Kurt Vonnegut’s most foolish or most dishonest story may be “Harrison Bergeron”. It’s about an ostensibly radical egalitarian society in which a Handicapper General handicaps people whose abilities are in any way better than anyone else’s. The specific target of Vonnegut’s satire may be clear in the identity of the Handicapper General, a woman. In 1961, some otherwise admirable men were terrified by the idea of women being their social equals. Whatever the story’s original target, “Harrison Bergeron” is loved by right-libertarians and racists and hierarchists of many stripes.
But where has anyone advocated a society like that? In 1961, scientists, artists, and athletes were praised, encouraged, and promoted by the USSR and Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba. Even under those undemocratic forms of communism, individual ability was celebrated, not repressed.
When I talk about equality, I am talking about equality of opportunity. When the rich use the same phrase, they mean that everyone should have an equal opportunity to inherit or accumulate great wealth, go to the most exclusive schools, and exploit the work of people who make less money than they do. When I use the phrase, I mean that everyone should have excellent schools, health care, food, and shelter. Without equal resources, there is no equal opportunity.
Equality of opportunity has nothing to do with equality of outcome, but it has everything to do with equality of income. This is why the rich fear it. Our world has limited resources. The rich would rather put those resources into things that benefit themselves and ignore famine, rape, and slaughter around the world. That’s no concern of theirs until a source of profit has been identified: to them, a dictator who has oil is a better friend or a greater enemy than one who does not.
later: thanks to
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in the comments, we now know that Vonnegut did not think his story had anything to do with unequal wealth; see here.
I like it and I think you read something different in it than I do, but I think you are more introducing your point with it than anything, I i won’t argue that one.
And I think I’ll just ask questions here, so I can better understand what you are saying, before I try to discuss any of it.
Without equal resources, there is no equal opportunity.
By resources, do you mean schools, health care, food, and shelter, which you had just mentioned, or more physical things? Are you talking on an individual level or period? Equal resources within a community, state, nation, the world? Should every nation have equal resources, or are you only talking each person?
Equality of opportunity has nothing to do with equality of outcome, but it has everything to do with equality of income.
Are you proposing an identical salary for every person no matter what they do or don’t do?
Thanks for clarifying,
-ken-
How does equality of opportunity cause equality of income?
I had the same opportunity to play basketball in public playgrounds as some people who are now earning millions of dollars playing in the NBA.
Should parents be allowed to teach their children to read? Some parents read to their children, and cause their children to love reading (and learning). Others don’t. Would you require all parents to teach their children to your standards? Would you take infants away from parents who don’t (perhaps only for a few hours a day, to get other people to teach them)? Or would you accept that the opportunities children have will differ due to having different parents?
When I use the phrase, I mean that everyone should have excellent schools, health care, food, and shelter.
The thing of it is, it is physically possible for everyone to have these things, and for some folks to still be richer. Perhaps not as much richer.
Higher taxes? Some countries do that.
Have you, in any of these essays, defined the term “the rich”? If not, I think you should do so, so that we are all talking about the same thing. (The fact that I think you should in no way obligates you to do so, of course.) If you have, will you please point me to the definition, so that I know what we’re talking about?
I think equal resources mean equal duty. Whether that’s a positive thing or negative thing is of course another question (and I don’t agree entirely with either your or the rich version of equality of opportunity), but essentially I don’t think equality works without an emphasis on not just on what a citizen is supposed to earn but also what she is supposed to give.
And I think that’s why social democrats in the old century used slogans like demand-your-rights-and-do-your-duties, or why social liberals liked the no-rights-without-responsibilities logic. I guess one can also make some sort of pondering what is typical of rather equal societies, culturally and philosophical-wise.
Did you know that that story was actually used in a lawsuit: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/may/05/vonnegut_lawyers_could/
Funky world we live in these days.
(I expect if you could ask him, Vonnegut would have said that he was satirizing assholes. Just, you know, in general.)
Whoops. Forgot to log in on that last comment.
People who work hard for things want to keep them, is what’s going on here.
If the benefits of taking major risks are trivial, most people won’t do it, and we’ll lose our wellspring of innovation. If the benefits of working hard are trivial, most people won’t do it, and we’ll lose a lot of our productivity. We can’t support the population of the world in pleasant idleness, fun, and games; it just won’t work.
Stealing from the rich is an economically unproductive activity (like all theft).
