Update: 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.

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

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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, level of participation, and goal.

The concept of work as a way of life was required as a function of agriculture since farming was inescapably labor intensive and presented a common goods problem where in the sedentary profited most. 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.

Eventually it 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. We all deserve a share of the profit of our nation and society, not merely what we can squeeze out of 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 human.

The social credit economics systems is a great example of the intention I share, but debating its validity specifically is not the focus of this document.

So too should they share in the debt, and the responsibility.

We need to scrap the idea that you must earn your right to exist from the social lexicon, because everyone except some suicides 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?

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 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.

Essentially our society is 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.

America has 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.

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.

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 right wing wants to enforce a lethally detached amoral social Darwinism.

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

How this has manifested has been the right seeking to unbound business regulation in search of a setting that will make the Horatio Alger myth a reality, and the left trying to tax the rich to the point of not being painfully wealthy anymore, to make their vision of a social utopia a reality.Obviously we both want the same things. Health and happiness all around.

The problem is they are competing, 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 side can ever be allowed to “win.” We all know that is the case, no matter what party has a majority clearly no side is 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 its 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.

Think of money as water in the middle of a vast desert, which can be converted into every element of technology. Is it ethical to force people to compete for it? Is it ethical to let some choice few collect millions of gallons knowing full well that this collection means distant unseen people will die or worse?

The right and the left are arguing about how to fix the American economy, putting water here and taking it from there, making sure certain pumping stations close and certain ones stay open, desperately trying to keep the flow the same, despite the fact that there is only so much water, 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.

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 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. Not just rivers streams and aqueducts coupled to a giant hydraulic despotism, but free for everyone, rain.

That’s probably hard to understand. It’s a hugely complex topic. And 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 with hand pumps, 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 arguably as bad for the rich as it is for the poor.

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, we all require an effort be made to live. Predation is the system of exploiting the effort of lesser beings, and we are predators. I say we exploit the lesser beings we have made, machines, and allow ourselves to enjoy being the top of the food-chain.

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 marijuana secretly wants a pot clouded tie dyed commune.

Of course, neither is true.

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.

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 left winger 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 and a much larger cap on Corporate wealth. We then flat tax everyone, 90% of the gross tax going to the government to spend as they see fit as per the current system. And 10% going into “The Fund.” Any money a person receives over the cap, goes straight into the fund.

What is done with this huge pile of money? It gets divvied up. Among everyone, evenly. Like rain. Every American citizen gets a monthly check based on the fund’s current value.

This way, everyone gets enough to live on, and the market is totally 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.

As a long term bonus this would allow the 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, its a bit like energy in that respect, it just gets converted and flows around mostly.

Eventually you would end up with one of two 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 that threatens 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.