You are just pushing the problem back one step. My critique of rent is not only housing rent, though that's one of the biggest problem areas. It's anything where someone with some form of wealth "earns" more wealth merely by letting others borrow their wealth, which moves wealth from those with less (who need to borrow it) to those with more (who can afford to lend it). You're saying that the rentier is just passing along (some of) the costs of financing his purchase like interest... but interest is itself a form of rent. Interest is rent on money, and I have just as much objection to that as I do rent on real estate. The banks are using their wealth advantage to extract more wealth from those who have less (the home buyers), and some of those home buyers (notably, only those who can afford more home(s) than they need for personal use, otherwise they would have to be homeless while renting out the home they would otherwise use themselves) pass the buck and use their wealth advantage to extract more wealth from those who have less than them (the renters). It's still the same problem.
And your talk of saving money renting vs buying (your "40% the price") only makes any sense if you assume that everybody will be paying housing expenses indefinitely. You are looking at monthly cost of housing; I am looking at monthly cost of housing times the number of months until I can stop paying it. By that latter metric, renting costs infinite money, because you will never get to stop. Buying on the other hand costs only a finite amount of money, even if it's more per month than renting. When I get to the point where I can start paying down a real house on its own land, I intend to pay a lot more per month than I am paying to rent right now (the big chunk of my income currently doing toward savings for a down payment), because that will minimize the amount of time it takes to pay it off and the amount of interest (i.e. rent) I will have to pay. But that means, if everything goes well, I will not have any housing expenses at all for the last 20-30 years of my life. Instead of getting kicked to the curb when I'm too old and broken to work and thus can't pay rent anymore.
You are the one who is full of it. I never said anything about "lots of land". I'm talking about just owning anything, so that you don't have to continuously pay to be not-homeless. This whole commuting tangent is a complete non-sequitur. The bottom line is this: when Alice rents from Bob, Alice pays a lot of money and never gets any property to her name, meanwhile Bob gets lots of money and never loses any property in the deal, and the only reason that arrangement is agreeable to anyone is because Bob has enough property that he can let others borrow it while Alice doesn't have any property and needs to borrow some. In a just world, the solution to that problem would be for Alice to trade Bob money for his property, and thus the property would naturally redistribute itself from those who have more than they need to those who need more than they have. Instead, with rent as an option, access to that kind of deal (a straight trade of money for property) can be priced out of the reach of many people, and replaced with an institute which funnels wealth from the people who have less to those who have more. That is a fundamental injustice, logistics about commuting or anything else aside.
I'm not saying anybody should be able to live somewhere that they can't afford to live now. I'm not saying anything at all about who should live where. I'm saying, if Alice spends $X/mo to live in a place for Y years, then she should have $12XY equity to show for the money she's been paying, and eventually, after Z years of that, she should own outright a place worth $12XZ. Instead of spending Z years paying $X/mo only to be out $12XZ with nothing to show for it (while Bob has made $12XZ, not lost a bit of his property, and can now afford to buy another and compound the whole process).
In response to your other post: buying a home should not be an "investment". That is exactly that kind of thinking which underlies this rent problem. People thinking that they should be able to make money off of just owning something (and letting others use it), rather than from selling something. Buying a home is not a means to make money, buying a home is a means to have a home to live in, without having to borrow someone else's for a steep price in perpetuity. Owning a home will save you money, sure -- by eliminating an expense that shouldn't exist in the first place. I want that opportunity to be available to everyone.
And there's no reason that home ownership has to be long-term or commit you to a single location: the same people who currently profit from renting out property could perform a real useful function providing liquidity to the market, selling high on long terms, and buying back low on short terms. For people or properties with high turnover, where someone is getting value out of being able to buy and sell quick (eliminating the long-term commitment), those "rentiers" would be providing a real, useful function, and making the profit they deserve for that. But for people who would currently spend a decade renting in the same place that they would be buying if the barrier to entry weren't artificially raised by the existence of the rental market, the situation would be far more just: all the money they spend on having a place to live would be going toward getting them a place to live, and eventually they could stop paying, instead of being stuck in that cycle forever.
I'm not talking about a nice neighborhood vs a bad neighborhood, I'm talking about living in a general area or not. I work from home (telecommute) so proximity to work is not an issue for me at all, but even if it was, I'm just talking about living in the general area, not about living in the best neighborhood in that area. I'm also not talking about having a big or nice house; just having anything that belongs to me, anywhere in the general area. I have finally reached a point where that is just within my reach. About half of the people who live in the general area are below that point. So half the people who live here shouldn't live here, is that your opinion?
Let's look at the Santa Barbara area because that's a great example of insane housing prices. The median home price in the general Santa Barbara area -- not the price of the homes in the nicest neighborhoods, just an average home, somewhere around there -- is over a million dollars. But the average income for someone living in the Santa Barbara area is nowhere near enough to even begin to buy a house in that range. It's not even enough to begin to buy a house in the low-end range for the area, which is still in the high hundreds of thousands. So the only hope for all those people who work there, but can't afford to buy there, if they actually want to stop having to run uphill against the threat of homelessness their entire lives, is to move out of the area -- like, to a distance that they can't work in the area any more.
If everyone moved to somewhere that they could afford to buy, as you advise, then the bulk of the working population would be fleeing the city. And now all those people who are rich enough to live there... either have to wait their own tables, or start paying waiters enough that they can afford to buy some kind of housing there, or start selling their now-empty rental properties (now that everyone's moved out) on terms that waiters can afford. Or some combination of all of those things, to the effect that the empty formerly-rental properties get traded for people's labor, and in the end a portion of the home-owning population there is waiting the tables. Which would be great, and which is what should happen -- and if everyone took your advice, it's what would happen. So why doesn't it?
Because they invented a loophole. "They" being the class of people wealthy enough to live there, collectively. They need someone to wait their tables, but they don't want to pay waiters what they would want to charge for their unused property -- they don't want to trade their capital for labor, they want to keep their capital and also get labor. They want a way to leverage their capital to get labor, without actually losing the capital in the process. So they say to the poor, "you can live in my unused property, if you work for me and give me most of the product of your labor". Just like a feudal lord: "you can live on my land, if you work my fields and give me most of what they yield". Of course I'm speaking there of the wealthy class collectively as one entity -- when broken down into individuals, the wage-serf gets to live in one lord's property, work for another lord, and split the product of his labor between the two (briefly holding possession of the landlord's share as he carries it to him from his employer), so it's not quite feudalism. But the dependency of the poor on the rich and the intentional inability of them to escape that cycle is the same.
If we closed that loophole, eliminated rent, then people would have to do as you advise -- move somewhere they can buy, because there's no such thing as rent -- and then the consequent responses to that as outlined above would follow, leaving far more equitable arrangements than there were before.
So only rich people get to live in nice places then? Some of those rich people better be prepared to have fun waiting tables and taking out the garbage then. Of course, unless those jobs pay well, they're not going to be rich for long, and won't be able to live there themselves, so those jobs had better pay well enough to afford to live in that area -- at which point, people who would otherwise be poor can take those same jobs and not have to move away.
