive consequences.

>So some of this is actual productive work that allocates capital or resolves disputes, and its not always easy to draw the line between parasitic activity and productive activity in these domains

If these professions were to strike, would the public even notice unless told to? Some specific capital owners would not get wealth redistributed to them from other unluckier owners with less redistribution specialists, but the welfare of the rest of the population would not be impacted since the actual wealth produced would still be there.

[chordalkeyboard]

> Out of these two phenomena, which do you think is the most problematic when it comes to making a less hellish society?

I'm not sure I could differentiate on the basis of some objective criteria. Capital rent-seekers seem to attempt to build a moat around their capital so that other capitalists can't compete with them and drive the rate of return down. Worker rent-seekers seem to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the social fabric in order to parasitize the system. They both take advantage of the regulatory system in order to enable this activity. The capitalist rent-seekers each individually have a larger effect, but there are many more worker-level rent-seekers.

> Usually capital allocators have captured massive surpluses without giving equivalent productivity in return, and the work of allocating capital is romanticized by those same allocators to be far more productive than it probably is in reality.

I'm not buying that. Allocating capital is productive activity, its what enables the workers to work more productively. The capitalist risks his capital by making allocation decisions, the profit he earns is his wage. You want me to give the worker credit for being productive when he is so productive because the capitalist created the conditions for that productivity by hiring him and giving him access to tools. Some other capitalist would have made different, possibly inferior, allocation decisions and the worker wouldn't have been as productive. People also romanticize labor, and labor is a necessary disutility.

> Not to mention that the work that actually generates capital or labor itself will logically be far more important in aggregate to work that merely allocates capital they did not generate, even if of course that work can have positive consequences.

Correctly allocating capital does make more capital. Allocating capital is labor. Investment decisions generate more capital.

> If these professions were to strike, would the public even notice unless told to?

Yes, they would. People who want to sue other people would have difficulty finding a lawyer. People with pending disputes wouldn't reach timely resolution and would have to find other dispute resolution methods. People who want to invest their surplus would find it harder to invest, and would have to find another way to allocate their surplus, since the investment market was on strike. People who wanted to find other people to invest in capital for their business would be unable to, and innovation would decrease.

> Some specific capital owners would not get wealth redistributed to them from other unluckier owners with less redistribution specialists, but the welfare of the rest of the population would not be impacted since the actual wealth produced would still be there.

Wealth is continually increasing. You're suggesting that we could stop generating more wealth with no ill effect.

[chongli]

We will never have an abundance of land, at least not without colonizing the galaxy. In a post-work society, people who own all the land will effectively own everyone else. How will people afford rent?

[Noos]

I don't get this. Go out and drive on a highway sometime.

I do, and I'm not in a particularly big state (small New England one.) Yet I pass empty miles and miles of forest, often without a single building in site. Even in normal streets I can go fifteen minutes down my road by car, and the houses thin out to nothing.

Unless you restrict the world to maybe what, the 100 most dense megacities, there's insane amounts of empty land out there. We are not that dense. The owning and restricting of land through law in many ways seems to be more a part of capitalistic society than a requirement; people have to own land to make money or not make money.

[AshWolfy]

Maybe there is a reason housing isnt built on that land. Maybe we shouldnt be bulldozing every forest just so we dont have to rethink how we organize society

[daralthus]

You can get rid of toil, automate the whole world and the day's needs, but it will be just used as a leverage for power. People don't not only have material needs.