Towards A Better Tomorrow : Part 4 - The Final Destination

Anarchism, Voluntaryism, Socialism, Capitalism, Communism!

All these systems are based on a fairy-tale we tell ourselves about scarcity.

There is nothing in this world that is scarce in the least.
For everything you can cite about something "being scarce", I can demonstrate conclusively that it is not.
For any given resource, product or service, what we have is not a supply problem, it's a distribution problem.

We've heretofore attempted to solve both the supply and the distribution problems with money.
Now that we've solved the supply problem, money itself has become the actual problem in the distribution equation.

We invented this "money" tool, close to 10,000 years ago and it has served us well for millennia.
We literally don't know anything different in this world anymore.

Money is not evil, but it's a flawed concept because no one really understands what it is.
Flawed though it may be, it does still serve a valid purpose, until we find a better way to fix the distribution equation.

It's not convenient for a farmer to haul chickens or produce everywhere he goes, and a Dr would have a very hard time performing surgery in the middle of the grocery store.

So barter fails on that account.

Time based currencies including those inherent in communism and socialism fail, because all they do is reclassify time and effort into something of equal value and they are most assuredly not equal.

If my child needs immediate, life saving emergency treatment; There is no amount of anything in the world that I would value more than this service. This is something that I would be willing to obtain at any cost, and I do mean ANY cost up to and including my own soul.

My home, all of my future earnings, I would burn my entire world to ash if that's what it took. Literally nothing in this world would be more highly valued than this one single service, by this one single person.

On the other hand, if my car needs a new engine, I may have to take some time to think about that.

Yet I spend more time with the car, than the child.

Money represents not a store of "value" but a store of "labor".

For x units of any currency, you can acquire the fruits of almost anyone's labor.

Where all of these 'ism's begin to fail is when you separate the person from their labor or skill.
You can just print unlimited sums of cash or other forms of currency in order to fuel economic "growth".

Economic growth has another term, "wealth transfer".
You transfer money from the future to the present when you print cash that is unearned.
This act is obliging someone's future economic output to the present, either by inflation or taxes.

It gets worse when you consolidate the power to do this into the hands of a very few.

But what is wealth really?

Wealth is the ability to accomplish the dictates of your own will.

Money is not actually wealth, it is merely a claim on the future energy of other people.
Energy which you control, but only so long as the others allow it.

Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, every other "ism" is based on this concept of obliging and binding the future to support the needs and wants of the present time.

This was at one time necessary because goods and services could not be produced and delivered upon demand.
Crops come in once a year, babies take a few months to gestate and a few years to raise, etc.
Yet certain things such as automobiles, computers etc are produced most efficiently when production rates are steady.
All of these can be built on demand now, if you have the resources, whereas things that require life also require time.

These timing differentials introduce massive energy inefficiencies into the market place.

Money solves this by providing an ondemand store of "labor".
Labor is just the energy of others.

On the small scale, you can get around this inefficiency with all kinds of moneyless systems.

But moneyless systems, fail to account for human greed.

Capitalism works as well as it does because it leverages greed in a positive way and as long as government stays out of the way, the market will tend to correct inefficiencies. However the natural path for all capitalistic systems is to evolve towards consolidation. This is because it is much more efficient to utilize energy resources when doing so at economies of scale.

Thus consolidation rather than competition is the natural evolution of any marketplace, even freemarkets.

This begins to push companies into a monopoly position and means capitalism is unsustainable, because eventually in any capitalist system, you end up with fascism. A condition in which a handful of large companies own the government, which is precisely what America has become now.

Make no pretense about any representative republic and freemarket capitalism in America, we are now a fascist police state and have been for half a century or more.

Yet almost no one alive today remembers anything different.

Any system of government is equally effective so long as you can trust your leaders to act in your best interests.
This only works so long as your interests and the interests of your leaders align.

You can't put a person into a place of authority and expect them not to corrupt and or serve their own interests. No matter how hard they try, the temptation will always be there and one day they will take that step and fall.

So what's the actual answer?
It can't happen overnight. It won't be a bloody revolution, nor will it be a Malthusian crisis that wipes out humanity.
We're actually on the right path to the correct answer.

Division of labor itself is gradually going away.
Goods and services are being produced and provided by robotics and AI.
Beyond that which we can produce ourselves, very soon we will all be beggars, including those who have the most money right now. In reality the rich will fall long before the middle class does, because the middle class has the skills to create things and the tools to fix the things. We have the tools to endure, what the others cannot even in the absence of anything resembling a free and fair market.

As this erosion of our "core values" occurs.
The health and well being of people will become our primary concern and beyond that, production of the "absolutely unique" will become paramount. Meaning in the short term, we will be moving over to a patronage model, as everyone from top to bottom loses their jobs and learns to find other ways to feed themselves and their families.

There may be some bloodshed and rioting as governments cannot keep up the bread and circuses, but eventually the final answer in this puzzle is that "anything that you can buy, will be designed by AI and built by robots".

Thus a change of focus in order to value the unique, the one of a kind; also known as patronage.
Steemit is an example of this patronage model in action, albeit a very early model.

The only other question left is "Who will own the robots and who will control the AI?".
Short term it will be the richest, but you can also build them at home if you like.
Nothing is stopping you, so it might be a really good idea to get handy with these...

Knowledge of how things work and how to build them, is where real wealth is even now, and with it you can outcompete even those with the most money.

In the long term of around 50 to 100 years, there will no longer be a need for division of labor.
Truthfully there will no longer be a need for big clunky robots to build things either.

If you live 50 years more, you will at some point get "the last shot you ever need".
A re-programmable nano-enhanced immune system. Something this intimate will eventually succumb to your will just like your immune system does now.

In fact you may not be aware of this, but your entire immune system was acquired not evolved. Dangerous pathogens were tamed, harnessed and reprogrammed to provide you with the various tools and skills of the modern immune system.

Upgrading this to be re-programmable, is the most natural extension to evolution that one can imagine.
We already have the hardware, now we're just sussing out whatever language it was was programmed in.

There is literally nothing that bio-nano tech cannot do for you, once you are able to fully control it.

What is a world like where instead of driving a car made by someone else, you download plans off the internet and set your bots to work building it from the midden heap in your backyard?

We already use inductive charging systems such as Qi to recharge our phones and tablets,
Why not our cellular machinery as well? How far out do you think this is? I say 20 - 25 years.

What does the world become, when instead of consuming food produced by someone else, you grow a solar panel on your front lawn and adapt your cellular machinery to extract energy from the environment directly from whatever sources are handy?

Instead of needing shelter and warmth built and provided by someone else, you change the environment and build your own home to suit your tastes and needs...

Pretty much we survive like we always have, by adapting our environment to ourselves, except now we do it..
atom by atom

We can do this already, we just don't know how to control it properly... yet

When you can literally build anything and everything you need, by direct extraction and manipulation of the environment atom by atom. What do you need money or even government for?

Your Knowledge and Creativity ARE both the Present and the Future of what it means to be Wealthy!
Perhaps it's time you recognized just how wealthy you really are?

This is part 4 of a multipart series, one I thought I could do in just a couple of days. There are many, many more of these coming, but if you've read this far, you should read these first...

Part 1: https://steemit.com/life/@williambanks/towards-a-better-tomorrow-part-1-there-but-for-grace
Part 2: https://steemit.com/life/@williambanks/towards-a-better-tomorrow-part-2-what-in-the-hell-happened-to-us
Part 3: https://steemit.com/life/@williambanks/towards-a-better-tomorrow-part-3-the-biggest-heist-in-history