And when the owners of robots can make more robots with little to no help from human labour?
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/?_r=0
Then we kick back and live post-scarcity lives on our government stipend, and only do labor that we find personally fulfilling.
If we compare Federal Funds (fairly close to the shortest term T-bills) with the inflation rate (monthly, percentage change over a year), we can get an idea of the post hoc real rate of return. Here it is. Normally the rate of return is higher than the inflation rate for a positive real return. Not always, but in the past it was the normal state of things.
I didn’t remember this, had to look it up.
The figures would be a bit different if we used expected real returns, but before TIPS there wasn’t really any direct market guide to expected inflation. The negative real return we can see in the 70s was a post hoc negative return, but I would guess the expected real return had been positive at least at the beginning of that window before markets wised up that inflation would be consistently higher than previous eras. The current era is fairly unusual.
That would be my hope; but there are a lot of more dystopian ways it could go down, as we discussed here. Think about the current composition of the U.S. House; if that doesn’t change drastically, there’s no way they’d go for such a plan.
HAAAAA!!! HA HA HA HA HA!!! Let me get this straight: You want a social safety net where the welfare recipients have to work to get food? That would never function. The reason many people are on welfare is precisely because they have no desire to work.
Many? Perhaps. But most people on welfare are either unable to work, or are looking for work. It is only a myth that a large proportion of welfare recipients are unwilling to work.
However, the plan of moving welfare recipients to self-sustenance farm labor is unworkable for other reasons, the primary one being there simply aren’t that many farm jobs. Even an able-bodied person can’t make his way around the country splitting rails and milking cows. The economy (and farm technology) have gotten beyond that stage.
The safety net today is in the form of food stamps, not a vegetable garden.
I’d:
[ul]
[li]Maintain interest rates at a permanently low level.[/li][li]Tax unearned income at the same level as earned income.[/li][li]Increase deficit spending, substantially and dramatically, whenever unemployment rose to an unacceptable level.[/li][li]Spend deficit money on big, expensive public infrastructure projects.[/li][li]Continue to monetize the debt, indefinitely.[/li][li]Make SS and Medicare taxes progressive.[/li][li]Increase the target rate for inflation substantially.[/li][/ul]
Owning it doesn’t add any value. Permitting it to be used does. Its entire value goes away, eventually, unless the owner allows it to be used.
Libertarian/conservatives have been successfully using moralistic language to push their own agenda for more than 30 years now. The problem with their approach is that they rely on a number of unexamined assumptions, which are in fact fundamentally wrong-head. For example: that owning wealth is the same as creating it. Or that having a large income is the same as being productive.
Well, there are folks who say that once they’ve finished building the robots, the workers will be redundant. Then what will they do?
Sure it has value – to the people that made it.
If you operate a printing press to make notes, or a forge and make coins, you’re adding value.
Meanwhile the parasitic owner-class, like you and me, merely own that value, and permit it to be exchanged.
Thank you for this; it is substantial. I’ve taken the liberty of numbering the list.
I think a slight majority of the participants of this thread would agree with numbers 3 and 4, and perhaps with 5 and 6.
I think the Fed is already pushing number 7 about as far as they can. Same with number 1. Interest rates are already damn low, and we are inviting inflation.
So, the only item on the list that is sufficiently controversial for me to argue against it is number two, which has been your bete noir from the first post. Should we tax capital gains at the same rate we tax income?
If this were done today and in a sudden fashion, the stock market would crash, and both earned and unearned income would collapse. So, no, this would be a terrible idea. Some increase in the capital gains tax rate would suit me right down to a ‘T.’ So, yes, we should move gingerly in that direction. We should also increase income taxes on earned income in a progressive fashion, slowly rescinding the insane Bush tax cuts and, to a degree, the klutzy Reagan cuts. Moving to a Clinton-era tax rate would be very positive.
As has been pointed out several times over, it doesn’t matter what you believe the meaning of “own” means. It matters only what the law and (overwhelmingly) society has defined “own” to mean, not to mention most english dictionaries. If you want to go around changing the meaning of words to suit your desired ends then you and your like minded friends are in for a long run of disappointing outcomes.
And what, pray tell, is a: “(reasonably-sized) domicile”?
One which is no larger than SlackerInc’s own domicile, I’d wager.
Actually, I would consider something up to around twice its size, housing the same size family, to be reasonable. And of course that does not mean that something 201% of its size is wildly egregious–like many things, it is a continuum with much grey area and “I know it when I see it”.
BTW, despite my Marxian ideals, I am a pragmatist and would gladly settle for the centre-left programme advocated upthread by Triinopus.
So if everything changed, but everything else stayed the same, we’d have a heck of a pickle. Well, yeah.
The reason we don’t have the US House embracing a post-scarcity guaranteed income system is that we don’t live in a post-scarcity economy.
If in the future a majority of people are unemployable because they don’t have any skills that anyone wishes to purchase, including subsistence farming and living chess sets, the cost of production will have dropped so low that welfare for everyone (at a 2013 middle class living standard) will cost a tiny fraction of the national/world product.
If the Bill Gates of the future world of the future are so rich, some of them might just decide to buy everyone in America a house because he’s tired of looking down at them camping on the streets as he flies from his megamansion to his private Disneyland.
IOW the guy owning the hammer is adding value by permitting it to be used.
So the owner does add value, by permitting use, and therefore is owned something. It is no different in principle from owing and permitting the use of capital. Since the owner of capital is permitting others to use his capital, he is entitled to a return on his investment. QED.
Regards,
Shodan
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
What does “owns” mean? It has a legal definition…
[/quote]
The legal definition is adequate for our discussion.
I’m guessing you do when you are talking about your stuff. Otherwise you folks wouldn’t be blathering so much about somebody else making money off your labor.
Regards,
Shodan
I would have put it differently. The owner adds value by deciding what the best use is, and contributing it to that use. How does he decide? The best use is the use which makes him the best return on his investment.
And if no return is possible…why did he go to expense of acquiring, and face the risk of owning, the hammer? Without profit, there’s no private capital, and without private capital, you get the Soviet economy.
Perhaps it could go down that way. But if the Keynesians are right, it might go down more in a way that doesn’t allow the owners of capital in the future to make profits very easily, because too great a number of people are unemployed and cannot provide consumer demand. It could take a revolution or at least an FDR type figure to step in and change direction.