SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday July 03 2014, @12:25PM
Having been cheated of my legitimately earned pay by members of the wealthy, and been told that I should feel sorry for them not myself because their precious ideas didn't pan out, their businesses failed, and they're hurting, I have a very low opinion of them. They kept everyone in the dark about the money having run out and not being able to make payroll. Deluded themselves into believing that the business would finally take off this month and they'd be able to make payroll, perhaps helped by the do-or-die pressure. Two had the cheek to ask me to continue working for them for free, would hate to see me go. I told them yes, but with some conditions so that it amounted to no. If they can persuade my landlord to let me live in my apartment for $0 rent, and can persuade grocery stores to give me free food and gas stations to give me free gas, and I can get whatever else I need for free, then sure, I'll work for free.
The wealthy are like those sorts of dogs who cannot stop eating as long as there is food in front of them. Put unlimited food in front of them and those dogs will eat themselves to death. The wealthy are like that with money and power. They can't help themselves, they just have to grab and hoard everything in sight, no matter how senseless, unfair, or harmful to society that may be. They go further. They concoct tons of rationalizations to justify the situation, and start believing their own bull, become very arrogant.
We as a society have really fallen down on this. We've let these dogs get away with it. Not good for us, or them.
As to technology, yes I think robots will eventually be able to do all our manual labor. A big change we may see is a scrapping of the notion that everyone should aspire to having a job. And would that be so bad? We should think more about what kind of world we will have and want. I'm not too sure that heaven is so heavenly, the good life is so good. Can we feel fulfilled spending all our time on leisure while robots do the labor? Maybe we can.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:20PM
A big change we may see is a scrapping of the notion that everyone should aspire to having a job. And would that be so bad?
It is very bad, but not because of some law of nature. It's simply because idle hands are the devil's workshop. You already have ghettos that are full of people who are perfectly acclimated to not having a job. What do they do instead? Humans cannot sit idly for years; humans are not plants. So they look for an activity that fits their education and IQ. (Not that they got much of education, with everyone knowing that they have no use for spherical trigonometry.) What occupation then befits them? Among non-violent, that would be drugs and alcohol. Among violent that would be crime. This is simply because people always want something that they don't have. But that's not all. Crime will exist even in a society where anyone can have anything without paying. This is because there is one more item that you cannot get in a store: power over others.
Human societies always depended on high employment and on hard, long work hours to pacify the common man. It is just a handy workaround. Officers in the army know it well; that's why they try to keep the soldier busy with something. Remove the need to work, and you get the whole world that is full of people in search of things to do. Even if you personally have no desire to become the King, there is always someone who doesn't mind that - and he will find enough henchmen to make it so. Democracies are weak; they exist only until the new team walks into the Parliament and announces the new order. How many of those lazy, weak people will rise to defend the democracy if that democracy doesn't really give them anything? Will *you* care if instead of a collective dictator you get a singular one?
This problem is not new. It is depicted in many futuristic novels. The root of the problem is in psychology of a man. Do you have a solution? (Please skip mind control lasers from the orbit, they were proposed already, but they simply exterminate humans as we know them, replacing them with something else.)