Of course, the way things are now, the waiters in rich places can manage to live there without being rich themselves because the rich people there can afford to snatch up more property than they need for their own use and then charge people to borrow it in an inescapable cycle that keeps them forever depending on the wages of their masters in order to afford the rents demanded by them. So basically, rich people and their servants who depend utterly upon them can afford to live in nice areas. I'm saying: get rid of the "having servants" option and watch shit sort itself out. Watch all the "help" move away since there's no way for them to live there, watch the rich move away because there's no one to serve them, watch the desirability drop, and prices with it, and watch wages rise to attract back the "help", and pretty soon anyone who can get a job there can afford to live there -- in their own place, not stuck in an inescapable cycle of dependency on someone else.
The flip side of the problem in the first paragraph is that there is not cheap housing available to buy. I would gladly go in for a $220k home... if there were any where I live. The median price here is about $350k, and the lowest price you're likely to find on anything but a mobile (which I already have, and which leaves me still paying rent anyway) is about $300k, which is what I'm stretching for (on the expectation that my income will continue to increase and that will become possible in the future). But close to half of the people who live around here make less than I do, most of them significantly less. It's fine with you if half the people in an area just have no hope of ever establishing financial independence, in the sense of only paying for things they consume, and not for the never-ending (if they're lucky!) privilege of using someone else's property just because they have no hope of ever obtaining their own? That over half the population are perpetually dependent on the other half letting them use their property in exchange for their continued servitude?
Someone making minimum wage should be able to afford some kind of tiny minimum-wage-level property of their own, and not be forced into renting (or homelessness) as their only options. I argue that eliminating rent would force the market to provide such housing, or else the people currently renting out properties would have useless properties generating no profit. But the people renting from them would suddenly be a huge market of people who need to buy, so the people in a power position in that arrangement -- the property owners -- would have to figure out some way to sell their property on some kind of terms that the only people who want to buy it (now that nobody's going to be buying it to rent it out) can afford it, or else make nothing off it and lose everything on their investment.
I generally agree with the point you are trying to make (freedom is unstable in the absence of some kind of regulation to preserve it), but I have a major bone to pick: Anarchy is freedom. "Anarchy" does not mean the absence of regulation. It means a free market of regulation -- free in the sense you're speaking of, well-regulated, not "fastest draw of their gun". It means nobody has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force (which is the textbook definition of a state, and thus the precise antonym of anarchy), but not that nobody provides that legitimate use of force (which is necessary to curtail illegitimate uses of force, and without which we would have "fastest draw of their gun" rule everywhere). It just means that the provision of that legitimate use of force (which is to say, the provision of regulation, or in simpler terms, protection of each market participant from the others) comes from voluntary agreements in an open market of providers.
Unfortunately that means that the "market for governance", as it were, is inherently unstable, and it is extremely difficult to preserve the freedom of it -- to preserve anarchy -- because preserving that freedom requires regulation, governance, and "A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned" (or to quote someone more classical, "Who watches the watchers?"). That means that a free market of governance -- anarchy -- tends to quickly collapse into collusion and "fastest draw of their gun" rule... which is to say, states as we know them. That doesn't make anarchy bad. That makes anarchy really hard to achieve, and states as we know them the unfortunate status quo that it's really, really hard to get rid of. Getting rid of one state is not so hard. Keeping another from popping right up to replace it, and doing that indefinitely, is the challenge.
Not everyone can afford to buy. That isn't a problem; it's an economic reality likely to persist as long as property exists as we know it.
Not everyone can afford food either, but the reality of that situation doesn't make it not a problem. The near-total impossibility for large swathes of the population obtain housing of their own, leaving them dependent on borrowing housing from others (which in itself perpetuates their inability to buy), is a problem. We cannot have a free and equal population when large chunks of it are dependent on others for a necessity of life like housing, and have almost no hope of even slowly or gradually working their way out of that situation.
I'm not complaining about gentrification here, in fact I've complained about people who complain about gentrification before. I have no problem with the value of real estate in different places being different, and changing as conditions in those different places change; that's just normal market dynamics. I'm saying that the real cause of the problem that has people upset about "gentrification" is the fact that so many people don't live in a place which is their own, and can have the conditions of their tentative permission to live there changed out from under them (with some restrictions of course). That is where people's energy should be directed, not at bullshit like these protesters are complaining about.
However, a tangential problem gentrification which I don't quite have a solution to is this: even fixing the tax and rent problems, people born into expensive places, who grew up there and who have everyone and everything they love there, can still be forced out of their homes in a broader sense, if the place they were born becomes more popular (and thus more expensive) than when their family first moved there. That's the situation I'm in: two generations of my family have lived in my home town, I've spent my entire life here, all my friends, colleagues, career, romance, all of that is here, and on top of that it is a fantastically beautiful place which has set my standards for what a decent place to live looks like, and makes most of the rest of the country look intolerably ugly or plain to my eye. But despite two generations of our family living here, that beauty has made prices skyrocket, and all my cousins have either had to move somewhere I'd never want to live, or still live at home with their parents, because nobody can afford to live here on their own. I am only barely managing because I am more successful than any of my parents or their siblings were at my age.
Doesn't something seem wrong about the fact that people are displaced from their home lands just because other, richer people from other lands want to live there and money is power so they get what they want and the locals have to GTFO? What if a bunch of rich Americans moved into some impoverished third world country, bought the place up, and within a generation or two the indigenous people who had lived there for centuries were forced to emigrate elsewhere? Something just like that happens at a smaller scale all the time, and from I'm not sure how to fix it even if the rental problem is fixed, but it's still a real problem. It's not a problem that "foreigners" can "immigrate", I'm not complaining about non-locals in my hometown or anything; but it's a problem that the locals can be displaced even if they would rather stay put, just because there's no way they can afford to live there.
The problem is that buying is not an option for many people, because the money that they would otherwise be putting toward paying off a house (or that 20% of a house they have to put down up front before they can pay the rest off over time) is instead spent paying off their landlord's mortgage for them.
I'm 31, make a bit above the national median household income since about two years ago, and live in a moderately expensive area (not the Bay, but not Bumfuck Idaho either; average home price here is about $350k), and homeownership is a distant long-term life goal for me, which is so strenuously nigh-impossible that it's just about displaced everything else I ever dreamt I might want to do with my life. I've just barely managed to buy the smallest cheapest mobile home I could buy last year, but that still has me paying space rent about equal to the rent on a room I'd been paying my whole life since, and it's looking like another 5 years of saving at least before I can afford to put a down payment on a real house and FINALLY have my housing expenses go toward buying something of my own instead of borrowing something of someone else's. (Then another 30 years of working my ass off to pay those bills and I can finally afford to spend time doing something meaningful with my life in last five years of it, provided I have any energy or sanity left by then to do the shit I wanted to spend my life doing when I was 20).
The only reason gentrification is a problem at all is, for one part, the property taxes issue, which Prop 13 has fixed; and for the second part, the can't-get-out-of-renting issue, which is the real problem, and a major manifestation of the real underlying cause of all the excesses of capitalism. Rent of any form is inherently parasitic and market-distorting and needs to be eliminated entirely if we ever want people to be free from serfdom. Just because we live on one lord's land while working another's now does make it any less feudal than when we live and worked the same lots.
