Jobs, and the Grand Compromise.

Update: http://www.good.is/post/utahs-four-day-workweek-experiment-did-it-work/ See? What did I tell you? Less work means more time for other things and since we all share common goals 90% of the things people do on their days off end up helping society in some form or another anyway. The argument that the fiscal motivator is the only motivator is absurd on it’s face and the only reason we even give it a second thought is because of a 200 billion a year public relations push funded by the top 1% who need us to continue working until we die so that they can continue their obsessive compulsive pathological greed driven economic rampage.

Update: http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm Check this out.

Update: For a talk that explains how profit isn’t only the motivator watch this talk. http://vimeo.com/22633948

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“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” ~Aristotle

To understand the nature of jobs in America and pretty well anywhere else with money as of this writing (4/29/2011 1:29:41 AM) just think of the apparent absurdity of the following scenario. Soliciting bosses like bosses currently solicit workers.

Imagine making them compete for your labor, by requiring them to send payment up front which you will keep, only then working for whoever sent the highest amount and best benefits packages. This instead of the traditional model of building a portfolio or resume and begging them via interviews for the privilege of selling your finite time at a loss to an immortal corporation. This thought experiment nicely illustrates the fundamental injustice of the Corporate/College assumption of workmanship.

The structure of our society is not the only structure it could have it is merely the way which results from allowing (by definition psychopathic) http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=1694 corporate entities the standing of people and allowing them to then in turn use that standing in ways one would expect of immortal and immoral intelligences.

Why don’t they compete for our labor? Why do we even desire being owned by some corporation as a human resource in the first place, much less why have we allowed that relationship to degenerate into a bidding and begging game, like so many slaves jockeying for a particular kind of whip?

Why all this social focus on jobs? It seems to me that we have forgotten the point, generally.

A job is a means to an end, and that end is the provision of basic needs and hope. That is the point of society, to accomplish together what we cannot accomplish alone. To provide for the individual. We are not ants, society is not an end in and of itself, nor indeed is life. Only pleasure and life combined provide purpose. Beyond that basic truth, the decision rests with each individual to determine his or her place and goal.

The concept of work as a way of life was required as a function of agriculture and industry since farming was inescapably labor intensive and presented a common goods problem wherein the sedentary profited most. This is know as the free rider problem. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Free_rider_problem In order to motivate everyone to work who needed to work, deception had to be used.

But now escape is clearly possible. Our productivity per hour of labor is growing exponentially as a result of technology. I think we have reached a point where our own random desires can be harnessed to accomplish everything that needs accomplishing if the proper artificial barriers were eliminated and the proper voluntary social structures were created.

Eventually all physical maintenance will be a matter of code and material scarcity, nothing more. We should admit this and speed up the process.

We as a society need to admit that no part of society exists without any other. If a job is worth paying for it is needed by someone, and that someone is needed by someone else, and so on. Thus we all deserve a share of the profit of our nation and society, not merely what we can squeeze out of adjacent others directly for ourselves, but in general from the profit of the state. They deserve it for being the children of our ancestors and our distant cousins. They deserve it for simply being members of our human tribe.

The social credit economics system https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Social_credit (and to a lesser extent negative income tax https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Negative_income_tax) is a great example of the intention I share. But debating their validity specifically is not the focus of this document.

So too should we all share in the debt, and the responsibility. After all the top 1% only exist by the fiat of property right. Clearly they don’t produce anymore. The argument for their position’s justification is circular. They accomplish X with wealth thus they deserve their wealth. Wealth as I have written elsewhere is about luck and accident of birth. Allowing them free right to amass as much as they can is anathema to the concept of democracy. http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105

We need to scrap the idea that you must earn your right to exist from the social lexicon, because everyone (except some suicides which are by definition pathological) feel worthy of living.

Further, forcing everyone to participate in society is as destructive as forcing everyone to be president. A person’s absence can be as helpful as their presence, sometimes more so. If we truly embrace democracy, the idea that everyone is fundamentally worth the same thing, then why do we force everyone to try and “earn” their right to exist in the same way?

Forcing me to get a job on pain of death and starvation is an attack on my civil liberties and an unfair exchange when I am not allowed to abstain from society’s restrictions. I am born a slave to the law. What do I get for that? It must be something more than simply the benefits currently allotted.

The price that must be paid for our obedience should be a living wage and the opportunity, not the requirement, to “better” myself. That is only fair.

