surviving the 21st century
Tuesday, 31 May 2005 07:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eOur economy needs robots in order to survive.
The "leaders" of our society are currently planning a series of actions to break our workforce, repeal a lot of our luxuries, and make people work from the cradle to the grave for subsistence wages.
They are not doing this because they are inherently evil or because they take joy in ruining their population; they simply can't think of an alternative. The economic powerhouse of China scares them witless, and they honestly feel that the only way we can compete is to reduce the working conditions of the average Australian to third world conditions. But this won't ever succeed, for some pretty obvious reasons. The Chinese poor have great incentive to be wage slaves. Their eyes are fixed upon a great future where their children might be rich and live in luxury. Our workers, having exactly those same possibilities stripped away from them will become simply disgruntled and angry. Also, a feudal society with a few mega-rich at the top and the rest bound in indentured slavery is too inefficient and too unstable to survive. We would become less efficient while the Chinese continued to push past us, to hopefully learn from our mistakes.
So how do we raise our standard of living while boosting our economy?
The first partial solution is a simple economic measure. Redistribute wealth more effectively. Tax the rich individuals and corporations more heavily and invest that money in the best long-term resource Australia has: its people. But that isn't enough by itself. That will only boost our local well-being. It does nothing about our ability to survive on a global market. We need slaves. It is immoral to use humans for that as well as couterproductive, as I mentioned above.
General purpose robots could clean, drive vehicles, and do all the things half the working population currently do, but they would do them around the clock and without wages. This would boost productivity far beyond what could ever be achieved with a human workforce. Initially this risks causing massive social dislocation. But there are a few ways to help us past that problem.
A universal wage, championed by many in the past, and most recently by Marshall Brain, would go a long way toward taking the sting out of massive unemployment. A universal wage is not a communist idea of everybody getting the same income. It is more like a pure capitalist notion of all Australian residents being shareholders in the Australian economy. Everybody would receive automatic weekly or fortnightly share payments whether they are rich or not, and whether they are on a wage of tens of thousands of dollars or zero.
Freeing up the people who normally waste their lives in slavery and allowing them to move on to more productive lives would help Australia become a smarter country. Many would go back to school. Many would start new businesses. Others would give the tourist economy a much needed shot in the arm. More would spend time raising their children, (producing further benefits later when a generation of well-balanced citizens grows up). Almost immediately the knowledge economy (one of our real strengths) would boom. It would usher in a renaissance in thinking, writing, music, art, and science. People would no longer work because they are forced to; they would do so because they want to.
It would also bring about a major change in the way workers are treated. Employers who mistreat people would lose their workforces very quickly. The only way to maintain your workforce would be to give them dignity. The benefit would flow on to customers of those businesses as they would deal less with harried and angry staff, and more with happy, satisfied people who work at their job because they like it.
Fairer taxes, general purpose robots, a universal wage. These things are almost enough to fix our ills, but we need two more.
Free, universal health care is the only way to keep costs from ballooning and to ensure we don't develop pockets of illness that place all of us at risk.
Free, universal education keeps the knowledge ball rolling. It stops us stagnating into a nation of couch-potato bigots, and feeds the knowledge economy.
The heavy taxes would not scare corporations away because they'd be more than offset by the massive gains of being able to use a largely robotic workforce. The political "leaders" would need to show strength here -- I seriously doubt our current crop of mental and moral pygmies would be up to it. They would have to ensure that companies participating in the benefits of Australian conditions must be responsible citizens and be taxed here too. Offshore tax shelters could not be tolerated.
This all needs to be done very soon. If we don't then the Chinese economic juggernaut will figure it out and do it themselves and we will be left sitting in their dust, squabbling over crumbs, and wondering what happened. We have a short window of opportunity. Sadly, I think our "leaders" are too backward-looking to see it. Their eyes are covered by the wool of devout belief in a marketplace as blind as they are.
The "leaders" of our society are currently planning a series of actions to break our workforce, repeal a lot of our luxuries, and make people work from the cradle to the grave for subsistence wages.