Computer scientists are scientists. They study the theory of how computers can possibly work. They discover the tools nature gives us for building computers.
Software and hardware engineers take the results of computer science and use it to build computers. They create new tools for us to use for our specific purposes.
Information technologists take those tools which engineers have created using the discoveries of the scientists, select the best tools for the job at hand, and make sure that those tools keep working.
IT is to SE is to CS as an auto mechanic is to an automotive engineer is to a physicists studying the mechanics and thermodynamics of theoretical engines.
The problem is human beings shouldn't be allowed to have power over other human beings.
How can humans be prevented from having power over other humans if there aren't any humans with power over other humans to prevent the humans from having power over other humans?
All humans always have power over other humans; and on a social scale, most of that power comes from the support and acceptance of other humans.
The problem is not people having power over each other, but abusing that power. Which is generally to say, using it against each other for reasons other than to prevent each other from using it against each other.
The trick then is in convincing enough of those humans both not to abuse their power, but also to use their power to prevent other humans from abusing their power.
In other words, we can only have justice if enough people support and accept only just exercises of power, and oppose or undermine any unjust exercises of it.
Said differently, when does this thing become a human, and when does it cease to be a human?
While I agree with what I think you're trying to say, the way you've said it belies the problem trying to be solved.
A blastocyst and someone in a permanent vegetative state are unquestionable human. "Human" just describes the species of animal which we are; if it's homo sapiens, it's human.
The question is whether they are persons. To conflate "human" and "person" is to imply that all (and only) things which are members of our species are persons, regardless of whether the mental faculties characteristic of persons are totally undeveloped / totally destroyed, or fully functional and present. And that seems to be exactly the question you're trying to pose.
If you find that book you mentioned I'd be interested to read it, BTW. Sounds intriguing.
There are actually a lot of unemployed lawyers. When the economy tanked in 2008-2009, a lot of high-level lawyers got laid off, which made it virtually impossible for fresh law school grads to get jobs in their field (because there's so many people with many years of experience ahead of them in the jobs line). In 2009 I was dating someone with a juris doctorate who worked a call center to pay the bills. Last I heard she'd managed to make her way up to some paralegal-esque office job, but still couldn't find real law work befitting her education. And apparently that's true of a lot of people in similar situations.
I am not sure I would call the government "bigger" in the theocratic monarchies of yore. More likely to interfere with your daily life, sure. More likely to restrict what you could do economically, sure. But it employed fewer people, didn't it? I suppose it all comes down to what you mean by "bigger".
I meant "bigger" in the sense of "more invasive", which as fas as I can tell is the generally used sense, in the English-speaking world at least. It's "bigger" in the abstract space of aspects of life: a government which is small in that space covers very few aspects of life, a government which is large in that space covers many aspects of life.
As for the changes to the meaning of political labels, we in Denmark have them enshrined in the names of our parties. The party "venstre", litterally "left", is a right wing party, while the party "det radikale venstre", literally "the radical left", is a center party, at least as far as that they have been in governments with both sides within the last decades.
That sounds not too dissimilar to other party names and political labels around the world. In the US "liberals" no longer favor maximal liberty but instead lean in a social-authoritarian direction. In most Commonwealth countries "liberal" retains closer to its old meaning but has since been abandoned by the left, making "liberal" (originally leftist) parties now right-wing. Meanwhile there and in much of Europe, parties which were further left of the original left-liberals, "radical left" socialists, are now considered mainstream and thus centrist.
I was speaking of the days when theocratic monarchies and their supporting aristocracies across the west were shown the door or worse. The American and French revolutions, the collapse of the British and Spanish empires and their evolution away from absolute monarchy, the general collapse of feudalism and aristocracy and rise of liberal democratic republics around the world. Those were the days when "liberal" and "conservative" were coined as antonyms, along with the "left-right" terminology, because the people pushing for more freedom (the commoners, on the left) were the ones wanting a change (so liberalism was progressive and leftist), and the ones wanting to keep things how they were (the nobles, on the right) were the ones in favor of strong state power (so statism was conservative and rightist).
It wasn't until those progressive liberal movements largely won and the left later adopted their own kind of statism that the right started advocating conserving the liberty they had since adapted to. That's been the status quo now for century or so, but when it started it was a major reversal of the trend of the prior century or so, and it was in that earlier context that the words themselves were coined.
But Republican Christian nutjobs are generally considered conservative in American popular usage as well, which was my point: you gave an overly-restricted sense of "conservative" to exclude the Republican Christian nutjobs (who are usually lumped into that category) from it, when they are even more rightly lumped into it than libertarians are. Religious authoritarians have always been conservative; libertarians were once progressive, only recently became conservative as authoritarianism began trending up again, and arguably could be considered progressive again now that it's been a while since the left and right both adopted authoritarianism.
"Conservative" does not mean "favoring smaller government and more liberty"; that's "libertarian".
"Conservative" means "favoring things as they once were; opposing change".*
It's a mere historical coincidence that in recent history, change has been away from smaller government, and so libertarianism became conservative.
In older eras, change was toward smaller government, and conservatives were in favor of preserving the authority of the church and state. The Christian nutjobs still pine for those "good old days", and that makes them even more conservative than the libertarian type of conservative.
*(Strictly speaking "conservative" should be distinguished from "reactionary" in that the former favors preserving things as they are now, and the latter favors bringing back things that used to be, in which case all of the aforementioned "conservatives" are really "reactionaries" since society has already changed away from the way they wish it still was).
Why would that happen? More to the point, why would the owners of current rental properties let that happen, sitting on their properties doing nothing, which makes the rental properties useless to them, when they could instead sell them for money which they can use to buy useful things? Not coincidentally, there would at the same time be a large body of people in the market to buy. People who are presently priced out of the market because other people with more money can afford to buy overpriced property since they can then rent it out to recoup the cost and more. Eliminating the rent in the middle there would make the new equilibrium state one where the owners of current rental properties start selling them on terms that current renters can afford (as only people in need of that property for their own personal uses would buy it, since there's no profit to extract from merely owning it to rent out). Thus capital moves from the hands of those who have more than they need to the hands of those who don't have enough, without any coercion; just letting natural market forces operate, after removing the market-distorting factor of rent.
And nobody would lend money for profit, but they would most certainly invest it, as in buy an ownership stake and take on a share of the risk, as otherwise their excess money would be sitting around doing nothing for them. Nobody's going to just sit on useless capital. They will find somewhere to invest it besides lending at interest. There's plenty of options already out there, and it wouldn't surprise me if more still sprung up.
The level of blindness to alternate arrangements never ceases to astonish me. People act like if things weren't exactly like they are now, nothing could possibly work at all.
Simply make contracts of rent and interest void. Do not enforce any supposed obligation for anyone to pay anyone for the temporary use of their property. All existing rent and interest arrangements would then need to be refactored into genuine sales if the existing creditors/landlords/etc want to keep making money off their capital, which would set up a the gradual natural distribution of capital that should have been happening all along.