I guess one can also make some sort of pondering what is typical of rather equal societies, culturally and philosophical-wise.
If we can find one that has a large enough population to compare…
-ken-
“Equality of opportunity has nothing to do with equality of outcome, but it has everything to do with equality of income.”
I reject this proposition. It seems to suggest that we can’t decouple opportunity from income, so the right thing to do is enforce equality of income as a means to achieve equality of opportunity.
I say if we’re going to try to do something radical, let’s do the _right_ radical thing and just change the system so that additional income doesn’t mean additional opportunity in the key areas: this particularly includes access to education and health care.
The people who work hardest in our society are the poorest. They are called factory workers.
The rich would rather put those resources into things that benefit themselves and ignore famine, rape, and slaughter around the world.
No, actually, we wouldn’t. An absolute statement like that is disproved by a single example, and I’m pretty sure I can come up with more than one. Come on, Will. You wouldn’t tolerate a generalization like that made about any other group. It’s sloppy thinking.
Even if you’re going to regard everyone over a certain income level (including me) as your class enemy, you do yourself a disservice if you fall into the trap of demonizing us. Reality is a lot more complex than that.
Iraq: has oil, enemy.
Saudi Arabia: has oil, friend.
North Korea: has nukes, enemy.
the Congo: no oil, no nukes, silence.
“If the benefits of taking major risks are trivial, most people won’t do it, and we’ll lose our wellspring of innovation.”
That certainly is the usual argument, but I wonder how true it really is. To be sure, the desire for personal gain has at times played a role in inspiring innovation and creativity; but historically, so have many other things. I think the most common thing that inspires innovation is itself–someone engaged in activity and realizing how it can be done better; or seeing a problem and getting a sudden inkling of how it can be solved. The profit motive has, I believe, less to do with the innovation than the funding thereof. Question: is there any way to test this, or to back it up with facts and figures? It’s an interesting question, and certainly worth getting hard data on if there is any way to do so.
“Stealing from the rich is an economically unproductive activity (like all theft).”
That may be true in a very limited sense, but historically it is clearly incorrect. Every time economic forms have changed (primitive communism to slave society, slave society to feudal; feudal to capitalist) it has involved appropriating (also called “stealing”) one form of property in order to defend another form of property. The holdings of the landlords were broken up and divided (often with no compensation, rarely if ever with full compensation), in order to create a massive workforce for capital. The history of the end of slavery presents different pictures in different places, but compensation of the owners for their property is, to say the least, an exception.
China: has nukes, ?
India: has nukes, friend?
Pakistan: has nukes, enemy?
I’m not sure I get your point…
-ken-
I think you’re missing the “no oil, no nukes, silence” line there. The point being “if you can neither help nor hurt us, we don’t give a fuck.”
That was awfully sketchy.
Capitalists help where they have incentive in the form of profit or fear. They don’t help for the sake of helping; there’s no profit in that.
Which especially works if you imagine Dick “What’s good for Halliburton is good for the USA” Cheney saying it. I think he and W are supposed to be doing ‘good cop, bad cop’, though it looks more like chimp and organ grinder.
Oh, I should’ve said this immediately: I don’t regard anyone over any income level as a class enemy. It’s wealth that counts. And even then, you can choose to work for the interests of the working class.
Who is demonizing? I don’t want to punish the rich–I want them to have more than they want people of median wealth to have.
You’re changing the subject :)
‘The rich are self-serving and have no concern for human suffering’ is as absurd a statement as ‘The poor are lazy and just not trying hard enough’. Either is true of some individuals; neither is universally true of the entire group.
I wasn’t objecting to the idea that some people behave the way you describe - merely to the over-generalization with which you attribute the attitude to…what, everyone in the top 20% income bracket?
Presenting ‘the other side’ as 2-dimensional cutout figures of iniquity is a popular rhetorical technique, but it’s a bad idea to actually BELIEVE it. It blinds you.
I have a great deal of sympathy for the rich, because under our current system, what are you supposed to do if you’re rich and you want to help others? After all, first you have to stay rich.
And those who set up false dichotomies suggest the equation is keep everything or give everything, which is especially terrifying to the rich. The last thing they want is to join the working class.
But anyone who has two homes when others have none should not expect to be praised for their love of others.
