[enraged_camel]

>>"traditional slavery" which is man-made.

So is capitalism. So is the corporate hierarchy. Heck, the society we live in right now is man-made. Why does that matter as an evaluation criteria?

Yes, food and shelter have always required work. The difference is that they have required work by the person for the person. Or by the person for their family. Or by the person for their tribe. This meant that you worked only as much was actually needed - i.e. subsistence - and no more.

That is a very different set up than what we have now. The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible.

[enoch_r]

> The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible.

What? It's perfectly possible to receive "subsistence healthcare" in today's society--just never go to the doctor or take any medicine. If you want to splurge, do some research online, and you'll gain knowledge leagues ahead of "subsistence" medicine.

[enraged_camel]

I think you grossly misunderstood what I said.

What I meant by "subsistence living" is working enough to cover the essentials, and no more. These essentials include food, water, shelter, and healthcare.

The problem is the last one: it is astronomically expensive, which means that subsistence living still means working a ridiculous amount of hours.

[rwallace]

Okay, but if you define the essentials that way, not one person who ever lived before the mid-twentieth century or thereabouts was ever able to obtain the essentials for any price. (The standard of healthcare you get today by never seeing a doctor in your entire life, just taking into account the protection you get from other people having been vaccinated against the deadliest infectious diseases, is better than anything that used to be available to kings and presidents.)

So if you want a better standard of living than Caesar or Charlemagne or Washington could have dreamed of, you have to work, yes. Is that shocking or unreasonable? I doubt the men I just named would have thought so.

[chii]

i understand the sentiments, but i must point out how wrong it is to think that "subsistance" living is possible.

Lets just talk food - the work required to produce enough food to feed 1 person is astronomical and completely inefficient if everyone did it for themselves. In order to reach some efficiency (i mean, you aren't gonna just eat raw wheat right?!), there must be specialisation. Which means that if you were to really live alone, you'd have to aquire all the skills and all the equipment in order to produce food.

You can substitute food for anything else, and the story is the same.

The world as it is now, is pretty m uch the result of specialization over the millenia, your job (if you have one, or your business) is in fact some form of specialization, and it is this specialization that allows each and every one to eat, because they contributed back something they specalized in.

[wffurr]

Don't forget that the rent is too damn high. Shelter don't come cheap.

[jkaunisv1]

Don't forget you're choosing to live in a place with rent.

[LekkoscPiwa]

Being a slave he has no choice. He has to live there where the jobs are. And where the jobs are, the rent is high.

[ams6110]

If you are really existing at that level you'll qualify for medicaid and you don't have to worry about health care. Just go to the ER.

[lars512]

Move outside the US to a country with socialised medicine. Done.

[LekkoscPiwa]

I hope you're not sarcastic. According to the CIA Factbook the US doesn't even make it to the top 50 countries in the world in life expectancy. And there are only 19 developed countries in the world, this makes us worse than 31 developing nations in life expectancy. Used to be number 1 in 1960s.

I'm a dual Polish/US citizen. Poland has better life expectancy according to the CIA Factbook than the US does. Poland had an average income of 240usd per year as recently as 1989. It's about $20k today. Still can provide better life expectancy than the US. Shame.

[lars512]

I was deadly serious, and I agree with you.

I'm a Swedish/Australian dual-citizen, and although both countries have higher costs of goods, it seems a most reasonable price to pay to have functioning public health care.

[hyperplane]

> The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible.

No. Subsistence living is entirely possible - there are millions of people doing just that somewhere in backwoods wherever, across a multitude of political systems and states, all over the world.

What you want as "subsistence living" is not its definition. What you're talking about is "how much labor cost it requires to maintain your current lifestyle in this current political system".

EDIT: I was late on this reply I guess.

[coryrc]

> The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible.

You don't seem to understand what subsistence living means.

[sliverstorm]

This meant that you worked only as much was actually needed - i.e. subsistence - and no more.

You do know that in agrarian societies this meant 12 hours a day 7 days a week with no holidays ever? And that children worked in the fields instead of going to school?

People don't subsistence farm because they don't want anything more than the bare minimum for survival. They subsistence farm because the bare minimum for survival is the best they can manage.

[enraged_camel]

I'm not sure if your second paragraph necessarily leads from your first one.

I have two questions for you that you should think about.

Question 1: Why is it that, as our productivity increases, we find more things to "fill up" our workday, instead of working fewer hours for the same output (which would satisfy our needs)?

Question 2: Forget about need. Do people actually want the things they are working for today? Or is it that we are socially conditioning them, from the moment they are born, that a consumption-based lifestyle is one they need to strive for?

[sliverstorm]

Question 1: Because people want more than they need. This is practically an axiom. You don't need much more than a pile of sticks to sleep under, food, and water, but I bet even you would agree this is not satisfying.

We aren't unique in this regard either. My cat needs air, water, and food. My cat wants attention, affection, and canned wet food.

Question 2: I wasn't socially conditioned to want the fan that keeps me cool when it is hot. I wasn't socially conditioned to enjoy beer. I wasn't socially conditioned to like literature. Sure, some people are working for things they have no real use or desire for, but IMO there are plenty of things that improve life beyond the truest basic needs, that are worth continuing to strive for. Amusement, art, intellectual pursuits, athleticism, etc...