How to get the law changed in that way is a question I don't have an easy answer to, but the first step is getting enough people supporting that change that they can do what's necessary to get it made, and the first step toward that is making people aware of the existence of that option, which is what I'm working on here.
I don't really see that as Devil's Advocate, since it's not a counterargument to my proposed solution. It's just pointing out that that solution is very unlikely to be enacted, because the people with the power to enact it don't want it enacted. I agree with that entirely.
The four possible scenarios I can see playing out are:
A) The owning class secures their power with things like robotic security and such to the point that they no longer need the working class at all, all the workers get laid off, starve and go homeless, try futilely to riot but can't overthrow the owning class's secure position, and eventually die off entirely.
B) The owning class secures their position of power, the working class becomes entirely unnecessary, but out of some little shred of humanity (or possible uncertainty in the security of their position), the owning class keep the working class around, but now wielding absolute power over them as the owners have absolutely no need for the non-owners and the non-owners are absolutely dependent on the owners for their "charity".
C) The revolution comes before the owning class can totally secure their position and the working class are able to overthrow the owning class, either violently or somehow through nonviolent political means. Some traditional form of state socialism is enacted to redistribute wealth, and everyone now lives on the welfare of the state and its robot armies, which in turn (its leadership that is) wields absolute power over the people as it has no need for them per se and they are entirely dependent upon it.
D) The revolution comes soon enough to succeed by whatever means it does, and something more like my libertarian socialist solution is enacted: divisions between owners and non-owners are dissolved, without eradicating all personal liberty.
I think B and C are probably the more likely options, but A is still a frightening possibility, and it depresses me that nobody even seems to consider the possibility of genuine solutions in category D.
Whether or not this current revolution creates enough new jobs of new types to offset the loss of old jobs of the old types, the net trend and the entire point of developing technology is labor saving: we are, as a culture (the global human culture, not America specifically), actively trying to eliminate the need for people to do work. Either because we don't want to work ourselves, or we don't want to have to pay someone else to work; there is a constant universal and undying pressure to find ways to have people doing less work.
On the whole, this is a good thing. A world where nobody has to work would be great! The problem is that we have, and for most of human history always have had, a division in our society, between those who have more stuff than they need to get by, and those who don't have enough to get by, which allows the former group to not work, at the expense of making the latter group work more, in exchange for the former group providing the latter group with the material goods they need to get by.
It is only in the presence of that division between non-working owners and non-owning workers that the elimination of work is a problem, because it makes the working class entirely unnecessary to the owning class who hold all the power. If instead everyone was an owner and a worker, then the elimination of work would leave us with an eventual society where everyone is an owner and not a worker. Well, we will get that eventually one way or another, but the question is whether we get there by eliminating the workers and leaving only the owners (bad), or if we just eliminate working for everyone and leave everyone just owning (good).
So the way around the inevitable (if not looming) elimination of an entire class of people is to eliminate that class division. To make everyone a member of the owning class. Then we can all be happy to eliminate all the jobs we can. This of course is not a new idea, but I think the way it's been approached in the past has been entirely wrong. To bring people into the owning class does not require forcibly taking things from the existing owners and giving them to the workers for free. It should be happening naturally and voluntarily. Look at the arrangement between owners and workers again: the owners trade their capital for the labor of the workers. So labor flows from the workers to the owners, and capital flows from the owners to the workers. So obviously the workers gradually accrue capital and the owners gradually lose capital until the workers and owners are equally owners, and now the owners have to start working themselves since they've no capital trade advantage left. Right?
That clearly doesn't happen, which means that there must be some kind of mechanism which is operating counter to the flow of capital from the owners to the workers, keeping the workers from accruing capital and the owners from losing it. I propose that the underlying mechanism here is rent, including rent on money otherwise known as interest. In a rental arrangement, someone with capital lets someone else temporarily use that capital in exchange for a permanent payment, and then gets their capital back at the end. So the person with enough capital that they can lend it out gains more capital (the money paid to them) at the expense of someone who doesn't have enough capital and needs to borrow it (the thing they rented). The people who need to borrow capital are of course precisely the people who need to trade their labor for the money they need to pay that rent, and the people with enough capital to lend it out are of course precisely the people who have enough that they don't need to labor at all. So rent and interest creates exactly the kind of backward flow from those without enough (the workers) to those with more than enough (the owners) that counteracts what would otherwise be the natural flow of capital in the other direction.
All we need to do is eliminate rent (including interest) and the class divisions will naturally disappear. And when the class divisions disappear, the elimination of work ceases to be a problem and becomes a blessing instead.
Which is fine if the growth of customer base is greater than the loss per customer.
If lowering prices to 75% of what they were will get them 200% the customers they had, hell yeah they'll do it. That's a 50% increase in profits (i.e. 150% of what they were profiting before). It doesn't have to be that extreme of course. If ([new price]*[new customer base])/([old price]*[old customer base]) > 1, you do it.
raise their costs by dealing with more customers
The net profit made from each customer is already the income from the customer minus the costs of dealing in particular with them, minus a fraction of general operating expenses. Having more customers means the operating expenses get spread out across more customer and each customer costs you less to handle overall. E.g. I'm not going to set up a shop to serve two people per week, unless they're each paying me the cost of the product I'm selling them plus half of my weekly operating expenses plus half of whatever profit I need to make, which is unlikely. If I get a thousand customers per week though, those operating expenses (like rent, electricity, advertising, etc) get spread over over a thousand people, so they only need to pay me the cost of the product I'm selling them plus a thousandth of my operating expenses plus a thousandth of whatever profit I need to make.
TL;DR: Conducting business generally is cheaper per customer when you have more customers.
No, in no scenario would their ever be any reason a competent business man would want to do what you are suggesting.
If business operated like you suggest, every business everywhere would charge infinitely much for everything. They don't do that because then nobody would buy anything. So they lower their prices until someone is willing to buy their product. But having just the one richest person in the world buy your product isn't much of a business, so they lower it more so they get more business, and they keep doing that until the growth of the customer base costs more than it makes them, which is the final market price, which reflects what people on average think that product is worth (what they're willing to pay for it).
Authoritarianism has nothing to do with how many people are holding the reigns, it has to do with how heavy a yoke is laid upon each person.
In other words: both a single dictator and a supermajority can pass and enforce laws trampling on the rights of every individual in the society. You might argue that the supermajority is less likely to do that, but liberty/authority dichotomy is about whether or not that kind of law is passed, not about how many people approved the passing of that law.
Well, if this concept pans out, we'd be able to calculate all kinds of particle interactions we'd never be able to observe otherwise because those interaction would just be different facets of The One True Gem
Crap, so the "Time Cube" guy was right all along?;-)
(He was featured in this xkcd which spawned an epic forum thread and its sequel, wherein we all attempted to explain relativity and some basic geometry to him.)
That's fnj's point, I think. Watts are a measure of power, which is energy per (i.e. divided by) time. Then you multiply that power by a unit of time to to get a unit of energy. Watt-hours measure energy; plain watts measure power.