I agree. What is more significant is not, as Will appears to be saying, the personal character of the capitalist, but the system in which he finds himself–as trapped as the worker is. Of course, in the case of the capitalist, the trap is rather more comfortable.
I think that part of the real trap lies in how the discussion ends up being framed…the idea that improving your own condition (a natural and reasonable impulse) must or ought to be accomplished at the expense of the people around you.
I do believe that in most cases, it would be best all around if we sought to improve our own condition by way of helping the entire community (and ourselves with it). But we’re so conditioned to judge our condition relative to the people around us instead of in absolute terms that some people find it hard to see progress for themselves in EVERYONE improving.
If you could change just one attitude within our culture, I think changing the way we evaluate our own position (how secure, comfortable, and well-provided-for we are) might have the most far-reaching impact.
When you say “improving,” are you speaking of wealth or happiness?
You seem to identify the circumstances as being the result of the ideology. I believe the reverse.
Okay, yeah. I should have got that to begin with.
-ken-
I think it works in both directions. Circumstances build ideologies, which define circumstances, which build ideologies. Hence history is necessary to look at to understand the ideologies and the circumstances. Socialism is a much different idea in the US than in Russia, than in China.
-ken-
If you could change just one attitude within our culture, I think changing the way we evaluate our own position (how secure, comfortable, and well-provided-for we are) might have the most far-reaching impact.
I think our attitude of me first would be better to change. Regardless of how we see our position, we still all look to what will benefit me, not how can I help those around me.
-ken-
So it’s okay to make $300K when most people make less than $30K, as long as you don’t build it up? Isn’t the the desire of capitalism, that everyone spends as much as they can?
-ken-
No worries! One of the reasons I love to discuss things online is it helps me discover the assumptions I make that others don’t. When I learn what the implicit assumptions are, I can make them explicit. If I don’t, the other person will keep wondering, “What drugs is that guy on?”
Which sometimes happens even when an assumption is made explicit. “You don’t believe that my race is superior/women are inferior/the deserving few should own more than the undeserving masses? You fool!”
But then I know I can honorably withdraw from the discussion. I hate doing that before I know that the other person’s principles are essentially religious, not reasoned.
And if my principles are equally religious, that’s fine, too. When assumptions are incompatible, debaters simply have to expect that society will ultimately decide if either of them are right.
When assumptions are incompatible, debaters simply have to expect that society will ultimately decide if either of them are right.
Or the society will decide which to believe, then change it’s mind repeatedly in the future… ;-)
-ken-
The desire of capitalists is that everyone *else* spends as much as they can. The goal is to be at the top of the pyramid, and only a few can win.
Income and wealth are different: If you have a million dollars and get no money one year, you’re much better off than that guy who just made $300K. Under the US tax system, at the end of the year, you’ll still have your million, but the guy who earned $300K will have paid a good piece of it in income tax.
Societies wobble, but they don’t change their minds radically. The most socialist elements (social security, universal health care, etc.) tend to hold on, even if the rich get a temporary rollback on them.
That only happens if people never take their rights for granted, of course. The rich are always ready to take our rights away, because longer hours, less pay, fewer benefits, and more dangerous work places are more profitable.
Total nonsense. They work fewer hours than most doctors or executives, for example. Furthermore, the poor are rarely factory workers in our society anyway; the factory jobs left are solidly middle-class in most places.
More than just innovation, too. We’d find ourselves, in about a week, in the position of either forcing people to collect the garbage against their will, or else not having it done. And shortly after *that*, we wouldn’t have the money to pay them the stipend promised. The whole scheme would collapse in no time at all.
Working from recent to older (I know more about the more recent for some reason), the slave society was already economically moribund, so I’m not sure the value of the expropriated property (freed slaves) was terribly high. Hard to measure economic effects since they’d *also* just lost a war, and were abused pretty badly for a while afterwards.
“Economically productive” is a bit narrow for describing most of these massive political changes anyway; they remade the landscape in so many ways.
That’s a *good* thing, isn’t it?
Don’t tell Warren Buffet and Bill Gates; they’d laugh at you. Really *really* loudly.
Or George Eastman, or Ford, or Carnegie, or pretty much any other of the “robber barons”.
Note: I’m not arguing “good person” vs. “bad person”, net good vs. net evil, or any of that. I’m giving a few of the counter-examples to your absurd claim.
It is the capitalist who improves the condition of all around him, and the communist who does it at the expense of others.
