Skip to main content

Socialism and Wealth Creation

Wealth basically comes from the same place in a society that calls itself 'socialist' as it does in any other.

so·ci·e·ty -- /səˈsīədē/
noun
1. the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.

so·cial·ism -- /ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/
noun
a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

To some extent, society by its nature is socialist. 

Much wealth is already in place. In the USA, the baby boomers are about to pass on a cool $30,000,000,000,000.00 (yeah, that many zeros — trillions of dollars):

The Greatest Wealth Transfer In History: What’s Happening And What Are The Implications

Some wealth needs only to be discovered:

Lucky Fishermen Have Stumbled Across a $3 Million Lump of Whale Vomit

Some is made using various means of production:

5 Reasons Why America's Manufacturing Is Growing Again

We acquire things of value in excess of our needs, use something agreed upon as currency to measure relative value and exchange things, and use appropriate agreed upon instruments as stores of value.

We are in a transition period to an economy where many of the ordinary things a person would need require very much less human labor than we have available.

As things currently stand, the costs formerly associated with producing artifacts necessary to access media like books, pictures, movies, etc are no longer required. If you are content to use your existing online PC, the only thing that stands between you and access to hundreds of millions of items are the gatekeepers claiming the right to stop you. The cost of accessing digital data is becoming too small to meter.

Action Item: We need to eliminate copyrights and associated mechanisms that give gatekeepers their power.

The next phase: Advancing automation promises to usher in a spectacular new industrial revolution. Artificial Intelligence, robotics, 3D printing and the IOT are currently coming on fast. We are probably less than two decades away from fully automated systems capable of producing just about anything, including copies of themselves.

Tesla’s full self-driving computer is now in all new cars and a next-gen chip is already ‘halfway done’ – TechCrunch

Boston Dynamics’ latest robot is a mechanical ostrich that loads pallets

The Metal X metal 3D printer

The Rise of the Internet of Things

Soon we will be able to create physical artifacts like can openers for basically just the cost of the metal and energy required. Food  will eventually just about reduce to energy costs, with the raw ingredients simply being recycled. In the coming years, the only thing standing in the way of people getting most ordinary things they might want will, again, be the gatekeepers claiming the right to stop you.

Action Item: We need to eliminate patents and associated mechanisms that give gatekeepers their power.

Sharing the Wealth: We are already awash in a sea of wealth and poised to enter a world where much more will be created with little human labor. Distribution of wealth is already a problem and that is something that socialism aims at making better.

Pretty much all human endeavours are already socialist to some degree. What we need to do is concentrate on how we manage it so that we all can agree. Our current situation in the first world is evidence of how spectacularly good our mutual cooperation can be.

Libertarian Socialism: A socialist society can and should value and protect personal liberty. Except when the state is enforcing sensible common cause rules like the rules of the road, I don't think the state has a place dictating our behavior. Working together does not mean that everybody has to be controlled from above. Wealth without freedom is pointless.

Social Capitalism?: I like the idea of people democratically ‘voting’ with their dollars. I think we have enough evidence that it is an effective way to prioritize production, reward innovation and quality, and punish poor performers. I think that we are all best served if we allow our best people to make more money by producing more, and effectively get more voting power.

If everybody’s reasonable basic needs are met, I don’t think anybody would object to incenting highly productive individuals by giving them more money. There is a limit, though, and at least here in North America, we have long since passed it.

Evil robots: Capitalism as promoted in the United States is a formula for creating ‘evil robot’ corporations whose only purpose is to serve the bottom line. That is what we see happening. The only way to fix this is to legislate effective checks and balances. Corporations are not human. They cannot govern themselves because their allegiance to the bottom line runs counter to human interests.

Socialism *is* wealth creation: Socialist things like shared infrastructure, socialized medicine, education, management of natural resources, the protections of a legal system, defense, education, etc are good things. Taking care of one another is hardly inconsistent with the creation of wealth. If wealth is to have any real value, it should start here anyway.

Comments

Unknown said…
This sounds correct Bob, where do I sign up. Give me a call sometime soon. Al

Popular posts from this blog

The system cannot execute the specified program

It always annoys me no end when I get messages like the following: "The system cannot execute the specified program." I got the above error from Windows XP when I tried to execute a program I use all the time. The message is hugely aggravating because it says the obvious without giving any actionable information. If you have such a problem and you are executing from a deep directory structure that may be your problem. It was in my case. Looking on the web with that phrase brought up a bunch of arcane stuff that did not apply to me. It mostly brought up long threads (as these things tend to do) which follow this pattern: 'Q' is the guy with the problem asking for help 'A' can be any number of people who jump in to 'help'. Q: I got this error "The system cannot execute the specified program." when I tried to ... [long list of things tried] A: What program were you running, what operating system, where is the program? What type of

Coming Soon: General Artificial Intelligence

The closer you get to experts who understand the nuts and bolts and history of AI, the more you find them saying that what we have is not nearly General Artificial Intelligence (GAI), and that GAI seems far away. I think we already have the roots in place with Neural Networks (NN), Deep Learning (DL), Machine Learning (ML), and primitive domain limited Artificial Intelligence (AI). Things like computer vision, voice recognition, and language translation are already in production. These are tough problems, but in some ways, machines are already better than humans are. I expect GAI to be an emergent property as systems mature, join, and augment one another. I was around during the 70s AI winter, and was involved in the 80s AI winter as one of the naysayers. I built a demonstration system with a Sperry voice recognition card in 1984. I could demonstrate it in a quiet room, but as a practical matter, it was not production ready at all. Around 1988 we built demonstration expert systems usin

Your call is important to us, but not much.

Rogers entire network is down and Rogers either does not know why or sufficiently disrespects its customers that it won't say. I was on the advisory committee for the largest private network in Canada serving 150,000 employees countrywide. I was also an active participant building out that network. I installed the first Local Area Networks there. I wrote a code generator responsible for the most critical portion of Bell's mobile network. I also wrote a portion of code for a system in the United States that detected and pinpointed line breaks in their network before they happened. For a time, I held the title 'Networking Professor' at our local College. I registered my first domain name in the 1980s. I have administered Internet network servers for decades. In one capacity or another, I have worked with most of the telecommunications providers in Canada past and present. Nearly a billion devices use a small network codec written by me decades ago.  Except that Rogers was