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Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...

Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.

Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.

An important point is that even if robotics, AI, and automation have not yet taken most jobs, they almost certainly have been keeping wages down for many jobs. The Atlantic as had some good articles including looking at the economics of what jobs are being automated in what sequence. Some of them:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

However, there are all sorts of complex and messed up politics relating to all this, as others have written about. In th

"We can't have a society at all where everybody expects to be taken care of by some magic of 'past social credit', somebody has to do the actual work of creating the stuff, whatever it means, and it really means organising land labour and capital in the most efficient manner to give the market something that will be profitable enough to keep the lights on."

Tell that to Linus Torvalds and all the Debian GNU/Linux maintainers. Kids should tell that to their parents and adopters too. There are many ways of organizing how things get done based on what values we want to celebrate.

How much "work" does it take to tell robots what to do?
"PR2 Fetches Sandwich from Subway"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp0

The authoritarian USSR you knew is history, and the quasi-authoritarian USA is going much the same way.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

There were zero net new jobs created in the USA in 2000-2010 while population grew and the GDP went up by 30% or so.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comments

People can deny it and fight it all they want. Probably the best they'll accomplish to protect and obsolete old order is wipe out humanity -- I hope we do better than that.

Also, comparative advantage does not apply when there is local unemployment. Who is the "you" you are referring to in trade anyway? The people without jobs who are at the edge economically and socially in the USA? So much of what people think they know about even mainstream economics is bunk. See also, for just one example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_toil
"The paradox of toil is the economic hypothesis that total employment will shrink if everybody wants to work more when "the short-term nominal interest rate is zero and there are deflationary pressures and output contraction".[1] The idea is that total employment will fall when wages, and therefore consumption, are pushed down by the simultaneous efforts of everyone to work more in situations where interest rates are against the zero bound so that rates cannot drop more to increase demand for goods. This is a limited example of the fallacy of composition.[1] where assuming that the increase in production that normally occurs when total labor increases applies in all situations. Put simply, when a recessionary economy is up against the zero bound, having more people seeking work - at lower wages if necessary - can actually reduce the number of jobs due to reduced demand from lower wages."

There are at least four fundamental complementary ways to arrange most work that needs to be done:
* Volunteerism through a gift economy (Wikipedia, Linux, Freecycle)
* Through the exchange market, but softened by transfer payments like a "basic income" (or a more fragmented system like in the USA with social security, public school supports, welfare, unemployment insurance, etc.)
* By local subsistence through advanced technology like 3D printers, personal robotics, solar panels, and similar DIY stuff
* By democratic participatory resource based planning at all levels.

The fact is, neither the USSR nor the USA was talking about "socialism" when they either celebrated it or maligned it. Western Europe is a better example of what "socialism" means. See Chomsky here to see more about the truth about the USSR and the USA and how they played against each other:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA

Lots of alternatives:

While you make some good points, please explain why then over the last three or four decades, the US GDP has doubled or tripled but real wages have stayed about the same for most people...
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

So, there are other political forces at work...
http://www.businessinsider.com/do-low-tax-rates-on-rich-people-ruin-the-economy-2011-7

You might like these links that support your first point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_toil
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

Basically, GDP has doubled or tripled over the past four decades, but real wages have been flat for most workers (with all the benefits going to 1% or so of the population). Rather than give money to workers to buy stuff as wages, the money has been provided as loans.

Had there not been the housing bubble etc., there would have been a financial crisis a decade ago. But now people have reached the end of what they can borrow under current standards, and the whole system is in great distress. It will likely get worse without some major interventions and policy changes, but these are resisted because they go against the dominant political/economic ideology of the USA.

Another factor, that you began to get at with leverage, is that the real economy of people's needs (like food and frost avoidance) is dwarfed by the amount of money in the "casino economy" related to speculation and so on (as mentioned in the video series "Money as Debt"). So, the real economy can not function to correct itself for many people because price signals are effectively broken for many real goods for meeting the needs of real people.

See also:
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged. This situation reflects the institutional power that the unconditional proponents of main-stream thought continue to exert on university teaching and research. This domination, propagated by the so-called top universities, dates back at least a quarter of a century and is effectively global. However, the very fact that this paradigm persists despite the current crisis, highlights the extent of its power and the dangerousness of its dogmatic character. Teachers and researchers, the signatories of the appeal, assert that this situation restricts the fecundity of research and teaching in economics, finance and management, diverting them as it does from issues critical to society."

