Send the populations that the OP hates back to subsistence level, and the those currently living in a subsistence economy no longer have increasing populations. Their increasing populations depend, to a large degree, on the horrible stuff produced in the societies the OP hates (food, fertilizer, birth control, medical supplies, etc.).
I do what I can atm to live in accordance with my values. I obviously do not care about trendy consumer goods, or acquiring the latest consumer gadgets. I do not watch TV. I do not play video games. I purchase almost all my clothing at thrift stores. I do not consume any Hollywood produced entertainment. I have replaced my smart phone with a dumb one. I drive an inexpensive used vehicle. I’d rather not have a car at all, but it’s almost a necessity for me right now. I eat a simple, strict vegetarian diet. I will never, ever procreate, and think that others should do the same. I don’t invest any time or energy into following pro sports.
In the future, when I have more freedom, I will live even more in line with my values.
Thank you for answering a direct question. I’m glad that you are attempting to live up to your ideals.
I also need to point out that your self-abnegation is not the same thing as living in the world you advocate for others. Fun is not an evil to be avoided: it is a necessary part of the human condition. A vegetarian diet has much to recommend it, but unless you are growing it yourself on your subsistence farm it still requires the worldwide production, distribution, and sales infrastructure that animal foods do. If a car is a necessity for you, then you are culpable in the entire system that requires cars. I will assume that you have a job, but that too is antithetical to the system your OP proposed. I will further assume that you rent or own a home, rather than built it yourself. I assume you went to school and not just to learn farming. I don’t have to assume you post on an internet message board: think about how that fits into your assertions.
I don’t know your health situation, but I know mine. That alone is a gigantic hole in your simplified world model. I want the most sophisticated health care, pharmaceuticals, and palliative care our modern society can provide. I get most of my clothes from thrift stores and I’ve been actively recycling since before you were born. But none of that means anything when I go to the hospital.
Your OP and most of your responses here have been inchoate rants. An argument exists for some simplification in western society. No such argument exists for subsistence living. I won’t do it and I’ll bet the iPhone I don’t have that you won’t either.
We all need to follow this woman’s adherence to those ideals. Anything less doesn’t cut it.
Even in that case, what keeps me from going over and taking what she has, rather than getting it myself?
It’s useful having a surplus production to give to people who have the sole job of preventing crime.
I’m curious what you mean by this and how you plan to acquire more freedom. If I had to guess, it would be that you plan to perform a surplus of work and acquire some additional financial security, but that would seem anti-thetical to your ideals, so I’d prefer to hear from you what you mean by this.
You would condemn humanity to die after the current generation?
I told you he was witnessing. The essence of witnessing is the terror that some people are not thinking the way you do.
One reason why it’s hard to talk about is that economic opinions have become part of people’s social identity to the extent that talking about a change or variation of economic systems is felt like an attack on the person themselves.
There are people who are very unwilling to hear “Capitalism is a great element of a unified econoomic policy that also includes government planning and social action” because this is different to “Capitalism is perfect in every way, and our economic system should consist of capitalism with capitalism icing, and extra capitalism on top” and in their minds (and that of other people like - say - the OP) the only other possible position is “Capitalism is the root of all evil and must be destroyed immediately”
I take issue also with the people who say that increasing population and resource consumption are necessary for a market-based economy too. We might feel like increasing population is necessary because we’ve always lived in a world that does in fact have increasing population, and we know how that works. But in essence all you need for markets to work are:
[ul]
[li]Someone wants something they don’t yet have[/li][li]Someone is able to work to provide something people don’t yet have[/li][li]There’s a mechanism to get these people together to form agreements[/li][/ul]
And “something” can be anything - it can be an intangible, it can be instruction in a skill, it can be some sort of social or intellectual “good” (in the market sense). It doesn’t actually have to consume (much) physical resources.
So one way to transition to post-scarcity without suffering a Malthusian crisis would be if people value physical stuff less, and intangibles more.