I don't know about you, but I eventually get full when I eat dinner. I would propose that most people actually have limits to their demands; that the demand we see expressed is merely a symptom of pervasive discontent with present material conditions.
Sure - there is a limit to how much food we can eat. But not to the quality of that food. Other things being equal, wouldn't you prefer your meals cooked by an excellent rather than a rubbish cook? Wouldn't you prefer access to more varied, fresher, higher quality ingredients?
Imagine having this conversation in late 19th century England (or the US). Your society has already experienced a sustained economic growth for decades. You live better than your parents or grand-parents. If you were to argue for an ultimate limit for consumer demand,
where would you place it? And how would you feel today, in the 21st century, being stuck at a level considered ample in the late 19th century?
In other words, demand is not infinite. If nothing else there are constraints imposed by space-time (there are, after all, only so many seconds in the day where you could be using all of your effort to consume things).
Demand isn't finite or, at least, there is no way of ascertaining where the limits of demand might lie. Sure, at some point you don't demand more food - only better food. Not more cars, but faster, safer and more comfortable cars. You may demand more leisure, longer vacations. You may demand more services which depend on human labour (nursing, medical attention, massage, chef-quality cooking, one-on-one tutoring, etc, etc.).
No, there is no visible or ascertainable limit to demand, this side of paradise.
All that is required is for the effort required to create specialists to drop to nothing or nearly nothing. For example, if computing power becomes so cheap that medical expert systems can turn anyone into a reasonable diagnostician at effectively trivial prices. Computers are actually pretty good at that sort of thing, so that potentially provides a solution.
Ah, post-scarcity nirvana. In which computers will do all the work, and humans can have grapes dropped into their mouths by robot servants...
Seriously though, in such a society, the notion of a physician will cease to apply. But whatever professions are relevant (somebody has to program those computers, for example) will still be associated with differing marginal values. An hour of, say, an expert medical system designer would still be worth more than an hour of, say, a nursing aid. And getting a personal qualified as the former to have to work in the capacity of the latter is wasteful.
It's wealthier by some measures, not by others. That enters into the fundamental multimodal optimization problem in economics--or, in other words, the lack of a functional system of valuation.
But we do have a functional system of valuation, namely how much people are willing to pay for stuff. It works. If members of society, for example, derive pleasure from seeing qualified professionals part-time as unskilled workers, that is perfectly consistent with capitalism, even anarcho-capitalism. All that has to happen is for people to
voluntarily pay enough to induce those professionals to sweep floors for the public's entertainment...
Why would you want to? It's kind of an odd impulse. Do you just want to say "I own a factory?"
A factory doesn't need to be a multi-billion-dollar facility employing thousands of people. It can refer to any size of production facility. And so no, wishing to own a factory isn't an odd impulse. You may want to produce goods that other people don't believe in. Or in ways others aren't interested in. You are an individual, and you have your own ideas which you might want to implement without seeking the approval of thousands of others.
Depends on the socialist model. Under anarcho-syndicalism, for example, there would be absolutely no restriction whatsoever on the ownership of property because society would stop recognizing property rights. Remember; you need not restrict ownership to abolish property. All that is required is for the government to stop granting property privileges. Property is not some naturally preexisting thing that requires active resistance to abolish. Property exists only because governments say that it does--if governments stopped protecting the property privilege, it would literally cease to be.
Not quite. "Property" refers to physical objects (or locations) which
society (not government) recognises as somebody's exclusive domain of control. All societies have property, though what constitutes property depends on technological development and production modes. For example, in a hunter-gatherer (or a nomad) society, land doesn't tend to be property in the exclusive sense, although use-rights in land are still very important. But personal property (your bow and arrow, for example) are still property.
Conversely, in the 20th century, radio frequencies started to be treated as property (albeit, unfortunately, government-owned).
But make no mistake about it - every society requires property.
You don't. Without property, what's the point in payments?
So without property, every person can just help themselves to whatever they fancy. No locks, no fences. Just go in and help yourself to whatever food, electronics, art, furniture, clothing, cars or other goods you feel like. Hey, why don't we go and sleep in the bed of Comrade Johns tonight?
"What your labor contributes to the well-being of society." Or roughly something like that, anyway.
That's not nearly good enough. How is that contribution going to be quantified? By whom? Using what standards?
If a job is important enough that it becomes self-evidently necessary, then obviously some people will consider it worthwhile enough to spend some of their time doing it. For example, repairing sewers because one does not want to live in their own filth.
What if not enough people volunteer to repair the city's sewers? After all, the benefit to me from repairing the sewers is much smaller than the cost in terms of time spent doing something unpleasant?
Alternatively, communities and cooperatives might well arrive at their own agreements as to the division of unpleasant but necessary work--agreements to provide certain services in exchange for others. This does not actually require a wage system to arrange.
It would require wages in all but name (and efficiency). Ultimately, people would need to be offered something of value (to them) in exchange for doing something unpleasant but necessary. What some people value is different from what others do. It is thus far more efficient to provide value to people in a form that they can readily exchange for whatever they actually value most. In other words - money. Give people money (or what is in effect, even if not in name, money), in exchange for doing work, and you have wages, whether that's what you call them or not.
The more hung up you are about labels and appearances, the less efficient the system will become. Thus expect to see "vouchers" instead of "money", "reward" instead of "salary". But look under the labels, and you'll see the same thing again.
Let me ask this; why would garbage collection be necessary for the functioning of society if people had nothing in particular they were expected to do? Couldn't they just take their own garbage out? Garbage collection only seems necessary because everyone is spending all their time doing some specific job for other people--no one has the time to actually do that themselves. Even if we assume that it is necessary and assume that there aren't enough people willing to do such an apparently(?) necessary job... why couldn't they just arrange to handle that on a rotating basis on a neighborhood level?
Are you seriously suggesting we do away with the huge benefits of the division of labour, and go back to each doing everything for themselves?
Division of labour didn't arise out of some theoretician's dream. It emerges naturally whenever you allow people to freely interact with each other. Time and time again, in every society that progressed beyond hunter-gatherer existence.
The alternative basically condemns most of humanity to perpetual slavery.
Actually, the alternative is working remarkably well to lift most of humanity to unprecedented levels of prosperity...
Let's look at this another way--we've currently had to structure our entire society in such a way that it forces some people to do work that (apparently) is so intuitively distasteful that the only way they can be compelled to do it is to offer them a choice between working and starving.
Don't you think there could be a better way? Especially as it relates to tasks that are fundamentally nothing more than one person sacrificing their own future to serve the trivial whims of other people? If garbage collection is an obviously necessary function for society, don't you think that people will find that obvious enough to perform the work required to make it happen?
A system in which some people specialise in being garbage collectors is better for
everybody, including, first and foremost, for garbage collectors.
It is a system in which every person finds (or is as close as humanly possible to finding) the occupation in which they most productively help satisfy the wants of other members of society. A garbage society doesn't have his job because otherwise he would starve. Rather, he has this job because nothing else he can do is of more value to other members of society. He is rewarded for doing that job by gaining access to the fruits of the labour of all other members of society.
Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.
- By skinster
- By QatzelOk
- By litwin