The provision for those who simply wish to live quiet lives, and reap the rewards of one hundred thousand years of human progress currently is wage slavery at best and abject poverty leading to death at worst. This is unacceptable. What good is all this technology if we don’t let everyone enjoy it?

I’m glad some of us are driven to contribute, that will always be a part of our psychological landscape, but if everyone is required to be type A personalities then all of our achievements become meaningless because each advance will merely be used as a tool for another advance. We are not mayflies.

Essentially our society, the bottom 99% anyway, is expected to be pathologically OCD and workaholic.

Some of us don’t aspire to owning 400 gold plated Escalades. Many of us don’t even vote. I mention the vote because many people are content to be kept. This has been a valid, even encouraged, choice for women for a long long time, and now I say we extend it to everyone. What’s wrong with wanting to be taken care of? The technology allows it now. Some of our greatest minds had patrons, not employers. Patrons. The closest modern analog are grant holders and privately funded general researchers. I say since we have the technology we make contribution strictly voluntary.

I think you’d find that things across the board will improve. Like a dog on a leash, sometimes the best way to get it to move is to let go. We need to free people and guide the society that emerges from our collective efforts. Government has long over stepped its bounds as a tool to attack common good problems.

America has a long history of being a strange mix. Most clearly between communism and capitalism. The country has long grappled with, and miserably tried to reconcile the drive to let (make?) everyone live in a Laissez-faire economy, and securing our style of life with regulation and subsidy to the point of a homogenizing commune. (Ever notice how all the rich people wear ties?)

I think there needs to be a middle ground. The country agrees, but only practically, only subconsciously. It agrees as a manifestation of the war between them. To continue the metaphor I say we decide the borders by treaty rather than rifle fire. Sue for peace, as it were.

Clearly as a nation we have accepted a few things that logically support my assertions. Specifically, a basic national compromise, composed of two primary concessions that keep the country from tearing itself apart and descending into a second civil war.

1. That money will be spent to help the poor, no matter how badly the Republicans want to enforce a lethally detached amoral social Darwinism.

2. That money will be allowed to accumulate, no matter how badly the Democrats want to feed a million homeless crack addicts on what Bill Gates gets in interest every month.

The hyperbole of both these concessions is intentional.

Typically, how this has manifested has been the right wing seeking to unbound business regulation in search of a setting that will make the Horatio Alger myth a reality, and the left wing trying to tax the rich to the point of not being painfully wealthy anymore, to make their vision of a social utopia for all a reality. Obviously we both want the same things. Health and happiness all around. (Those who do not are psychopaths and are a completely separate problem. Again, http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=1694)

The problem is they are competing based on incorrect assumptions, and their compromises are not articulated. Sure occasionally congressmen will work together in a limited “both sides of the isle” way for specific purposes, but that’s not what we need.

We need a systemic admission from both sides that neither approach can ever be allowed to “win.” We all know that is the case, no matter what party has a majority clearly no side is (openly anyway) actually trying to eliminate the other. It’s like how you never see Coke trying to hostile take over Pepsi. If Coke bought Pepsi Coke would be in anti-trust land, so its best that they maintain the oligopoly, and keep us paying 1$ a can for what costs four cents to make(and rots our bones).

They of course would never admit that, and we all lose out. That’s (arguably) trivial when it comes to soda choice, after all I can say screw them and drink water or tea (I do). But it’s not so trivial when you have a country to run and use the same logic.

Letting the right and the left fight each other in this endless Orwellian pseudo war is sucking up resources at a phenomenal rate. And this is where we get back to jobs.

Is it ethical to let some choice few collect the money knowing full well that this collection means vast numbers of other people will die or worse?

The right and the left are arguing about how to fix the American economy, putting money here and taking it from there, making sure certain cash flows close and others stay open, desperately trying to keep the flow, to them, the same, despite the fact that there is only so much wealth to be had, and only so much can be extracted from pre-existing sources.

The system funnels money to a select few places. That flow of money is called the economy. Specifically the materials economy. Natural resources are converted into wealth and as it flows through the system changing hands and forms, the illusion of a cyclic system is created. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM

It’s like eddies in a stream. Sure there may be a whirl pool or two, you may even live in one, but if the water ends up in a cistern at the end and is never allowed to evaporate, eventually the rain will stop and that whirlpool is going to dry up.

The whirlpool is the economy, the cistern is the government and the rich, and the water is the money. The solution isn’t to talk the government and corporations into dumping some of their cistern water back at the beginning because they can not and will not dump ALL of it.

