This is less about people who are starving and more about people who want to receive what a richer society can produce. Of course neither all nor most of the "outsiders" are a problem, just some of them. And these people make it impossible.
Rules of justice and law must always be enforced, but must be enforced fairly. And we must not fall prey to the human tendency to draw lines between our 'groups'. The US vs THEM mentality is half our problem here.
Of course people want fair access and the perversion of an honest sense of justified entitlement is always going to be an issue as such misperception can be so easily adopted as most of us have no clue just how self centered we are. This is gradually counterable by the promotion of the value of the community (all humanity) over the individual. We have a hard time imagining how this could work because most of us in the developed West live in societies that value individual over community. The people of Tibet knew how to make this community over individual value system work for all. It comes down to what individual values we choose to adopt and spread.
The world would be a much better place if only the rich people did the "exploiting".
I find this a baffling statement. Of course there are many who would do the exploiting but if only the rich do it, the rest of us would die off at the whim of a market that only values us as a commodity that is only as necessary as it is needed to achieve the desires of those rich few. The rest would be allowed to wither and die and may even just be made test subjects, as if we aren't already unwitting participants in many such efforts. If we keep allowing them to destabilize the balance of power between the common masses and the wealthy few, we will begin to wake up to realize we've already lost all hope of averting a nightmare we could barely imagine. It's beginning to look like the Nazis may go down in history as rather tame.
Then there are a few cases of very well meaning actions with terrible outcomes:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/24/g8.debtrelief (Warning: very depressing). Another report on this topic:
http://www.spin.com/featured/live-aid-the-terrible-truth-ethiopia-bob-geldof-feature/ So now we also have to watch cases where the proverb about the "road to hell" becomes terrible reality.
Once again, in large part the problem was mostly how a wealthy powerful few perverted and stole from the efforts to aid. Improved oversight and enforcement of fair principles cannot be achieved by purely private goodwill efforts. Powerfull government that serves the wellbeing of the people must be in place wherever there is to be a hope of the people thriving. Such governing bodies must be well-structured to prevent abuse of the system by any and all. This is an element we have not achieved on Earth yet on a macro scale but I would argue that this is due to the fact that large governments were almost universally formed, chartered and designed, by wealthy few with special interests to begin with.
The fact that the wealth is unevenly distributed does not come from any kind of redistribution, but from the fact that abilities are unevenly distributed. This is, of course, only the first "step", but even this is enough to reach the conclusion that uneven distribution, no matter how you look at it, is not the "unnatural state". And until we find a cure for laziness, it remains for some people the only reason to go to work at all.
I propose the radical concept that in the approaching and arguably arrived future where technology and automation have made abundance and plenty capable with very little true human effort (I find most jobs are invented just so a job can be had these days) our destiny as human beings should be to reap the rewards of this grand accomplishment as a species of eliminating the requirement to work. Our time is better spent free to explore the meaning of life in whatever peaceful means we see fit. Who knows... perhaps we may really figure out why we're here and what this is all about and in the process find true joy as we are freed to contribute to our society what we feel is our own inner calling.
AKA, there is no 'cure' for laziness because 'slack' is the ultimate goal which reaps its own tremendous rewards. Any time I've been lucky enough to find that 'slack' myself, I always find I drive myself to do something meaningful with it... like this mod. Not all contributions to society can be converted into financial gain and the best contributions are done by people who simply love what they are doing. We will quickly find, once being 'lazy' is made a perfectly acceptable choice, that we want our existence to mean more than lazing around all the time will ever provide us. Pride, love, appreciation, and awakening self-awareness will drive us to contribute when contribution becomes an option rather than a demand. And suddenly, 'we the people' find what real happiness actually means. We won't find that without the freedom to experience slack at will.
Over time, I believe we would find that what we 'feel like' contributing is exactly what the community actually needed the most. Let greed and fear die as our primary motivator and we'd find there is a stronger motivator within.
Even good wages are just the second step to escape mass poverty. The first step is to have a lot of goods available that you can buy with your money. Abundance has the primary effect of driving the prices down, so the wage you receive can give you a better lifestyle already. Sorry for this truism, but people are not just part of the workforce (well, most of them), they are also consumers. OTOH if you increase the wages without there being more goods on the market, the only thing you really produce is inflation. And it's not the rich who suffer the most, but those who have all their savings in their bank account.
Agreed. You cannot just raise a minimum wage to fix things. This is a prop up. You must instead make the value of labor greater. To do so in an environment where there are far more people to provide labor than there is labor required, you MUST enable a society to outgrow the need to require all to labor to survive. It is good to allow those who would choose to labor to reap some above average wealth reward for so doing, but one who would hoard great wealth should be met with a strong law of diminishing returns on efforts (from which we derive wealth to redistribute.)
You can define productivity by the amount of work someone gets done, or by the price someone can demand on the market. Of course this system is not error-proof, but nobody has so far constructed a system that is.