That’s PR, the purchase of good will. It’s at least as old as bread and circuses; what they do does not threaten the system that keeps them rich, and it pacifies some of the people who are harmed by it, and they never give enough money to be personally inconvenienced. Yes, philanthropists are better than people who are worse, but the good they do does not offset the harm of hoarding wealth.
Your initial claim was “Capitalists help where they have incentive in the form of profit or fear. They don’t help for the sake of helping; there’s no profit in that.”
I think my counterexamples demolish that claim completely. Lots of capitalists are doing what they *and you* think is the right thing: helping others for reasons other than tangible personal benefit.
This begs the question, and I’m not expecting an actual answer, do you give enough to be personally inconvenienced?
If Bill gates, for instance and using an arbitrary amount that I don’t know if is accurate in the slightest, makes $600 million each year, and he spends $200 million, he would have to give away more than $400 million in a given year to have it actually inconvenience him. If someone makes $60K, they would have to give away $40K and live on less than $20K to be giving away an equivalent amount. And that’s if we assume neither has prior savings. And these numbers really mean nothing.
My point here is that “personally inconvenience” means giving away enough that you can no longer live at your current level to do so. So the low-paid people are no more or less willing to do so than the rich. People only give away enough to inconvenience themselves if they are forced to, are afraid not to, or believe in what they are giving to more than they value their level of living. It doesn’t matter what government, ideological, or economic system you have, the only way to get people at any level in society to do what you are saying is to force them, scare them, or get them to have as much faith as the average religious zealot. Which method do you propose?
-ken-
Not at all. I worked in the facory and it was barely above minimum wage… very hard labour (I was in great shape anyway) and I often had to work double shifts. I was always under the poverty line… and always breaking my ass.
There’s a great deal of reason to want good PR. In good times, it’s extremely profitable, and in bad times, it may keep your business going. That’s why companies engage PR firms.
The rich do spend money on pleasure, and being praised for their goodness is something even the most brutal kings and priests have always enjoyed.
Every dollar I give, I feel. I live below the poverty line.
Your last question begs a number of issues. I hope to get into this later.
DD-B’s a friend from way back, but he’s never spent much time at physical labor. Like many desk workers, he makes the occasional odd assumption. Having done both desk and sweat work I think anyone who believes in hierarchies of pay should expect people with air-conditioned offices to earn less money than anyone else. A janitor’s job is both harder and less satisfying than a CEO’s.
Well, unless the CEO starts wondering how trickling on the world helps the world. CEOs can despair, too.
I actually kind of liked being a janitor. (Well, except for the cleaning toilets part.) At least when you’re cleaning something, you can see what effect the effort is having. I’d never be happy pushing papers.
But it would be pretty funny to make a few CEO’s get real jobs. I don’t think they’d last very long.
Oh, there’s a lot to be said for having a job that you can leave behind at the end of the day, and a clean toilet makes the world a better place for everyone who enters the stall. But CEOs get all kinds of bizarre perks that janitors don’t. Sure, a lot of us have more respect for janitors than CEOs, but in capitalist society, we’re the exception.
This has nothing to do with hierarchy or pay levels, Will; this was about how “hard” people work, which I chose to interpret as how many hours. Some people at the bottom manage to regularly work 2 jobs, say 80 hours a week; though rather few do it all *that* regularly. But lots of people at the top of the pay scale work that much; work more hours in a year, often. The people I’ve known who worked 80 hour weeks frequently were managers, with a few doctors.
If you want to shift the definition of “hard” to how much physical labor, well of course construction workers and such do much more than managers or programmers or doctors. In fact lots of desk workers pay money and use their own time to get in more physical labor, for their comfort, health, or pleasure. On the other hand football players during the season may work “harder” than factory workers, too, and they sure get paid a lot.
Social security was instituted, and has not been seriously threatened since. Medicare was instituted, and has not been seriously threatened since. Exceptions to the anti-trust act to allow unions to exist were instituted. Limitations on child labor and work weeks (mostly for hourly, not salaried, employees) were instituted. Since social security is one of *your* examples of a “change your mind” size of change, I’ll claim it’s creation within this society (not as part of a revolution) disproves your claim.
Similarly, Britain went through a HUGE period of nationalizations of key industries in the 50s and 60s, and then realized what a disaster they had created and undid some of it, and also sold off some even older national assets (probably stupidly, but they did it). Another example of big changes of opinion in a society, I think.
