Does anyone have any economic information on what happened to grocery stores when the scanner was introduced? Did prices go down? What happened to those workers? I bet consumers didn't notice any benefits. I bet wait times stayed the same because fewer lines were open. I bet prices didn't go down either.
When I go to the supermarket I go through a self-serve scanner to pay for my items. It's much faster than waiting in line. So yes, some consumers get benefits.
Using a self-serve scanner means you work for free for the store.
Laws are backed by the threat of violence. So yeah, you will have your freedom confiscated and probably the stuff you were selling too.
I don't know where you live but around here, property of people in prison still remains their property.
The property used to commit a crime are usually taken by the police. What do you think happens to your meth lab if you get caught? Or your stock of marijuana or raw milk or the other gazillions things you are forbidden to sell by the power that be and knows better what's good for us?
The Marxists and communists have tried doing that thing many times and have failed spectacularly. Business based market economy is the only (till now) successful and socially most beneficial type of society that has ever existed. I upvoted the OP because he/she/it (it may be a bot) has put this thing in clear words.
There have been successful (meaning what exactly?) societies that were not market economy based. People tend to think communism vs capitalism but for most of human history it's been something else. Like hunter/gather or some form of feudalism. I don't disagree that market societies work for distributing goods. But they do have external costs. Are there more efficient ways? Probably. Will market economies go the way o…
Can you name one society with a higher standard of living than one based on a market economy?
I don't know where you live but around here, property of people in prison still remains their property.
The property used to commit a crime are usually taken by the police. What do you think happens to your meth lab if you get caught? Or your stock of marijuana or raw milk or the other gazillions things you are forbidden to sell by the power that be and knows better what's good for us?
The police can't do any such thing here. Only a court could. And even then, it generally happens to the property that is the result of a crime (like bribes, for example, or drug money). What message about the level of respect towards private property and human rights would it send if unrelated property was seized for no good reason? If you can't sell your raw milk (I don't actually believe it's illegal here anyway), I don't think anyone is going to take it from you. After all, it's better if you have to get rid of it. You're perfectly free to drink it. At least the state doesn't have to pay for its sanitary disposal.
The Marxists and communists have tried doing that thing many times and have failed spectacularly. Business based market economy is the only (till now) successful and socially most beneficial type of society that has ever existed. I upvoted the OP because he/she/it (it may be a bot) has put this thing in clear words.
Up until now, the possibility of having a group of people who lead a leisure life without an undercaste of slaves hasn't existed. Automation is a new thing under the sun.
No, no it is not, for fuck's sake. Automation is not new. The spinning Jenny was invented in 1764. Robot labor has been here since industrialization started and there is NOTHING new in the last twenty years. Automation is only the replacement of manual labor with machine labor, a.k.a productivity growth. If you've noticed, economies have been growing for centuries. In fact, growth is slower now than in the past. Automation is happening less now.
Stop believing all this 'robots are coming for our jobs' crap. The robots have always been here.
Up until now, the possibility of having a group of people who lead a leisure life without an undercaste of slaves hasn't existed. Automation is a new thing under the sun.
That's funny because the "slaves" in America right now enjoy a higher standard of living than virtually every king and queen before our generation.
Kings and queens didn't have to work 70 hour weeks to feed themselves last I checked.
The solution I'd like to see: Enact basic income AND change the fact that our culture views work ethic (narrowly defined in terms of market income) ~= value.
How do you enact basic income when a majority of your population doesn't have an income and thus can't pay the taxes that finance that exact basic income?
The taxes are paid by the people who now own the entire productive economy.
What is the difference though between them being paid for unproductive work for the sake of having a job or being paid a basic income?
but that's the thing... they most likely wont be paid for unproductive work or given a basic income they will simply be let to starve as has ALWAYS been done historically. This is the key point that always perplexes me in these discussions of automation, the belief that somehow a fully automated society is going to lead to large swaths of the population not doing work and somehow being given basic income and being le…
Human history has always been dominated by scarcity. Fully automated production would by definition be a repudiation of all economic theories built upon a foundation of scarcity, so we can't really use them to guide us in devising a solution.
The closest humans have ever come is the indiginous potlach societies of Papua New Guinea where scarcity wasn't an issue and people lived fairly idle lives (and substituted physical scarcity with societal scarcity).
FYI, large minimum wage increases in the San Francisco Bay Area in the last few years have been accompanied by drops in unemployment.
But of course, San Francisco is hardly a good representative of the state. What happens when the Dairy Queen in Fresno is required to pay the local teenagers $15 an hour, or around $30K a year, to sell ice-cream cones? My guess is that there's going to be one less Dairy Queen in California and those teenagers will be out of a job.