Sadly, I have to agree that the issue you raise is a big potential problem (especially that those with power and wealth often use that first and foremost to preserve their relative privilege), and it is very much what the USA is already struggling through. For example, real wages have been essentially flat in the USA for the past thirty to forty years, while productivity has doubled or tripled and the money has gone to the workers not as wages but as loans:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

Things may well get much worse before they get better, before people (OWS etc.) eventually confront "the mythology of wealth":
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"In fact, the cheap-labor conservatives have counter-attacked with their own “rational” theory to justify their hierarchical world-view. Some call it “Social Darwinism”, though more politically savvy cheap-labor conservatives avoid that term. The purpose of this “rational theory” is to establish that the existing social order is the “natural order”. Elites enjoy wealth, privilege and status because of their inherent superiority. The place where this natural hierarchy is established, is that mythical place known as the “market”."

And:
"The Market as God"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/

Marshall Brain talks about that general issue here:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
"With the rank and file employees gone, all of the money in the corporation flows upward to the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will accelerate dramatically because robots allow real automation in the service sector for the first time in history. The amount of money paid to executives and shareholders will be remarkable. Meanwhile, the one million displaced employees will flow into a job market that is flooded by robotically-displaced workers. Since all major corporations with large numbers of employees will be doing the same thing, it is difficult to imagine the economy suddenly creating enough jobs to absorb all of the displaced workers. If the economy does not create new jobs for them, they will be living in government welfare dormitories. "

And also in his story "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

This is starting to happen even in China. See, for example:
"Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years"
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-07/30/c_131018764.htm
"Foxconn, the world's largest maker of computer components which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants, which some blamed on tough working conditions."

Or from a couple years ago:
http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen. China, once considered one of the lowest-cost automotive producers because of its supply of cheap labor, is becoming another example of rising expectations as workers demand their share of the country's growing industrial prosperity. The rash of strikes at Honda and Toyota parts factories and assembly plants in southern China this year -- with demands for substantially higher wages at the Japanese-owned companies

That video by Albert Bartlett is misleading because it ignores how more people leads to more innovation -- like developing solar panels or fusion energy to replace fossil fuels, or developing space habitats to make more land for humans.

But I agree with you about the economic issues as far as our current financial system. Both the housing bubble and the college bubble helped push back a problem related to rising productivity but flat real wages related to wealth concentration.
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5494

As I outline on my site ( http://www.pdfernhout.net/ ), mainstream economics assumes infinite demand (or at least, that demand will grow as fast or faster than productivity). But that assumption is becoming invalid, and so all of mainstream economics is suffering through a divide-by-zero error which most economists won't admit.

See also:
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/

A fairly straight-forward solution is a "basic income", but there are other approaches and we will likely see a mix of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
"In economics, an externality (or transaction spillover) is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices,[1] incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit. A benefit in this case is called a positive externality or external benefit, while a cost is called a negative externality or external cost."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
"The process of enclosure has sometimes been accompanied by force, resistance, and bloodshed, and remains among the most controversial areas of agricultural and economic history in England. Marxist and neo-Marxist historians argue that rich landowners used their control of state processes to appropriate public land for their private benefit. This created a landless working class that provided the labour required in the new industries developing in the north of England. "

Anyway, AC, so that is the kind of reasons you got screwed by the system, and why you are poor when your current birthright is currently about 1/7-billionth of the Earth and ultimately the same percentage of the solar system or beyond. You have a right to part of our cultural and technical capital, but you deny that right for yourself, and for everyone else. See also, on why wealth comes from more than present-day labor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit

And that is why the first part of this "Manna" story by Marshall Brain may well be your future (and for the rest of us, too):
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

The problem in the USA, which has been pursuing regressive neoliberalism for decades, is that the US Republicans are the worst sort of Socialists, who privatize profits (Enclosure) while socializing costs (Externalities). A truly socialist country would not do that. As for your suggestion of "America, love its regressive neoliberalism or leave it", well, people can't move as easily as capital encoded in internet packets -- they have family issues, language issues, cultural issues. So most people are stuck in the USA as it goes down the toilet. The USA may well take the whole world with it too, given all its stockpiled WMDs (which is another reason to stay and try to reform it, since where are you gonna hide from widespread US-originated plagues, nuclear fallout, and killer robots?). See also:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
"Neoliberalism As Water Balloon"
http://vimeo.com/6803752