Except for the two modern examples, most of them did it at the end of their career, when their need for PR seems to have been at a minimum.
Certainly we can argue about their motives, but we can argue about *anybodie’s* motives. We don’t know what their motives are; hell, if we’re smart we’re often a bit unclear about *our own* motives.
Fear_and_faith up there was me being too lazy/distracted to change names. Just to be clear.
As for that being a good thing, it’s great if (a)you live in a relatively safe place or otherwise are content or (b) are one of the bad guys who make a place unsafe and destroy other people’s lives. Kinda sucks if you’re a powerless kid in a place where the men are killed, the women are gang raped, and you’re dragged from your broken, bloodied family, given a gun, and are forced to be a human mine sweeper when you’re not shooting someone. Under those circumstances, I’d like my area to have some natural resources some asshat wants to exploit behind the guise of imposing democracy.
Okay, focus on hours: how many hours must someone working at minimum wage work in order to make the same amount of money that the average USAn CEO makes in a day?
Also, when you compare hours worked in a year, don’t forget holidays. As a general rule in the US, CEOs get a lot more holiday time than burger flippers.
Ah, we have a misunderstanding here. I don’t think social security is an example of a society changing its mind, though Republicans clearly wish the US would change its mind there.
Britain is wobbling, no doubt about it.
Agreed. Which is why I’m more interested in efficiency than motives; charity is much less efficient than redistribution.
I need to read more about this, but I understand China is doing a lot more to help in Africa than the US.
“We’d find ourselves, in about a week, in the position of either forcing people to collect the garbage against their will, or else not having it done.”
Hmmm. Can’t see why. In the first place, I think garbage, given human ingenuity, could be reduced by orders of magnitude. Second, if people accept that some things need to done, I can’t see what’s so difficult about cooperative people figuring out how to make the unpleasant chores equitably divided. Hey, want to work three hours a week overseeing a solar power generator, or half an hour every other week collecting garbage?
“I’m not sure the value of the expropriated property (freed slaves) was terribly high.”
If you refer to the value of the slaves in the US at the time of the passing of the 13th Ammendment, the value was most certainly high (over a thousand dollars for a male slave measured in Yankee greenbacks as of 1864, as I recall). The same is true of the slaves of the Romans at the time of the Empire’s fall, although that was more complicated because you had an entire culture collapsing and being invaded at the same time. I am lementably ignorant about China.
‘”Economically productive” is a bit narrow for describing most of these massive political changes anyway; they remade the landscape in so many ways.’
Well, I’d argue that the economic changes were the cataylist and driving force for the political and other changes in most or all of these situations. Do you disagree? Shall we pick one or two to look at in some detail?
Oh.
The other thing that might be worth noting is that the burger flipper has much less control over his hours. (Guess how many people get to work exactly one hour less than they would need to be considered full-time?) Of course, if the economy is good, the burger flipper can get three part-time jobs, but that isn’t necessarily going to show up in your statistics and I don’t think anecdotal evidence of who works the longest is going to be very accurate. It only provides you with information about the people you happen to know.
Of course, the whole concept of what constitutes hard work is completely subjective anyway so there probably isn’t much point arguing about it.
Anyone who says “hard work is subjective” is welcome to come dig ditches for a week in the Arizona clay under my supervision.
(Total agreement with your first paragraph!)
These discussions- both today’s posts and the comment threads- are reminding me very strongly of some of the conversations that take place in John Barnes’ Jak Jinnaka books. It’s at least tangential, if not totally irrelevant, to the ongoing discussion to bring them up, but the parallel got me wondering if there are any fictionalized societies in fiction that work as a good example of the ideals you’re talking about. There are certainly a great many that predict Earth moving in the opposite direction, towards total or near-total corporate feudalism, but off the top of my head (which is uncaffeinated at the moment and thus inefficient) I don’t remember any books depicting positive socialist societies as the setting for their stories- or even as the goal.
Spider Robinson books don’t count.
Nah, I don’t do heat. I like shoveling snow (which is, of course, much easier to deal with than clay), but the climate is so screwed up, I don’t think I’ll be doing that anytime soon either. *grin*
And, actually, for me the hardest thing to do is scraping paint off of flat surfaces. It causes agonizing pain in my right wrist. (Arthritis probably. I broke it when I was a kid.) Pain makes everything much harder.
