• lolcatnip
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    4 months ago

    Going to work so I can eat and pay rent fucking sucks, what are you talking about? The fact that you even conceptualize economic output as being all about money means you’re missing the point of an economy. Money is a representation of wealth, not wealth itself. You can’t eat money, shelter yourself from the elements with money, cure diseases with money, etc. Having access to goods and services is a blast, but money is nothing more than a mechanism to facilitate trade and the distribution of wealth.

    The “commie bullshit” is entirely your contribution. I said nothing at all about making everyone’s income equal. Not within a country and certainly not between regions with wildly different costs of living. I’m talking about actual wealth, actual labor, and the way a society decides who deserves to have access to material wealth.

    Let me spell it out for you: when a new technology makes a category of work obsolete, it sounds be a good thing because less work needs to be done to produce the same wealth. It’s like how having a washing machine is great because it saves you from doing many hours of tedious labor with essentially no downside. The reason that doesn’t work at a societal level is because our economic system is designed to funnel 100% of the benefits of labor-saving technology to a parasitic ownership class, leaving the average person poorer as a result. Our economic system is based entirely around scarcity, and introducing just a little bit of abundance breaks it and fucks over people whose labor is no longer needed by denying them access to wealth.

    Do you really think it’s reasonable that having less work needing to be done to produce the same wealth should ever make the average person less well off?

    • Cornpop@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Some kinda UBI is good, but people still need a purpose. We should still strive to build something and better ourselves.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        4 months ago

        You don’t need work for that. You need work to do necessary things for society, which would be far less than the amount of work being done right now.