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You are just pushing the problem back one step. My critique of rent is not only housing rent, though that's one of the biggest problem areas. It's anything where someone with some form of wealth "earns" more wealth merely by letting others borrow their wealth, which moves wealth from those with less (who need to borrow it) to those with more (who can afford to lend it). You're saying that the rentier is just passing along (some of) the costs of financing his purchase like interest... but interest is itself a form of rent. Interest is rent on money, and I have just as much objection to that as I do rent on real estate. The banks are using their wealth advantage to extract more wealth from those who have less (the home buyers), and some of those home buyers (notably, only those who can afford more home(s) than they need for personal use, otherwise they would have to be homeless while renting out the home they would otherwise use themselves) pass the buck and use their wealth advantage to extract more wealth from those who have less than them (the renters). It's still the same problem.
And your talk of saving money renting vs buying (your "40% the price") only makes any sense if you assume that everybody will be paying housing expenses indefinitely. You are looking at monthly cost of housing; I am looking at monthly cost of housing times the number of months until I can stop paying it. By that latter metric, renting costs infinite money, because you will never get to stop. Buying on the other hand costs only a finite amount of money, even if it's more per month than renting. When I get to the point where I can start paying down a real house on its own land, I intend to pay a lot more per month than I am paying to rent right now (the big chunk of my income currently doing toward savings for a down payment), because that will minimize the amount of time it takes to pay it off and the amount of interest (i.e. rent) I will have to pay. But that means, if everything goes well, I will not have any housing expenses at all for the last 20-30 years of my life. Instead of getting kicked to the curb when I'm too old and broken to work and thus can't pay rent anymore.
You are the one who is full of it. I never said anything about "lots of land". I'm talking about just owning anything, so that you don't have to continuously pay to be not-homeless. This whole commuting tangent is a complete non-sequitur. The bottom line is this: when Alice rents from Bob, Alice pays a lot of money and never gets any property to her name, meanwhile Bob gets lots of money and never loses any property in the deal, and the only reason that arrangement is agreeable to anyone is because Bob has enough property that he can let others borrow it while Alice doesn't have any property and needs to borrow some. In a just world, the solution to that problem would be for Alice to trade Bob money for his property, and thus the property would naturally redistribute itself from those who have more than they need to those who need more than they have. Instead, with rent as an option, access to that kind of deal (a straight trade of money for property) can be priced out of the reach of many people, and replaced with an institute which funnels wealth from the people who have less to those who have more. That is a fundamental injustice, logistics about commuting or anything else aside.
I'm not saying anybody should be able to live somewhere that they can't afford to live now. I'm not saying anything at all about who should live where. I'm saying, if Alice spends $X/mo to live in a place for Y years, then she should have $12XY equity to show for the money she's been paying, and eventually, after Z years of that, she should own outright a place worth $12XZ. Instead of spending Z years paying $X/mo only to be out $12XZ with nothing to show for it (while Bob has made $12XZ, not lost a bit of his property, and can now afford to buy another and compound the whole process).
In response to your other post: buying a home should not be an "investment". That is exactly that kind of thinking which underlies this rent problem. People thinking that they should be able to make money off of just owning something (and letting others use it), rather than from selling something. Buying a home is not a means to make money, buying a home is a means to have a home to live in, without having to borrow someone else's for a steep price in perpetuity. Owning a home will save you money, sure -- by eliminating an expense that shouldn't exist in the first place. I want that opportunity to be available to everyone.
And there's no reason that home ownership has to be long-term or commit you to a single location: the same people who currently profit from renting out property could perform a real useful function providing liquidity to the market, selling high on long terms, and buying back low on short terms. For people or properties with high turnover, where someone is getting value out of being able to buy and sell quick (eliminating the long-term commitment), those "rentiers" would be providing a real, useful function, and making the profit they deserve for that. But for people who would currently spend a decade renting in the same place that they would be buying if the barrier to entry weren't artificially raised by the existence of the rental market, the situation would be far more just: all the money they spend on having a place to live would be going toward getting them a place to live, and eventually they could stop paying, instead of being stuck in that cycle forever.
I'm not talking about a nice neighborhood vs a bad neighborhood, I'm talking about living in a general area or not. I work from home (telecommute) so proximity to work is not an issue for me at all, but even if it was, I'm just talking about living in the general area, not about living in the best neighborhood in that area. I'm also not talking about having a big or nice house; just having anything that belongs to me, anywhere in the general area. I have finally reached a point where that is just within my reach. About half of the people who live in the general area are below that point. So half the people who live here shouldn't live here, is that your opinion?
Let's look at the Santa Barbara area because that's a great example of insane housing prices. The median home price in the general Santa Barbara area -- not the price of the homes in the nicest neighborhoods, just an average home, somewhere around there -- is over a million dollars. But the average income for someone living in the Santa Barbara area is nowhere near enough to even begin to buy a house in that range. It's not even enough to begin to buy a house in the low-end range for the area, which is still in the high hundreds of thousands. So the only hope for all those people who work there, but can't afford to buy there, if they actually want to stop having to run uphill against the threat of homelessness their entire lives, is to move out of the area -- like, to a distance that they can't work in the area any more.
If everyone moved to somewhere that they could afford to buy, as you advise, then the bulk of the working population would be fleeing the city. And now all those people who are rich enough to live there... either have to wait their own tables, or start paying waiters enough that they can afford to buy some kind of housing there, or start selling their now-empty rental properties (now that everyone's moved out) on terms that waiters can afford. Or some combination of all of those things, to the effect that the empty formerly-rental properties get traded for people's labor, and in the end a portion of the home-owning population there is waiting the tables. Which would be great, and which is what should happen -- and if everyone took your advice, it's what would happen. So why doesn't it?
Because they invented a loophole. "They" being the class of people wealthy enough to live there, collectively. They need someone to wait their tables, but they don't want to pay waiters what they would want to charge for their unused property -- they don't want to trade their capital for labor, they want to keep their capital and also get labor. They want a way to leverage their capital to get labor, without actually losing the capital in the process. So they say to the poor, "you can live in my unused property, if you work for me and give me most of the product of your labor". Just like a feudal lord: "you can live on my land, if you work my fields and give me most of what they yield". Of course I'm speaking there of the wealthy class collectively as one entity -- when broken down into individuals, the wage-serf gets to live in one lord's property, work for another lord, and split the product of his labor between the two (briefly holding possession of the landlord's share as he carries it to him from his employer), so it's not quite feudalism. But the dependency of the poor on the rich and the intentional inability of them to escape that cycle is the same.
If we closed that loophole, eliminated rent, then people would have to do as you advise -- move somewhere they can buy, because there's no such thing as rent -- and then the consequent responses to that as outlined above would follow, leaving far more equitable arrangements than there were before.
So only rich people get to live in nice places then? Some of those rich people better be prepared to have fun waiting tables and taking out the garbage then. Of course, unless those jobs pay well, they're not going to be rich for long, and won't be able to live there themselves, so those jobs had better pay well enough to afford to live in that area -- at which point, people who would otherwise be poor can take those same jobs and not have to move away.