Salon has just published a new Epps article about Why We Should Abolish The Electoral College. It mentions many points you’ve made, and a few you haven’t gotten around to yet. For instance, the EC nearly denied Jefferson the Presidency, and an armed revolt was in the offing. Or how the EC has not only stolen 3 elections from Democrats, it almost cost them a fourth in 1976.
Like you’ve said, it’s important to remember that Founders were ordinary, flawed human beings like all of us. Yes, history likes to record them as fearless rebels, and for the most part they were, but while they were rebelling against the King’s unfair authority, they codified their own unfair authority over the poor, women, slaves, etc. into the Constitution.
“But where has anyone advocated a society like that?”
Our public education system seems to reward those in the middle, and punish the fast and slow.
Regarding your point about duty, capitalists often forget that the communist manifesto calls for work, not sloth. And the classic “from each according to their abilities” calls for duty also.
Which is a comment on how badly we fund our schools.
It’s not just about funding. Teachers have lesson plans accepted or denied, and some are encouraged to babysit rather than teach.
Sorry, you won’t get me to knock our schools until this country pays as much per student as countries like Japan do. Our school teachers and administrators are doing great jobs considering the restrictions they’re under. When we value education more than military might, then I’ll complain about something other than funding. But right now, the big problem is funding.
Good one!
I agree about the lack of funding, but also it isn’t distributed evenly. I attended “nice” schools where learning was still restricted, so it’s not all about money.
Thanks! I thought you’d like it. BTW, Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize this morning, was lovely news to wake up to.
This, too, I think is too generalized. I’ve attended two high schools, one in rural Oregon and on in Jackson, WY. The Oregon school I attended was tuned to the lowest denominator. If you excelled, there was nothing to challenge you and no way to advance your learning. In Jackson, the school was tuned to the highest denominator. If you excelled, you had more opportunities than you could possibly squeeze in. I took Physics II and Calculus II in high school. But if you didn’t do well, you were pushed out and sent to the “alternative high school.” While the alternative high school worked well for many people and gave opportunities a lot of people never would have got, I still have issues with the main high school being unwilling to help.
What we need is an educational system that adapts to the needs of the students so everyone can learn at the pace they need to and have the assistance they need to excel, without just moving them on when they aren’t ready.
-ken-
That only happens if people never take their rights for granted, of course.
Which most people do, hence a lot of the abuses under any government system we’ve seen in operation so far.
-ken-
Every dollar I give, I feel. I live below the poverty line.
I withdraw that question then. How about, if you made, say, $50K, would you be willing to give everything above the national median away? But, the question, really isn’t pertinent, so I’ll actually withdraw that one completely. So, never mind.
-ken-
The desire of capitalists is that everyone *else* spends as much as they can. The goal is to be at the top of the pyramid, and only a few can win.
So the people who buy so much they are in awful debt (too large percentage of the US) aren’t capitalists, then? What are they?
Income and wealth are different: If you have a million dollars and get no money one year, you’re much better off than that guy who just made $300K. Under the US tax system, at the end of the year, you’ll still have your million, but the guy who earned $300K will have paid a good piece of it in income tax.
So maybe taxation based on assets instead of based on income, could be the solution? Like a flat tax of everyone pays 15% of their assets each year, and nothing of their income. I see some problems with this, but it seems like the beginning of an idea that might work to address both views we seem to be discussing here.
-ken-
Oh, I just realized I should clarify. When I say something is subjective, I just mean it isn’t measurable. The term “hard work” can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Usually if somebody wants to measure it, they take an aspect of it that’s concrete and measure that instead. So, for instance, ddb chose to measure the “hardness” of work by number of hours spent doing it and you chose to measure the “hardness” of work by the amount of physical labor involved. The problem with ddb’s version is that, even if you could get accurate information, it would characterize work that is so arduous that people can only do it in short bursts as easier than work that can be stretched out over a long period of time. The problem with your version is that it would characterize work that costs emotional energy or mental energy as being automatically easier than work that’s purely physical. (There are other problems, actually, but those are the ones that leap right out at me.)
So, certainly digging ditches is hard work, but so is being a social worker. It’s just that one takes a greater physical toll and the other takes a greater emotional toll. I’m lazy. I’d rather paint a picture than do either of those things.