It can only be done organically, which is what capitalism gets right. But we must evolve past the Adam Smith capitalist ideals of every man for himself and find a more communal way to uplift all of us. We too easily forget that if you make life better for another you make life better for yourself. This is a spiritually true macro-principle.
If you just
assume that an innovation is good (without it standing the "test of time"), you can still make mistakes (alchemists were funded by various governments and it was mostly a waste), and then there are people who cheat to get funding (
http://stemcellbioethics.wikischolars.columbia.edu/The+Cloning+Scandal+of+Hwang+Woo-Suk).
This is always going to be a little tricky. What I'm advocating is that people never be allowed to be so swamped by the system of imbalanced wealth distribution that the opportunity to explore the validity and potential for any innovation is squashed before it's given a chance to be evaluated in a fair measure. I'm advocating that companies should not be so motivated by greed and profit that they purchase the intellectual property rights to ideas and innovations that make them completely obsolete and unnecessary, particularly when the operations of that company are damaging to the environment and the public, and hold onto those innovations in vaults that will never see the light of day. Profit should not be more valuable than the well-being of the people. This should not be too difficult for us to create a society that upholds this greater value than wealth as well, given that it is people who run the show. If people can see that something is good for people then those people should be easily motivated to support that something. But the current economic principles fly in the face of this concept as a company is a risk for reward and thus has a will to live itself, even if it destroys and corrupts.
In many cases their productivity is less than the minimum wage (often education-related, if only because of a language barrier), so you cannot employ them without suffering a (sometimes heavy) net loss. This is part of the reason why it's hard for a country to be both a welfare state and an immigration country.
Very true. Interesting you mention language barrier. I am a strong advocate for advancing a singular language globally as well. I believe our societal boundaries should be primarily defined by our operational languages and if we are to draw lines of competition, let it be based on that.
Pretty much no libertarian argues that market economy is nice or aims at reducing poverty. They merely argue that market economy is applied mathematics. And make no mistake, no system is completely devoid of the market. If the political system outlaws the market (soviet economy), you have the black market.
I suppose I'm not a libertarian because I don't believe that a LESS regulated free market is the answer. I believe in heavy regulation and increasing taxation as income and wealth amasses so that taxation can be used to reallocate for the invigoration of those on the bottom - redistribution in short. I guess that makes me a true Democratic Socialist eh?
Perhaps eventually we can dispense with the need for money altogether once we evolve to understand there are more important things to live for.
If you are interested how market theorists argue these cases, a good start is here:
http://www.friesian.com/smith.htm (Warning: It is a bit long. And it is part of a rather large website, containing IMO some interesting ideas, often not well known.)
Thanks for this link! I shall certainly be reading further here as I've become rather interested in the subject.
There used to be a counter not so much to "the amassement of wealth" but to the actions of those with the wealth if they were seen to not be using said wealth for the betterment of others. Almost all religions and codes of ethics say that you should help those who are not as fortunate as yourself. The rise of "individualism" aided by democracy and in particular the rule of law has lead to some individuals thinking that such rules of ethical behaviour do not apply to them and the group feeling that there is nothing they can do to correct such behaviour.
The people behaving unethically are not breaking any law, so the justice system can't resolve this problem. Minor revolts to kill off the offending "noble" and family are no longer fashionable or desirable. What can be done?
My answer to this is redistribution. Don't ease up because the wealthy passed a certain point of wealth where they now have the means to pay professionals to find taxation loopholes for them. The more you have and earn, the greater % you are taxed and the wealthy should understand this is a benefit to them because to reinvigorate the economy from the bottom up is to give them more opportunity to market new products and earn yet more!
edit The nature of wealth, whatever it is measuring, is that it will always form into clumbs, so some people will become wealthy. According to the mathematics such clumping happens no matter what people do don't do to "deserve" a clump. Luckilly the maths also tells us that it doesn't stay in the same clump for ever. The maths I saw did not have a time interval duration defined in days and hours just a generic time flow.
The point goes to show how unjust this clumping actually is. People who argue that the wealthy are only wealthy because they put in 'harder work' are completely ignorant to the fact that usually it is the poorest who work the hardest. I admit it cannot be avoided, which is exactly why it should be allowed, but subject to diminishing return as wealth accumulates, with greater redistribution efforts dipping into the pockets of those who are far more fortunate and can afford to be taxed deeper for the benefit of the community.
It's funny, I used to be very libertarian/republican in my views, feeling like the economy is healthiest when government stays out of it and lets the market go. But since the manipulations I've learned this approach enables corporations to craft and how detrimental that has become to the well being of the system, the planet, and the people IN the system, I no longer support rampant, unchecked capitalism. Instead, I believe that a socialist approach muct be in perfect balance with a capitalist approach for the system to truly be healthy.