[ertian]

The claim that work is inherently coercive is crazy to me. In order to live, we need food, clothing, shelter, comforts. Those take labor to produce. We've abstracted labor using money, allowing for specialization, so you can perform some specialized labor to provide for all your needs.

The needs aren't forced upon you. They're inherent. Labor is required to meet the needs you must meet in order to live (and live in comfort). They'd be needed even if no board of directors had ever sat in a meeting room. So who's coercing you? It's like a farmer hating his field: you're mad that companies 'make' you work to survive; a farmer might hate his field for 'making' him plant seeds to produce food.

I don't get it. It seems delusional.

[harwoodjp]

Automation makes jobs unnecessary. We should build social infrastructure that allows people to pursue their passions with basic necessities guaranteed. This has been possible for awhile now.

[chongli]

Nonsense. You can’t feed people with machines. You need raw materials and you need land to produce those materials from. That productive land is already owned by a bunch of people who currently use it to grow food and sell at market for profit.

Are you proposing we seize their land? That’s what the Soviets did. Millions died. With the weaponry we have today it could be hundreds of millions or billions. All for what? So people don’t have to work?

Now suppose we do collectivize all the farms, this time miraculously without killing everyone, and we successfully set up the automation to feed everyone (despite the fact that a lot of crops still need to be picked by hand due to a lack of robot technology). We still don’t eliminate the need for work. There’s tons of other stuff to be done. Building houses, computers, trains, planes, automobiles, and new factory robots. There’s still tons of research going into all this stuff, maintenance and repair. People still need to do all this work. Who is going to pay them? Who is going to own what they produce?

If I build a robot in my garage to automate harvesting the peppers I grow in my backyard, do I own it?

[kaibee]

> Are you proposing we seize their land?

And how did they come to own their land? You trace the claims back enough and it'll resolve to "some ancestor took it from someone else at the point of a spear". But we don't need to seize the land. A land value tax achieves the same goals while leaving in place all the nice free-market stuff you're talking about.

[chongli]

And how did they come to own their land? You trace the claims back enough and it'll resolve to "some ancestor took it from someone else at the point of a spear".

Yes, this falls under the same umbrella of theories that Nozick's rectification [1] falls under, where the same critiques and remedies apply.

A land value tax achieves the same goals while leaving in place all the nice free-market stuff you're talking about.

Now you're speaking my language. I'm fully on board with land value tax, as it purports to achieve many other goals that I value, such as fixing up a lot of dysfunctional city planning and development.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nozick-political/#RecHisI...

[harwoodjp]

> Are you proposing we seize their land?

Not necessarily, but I think the workers should operate their farm democratically.

> That’s what the Soviets did

The USSR was state capitalist. Workers' councils (or soviets) stopped being considered very early on.

> If I build a robot in my garage to automate harvesting the peppers I grow in my backyard, do I own it?

Yes, it's your personal property. Private property is something else.

[fragmede]

Only the poors need to. If you chose the right parents, you got a trust fund when you turned 18, and don't need to labor to afford life's necessities. There's just this spigot that gives you $5,000 a month, and you don't have to labor, ever. If rich kids get to live like that, why can't more people?

If we oversimplify a human's needs into clothing, food, and a dwelling, and ignore the concept of money, the industrial revolution has made it so that humanity is able to produce enough of those for everybody. It then becomes a distribution and coordination problem rather than a problem of there not being enough for everybody. Of course, if we abolished money there would be other problems, so it's still delusional, but if 100 people can make enough food and shelter and clothing for 1000 people using machines, why do the other 900 need to sit in an an office making spreadsheets five days a week?

It's not that simple, of course (because those machines have to come from somewhere), and homesteading is a thing, but it's food for thought.