[enraged_camel]

>>Question 1: Because people want more than they need. This is practically an axiom.

Is it? There are several hundred million Buddhists who might disagree with you.

>>We aren't unique in this regard either. My cat needs air, water, and food. My cat wants attention, affection, and canned wet food.

Your cat wants attention, affection and canned wet food because as a pet it has gotten used to those things. There are a billion felines out there that are quite happy with living alone and marking their territory and hunting for and munching on raw meat.

>>You don't need much more than a pile of sticks to sleep under, food, and water, but I bet even you would agree this is not satisfying.

It depends. I love to go cross-country backpacking and the only things I bring with me are the bare essentials: tent, sleeping bag, food and water, clothing and some emergency supplies.

>>Question 2: I wasn't socially conditioned to want the fan that keeps me cool when it is hot. I wasn't socially conditioned to enjoy beer. I wasn't socially conditioned to like literature. Sure, some people are working for things they have no real use or desire for, but IMO there are plenty of things that improve life beyond the truest basic needs, that are worth continuing to strive for. Amusement, art, intellectual pursuits, athleticism, etc...

Your argument is shifting away from what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you do not have to work 40+ hours a week for any of those things. You only have to do it because our capitalistic society is engineered that way.

Think about it like this: the productivity of the average worker has increased tremendously over the last century. Yet, instead of reducing work hours to account for the fact that we can produce the same amount of goods and services in less time, we have opted to work the same number of hours (or even longer in some cases) to produce more than society needs.

Even if everyone worked 20 hours a week, you could still enjoy your beer and athleticism and art and intellectual pursuits. In fact, you would have more time for them!

[jl6]

You work to pay for what you want. If you want less, then you can work less. Those millions of Buddhists are very happy to live in a capitalist world.

[hvs]

The Buddhists wouldn't disagree, they would agree and state that it is an axiom of their philosophy. The whole point of Buddhism is that people want more than they need and that it offers a way out.

[enraged_camel]

No, the whole point of Buddhism is that capitalism teaches people to want more than they need.

It is not an inherent human quality. Our ancestors in the African Savannah weren't going out of their way to acquire material goods. They were lean.

[bjourne]

That wasn't universally true. In northern europe winters and long nights significantly reduced the number of hours they could work. Sure, they worked extremely hard during planting and harvesting seasons, but the rest of the time not that much. Seasonal farming means that the result wasn't proportional to the work put in but rather to whether the crops got the right amount of sun and rain.

Before that, hunter gatherer groups worked even less because they were so few and the food so plentiful.

[ojbyrne]

"The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible" is US-centric. In large swathes of the world that is not in any way true.

[jessaustin]

I guess we should expect everyone to jump on that last sentence. Whatever, I don't consider inapt idiom to destroy this position. Perhaps we should say that subsistence living is impossible when one's peers drive new cars, carry new computing equipment, and pay for their health care with insurance.

[LekkoscPiwa]

Capitalism is as man made as theory of evolution. It's been discovered. Or it's just the way the societies always worked. Most efficient. Capitalism as an ideology is just noting the fact. Not inventing, just realization of how brutally nature is and how brutally it works. Socialism is invention from the realization that capitalism is morally bad. It's exactly like vegetarians agenda: killing animals is morally wrong. Yeah, but you know what we still need to eat. It's the same way with socialism: exploiting people is morally bad. Yeah, but you know the work still needs to be done.

[alexeisadeski3]

Capitalism is a recent invention. Societies in the past were not capitalistic, I challenge you to find one.

They were imperialistic, mercantilistic, corporatist, fascistic, communal, the list goes on.

Adam Smith invented capitalism as a response to the mercantilism of 18th century England.

[LekkoscPiwa]

>Capitalism is a recent invention. Societies in the past were not capitalistic, I challenge you to find one.

They all were. Not in social sense, but in the economic one. The challenge makes no sense. What is capitalism? As long as you let the markets work and don't interfere with people decisions on the market on a permanent basis this is capitalism. As you let the capital flow and accumulate. Once you impose restrictions to it based on ideology based in distrust to free economy or marktes, you don't have true capitalism. I.e. in communism private property is banned. Actually in some instances communists were propagating the idea of moneyless society. You haven't had such an assault on the idea of making money before socialism was invented. The first person who traded results of their labor for results of labor of someone else was a capitalist. And that's how it has always worked. Actually, even imposing penalties on people for doing trade, owning property, etc. as was common in communistic states, didn't change people's behavior who still wanted to enrich themselves. Meaning we are capitalists by design, it's as natural as eating meat. Might be inconvenient morally, but the facts are facts. Smith merely discovered/noticed the phenomenon and gave it a name. So not soon later it could have been and was attacked, but as long as our DNA doesn't change we are and will be capitalistic beings.

[alexeisadeski3]

You're confusing human competition with the complex economic system of capitalism.

It's a recent invention, and requires much vigilance and restraint to be kept alive. In many ways it is already gone.