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by jeffool
5412 days ago
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If you do a GIS for "US manufacturing output" you'll see what the GP is talking about. Worker productivity has shot up over time, as has output. In return, far fewer workers are needed. I see this as a simple truth: We have arrived at a time where we have far fewer jobs than workers, and this won't be getting better any time soon. Either we decide to become a country of wildly disparate classes being the norm (think the favelas of larger Brazilian cities), or we need to find a way to spread the wealth, as our current economic model isn't doing it. And I don't necessarily think some socialist fantasy will save us; I don't know the answer. I just know what we have isn't getting people who want to work, paid. Maybe eliminating the minimum wage will encourage employment. Maybe we do need to bite the socialism bullet, and instead of Social Security, give everyone a guaranteed minimum income with a negative income tax. Maybe we just need to make the legal work week 32 hours. (Or more strictly enforce 40.) I'm not claiming to have an answer. But the jobs are leaving, both our nation, and existence due to increased productivity and increased automation. Wealth is concentrating, and becoming idle. This is bad for us all. |
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I'm a small-l libertarian and I support that in principle, because it's no more socialist than what we have today. We've already decided that we aren't going to let people starve, or die due to lack of basic health care. So given that, it's more efficient to just give everybody enough money for survival than to have hundreds of government agencies trying to fulfill specific needs, or to impose protectionist policies for the purpose of keeping inefficient jobs. That would also get rid of the perverse incentives that the working poor often face, where it's possible to get a raise and end up worse off because your benefits go to zero.