Additionally, individual aspects of the workers involved will have an effect on how hard the work is for them. I was just reading a book the other day about a man with Tourette Syndrome who twitches and blinks and jerks his head so much that it takes him half an hour to read one page. For him, writing a book might be more difficult than digging a ditch. (Although he decided to become an elementary school teacher rather than a ditch digger… So maybe it wouldn’t. I’d have to ask him. *grin*)
Exactly. That’s the heart of “from each according the their ability, to each according to their need.”
I wish US tax dollars didn’t go to killing people in other lands, because then I would happily test the experiment, but, yes, I would be willing to give away everything I made that was above the national income median. However, I think it’s fair to reach the national wealth median first. I ran the numbers here. Emma and I could live very comfortably with median wealth and income.
“So the people who buy so much they are in awful debt (too large percentage of the US) aren’t capitalists, then? What are they?”
Workers. Or in Marx’s terms, the proletariat.
Taxation based on assets makes a great deal of sense, but it’s harder to regulate than income.
Definitely agreeing with all of that. It’s another part of “from each according to their ability.” Our abilities differ, and our work should reflect that.
Making mental note about the Barnes’ books.
For the most part, f&sf isn’t set in societies that work. The drama’s a lot more fun if the society’s flawed. That may be why so many stories are set in capitalist societies. (Yes, we’ll be here all week! Don’t forget to tip the waitstaff!)
Quite possibly true.
Though, hm, on reflection I think I missed a big example.
The United Federation of Planets- or at least, Starfleet and the Earth parts of it that we see in Star Trek - do seem to operate on socialist lines to some degree. At least, I can’t imagine a society with no money being capitalist.
Ah. That’s a concrete number to work with. Makes it much easier for me to see what’s needed and what isn’t. If I got rid of all my debt first, I could definitely live with that amount.
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Actually, now that I read that whole post, my wife and I could live decent on the one-person amount. On the two-person amount, if we got rid of our debt, I think we’d be living on more that we currently are after bills.
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Taxation based on assets makes a great deal of sense, but it’s harder to regulate than income.
True, unless we changed the rules on how things are regulated. By I see myself going down a Big Brother 1984 path with that idea, so I think I’ll shelve my thoughts on that for now.
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Yep. Star Wars is set in a capitalist ‘verse, as the awful intro to first of the new trilogy made explicit, but Star Trek occurs after the triumph of the proletariat. George W. Bush is one of the more incompetent Ferengi.
Ditto on the one-person amount for Emma and me.
*g*
I don’t want the government poking into my affairs either. But based on what I hear about the IRS, people are, well, honest enough regarding their taxes, and the IRS tries to stay out unless a lot of warning flags go off.
SciFi and Fantasy governments that I think work (though might not work out of fiction):
1) Steven Brust’s Dragaera Empire. It might not always work and it might have plenty of abuses, but the government changes enough that many different structures can add to it. I think Will would prefer the Teckla rule. Of course other races lose in this structure.
2) Robert Reed’s Great Ship. I think the Captains overall have a great government for handling the hundreds of thousands of different species. Of course, only humans could be captains in Marrow…
3) Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. The Autarch rules with well because he understands two principles: First, a government needs an opposition, so he made sure he had one. Second, when you have more people than you can keep track of, it’s better to make the people feel like you are directing them without interfering with their lives. Of course the society is royally messed up, but it seems to “work”…
4) John Twelve Hawks’ The Traveler has a community which has chose to live off the grid. They are the best example I have seen of Will’s libertarian democratic socialism. They hold everything in common, all work to raise the children, all work for the benefit of the community. All the adults have a vote, and strive to allow each member to live how they choose. It’s probably the best example I can think of.
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True, mine was a regional comment and not all schools are the same. What does seem to be the same (in discussions with others, there may be exceptions) is that public schools in wealthier areas have more money, and schools in poorer areas have less. My high school was *very* nice. My grade schools were nice, but not nearly to that degree. Also, having significantly outdated books, especially in science and history, is (IMO) a bad idea.
And in my experience, the poorer the community, the poorer the school, the more the school tends to be tuned to the lowest denominator. And the richer the community, the richer the school, the more the school tends to be tuned to the highest denominator. Outdated books are worthless. There’s no point in using them if they are out of date. That’s one of the things that the education system needs to improve.
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