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Capitalism, the system where we allow poverty to exist
Hobbies are also a thing. Even if they don’t work, at least they won’t be criminals. Poverty is a major predictor/pre-requisite for criminal activities.
I don’t get why it’s so controversial that people should be able to survive without a job. It doesn’t need to be glamourous, but nobody should be unhoused or unfed. We are blessed with plenty and we should share. And before it sounds like I’m religious, no, I’m not saying churches should be responsible for that, government should. (Though obviously I have no problems with any religious groups feeding and housing people as well.)
You don’t sound religious at all, so I’m not sure why you mentioned that, but im completely against churches feeding and housing people because they impose rules upon the recipients. I don’t believe in charity, so that’s part of it.
Unless you assume people will work out of goodness of their hearts, every system has to somehow coerce people to work. You can’t fulfill everyone’s basic needs without workers.
And yes, maybe people would do some types of work anyway, but good luck finding people who find working in sanitation as an interesting hobby.
I think that people need a purpose and I think in a society not based on maximization of profit, people would have the ability to choose what that is and not have to do “whatever pays the bills”
Imagine a society where your doctors want to be doctors and your musicians want to be musicians.
In my experience watching my father retire and just living as an adult, people get squirrely when they dont have something to work on.
Work doesn’t have to be what capitalism values to be work, it can ve creation, it can be gardening, it can be helping others.
Id argue people do fundamentally have drive to work as they have drive to have purpose. Work just isn’t necessarily the suffering capitalism has led us to believe it is.
Yes and no. There fundamentally are jobs that are both necessary and unpleasant. It is easy to talk about things like gardening and art, but we need sanitation. Even some level of bureaucracy. There are many kinds of work people may be willing to do for free or cheaply, but also many types of work almost no one would.
PS: You can actually see this in volunteer driven open-source software projects. There are many volunteers to develop features or even fix bugs, but they sorely lack management roles and work on important but niche features (unused by most volunteers) like accessibility for blind people.
So you are in favor of keeping an underclass of people that you can threaten with death to force them to work?
Having an underclass and (monetarily) coercing everyone to do their fair share of work to meet everyone’s needs are two very different things. If I need to spell that out for you, you may want to think about these things and how they would look in practice a bit more for yourself before discussing them.
A billionaire’s family isn’t under threat of dying if they don’t get a job. They already have what something like UBI would give to everyone else. The only way to use pay to force labor is to have people so poor that not having an income would lead to their death.
That is called an underclass.
Everyone refusing to work would always lead to everyone’s death. Blame God for making reality this way. People must be coerced to work when needed.
But you immediately jumping to the opposite extreme case as if there were only two options shows you have no interest in actually understanding what I am saying. Can’t teach someone who doesn’t want to learn. So I think we are done here.
Someone would probably engineer a new sanitation machine or system that doesn’t need as much human labor or exposure with unsanitary stuff as an interesting hobby. But yeah, people would have to build communities and the sense of community, and come to a consensus on how that community would want to divide labor; i.e. the community could vote to take turns doing undesirable jobs, or allow people to in undesirable jobs to work less hours or something.
Now that I think of it, things could be radically different if everyone is exposed to the undesirable work. Communities would probably opt for composting and less or compostable packaging in lieu of having to do a lot of trash work. They’d probably opt to eat less meat rather than working at a slaughterhouse.
It’s interesting but you did not answer the issue. What do you do when someone refuses to do the work assigned to them. Do you coerce them (so same as capitalism) or do you just let them off and encourage more people to refuse as well, because why should they do it if others don’t.
They’d be hurting their family, friends, and community, and risk becoming ostracized. That should keep most people on the shared vision. Everybody having a say from voting or some shared consensus gives people ownership over decisions and should increase cooperation. There would likely still be some people who wouldn’t cooperate, in which case they can leave or be voted out of the community and try to join another, which I suppose is coercion. I suppose there could also be lighter consequences for not doing what the community agreed upon (sanitation duty or peeling onions or whatever) that the person could choose to do if they wanted to stay.
I should say that in these hypotheticals I’m envisioning an anarcho-syndicalist or perhaps market-socialist type of society made up of a network or federation of smaller communities. I don’t think this would work very well if it was one nation-sized “community,” because people likely wouldn’t care as much about the plights of people on the other side of the country.
So an even stronger type of coercion. Since in capitalism, you can earn money in any way you like and are able to. Here it is what you are assigned or banishment. It’s nice you throw in words like community, but this is a very authoritarian regime at it’s core.
You reward those willing to do the hard jobs. Coercion’s ethical cousin is called “incentive”.
Capitalism also calls salary incentive.
On the other hand, if nobody would work, or even want to do the dirty jobs like trash removal, we wouldn’t be able to have a functioning society.
These sort of comments are almost a non sequitur as they just take ridiculous ideas from capitalism.
Capitalism is fine as long as it’s controlled well. Any system that doesn’t have the right laws in place to limit it would be abusive within minutes. Put laws in place to restrict how much wealth each single person can have, for example, that would be way more productive than writing up nonsense like this
You think that you personally ought to be threatened with starvation, illness, and homelessness?
No, because I have a job
Do you really expect food to magically materialize out of thin air in your home that also just popped into existence?
If nobody works, how do you exactly.expect humanity to survive?