Of course, the way things are now, the waiters in rich places can manage to live there without being rich themselves because the rich people there can afford to snatch up more property than they need for their own use and then charge people to borrow it in an inescapable cycle that keeps them forever depending on the wages of their masters in order to afford the rents demanded by them. So basically, rich people and their servants who depend utterly upon them can afford to live in nice areas. I'm saying: get rid of the "having servants" option and watch shit sort itself out. Watch all the "help" move away since there's no way for them to live there, watch the rich move away because there's no one to serve them, watch the desirability drop, and prices with it, and watch wages rise to attract back the "help", and pretty soon anyone who can get a job there can afford to live there -- in their own place, not stuck in an inescapable cycle of dependency on someone else.
The flip side of the problem in the first paragraph is that there is not cheap housing available to buy. I would gladly go in for a $220k home... if there were any where I live. The median price here is about $350k, and the lowest price you're likely to find on anything but a mobile (which I already have, and which leaves me still paying rent anyway) is about $300k, which is what I'm stretching for (on the expectation that my income will continue to increase and that will become possible in the future). But close to half of the people who live around here make less than I do, most of them significantly less. It's fine with you if half the people in an area just have no hope of ever establishing financial independence, in the sense of only paying for things they consume, and not for the never-ending (if they're lucky!) privilege of using someone else's property just because they have no hope of ever obtaining their own? That over half the population are perpetually dependent on the other half letting them use their property in exchange for their continued servitude?
Someone making minimum wage should be able to afford some kind of tiny minimum-wage-level property of their own, and not be forced into renting (or homelessness) as their only options. I argue that eliminating rent would force the market to provide such housing, or else the people currently renting out properties would have useless properties generating no profit. But the people renting from them would suddenly be a huge market of people who need to buy, so the people in a power position in that arrangement -- the property owners -- would have to figure out some way to sell their property on some kind of terms that the only people who want to buy it (now that nobody's going to be buying it to rent it out) can afford it, or else make nothing off it and lose everything on their investment.
I generally agree with the point you are trying to make (freedom is unstable in the absence of some kind of regulation to preserve it), but I have a major bone to pick: Anarchy is freedom. "Anarchy" does not mean the absence of regulation. It means a free market of regulation -- free in the sense you're speaking of, well-regulated, not "fastest draw of their gun". It means nobody has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force (which is the textbook definition of a state, and thus the precise antonym of anarchy), but not that nobody provides that legitimate use of force (which is necessary to curtail illegitimate uses of force, and without which we would have "fastest draw of their gun" rule everywhere). It just means that the provision of that legitimate use of force (which is to say, the provision of regulation, or in simpler terms, protection of each market participant from the others) comes from voluntary agreements in an open market of providers.
Unfortunately that means that the "market for governance", as it were, is inherently unstable, and it is extremely difficult to preserve the freedom of it -- to preserve anarchy -- because preserving that freedom requires regulation, governance, and "A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned" (or to quote someone more classical, "Who watches the watchers?"). That means that a free market of governance -- anarchy -- tends to quickly collapse into collusion and "fastest draw of their gun" rule... which is to say, states as we know them. That doesn't make anarchy bad. That makes anarchy really hard to achieve, and states as we know them the unfortunate status quo that it's really, really hard to get rid of. Getting rid of one state is not so hard. Keeping another from popping right up to replace it, and doing that indefinitely, is the challenge.
Not everyone can afford to buy. That isn't a problem; it's an economic reality likely to persist as long as property exists as we know it.
Not everyone can afford food either, but the reality of that situation doesn't make it not a problem. The near-total impossibility for large swathes of the population obtain housing of their own, leaving them dependent on borrowing housing from others (which in itself perpetuates their inability to buy), is a problem. We cannot have a free and equal population when large chunks of it are dependent on others for a necessity of life like housing, and have almost no hope of even slowly or gradually working their way out of that situation.
I'm not complaining about gentrification here, in fact I've complained about people who complain about gentrification before. I have no problem with the value of real estate in different places being different, and changing as conditions in those different places change; that's just normal market dynamics. I'm saying that the real cause of the problem that has people upset about "gentrification" is the fact that so many people don't live in a place which is their own, and can have the conditions of their tentative permission to live there changed out from under them (with some restrictions of course). That is where people's energy should be directed, not at bullshit like these protesters are complaining about.
However, a tangential problem gentrification which I don't quite have a solution to is this: even fixing the tax and rent problems, people born into expensive places, who grew up there and who have everyone and everything they love there, can still be forced out of their homes in a broader sense, if the place they were born becomes more popular (and thus more expensive) than when their family first moved there. That's the situation I'm in: two generations of my family have lived in my home town, I've spent my entire life here, all my friends, colleagues, career, romance, all of that is here, and on top of that it is a fantastically beautiful place which has set my standards for what a decent place to live looks like, and makes most of the rest of the country look intolerably ugly or plain to my eye. But despite two generations of our family living here, that beauty has made prices skyrocket, and all my cousins have either had to move somewhere I'd never want to live, or still live at home with their parents, because nobody can afford to live here on their own. I am only barely managing because I am more successful than any of my parents or their siblings were at my age.
Doesn't something seem wrong about the fact that people are displaced from their home lands just because other, richer people from other lands want to live there and money is power so they get what they want and the locals have to GTFO? What if a bunch of rich Americans moved into some impoverished third world country, bought the place up, and within a generation or two the indigenous people who had lived there for centuries were forced to emigrate elsewhere? Something just like that happens at a smaller scale all the time, and from I'm not sure how to fix it even if the rental problem is fixed, but it's still a real problem. It's not a problem that "foreigners" can "immigrate", I'm not complaining about non-locals in my hometown or anything; but it's a problem that the locals can be displaced even if they would rather stay put, just because there's no way they can afford to live there.
The problem is that buying is not an option for many people, because the money that they would otherwise be putting toward paying off a house (or that 20% of a house they have to put down up front before they can pay the rest off over time) is instead spent paying off their landlord's mortgage for them.
I'm 31, make a bit above the national median household income since about two years ago, and live in a moderately expensive area (not the Bay, but not Bumfuck Idaho either; average home price here is about $350k), and homeownership is a distant long-term life goal for me, which is so strenuously nigh-impossible that it's just about displaced everything else I ever dreamt I might want to do with my life. I've just barely managed to buy the smallest cheapest mobile home I could buy last year, but that still has me paying space rent about equal to the rent on a room I'd been paying my whole life since, and it's looking like another 5 years of saving at least before I can afford to put a down payment on a real house and FINALLY have my housing expenses go toward buying something of my own instead of borrowing something of someone else's. (Then another 30 years of working my ass off to pay those bills and I can finally afford to spend time doing something meaningful with my life in last five years of it, provided I have any energy or sanity left by then to do the shit I wanted to spend my life doing when I was 20).
The only reason gentrification is a problem at all is, for one part, the property taxes issue, which Prop 13 has fixed; and for the second part, the can't-get-out-of-renting issue, which is the real problem, and a major manifestation of the real underlying cause of all the excesses of capitalism. Rent of any form is inherently parasitic and market-distorting and needs to be eliminated entirely if we ever want people to be free from serfdom. Just because we live on one lord's land while working another's now does make it any less feudal than when we live and worked the same lots.
Computer scientists are scientists. They study the theory of how computers can possibly work. They discover the tools nature gives us for building computers.