Meanwhile, you are just defending your own assailants because they have misled you with their self-serving "mythology of wealth":
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

That said, local subsistence is one way forward, but so is a basic income, a gift economy, and better democratic planning at all levels of our society.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

Thanks for the reply. I still think the situation is more complex than you outlined, and you are stuck in just viewing this through one lens of "regulation is bad". But what about managing "Externalities" through taxes, subsidies, and regulation?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

See also (though it ignores the value of health and community):
    "Marxism of the Right"
    http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism."

You think China and Japan and so on are less "socialistic" than the USA?

Neoliberal economics has kept real wages flat for thirty years in the USA, which is part of the reason for the current economic crisis. Related:
    http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Jix4opZuY

Also, the US government would have plenty of money without two (or is it five?) recent needless wars and the Bush tax cuts for the wealth.

All sorts of technologies have been subsidized in the past. Railroads were heavily subsidized, for example.

If you look at solar panels, costs are now dropping for the same reasons your computer chip costs are dropping, a lot of R&D and investment in that area. There is now, according to one report I read, as much research going into PV solar in two years as the entire amount invested in research on it since it was invented. There is a chart of falling prices here:
    http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices

That price decrease has little to do with government subsidies (other than pump-priming, to offset all the subsidies to fossil fuels and nuclear, given externalities of those have been generally ignored and "socialized".)

The bottom line: the USA is falling apart because Republicans make the worst socialists -- they privatize gains while socializing costs. Real socialist countries don't do that. That is why Western Europe, in general, is a much happier place than the USA for most people, and most people live longer there. As is Canada. Unfortunately, people can not flow over borders as easily as capital, otherwise much of the USA might just move somewhere with access to health care, cheap college, and so on (those who don't watch Fox News. :-) Though with that said, and it is joking obviously, since cultural ties and family ties keep most people rooted where they are short of a shooting civil war or other broad physical disaster, there are still many good things about US culture, like freedom of speech, which can still be better than in some other countries. But it seems the list of things better about the USA than other countries is getting shorter and shorter.

However, on top of that, there are broad trends from the centralization of wealth due to the increasing value of capital in production relative to human labor, which indeed undermines the paid value of most human labor (and not just in the USA, but eventually everywhere, which is why we will eventually see a new economic system for the 21st century with stuff like a basic income, a gift economy, better planning, and more advanced local subsistence production):
    http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

Ultimately, reality will "cull" the bad ideas. Knowledge (and back of the envelope calculations like I suggested) just helps you do that faster. Eventually, for example, reality will probably cull the imaginative fancy of "trickle down economics" one way or another.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
    http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

Knowledge is also a more slippery thing than most imagine, since how much of our "knowledge" is wrong? Space is empty, right? Everyone knows that. Until suddenly it is full of "Ultracool brown dwarfs"...

But sure, the most effective people tend to have a lot of imagination and a lot of knowledge and a lot of some other things, too (self-management, a sense of values and purpose, etc.).

Stuff by Einstein about science and religion/values, btw:
    http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. ... And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence."

Other ways to deal with bullies:
    http://www.bullies2buddies.com/How-to-Stop-Being-Teased-and-Bullied-Without-Really-Trying

Here is why the current approach pushed in schools just makes more:
    http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psychological-solution-bullying/201011/rational-alternative-the-national-school-anti-bullying-p

Maybe what made the USA strong decades ago was a progressive tax rate that went past 90%? :-)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax
    http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
Stagnant (even declining) real wages for three decades in the USA for most workers while productivity has doubled or tripled. Who go the benefits? Whose life became more precarious?
    http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap

See also though:
    "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel

"We have invaded places, but always with the idea of reforming that nation and giving it back to its RICH people."
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

FTFY. :-)

You can possess markets and extraction areas without saying you are going to move your people in there...

