All salient points and nobody wants to talk about these. Make no mistake I am firmly a capitalist, but when you broach these subjects other conservatives immediately want to attack your credentials. My question is always, “okay you tell me how this works when 70% of your population is incapable of doing high tech and they need jobs and those jobs are gone?” They always want to say the patent answer, “businesses are in business to make money and not make jobs.” In principle I agree, but that does not rectify the impending crisis that you have listed, 1)war, 2)expansion, 3)welfare. I will say that #2 is a limited parameter so that leaves #1 and #3. How far can we expand? This has always been my argument (for which I get heavily chastised for) that globalization is a false premise. The drive to globalize is one of the driving forces for efforts to increase automation so you can turn out more cheap product, not make quality products.
We are in a pickle and the ones that understand it fall in two categories: 1) they are making lots of money and have all the power and do not want to change and 2) have no power and are this dismissed when they try and talk about it.
Quite agree.
I am always surprised by how many people just refuse to talk about these issues. As if resolutely ignoring them will make them go away.
Actually I’m not surprised. This issue makes all of our ideologies, left and right, eventually irrelevant. Which means a total change in worldview is required, and that’s something people are extremely reluctant to do.
The leftist way of dealing with this situation is quite simple. Just tax those who are still active in the economy more heavily, and redistribute that money to the rest, who have fallen out the bottom of the economy. Since this economy is likely to be wildly productive, there may very well be enough wealth to support the unproductive at quite a high level, materially speaking.
The problem, even from a leftist POV, is that it does not address the issue of purpose and meaning in these people’s lives. More stuff is just not the answer here.
I have heard various notions floated of getting people into philosophy, art, literature, etc. The problem with this is that the people, in general, capable of devising meaning for their lives by these means are the highly intelligent. IOW, those people who will still have a genuine place in the economy.
Conservatives have it even worse, since they have the above issue, plus the unfortunate fact that presumably a very nearly all-powerful government would be required to do the distributing.
If there is a limited government mechanism for running such a society, I’d sure be interested in hearing about it!