this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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Politics
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There are two groups of people:
Those that think there are two groups of people, and those that don't.
The premise that socialism is better relies on the government not becoming corrupt. When it fails, it's really bad.
Capitalism also functions great when the government isn't corrupt ... it gives consumers choice and fails much more softly.
If you look at examples of cooperatives, socialist utopia projects, etc.. they break down much for the same reason capitalism has broken down for the majority of people in the US... The largest party is the party that doesn't vote, and of those that vote half of them don't know what they're voting for, and of those that know what they're voting for half of them are basing their votes on misinformation.
Managing society takes work from everybody in society. There's no easy button that keeps the train on the tracks.
To be fair, you did qualify "as it exists today" and that makes a difference. However, the point is it's not capitalism that failed us, in many ways it's ourselves, our parents, and/or our grandparents not paying attention and elected the right people. Similarly those same people buy the cheapest thing in Walmart and don't stop to ask themselves why it's so cheap.
Union busting, the manufacturing exodus, etc, it all could've been stopped if people had just paid more attention. You'll never get me to trust that by moving to socialism as an economic model people are suddenly going to pay more attention and not fuck it up.
I don't think the US needs to go full socialist (mostly because I think it's impossible and as you said, still corruptible), but we need to lean more towards socialism to start clawing our way back to having a middle class. If we could get affordable universal healthcare and affordable colleges, I would be beyond thrilled. Even though these are things that many, many other countries have had for a long time.
I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs. At some point, hopefully we become so efficient at "work" that we can use UBI to help people survive who want to do something outside the usual 9-5 (or who have been automated out of their job).
I agree.
I don't really believe AI is going to come for that many jobs ... at least not in its current generation/family. It's more of a story teller than a serious threat (it's like a robot that builds caricatures of products that occasionally are correctly assembled).
That said, I'm not entirely opposed to a universal basic income or a universal supplementary income (a point my father made is that rather than trying to raise the minimum wage, why not progressively subsidize people below a certain threshold).
Personally, I'd prefer to see the efficiency gains result in a 3 or 4 day work week for most people. Lots of people would decline without anything to do and society in general could miss out on some great minds that instead of creating simply consumed.
Yes, I think we should already be at a 4 day work week for many jobs. If you look at productivity and efficiency growth since the 40 hour work week was invented, it's off the charts.
However, that's one of the problems with unbridled capitalism. The market demands constant growth, which is hard to sustain and doesn't reward easing up on employees.