See also:
    http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. "

And:
    http://archive.uua.org/ga/ga99/238thandeka.html
"First, 80 percent of the wealth in this country is owned by 20 percent of the population. The top 1 percent owns 47% of this wealth. These facts describe an American oligarchy that rules not as a right of race but as a right of class. "

And:
    http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

...for the credit reason you said: http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

Basically, instead of giving money from increased productivity to workers as wages, as worker's collective bargaining power eroded for a variety of reasons (automation, women entering the work force, competition from China or other US states like the auto industry moving south, etc.), rich people kept all the money from productivity increases and *loaned* it to the workers instead. That eventually collapsed.

Look at the numbers again and you will see that those numbers are less that population growth. Population growth alone in the 2000s was about 26 million people. One can expect the same again for the 2010s. We're talking two decades worth of jobs that have to be created by 2020, so, about 30 million new jobs for 50 million new people.

It's true that people are still employed in construction, even with the recent bust:
"Construction Employment Trends Short and Long Term"
http://www.tauc.org/toolsResources/industry/index.cfm?fa=article&id=1411
But for how much longer will we need all these people in the construction trades given new designs that are easier to assemble or involve automation? For example, people are working on huge robots that essentially print houses:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=57
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=900

You're reciting economic dogma but not looking at the points on limited demand and the successive replacement of agriculture, manufacturing, and now *services*.

Where are these 30 million net new jobs to come from, especially as robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks takes even more jobs? Not only do you need to replace all the newspaper jobs we're losing, but then you have to invent 30 million new jobs in addition to those. Sure, we may well see some few millions of green jobs for a time, but what else? And at what point do most people say enough is enough as far as too much stuff and too many supersized meals that are killing them?

Anyway, your (mainstream) prediction that the system will just correct itself when I can point to trends that are replacing vast numbers of humans just seems like wishful thinking to me.

In order for mainstream economists wishful thinking to be true (these are the same people who missed predicting the Great Recession, btw), three things need to hold true, all of which are false:
* wealth from improved productivity needs to be widely distributed so it can be spent and not just stashed away or put in a "casino economy" of complex financial gambling (like with derivatives), but thirty years of US statistics says it has been getting more concentrated;
    http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
* demand needs to rise as fast as productivity, but Maslow's hierarchy of needs suggests people at some point turn to non-materialistic pursuits that are generally easy to satisfy;
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/09/07/1519221/Researchers-Say-Happiness-Costs-75k
* robots and computers need to never be able to be as smart and capable as most people, but we are already seeing that now in many limited domains (where the technology is smarter and more reliable than people at many complex tasks).
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Z8TR4ToNs

This is a phase change in our society. But, by so many people denying it and engaging in wishful thinking, reforms are being delayed, and suffering increased. Possible good solutions include a mix of a "basic income", democratic resource-based planning, a gift economy, and/or improved local subsistence in strong local communities.

What would it take to convince you (or most people) that wealth is concentrating, demand for stuff and paid services is limited, and/or robots and computers are getting better and better at replacing most human workers?

Wow, that all sounds pretty neat and mostly a lot of "hard fun".
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html

And related:
"Mortgage Free!: Innovative Strategies for Debt Free Home Ownership"
http://books.google.com/books?id=U8olv7h0of4C
"How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning How to Live the Conserver Lifestyle"
http://books.google.com/books?id=ImmgMBhdeHkC
"Life After the City: A Harrowsmith Guide to Rural Living"
http://books.google.com/books?id=Fmq19Hv1fqYC

We live in a somewhat passive solar home, and do a bit of organic gardening (but we can't bear to cut down the beautiful trees where we are to have a bigger spot to garden or more sunlight, although I agree with you about the economics of that -- plus, doing stuff outdoors also saves on entertainment expenses and, as you allude to, gym memberships. :-)

Karl Marx and his fans (like Simon Clarke in "The Global Accumulation of Capital and the
Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form")
http://www.riff-raff.se/en/furtherreading/clarke_global.php
predicted an extension of credit to keep capitalism going just before it collapsed (whatever one can say about his proposed cures, a lot of Marxian diagnosis of problems with capitalism was accurate).

Someone just recently sent me this summary about Simon Clarke's writings: "The stages he addresses and ultimately rejects as being too vaguely defined to be considered as true periods are: Mercantilism, Liberalism, Imperialism, Social Democracy, and Monetarism. He identifies (in 1992 or before) monetarism as either being a new phase or (as it turned out) a reassertion of free-market Liberalism that will cause overaccumulation, the solution to which will be imperialism and extension of credit, which will only delay a deeper recession or depression. That's nearly a 20-year-out economic prediction that turned out to be very accurate! (Granted, he didn't offer dates, but he predicted some of the most critical events.)"

