So, You Hate Money?
There are several authors on Steem who claim to hate money or not care about money. This attitude isn't just on Steem these people are everywhere. They constantly talk about the evils of money and greed.
However, they talk about money nearly incessantly. They brag about not caring about money, while they sneer at those who do.
These people cry out about others caring about money, but there is nearly always a boiling frustration in what they have to say.
I've got news for you:
If you are constantly bitching about money and lovers of money, you care about money. You are just bad at earning it. If you didn't care, you would just stop talking about it. Like the way, I never bring up .., say... Candy wrappers. I don't care about them, so I don't talk about them. That is all. Once in a while I come across a candy wrapper, I don't need to cry out about them, ever.
In my life I have lived both with and without money. I tend to prefer some of the comforts and freedoms that money brings.
Money is just a tool
I don't want it to just have it, I want it to have the freedom it brings.
If I have money and I want to go to a certain place, I can afford the things I need to go. I don't have to go, but the choice is mine. If I don't have money, my options are limited.
If I have money and I get sick, I might be able to afford a better treatment, nobody is obligated to provide me services without compensation.
If a steak looks good to me and I have some money, I can buy a steak. That feels like a nice option to me.
Some of these people also hate work and jobs!
I also enjoy the process of earning money. When I worked in the workforce, I enjoyed my jobs. When I didn't enjoy them any longer I changed jobs. I have written before about how I clipped fish fins and cleaned condos during my early adult years. Okay, those jobs weren't the best jobs I ever had, and every moment wasn't filled with joy, but they were interesting and I still feel a sense of pride and satisfaction from doing them.
The challenges and problems of work have taught me patience and how to deal with excitement and disappointment. How to work better with people, how to try to solve problems, and too many lessons to list.
So, you think you live in a gift economy?
Cool! I don't care if you live in a gift economy. That is cool, good for you. I don't. I live in a system set up with money, bartering, and trade. I live where when we provide things of value we expect things of value in return. Not only do I not live in a gift economy, I don't want to. That would mean I have no control over my own options.
I prefer an economy I can influence via my actions.
So, you want a Universal Income Society?
Good for you, I hope you find one.
I'm not interested in that at all. No, thank you. I would be terrified at what the providers of that income might require me to do in order to get my share. What personal power can I possibly have in a world where I can't support my own needs?
If you were to remove money and make "fish" the staple of an economy, then I am going to become very interested in learning how to fish.
That's just me. I try to view money as a tool. I am not rich, I am not poor, I believe in helping people when they are down, and I want people to have as much as they can, I just see money as a tool in that process. I don't want things to come easy or free.
Meant to trigger discussion. I am not invested in, nor is it my business how you view money unless you feel the need to tell me about it all of the time. Especially, if you think I should "Wake Up" and view it from your point of view.
Sunday Seconds - this article appeared here It was refreshed for your enjoyment today.
@whatsup,
For me money is the younger brother of God! I don't know whether it's correct or not! But to me it's true!
Cheers~
I have someone on my timeline who keeps bashing money while insisting they don't care about it. I don't get it because I do. Just like you, I love the freedom that comes with money and the ability to do what you want without letting anyone else know what you want to do.
I have lived an unstable life and let me tell you for free that it comes with a load of disappointments. I prefer the freedom and I am willing to work for it.
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I like the attitude. Being self-reliant is the only way to experience true freedom.
I think we should be less wasteful but I don't think money is bad.
There will be a time when your intelligence will not be sufficient for you to earn your living by working. Eventually, so will everyone else. We will all be outdone by intelligent machines in the end. By that time, all economic value will be created by machine intelligence. All scientific and technological progress will be the work of machines vastly superior to all humans. At some point, intelligence will be dirt cheap.
The labor market is getting crushed and the West is only able to maintain a growing level of consumption owing to ballooning consumer debt. The middle class is shrinking. Pretty soon, implementing UBI will not be as much a choice as necessary for social stability.
You assume the wrong thing though, you are stuck on thinking that we all need to maintain a certain way of life/standard of living in modern society.
What would actually happen if most people lost their "jobs/careers"? Then their "job/career" would be to survive. How do people survive? They farm their own food again and or work on someone else's farm and split everything. It is almost as if 95%+ of the world lived like this in the not so distant past.
That is your answer. We would basically become Amish out of necessity to survive. We adapt and do what we must.
"Pretty soon, implementing UBI will not be as much a choice as necessary for social stability."
Social stability isn't caused by giving everyone money to do whatever they want. It is caused by a sense of meaning and purpose and work.
We already have massive amounts of welfare in the USA and almost everyone who receives it can do whatever they want all day and are absolutely miserable. I know this from VERY personal experience. Every school I went to and all my friends were like this. It is dehumanizing to the highest possible degree.
