Quote from: radiator on 11 August, 2011, 03:32:42 PM
To have any sort of stability and growth in society costs money, and everyone needs to contribute to keep the whole thing going. I genuinely don't know what you're suggesting as an alternative. A return to some sort of idealised, primitive pastoral existence where people live in huts (and die of dysentery at the age of 25)? I'll stay here with the NHS, the police, the internet and my iPhone, thanks. I'm sure we'd all like a fairer society but you have to be realistic about these things. With all the problems we have in the modern world, I'd still rather be alive now that at any point in history because of the standard of living and relative luxury we enjoy today.
Well I'm obviously not suggesting going back to the Middle Ages. I'm suggesting we use our technology and our brains to run our society in a better way. At the moment we're paying other people to live, not paying our planet.
For example, we are running our manufacturing processes as linear processes. Linear processes in finite environments don't work. You could liken it to extracting clean water from a fish tank using a length of pipe with a filter in it. The fish tank is the finite environment, the filter extracts useful compounds from the water and the pipe is the linear system. Unless the water is put back into the tank after it's been cleaned then the tank will wind up empty. This is how we are using up the planet's resources - we extract, manufacture then discard. Why do we do this? Because it makes certain people along the way very rich whilst viciously exploiting others.
This point is explained very well in the short (20 minute) video The Story of Stuff.
The banking system must also be changed. For example, you believe that people must be made to pay if they want to live in a house. Fair enough, the resources to assemble that house must come from somewhere and if we insist on using the primitive monetary system then let's at least make it fair. Do you think it's fair that private banks create money out of nothing and lend it to you at massive interest when a social bank, like the Bank of England is supposed to be, could very easily create the same amount of money out of nothing and then lend it to you virtually or even completely without interest? Imagine business loans at 1% or less. Imagine taxes down to a couple of percent and a welfare system and public works projects that are paid for by interest free money which is not lent into society but spent into society.
These are just two of the things I suggest for improving society and, as you can see, neither one involves stepping backwards in time or sacrificing our collective wealth - although I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that this is exactly what the government's wholly unnecessary austerity measures will accomplish.
Quote from: radiator on 11 August, 2011, 03:32:42 PM
I'd be willing to bet that the average person now has a damn sight more free time than they used to. As far as I know the very idea of 'leisure time' is a recent concept.
Not sure about this. Certainly some people have more free time and some people have less. Automation and technology has vastly reduced the number of people needed in certain industries, but instead of using these technologies to ease the strain on society we instead use them to increase the profits of a few and chuck working people out to find something else to do. That something else tends to be less well paid and increases the strain on society whilst adding to the profits of companies and corporations. This one of a hundred little ways that the wealth of societies is being stolen from under us.
(I seem to remember hearing that modern workers have less free time than in the 1930s and far less than in the Middle Ages. I can't find a link for this, though, so I may have dreamt it.)
Quote from: radiator on 11 August, 2011, 03:32:42 PM
What I don't respect is people who are just plain lazy, or have no ambitions or aspirations beyond churning out a few sprogs and getting themselves a council flat.
And why is that? Since when was being a parent seen as a pointless exercise? Oh yes, of course - parenting doesn't make any money and therefore is a drain on the economy. Parents should have kids and work, or be rich enough to not have to work. Just because somebody doesn't want to be a part of this filthy, heartless, exploitative rampant capitalist vampire system we've somehow ended up with doesn't make them a bad person. The alternatives (at least from the Daily Mail type perspective) are to knuckle under and partake in a rotten system in order to live well, rely on the state to just live or go and live in a forest on your own somewhere if you want to live free, like a human being was meant to. Personally, I'm not entirely happy with any of those options.
