[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.