They are not doing this because they are inherently evil or because they take joy in ruining their population; they simply can't think of an alternative. The economic powerhouse of China scares them witless, and they honestly feel that the only way we can compete is to reduce the working conditions of the average Australian to third world conditions. But this won't ever succeed, for some pretty obvious reasons. The Chinese poor have great incentive to be wage slaves. Their eyes are fixed upon a great future where their children might be rich and live in luxury. Our workers, having exactly those same possibilities stripped away from them will become simply disgruntled and angry. Also, a feudal society with a few mega-rich at the top and the rest bound in indentured slavery is too inefficient and too unstable to survive. We would become less efficient while the Chinese continued to push past us, to hopefully learn from our mistakes.
So how do we raise our standard of living while boosting our economy?
The first partial solution is a simple economic measure. Redistribute wealth more effectively. Tax the rich individuals and corporations more heavily and invest that money in the best long-term resource Australia has: its people. But that isn't enough by itself. That will only boost our local well-being. It does nothing about our ability to survive on a global market. We need slaves. It is immoral to use humans for that as well as couterproductive, as I mentioned above.
General purpose robots could clean, drive vehicles, and do all the things half the working population currently do, but they would do them around the clock and without wages. This would boost productivity far beyond what could ever be achieved with a human workforce. Initially this risks causing massive social dislocation. But there are a few ways to help us past that problem.
A universal wage, championed by many in the past, and most recently by Marshall Brain, would go a long way toward taking the sting out of massive unemployment. A universal wage is not a communist idea of everybody getting the same income. It is more like a pure capitalist notion of all Australian residents being shareholders in the Australian economy. Everybody would receive automatic weekly or fortnightly share payments whether they are rich or not, and whether they are on a wage of tens of thousands of dollars or zero.
Freeing up the people who normally waste their lives in slavery and allowing them to move on to more productive lives would help Australia become a smarter country. Many would go back to school. Many would start new businesses. Others would give the tourist economy a much needed shot in the arm. More would spend time raising their children, (producing further benefits later when a generation of well-balanced citizens grows up). Almost immediately the knowledge economy (one of our real strengths) would boom. It would usher in a renaissance in thinking, writing, music, art, and science. People would no longer work because they are forced to; they would do so because they want to.
It would also bring about a major change in the way workers are treated. Employers who mistreat people would lose their workforces very quickly. The only way to maintain your workforce would be to give them dignity. The benefit would flow on to customers of those businesses as they would deal less with harried and angry staff, and more with happy, satisfied people who work at their job because they like it.
Fairer taxes, general purpose robots, a universal wage. These things are almost enough to fix our ills, but we need two more.
Free, universal health care is the only way to keep costs from ballooning and to ensure we don't develop pockets of illness that place all of us at risk.
Free, universal education keeps the knowledge ball rolling. It stops us stagnating into a nation of couch-potato bigots, and feeds the knowledge economy.
The heavy taxes would not scare corporations away because they'd be more than offset by the massive gains of being able to use a largely robotic workforce. The political "leaders" would need to show strength here -- I seriously doubt our current crop of mental and moral pygmies would be up to it. They would have to ensure that companies participating in the benefits of Australian conditions must be responsible citizens and be taxed here too. Offshore tax shelters could not be tolerated.
This all needs to be done very soon. If we don't then the Chinese economic juggernaut will figure it out and do it themselves and we will be left sitting in their dust, squabbling over crumbs, and wondering what happened. We have a short window of opportunity. Sadly, I think our "leaders" are too backward-looking to see it. Their eyes are covered by the wool of devout belief in a marketplace as blind as they are.
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no subject
Date: 2005-05-31 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-31 02:43 am (UTC)I checked out your LJ. You seem to have a lot of fun -- lots more than me. :)
I live out in the Australian bush with my dog. It is like paradise here, but very quiet. I like it though.
no subject
Date: 2005-05-31 02:47 am (UTC)