Software and hardware engineers take the results of computer science and use it to build computers. They create new tools for us to use for our specific purposes.
Information technologists take those tools which engineers have created using the discoveries of the scientists, select the best tools for the job at hand, and make sure that those tools keep working.
IT is to SE is to CS as an auto mechanic is to an automotive engineer is to a physicists studying the mechanics and thermodynamics of theoretical engines.
The problem is human beings shouldn't be allowed to have power over other human beings.
How can humans be prevented from having power over other humans if there aren't any humans with power over other humans to prevent the humans from having power over other humans?
All humans always have power over other humans; and on a social scale, most of that power comes from the support and acceptance of other humans.
The problem is not people having power over each other, but abusing that power. Which is generally to say, using it against each other for reasons other than to prevent each other from using it against each other.
The trick then is in convincing enough of those humans both not to abuse their power, but also to use their power to prevent other humans from abusing their power.
In other words, we can only have justice if enough people support and accept only just exercises of power, and oppose or undermine any unjust exercises of it.
Said differently, when does this thing become a human, and when does it cease to be a human?
While I agree with what I think you're trying to say, the way you've said it belies the problem trying to be solved.
A blastocyst and someone in a permanent vegetative state are unquestionable human. "Human" just describes the species of animal which we are; if it's homo sapiens, it's human.
The question is whether they are persons. To conflate "human" and "person" is to imply that all (and only) things which are members of our species are persons, regardless of whether the mental faculties characteristic of persons are totally undeveloped / totally destroyed, or fully functional and present. And that seems to be exactly the question you're trying to pose.
If you find that book you mentioned I'd be interested to read it, BTW. Sounds intriguing.
By that standard the 1st is a bit wishywashy too. All knowing? But what's true in the opinion of some people won't be in the eyes of others...
There are actually a lot of unemployed lawyers. When the economy tanked in 2008-2009, a lot of high-level lawyers got laid off, which made it virtually impossible for fresh law school grads to get jobs in their field (because there's so many people with many years of experience ahead of them in the jobs line). In 2009 I was dating someone with a juris doctorate who worked a call center to pay the bills. Last I heard she'd managed to make her way up to some paralegal-esque office job, but still couldn't find real law work befitting her education. And apparently that's true of a lot of people in similar situations.
I am not sure I would call the government "bigger" in the theocratic monarchies of yore. More likely to interfere with your daily life, sure. More likely to restrict what you could do economically, sure. But it employed fewer people, didn't it? I suppose it all comes down to what you mean by "bigger".
I meant "bigger" in the sense of "more invasive", which as fas as I can tell is the generally used sense, in the English-speaking world at least. It's "bigger" in the abstract space of aspects of life: a government which is small in that space covers very few aspects of life, a government which is large in that space covers many aspects of life.
As for the changes to the meaning of political labels, we in Denmark have them enshrined in the names of our parties. The party "venstre", litterally "left", is a right wing party, while the party "det radikale venstre", literally "the radical left", is a center party, at least as far as that they have been in governments with both sides within the last decades.
That sounds not too dissimilar to other party names and political labels around the world. In the US "liberals" no longer favor maximal liberty but instead lean in a social-authoritarian direction. In most Commonwealth countries "liberal" retains closer to its old meaning but has since been abandoned by the left, making "liberal" (originally leftist) parties now right-wing. Meanwhile there and in much of Europe, parties which were further left of the original left-liberals, "radical left" socialists, are now considered mainstream and thus centrist.
I was speaking of the days when theocratic monarchies and their supporting aristocracies across the west were shown the door or worse. The American and French revolutions, the collapse of the British and Spanish empires and their evolution away from absolute monarchy, the general collapse of feudalism and aristocracy and rise of liberal democratic republics around the world. Those were the days when "liberal" and "conservative" were coined as antonyms, along with the "left-right" terminology, because the people pushing for more freedom (the commoners, on the left) were the ones wanting a change (so liberalism was progressive and leftist), and the ones wanting to keep things how they were (the nobles, on the right) were the ones in favor of strong state power (so statism was conservative and rightist).
It wasn't until those progressive liberal movements largely won and the left later adopted their own kind of statism that the right started advocating conserving the liberty they had since adapted to. That's been the status quo now for century or so, but when it started it was a major reversal of the trend of the prior century or so, and it was in that earlier context that the words themselves were coined.
But Republican Christian nutjobs are generally considered conservative in American popular usage as well, which was my point: you gave an overly-restricted sense of "conservative" to exclude the Republican Christian nutjobs (who are usually lumped into that category) from it, when they are even more rightly lumped into it than libertarians are. Religious authoritarians have always been conservative; libertarians were once progressive, only recently became conservative as authoritarianism began trending up again, and arguably could be considered progressive again now that it's been a while since the left and right both adopted authoritarianism.
I do like that quote, BTW.
"Conservative" does not mean "favoring smaller government and more liberty"; that's "libertarian".
"Conservative" means "favoring things as they once were; opposing change".*
It's a mere historical coincidence that in recent history, change has been away from smaller government, and so libertarianism became conservative.
In older eras, change was toward smaller government, and conservatives were in favor of preserving the authority of the church and state. The Christian nutjobs still pine for those "good old days", and that makes them even more conservative than the libertarian type of conservative.
*(Strictly speaking "conservative" should be distinguished from "reactionary" in that the former favors preserving things as they are now, and the latter favors bringing back things that used to be, in which case all of the aforementioned "conservatives" are really "reactionaries" since society has already changed away from the way they wish it still was).
Why would that happen? More to the point, why would the owners of current rental properties let that happen, sitting on their properties doing nothing, which makes the rental properties useless to them, when they could instead sell them for money which they can use to buy useful things? Not coincidentally, there would at the same time be a large body of people in the market to buy. People who are presently priced out of the market because other people with more money can afford to buy overpriced property since they can then rent it out to recoup the cost and more. Eliminating the rent in the middle there would make the new equilibrium state one where the owners of current rental properties start selling them on terms that current renters can afford (as only people in need of that property for their own personal uses would buy it, since there's no profit to extract from merely owning it to rent out). Thus capital moves from the hands of those who have more than they need to the hands of those who don't have enough, without any coercion; just letting natural market forces operate, after removing the market-distorting factor of rent.
And nobody would lend money for profit, but they would most certainly invest it, as in buy an ownership stake and take on a share of the risk, as otherwise their excess money would be sitting around doing nothing for them. Nobody's going to just sit on useless capital. They will find somewhere to invest it besides lending at interest. There's plenty of options already out there, and it wouldn't surprise me if more still sprung up.
The level of blindness to alternate arrangements never ceases to astonish me. People act like if things weren't exactly like they are now, nothing could possibly work at all.
Simply make contracts of rent and interest void. Do not enforce any supposed obligation for anyone to pay anyone for the temporary use of their property. All existing rent and interest arrangements would then need to be refactored into genuine sales if the existing creditors/landlords/etc want to keep making money off their capital, which would set up a the gradual natural distribution of capital that should have been happening all along.