I'm adapting the following from a reply on that.

Just one more datapoint on that predicted "extension of credit":
"Debts Rise, and Go Unpaid, as Bust Erodes Home Equity"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/business/12debt.html?src=me&ref=business
as "capitalism hits the fan" (a talk by a Marxist economist)
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

So, agreeing with others, it is a good diagnosis by Marx and fans, up to a point, but poor prescription for current day events, as this essay says from 1971 by Murray Bookchin (someone more into decentralization):
"Listen, Marxist!" by Murray Bookchin
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/listenm.html

A fan of Charles Fourier suggested to me that everything good about Marx came from the earlier Fourier. And Fourier was more into self-reliant living (though at a village level).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier

Here is a document I put together forty years after Murray Bookchin wrote, and two hundred after Charles Fourier:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
The document suggests that there are four majo

To support your points, consider:
"The Two-Income Trap" (about needing two incomes and being more precarious)
http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
and:
"Capitalism hits the fan" (about 30 years of stagnant wages)
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

Still, I feel the grandparent post is right about taxes. A 90% progressive maximum tax rate would help deal with a growing rich poor divide, and the fact that since it takes money to make money, the rich tend to get richer, and then a centralization of capital leads to the free market and capitalism breaking down (small businesses can't get started, etc.). Also, there are some needed things that business just won't do because of the risk or time horizon or externalities. That tax rate is part of what pulled the USA out of the Great Depression (justified at the time in part by WWII).

As far as government debt, it could be paid off tomorrow by just printing the money (which can be non-inflationary if the money printed matches the growing need for it). Related:
http://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserve/dp/0912986212
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/

Debt by the US government and also citizens for mortgages is a tricky thing, since our economy is based on debt to create money. I think we'd probably be better off with some other approach eventually. Ideas on that:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

I'm working on a related system to what he describes towards the end of the article -- something that is a partnership between the individual musician and a the computer, to amplify musical creativity, for the Android Smartphone. It's almost ready to release...

People at IBM Research in the past (a decade ago) also did some things also to amplify musical creativity using computers, but unfortunately did not get as much support as they deserved:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/musicsketcher/
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_seminar.nsf/pages/sem_abstract_186.html

As David Cope says, part of our musical future may well be more about a partnership.

It's been said, "the woods would be pretty quite if no bird sang there but the best". The real reason to do music is because humans are musical creatures, however they want to express it.

The whole issue of "fame" or "income" is linked to dysfunctional social systems and dysfunctional economic systems. The real issue is that we need a "basic income" for everyone to reflect a human right to draw from the industrial material and informational commons, especially because more and more human labor is becoming worth less and less due to increases in automation, better design, and limited demand (as humans get enough stuff and move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to self actualization which often can be done fairly cheaply). More ideas I helped put together here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
And here:
"Ideas for a brickfilm and video games to help avoid a Caprican future"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/cf4ee7f45d631838#

I think we are seeing that now with health care. Much human labor is no longer valuable enough in the USA to earn the money to pay for health insurance -- even as some very few medical specialists who practice medicine or make medical devices (including medical robots) can command vast sums of money for their expertise. Of course, we don't need that many more medical specialists (even if more might be nice), so there is no easy solution to that since we don't need everyone to be a doctor or medical robot maker; so, ultimately, the government will have to intervene more in a dysfunctional marketplace, once the populace moves past the secular religion of "The Market as God".
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
Capitalism won't work well unless wealth is widespread, and that means the government has to step in and keep money flowing. Otherwise, the rich just put excess money into a "Casino economy" of derivatives and currency speculation that has little relation to the real world. See:
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

As robots can do more labor, whether creative as in putting together music or physical as in putting together food:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv7VUqPE8AE
we will need a completely new economic ideology if we are to survive the irony of real starvation amidst theoretical robot-produced abundance.

People have been talking about this since 1964 and even before:

"A simpler explanation is that the work can now be done by people who are willing to work for considerably less. There's no evidence of a genuine decline in the value of labor since globally the value of labor has been steadily increasing since 1950."