The solution is to let the water cycle happen. To put a percentage of the top back into the hands of the bottom, directly. We need rain. We need a default payment of some kind. A national profit sharing program. Not just rivers streams and aqueducts coupled to a giant hydraulic despotism, but free for everyone, rain.

I know that’s simplistic, but look into it yourself please. I can’t possibly explain every aspect of it concisely. I’m just trying to reveal the fundamental illusion that is causing a doomed effort.

This desire to “create jobs” which are just people, is futile. The money originally has to come from somewhere and the fact is the earth is running out of money precursors.

The right wing has it wrong in that the free market won’t solve anything because a fundamental fact of economics is that, dollar for util, it’s cheaper to be rich. Which means that even in a completely deregulated setting the economy would collapse or solidify into total aristocratic stagnation, where in the poor and the rich never switch places. Which is eventually as bad for the rich as it is for the poor since eventually the poor will wise up and start decapitating the wealthy.

The left wing has it wrong in thinking that if you make a government program for all those in need eventually everyone will be able to work and thus their product will offset the spending. But again, the money will end up in fewer and fewer hands, only this time instead of the rich owning the money it will be government officials controlling the money.

Both sides ignore the fundamental nature of money, the one trait it has that makes all these stopgaps just that. Money has it’s own gravity. Money is attracted to money. Money is a unit of effort and we all require an effort be made to live. Predation is the system of exploiting the effort of lesser beings, and we are the top predators. I say we exploit the lesser beings we have made, machines, and allow ourselves to enjoy being the top of the food-chain. At least until we can be free of it entirely. http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=663

Even the ultra rich never stop. I mean really, once you have 10 million in the bank, why get up for work? Because we are convinced that we must constantly take more. Of course we don’t call it take, we call it “make” as if we’re actually creating something when the precise opposite is true.

This is why the cold war boiled down to the USSR and USA. Both systems are extremely good at getting the people to work/pay without killing the bosses/officials. A great break down of that whole idea can be found in The Sovereign Individual. (ISBN-13: 978-0684832722)

The left wing thinks that everyone who calls for a free market is secretly corrupt and actually just wants a get out of jail free card for being a plundering jackass, and the right wing thinks that everyone who calls for plentiful unemployment benefits and medical benefits secretly want a pot clouded tie dyed commune.

Of course, neither extreme is true. We always exaggerate the differences between us and them.

That’s all well and good you say but can you do any better? Frankly. Yes. I can.

I think a systemic compromise can be reached, and here is what I propose in the broad strokes. This type of thing is not a new idea but applying it to the current context is new.

And here it is, The Grand Compromise. The peace treaty of the wings, so that maybe, finally, we can fly.

Good news and bad news for both sides.

Step one: Eliminate all government assistance programs, state, federal, and local. No food stamps, no unemployment, no disability, even. And the right wingers in the crowd go wild right? And the leftists wish they had felt differently about gun law and were packing right now.

But wait, step two is for you guys. We put a cap on personal wealth something like 500 million dollars, and a larger cap on corporate wealth something like 5 billion. Everything above the cap goes to the government. We then flat tax everyone’s income above the living wage, and institute the negative income tax until something better comes along.

Every American citizen gets a monthly check up to the living wage as determined by an independent third party. I would suggest a figure directly related to GDP and average income.

This way, everyone gets enough to live on, and the market is generally freed of regulation. Rampant greed can be safely indulged because no corporation will be able to wreck the system. Between the flat tax and the cap, everything gets paid for and everything stays a safe size.

We’ll also need to develop a real cryptocurrency to free our country from the tyranny of interest bearing currency. Bitcoin is a good start. Something that the banks can’t ruin.

As a long term bonus this would allow society to convert efficiency into freedom. As technology advances and jobs are innovated out of existence naturally profit in other sectors will expand. Money typically doesn’t dry up, it’s a bit like energy in that respect, it just gets converted and flows around mostly unless rich people are hording it.

Eventually you would end up with very few key businesses, such as fusion facilities and robot manufacturers, and such a whopping monthly check that everyone gets to live in luxury.

Making money will become a game and an art form, rather than a cutthroat world destroying endeavor run by psychopaths that threaten to reduce 99% of the world to abject poverty and radioactive glass. With all our needs met, and a sense of security we’ll go back to being the bastion of education, justice, and compassion we once were.

But hey, no one ever listens to me, why start now.