How to get the law changed in that way is a question I don't have an easy answer to, but the first step is getting enough people supporting that change that they can do what's necessary to get it made, and the first step toward that is making people aware of the existence of that option, which is what I'm working on here.
I don't really see that as Devil's Advocate, since it's not a counterargument to my proposed solution. It's just pointing out that that solution is very unlikely to be enacted, because the people with the power to enact it don't want it enacted. I agree with that entirely.
The four possible scenarios I can see playing out are:
A) The owning class secures their power with things like robotic security and such to the point that they no longer need the working class at all, all the workers get laid off, starve and go homeless, try futilely to riot but can't overthrow the owning class's secure position, and eventually die off entirely.
B) The owning class secures their position of power, the working class becomes entirely unnecessary, but out of some little shred of humanity (or possible uncertainty in the security of their position), the owning class keep the working class around, but now wielding absolute power over them as the owners have absolutely no need for the non-owners and the non-owners are absolutely dependent on the owners for their "charity".
C) The revolution comes before the owning class can totally secure their position and the working class are able to overthrow the owning class, either violently or somehow through nonviolent political means. Some traditional form of state socialism is enacted to redistribute wealth, and everyone now lives on the welfare of the state and its robot armies, which in turn (its leadership that is) wields absolute power over the people as it has no need for them per se and they are entirely dependent upon it.
D) The revolution comes soon enough to succeed by whatever means it does, and something more like my libertarian socialist solution is enacted: divisions between owners and non-owners are dissolved, without eradicating all personal liberty.
I think B and C are probably the more likely options, but A is still a frightening possibility, and it depresses me that nobody even seems to consider the possibility of genuine solutions in category D.
Whether or not this current revolution creates enough new jobs of new types to offset the loss of old jobs of the old types, the net trend and the entire point of developing technology is labor saving: we are, as a culture (the global human culture, not America specifically), actively trying to eliminate the need for people to do work. Either because we don't want to work ourselves, or we don't want to have to pay someone else to work; there is a constant universal and undying pressure to find ways to have people doing less work.
On the whole, this is a good thing. A world where nobody has to work would be great! The problem is that we have, and for most of human history always have had, a division in our society, between those who have more stuff than they need to get by, and those who don't have enough to get by, which allows the former group to not work, at the expense of making the latter group work more, in exchange for the former group providing the latter group with the material goods they need to get by.
It is only in the presence of that division between non-working owners and non-owning workers that the elimination of work is a problem, because it makes the working class entirely unnecessary to the owning class who hold all the power. If instead everyone was an owner and a worker, then the elimination of work would leave us with an eventual society where everyone is an owner and not a worker. Well, we will get that eventually one way or another, but the question is whether we get there by eliminating the workers and leaving only the owners (bad), or if we just eliminate working for everyone and leave everyone just owning (good).
So the way around the inevitable (if not looming) elimination of an entire class of people is to eliminate that class division. To make everyone a member of the owning class. Then we can all be happy to eliminate all the jobs we can. This of course is not a new idea, but I think the way it's been approached in the past has been entirely wrong. To bring people into the owning class does not require forcibly taking things from the existing owners and giving them to the workers for free. It should be happening naturally and voluntarily. Look at the arrangement between owners and workers again: the owners trade their capital for the labor of the workers. So labor flows from the workers to the owners, and capital flows from the owners to the workers. So obviously the workers gradually accrue capital and the owners gradually lose capital until the workers and owners are equally owners, and now the owners have to start working themselves since they've no capital trade advantage left. Right?
That clearly doesn't happen, which means that there must be some kind of mechanism which is operating counter to the flow of capital from the owners to the workers, keeping the workers from accruing capital and the owners from losing it. I propose that the underlying mechanism here is rent, including rent on money otherwise known as interest. In a rental arrangement, someone with capital lets someone else temporarily use that capital in exchange for a permanent payment, and then gets their capital back at the end. So the person with enough capital that they can lend it out gains more capital (the money paid to them) at the expense of someone who doesn't have enough capital and needs to borrow it (the thing they rented). The people who need to borrow capital are of course precisely the people who need to trade their labor for the money they need to pay that rent, and the people with enough capital to lend it out are of course precisely the people who have enough that they don't need to labor at all. So rent and interest creates exactly the kind of backward flow from those without enough (the workers) to those with more than enough (the owners) that counteracts what would otherwise be the natural flow of capital in the other direction.
All we need to do is eliminate rent (including interest) and the class divisions will naturally disappear. And when the class divisions disappear, the elimination of work ceases to be a problem and becomes a blessing instead.
But they would get less per customer
Which is fine if the growth of customer base is greater than the loss per customer.
If lowering prices to 75% of what they were will get them 200% the customers they had, hell yeah they'll do it. That's a 50% increase in profits (i.e. 150% of what they were profiting before). It doesn't have to be that extreme of course. If ([new price]*[new customer base])/([old price]*[old customer base]) > 1, you do it.
raise their costs by dealing with more customers
The net profit made from each customer is already the income from the customer minus the costs of dealing in particular with them, minus a fraction of general operating expenses. Having more customers means the operating expenses get spread out across more customer and each customer costs you less to handle overall. E.g. I'm not going to set up a shop to serve two people per week, unless they're each paying me the cost of the product I'm selling them plus half of my weekly operating expenses plus half of whatever profit I need to make, which is unlikely. If I get a thousand customers per week though, those operating expenses (like rent, electricity, advertising, etc) get spread over over a thousand people, so they only need to pay me the cost of the product I'm selling them plus a thousandth of my operating expenses plus a thousandth of whatever profit I need to make.
TL;DR: Conducting business generally is cheaper per customer when you have more customers.
No, in no scenario would their ever be any reason a competent business man would want to do what you are suggesting.
If business operated like you suggest, every business everywhere would charge infinitely much for everything. They don't do that because then nobody would buy anything. So they lower their prices until someone is willing to buy their product. But having just the one richest person in the world buy your product isn't much of a business, so they lower it more so they get more business, and they keep doing that until the growth of the customer base costs more than it makes them, which is the final market price, which reflects what people on average think that product is worth (what they're willing to pay for it).
it's an unwell community that demonises half of its members for the sin of having nipples.
Yeah, especially when that's a "sin" committed by nigh well 100% of its members! The hypocrisy of it!
Authoritarianism has nothing to do with how many people are holding the reigns, it has to do with how heavy a yoke is laid upon each person.
In other words: both a single dictator and a supermajority can pass and enforce laws trampling on the rights of every individual in the society. You might argue that the supermajority is less likely to do that, but liberty/authority dichotomy is about whether or not that kind of law is passed, not about how many people approved the passing of that law.
Crap, so the "Time Cube" guy was right all along? ;-)
What this news made me think of at first was Steve Waterman's crazy theory that the properties of fundamental particles are based on their geometric shapes, those being defined by the polyhedra named after himself based on close-packing of equal spheres.
(He was featured in this xkcd which spawned an epic forum thread and its sequel, wherein we all attempted to explain relativity and some basic geometry to him.)
That's fnj's point, I think. Watts are a measure of power, which is energy per (i.e. divided by) time. Then you multiply that power by a unit of time to to get a unit of energy. Watt-hours measure energy; plain watts measure power.