Then you also have the problem where the government sees everyone as leeches who contribute nothing to society. Then since the govt controls all the money they just stop giving you it if they want, what are you going to do about it? Vote them out? You have no power anymore because everyone lives off of the government, and why does the govt care about what you have to say since you don't give them any value??? They control everything about you and whether you live or die. There is 0 evidence that the government would want to keep us alive forever to give us free money. If machines truly are better in every way then we get put into the concentration camps and death it is.
Most people aren't exactly landowners and those who are have no need for farm hands. Even if there were a huge demand for food in the cities, which there will not be in your scenario, that demand would be much more cheaply met using robots to do the work.
On whose land?
Finding a sense of meaning and purpose will be a real problem in the scenario where human intelligence is left in the dust be machine intelligence. But value systems can change. There have been useless classes in society before. The nobility of old, for example, did not work or need work to justify their existence.
I agree that this is a huge problem under our current value and belief systems.
That's definitely a possibility depending on who controls the government. If the government is controlled by the people, then that is not a possibility. I have learned that in the USA, a lot of people consider the government to be something akin to a foreign occupying force they cannot have any control over. Maybe there's some truth to that as well since the political system may be more corrupt there than in most other Western countries. The USA also has a pretty strong securocratic elements in the government at the federal level. You guys might be fucked. Who knows. A lot will depend on the strength of civil society.
An interesting series of essays was written about this very topic by Marshall Brain:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
"That's definitely a possibility depending on who controls the government. If the government is controlled by the people, then that is not a possibility."
The entire problem is that people control an institution that controls other people. You don't solve that by having a "benevolent government".
Do you think decent/honest people want to control others?
You will always have a government of some sort. It can be a modern state or it can be the mafia or something like that. Coercion in one form or another is inevitable because there is no law of nature to stop it. The best we can do is have transparency and checks and balances. The blockchain could be leveraged to prevent certain types of fraud and make transparency easier to implement.
You are are always going to have taxes. When the state effectively broke down in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed, what you got were extortion rackets springing up everywhere. Criminal gangs would form and extort businesses for a cut of their profits. Soon everyone had a "protector". If you ask me, I'd rather have a modern democratic state with rule of law and separation of powers that I have at least some control over along with the rest of the public collecting taxes from me than criminal gangs who do nothing for me except keep other criminals from extorting me for money.
What I'm proposing a simple system where a cut of revenue from businesses get taxed and redistributed. The job-destruction-by-advanced-AI scenario is where libertarism fails miserably. Where I agree with libertarians is that state bureaucracy should be minimized. Other than collecting said taxes and redistributing them, the state should have no say over how people use their universal basic income.
That... without mentioning the problem of inflation.
That too! heh
I know many love to talk about that, but I don't believe it. Not in that manner. And who would pay people to do nothing? No one for any period of time.
People will always find ways to create and exchange things of value although in the future it might look very different than it currently does.
People work for rich companies and have difficulting surviving. How can this play out in UBI. Now "they" (whoever that might be) doesn't need these people and there will be no reason to support them at any type of livable level.
It will never happen and if it does, it will never be sustained. :)
If this happens to me, I will forge, hunt, cook and build before I would count on SBI.
Well I think it's useful to differentiate between a Universal Income and a Universal Basic Income. A UBI is not a replacement for capitalism. We already(in the US) have something similar that the vast majority of Americans are in favor of in Social Security. When people get too old to work, we have a program so that they can still live the rest of their life with dignity and in comfort. They aren't going to be buying Lambos, but it's a "basic" income. Right now my wife is on maternity leave and because of social security she still gets paid while on maternity leave.
So I think a better name for it is maybe Social Security for All. As automation and AI start to displace jobs at a rate that's posing to be exponential, I think it makes sense to have some program in place so that people can still survive. It would also be a good idea to have a transitional program to train people into whatever industries are still viable for humans, but more than likely technology will drastically outpace humanity's ability to adapt to it.
Well I think if you're working for a rich company and having difficulty surviving it's probably because you aren't being paid a fair wage. Getting into what "fair" means is another debate, but basically it's no secret that these companies have way too much centralized power and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this is one of the major problems with the world today. So regulation that addresses this problem is more in line with the world I want to live in as it's ultimately taking some of their power and distributing it to the people that work for them ie decentralization. I'd have thought that idea would be pretty popular round these parts.
Being that this income would be "basic", I think the vast majority of people still want steak when they want it, still want to travel when they want, still want to have more in life than what any program like this would give them, basically still want freedom, so they would still want money and they'd still want to find ways to earn it. There would just be a safety net for everyone, so that more people have access to the same freedom that we all want instead of being forced into indentured servitude or homelessness.
If workers are no longer needed and we do not have jobs and do not find a way to participate in a new economy, everyone will be in survival mode. Poverty will be overwhelming and those who do not have valuable skills will parish either quickly or slowly.