One other point on this, because it is easily show to be false by official statistics:
  http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

Or from:
    http://www.laborradio.org/node/3556
"From 1830 through 1970 real wages for workers rose every decade. But real wages are not rising now. Measured in constant 1982 dollars the U.S. Department of Labor says weekly wages were $302.52 in 1964. In 2004 wages were lower - down to $277.57. Labor Research Associates says the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals another drop in real wages over the last year. These stagnant and falling wages are lowering the living standards of U.S. workers."

However, it is true it is hard to measure quality. Cars are better now (ignoring you can't fix them yourselves that easily anymore). Computers are better and we have the internet.

If productivity has tripled or whatever during the last couple of decades, where has most of that increase in productivity gone? To a very few. And to waste. And to guarding.

On regulators being captured by special interests, see: http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/ or this related presentation: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7382297202053077236

For other ideas, see:
"Why limited demand means joblessness (and what to do about it)"
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/

These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:

• temporary measures like unemployment insurance and retraining funds, and when those fail, letting people live with relatives who still have jobs or be homeless (the USA now has one million homeless schoolchildren, an amount that has doubled in the last two years);
• government public works like in the 1930s (infrastructure, arts, research, medicine, etc.);
• a basic income for everyone, essentially Social Security and Medicaid for all with no means testing;
• improved local subsistence like with 3D printing and organic gardening;
• a p2p gift economy (like Wikipedia and Debian GNU/Linux);
• a shorter work week (like tried in France);
• rethinking work to be more fun so it is done as play;
• alternative currencies or other forms of exchange like barter or more formal rationing;
• increasing advertising to entice people into more debt (one cause of the current economic crisis as the debt bubble burst);
• intentionally producing shoddy merchandise or things with planned obsolescence, perhaps encouraged by promoting faddism in the culture;
• more prisons (employs guards and keeps people out of the labor pool);
• more schooling (employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor pool) while suppressing true education; and
• more war (employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance, and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool).

Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our best educators say compulsory school as we know it should disappear entirely.

The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un

Except you completely ignore externalities, systemic risks, and equity, which is what got us in various messes already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Consider the "True cost" of oil from various perspectives:
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
"""
Milton Copulus, the head of the National Defense Council Foundation, has a different view. And as the former principal energy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a 12-year member of the National Petroleum Council, a Reagan White House alum, and an advisor to half a dozen U.S. Energy Secretaries, various Secretaries of Defense, and two directors of the CIA, he knows his stuff. After taking into account the direct and indirect costs of oil, the economic costs of oil supply disruption, and military expenditures, he estimates the true cost of oil at a stunning $480 a barrel. That would make the "real" cost of filling up a family sedan about $220, and filling up a large SUV about $325 (when oil was $10 a barrel cheaper than it is now!).
"""

By the way, I've read it takes as much *electricity* to produce a gallon of gas as it would take an electric car to go about the same distance. So, all the external costs of gasoline are totally for nothing energywise.
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"

Depending on other regions for energy creates a systemic risk. Pipelines are inherently indefensible and so require a police state to protect because one small group could do vast damage to the society by damaging just one oil pipeline. Solar panels on your roof do not require a police state to protect, just regular police; if someone vandalizes them, the entire economy does not collapse.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a few who control oil companies also creates a wealth dispartity that damages democracy as well as the economy (because few can start small businesses without loans or investments from big organizations). One reason we have oil pipelines instead of solar panels everywhere is that it has been more profitable to a few people to do that, while the rest of us pay huge taxes for a military to defend those pipelines at home and abroad.

I could go on, but basically, you need to look at issues like externalities, systemic risks, and concentration of wealth to see the various ways that markets can and do fail regularly in practice unless they are taxed and regulated. Taxes and regulation have their problems too, of course:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

Ideally, we need to move beyond markets and rationing for most things. So, your enthusiasm is great. You're right that cheap energy would help with a lot of things (as long as it was also relatively clean, inherently safe, and long lasting -- like wind and solar and many other renewables). Ideally, we want an energy infrastructure that is inherently secure, not brittle and requiring now about a trillion dollars a year to secure extrinsically with soldiers and bombs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Still, if all the benefits of cheap energy or any other major innovation go to a few people, then we just have another problem. See Marshall Brain's short story on this:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

You're right that a left that focuses on rationing and scarcity is dysfunctional; that has historically b