Well...yea, exactly. I think this is pretty much an argument for UBI. I think the thing we absolutely can't control is the progression of technology, but we can adapt our economy. I don't think anyone who's looking at this as the nuanced issue it is would suggest that UBI in and of itself is the singular solution for the inevitability that soon a large portion of the human race will not have valuable enough skills to survive in our current system.
It's one of many things that could potentially be done as we adapt all of our social systems to match our current reality with technology and any other changes the future holds.
I think we still have time to avoid a dystopian future, and I think it would be in everyone's best interest if we think broadly, cleverly and creatively about how to deal with these challenges.
I believe that as machines take over many jobs, new things will hold value and people will learn new skills to create/sell/trade these things.
We may not work full time for an employer who is expected to solve all your problems, but instead back to a cleaner and more clear exchange of value
The problem with Social Security and the other programs though is that it is all unfunded liabilities that are going to go bankrupt at any given time. The only reason they do not is because our government prints more imaginary money and or takes money from other programs.
If you research how much debt we have in Social Security + Medicare + Medicaid + Other Social Spending you will see it amounts to over 200 Trillion Dollars. For each taxpayer to pay that off would amount to everyone who pays taxes paying 1,500,000 USD.
It is a scam through and through. The scam is still working right now, and yes there are people benefiting from it. The future generations won't, and will be stuck with the crippling debt of 1,500,000 USD.
The owners of the robot work force would pay. Robot labor would be taxed and the money redistributed. It's not like taxation is anything new. The owners wouldn't be doing anything, either. They'd be too stupid to run their own companies.
In a world where robots can do every type of job better than humans, it will come down to ownership of natural resources and the robot work force. Ordinary people own very little else but their cars and their houses.
There would have to be a political solution meaning that they money would be taxed. With robots doing all the work, productivity would skyrocket which is why this would be easily affordable.
Only politics would stand in the way. It would be a power struggle. Maybe it could not be done in America given how a lot of Americans think, which would mean that America would turn into a shit hole.
Unless you're a landowner, you'd be trespassing.
I hated money a lot in my twenties. It took awhile for me to realize it wasn't the money I hated; I hated what I was doing to get the money.
I like to see people earn the life they want. Participation awards are a terrible idea. If earning money isn't challenging, it loses its appeal and eventually becomes worthless. If gravel roads were made of gold nuggets, gold is just a rock.
If you abolish money... resources... like fish or as you point out Gold will be the next currency... Just changes.. there will always be classes and those who know how to do things and those who don't.
I agree fully and here are a few things I have picked up through the years that makes me comfy with money.
It is not that important, but ranks up there with oxygen and is the only thing that works at the grocery store.
If you hate money so much, just make enough so that it is not a concern in your life any more.
Money just gives you choices and freedom. Chase those and not money.
If you really want to help people, make money and use it as a tool to create happiness.
You can hate money all you want but it is misdirected emotion and you are better served shaking your fiat at the sunrise every morning. ;)
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Yep, yep, yep..
Acknowledge that you need it and learn how to earn it... that is the trick.
Let's see... hate money, work, and love universal basic income? Were you arguing with a socialist?
ha.. likely... But sheesh, they aren't greedy also, why are they worried what others do with their money.
Made me laugh. You share a lot of valid points. I think for many (not talking the gib me free shit crowd) is that those who control the money have dehumanized so much of the work, demanding performance the human body was not made to endure. The fact that those with the money pay off the power structures to funnel sweat and dignity from those not part of their club. The sad fact is, due to the hidden theft of inflation among many programs devised to set people back, more find themselves on a treadmill barely keeping afloat.
As for gifting economy, for myself that was one of the draws. I love that I not only can EARN here, but I can also aid those I deem worthy of earning as well. My hope is that despite the illusions of decentralization (as if any such thing could exist not only under the current holdings, but the larger picture when it is valuated using the currency of those who would be escaped, lol) that perhaps there will be a growth strong enough to offset the schemes and dreams of the major holders who seek their profits today and set little to no designs for tomorrow. Being as I am ignorant of coding and don't foresee myself becoming a coder, I choose then to leave myself at the mercy of those more intelligent than I, lol.
In the end we all are alone and responsible for our own welfare. Even if we have a partner, or a larger circle it is not smart to leave ones welfare in others hands. Our choices do have power, and we reap what we sew. Bitching about poor circumstances due to past choices solves nothing. By all means, it is a right to feel taken advantage of, and the smart person plans accordingly and looks for ways to escape that do not rely on anothers generosity.
Your final paragraph is great. That is what I am getting around to. I can not be a free adult making my own decisions if I don't accept responsibility for my own welfare.
I think I can make it short:
How can someone hate the most beautiful thing in the world?
Good analysis. I agree with your stand.