Should older people have their vote weighted less than younger people?
The case is simple enough. The older you are, the less time you have, the less stake you have in the future and the more you are likely to make short-sighted decisions which favor yourself.
As I’ve discussed before, this is the death bet: “I’ll be dead before the bad shit happens.” It makes total sense not to care about Climate Change in 1980 when you’re 40: You aren’t going to be around to experience it. Voting for policies which increase house prices faster than wages is great for older people who own homes, and so on.
I’ve heard the suggestion that parents should have more say, because they have kids and a stake in the future world. But the way global warming and university tuition and loans have been handled teaches us that parents don’t actually give a shit what happens to their kids, or, at least, not enough to matter. Not in America, probably not in the West.
It’s worth thinking about this. I wouldn’t actually do it, but it cuts to important questions about who should be allowed to have power in general. People who don’t have a stake in a good future, or who don’t have a stake in other people having good lives, probably aren’t going to make good decisions.
To the extent businessmen think that high wages overall are to their advantage, for example, you have a good economy. Bear in mind that the entire New Deal apparatus was designed to do two main things: Increase wages and increase prices. This was the world we lived in for forty years, and twenty-five or so of them were the best economy the US and the Western world ever had.
When you start believing that your prosperity is opposed to other people’s prosperity, or you start believing, “There is no such thing as society,” well, then you get what has happened to us.
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This is the second collation of articles on why our world is what it is, and how we can change it. Some of these articles are old, as I don’t write as much as I used to about economics because the decision points for avoiding a completely lousy economy are now in the past. The last decision points were passed by when Barack Obama announced his economics team and refused to try and get rid of or bypass Bernanke to enforce decent policy on the Federal Reserve.
(Author’s Note: This was originally published October 6, 2014. I’m putting it back up top, as I have gained many new readers since then.)
However, this economy was decades in the making, and if we do not understand how it happened we will only wind up in a good economy through accident, and, having obtained a good economy, will not be able to keep it. These articles aren’t exhaustive; a better list would include almost five centuries of economic history, at least in summary, and certainly deal with the 19th century and early 20th centuries.
I was heartened that hundreds of people read the articles linked in my compendium on ideology and character so I dare hope that you will, again, read these pieces. If you do, you will walk away vastly better informed than almost anyone you know, including most formal economists, about why the economy is as it is.
The Decline and Fall of Post-War Liberalism
Pundits today natter on and on about income inequality, but the fundamental cause of income inequality is almost always determined by how society distributes power. As power goes, so goes income–and wealth. The last period of broad-based equality was the “Liberal Period,” which started with the Great Depression. You can locate the end of that era at various points from 1968 to 1980, but 1980 was the point where turning back became vastly difficult, because it was the moment when a new political order was born: An order conceived to crush those who were willing and able to fight effectively for their share of income and money.
Why Elites Have Pushed “Free Trade”
Those who are middle-aged or beyond remember the relentless march of free trade agreements, the creation of the WTO, and the endless drumbeat of propaganda about how FREE trade was wonderful, inevitable, and going to make us all rich. It didn’t, and it was never intended to. Understanding fully why it only enriched a few requires understanding the circumstances required for free trade to work, the incentives for free trade, and the power dynamics which make free trade perfect for elites who want to become rich (often by destroying the prosperity of their own countries). Free trade is about power, and power is about who gets how much.
The Isolation of Elites and the Madness of the Crowd
All societies change and face new challenges. What matters is how they deal with new circumstances. America, in specific, and most of the developed world, in general, is in decline because of simple broken feedback loops. Put simply, ordinary people live in a world of propaganda and lies, while the rich and the powerful live in a bubble, isolated from the consequences their decisions have on the majority of the population, or on the future.
The Bailouts Caused the Lousy “Recovery”
This may be the hardest thing to explain to anyone with a connection to power or money: The bailouts are WHY the world has a lousy economy, not why it isn’t even worse. If people cannot understand why this is so, if they cannot understand that other options were, and are, available, other than making the people who destroyed the world economy even richer and more powerful, we will never see a good economy, ever again.
The Rapid Destruction of Countries
You may have noticed, you probably have noticed, that countries are becoming basketcases faster and faster. Some are destroyed by war and revolution, others by forced austerity. However it happens, the end of anything resembling a good economy in places like Greece, the Ukraine, Italy, or Ireland, or through war, in places like Lybia and Syria, is sure. Understand this: What is done to those countries, is being done to yours if you live in the developed world, just at a slower pace–and one day, you, too, will be more valuable dead than alive.
Why Countries Can’t Resist Austerity
Many of you will realize that much of the answer to this is related to the article on free trade. Weakness, national weakness, is built into the world economic system, and done so deliberately. The austerity of the past six years is just the impoverishment of ordinary people, for the profit of elites, on steroids. But it is worth examining, in detail, why countries can’t or won’t stop it, and what is required for a country to be able to do so.
Why Public Opinion Doesn’t Matter
We live in the remnants of a mass society, but we aren’t in one any more (though we think we are). In a mass-mobilization society with relatively evenly distributed wealth and income, and something approaching competitive markets, public opinion mattered. If it was not King, well, it was at least a Duke. Today it matters only at the margins, on decisions where the elites do not have consensus. Understand this, and understand why, or all your efforts to resist will be for nothing.
Money, my friends, is Permission, as Stirling Newberry once explained to me. It is how we determine who gets to do what. He who can create money, rules. This is more subtle than it seems, so read and weep.
It’s Not How Much Money, It’s Who We Give It To and Why
We have almost no significant problems in the world today which we could either not have fixed had we acted soon enough, or that we could not fix or mitigate today, were we to act. We don’t act because we mis-allocate, on a scale which would put Pyramid-building Pharoahs to shame, our social efforts.
Higher Profits Produce a Worse Society
No one ever told you that, I’m sure. Read and learn.
The USSR fell in large part because of constant and radical mis-allocation of resources, because those running the economy did not receive accurate feedback. Despite the triumphal cries of the West and the managerial class who pretend to be capitalists, a version of this exact problem is at the root of our current decline, and it would serve us well to understand how and why the USSR fell.
Of all the ideological bugaboos of our current age, one of the strongest is the idea that private enterprise is always more efficient and better. It’s not, but that belief is a very profitable to our elites, and understanding how the engine of privatization works is essential to understanding both our current economic collapse and how the fakely-bright economies of the neo-liberal era, especially the early neo-liberal period of Thatcher and Reagan, were generated.
It is, perhaps, odd to put this article so far down the list, but it’s wonky and important and not very dramatic. Simply enough, what we define as prosperity isn’t, which is why we are sick, fat, and unhappy with rates of depression and mental illness and chronic disease which dwarf those of our forbears despite having so much more stuff. Fix everything else, but if we insist on continuing to produce that which makes us sick and unhappy, what we have will not be what we need or want, nor will it be, truly, prosperity worth having.
The Four Principles of Prosperity
Prosperity, at its heart, is an ethical phenomenon, as much as it is anything else. Without the right ethics, the right spirit, it will not last, nor be widespread. If we want a lasting prosperity, which is actually good for us, we will start by reforming our public ethics.
How to Create a Good Internet Economy
The internet is wonderful, but despite all the cries of “Progress, progress!” it has mostly made a few people rich, created a prosperous class of software engineers who often lose their jobs in their 50s, while simultaneously overseen the decline of the prosperity for most people in the developed world. It has not produced the prosperity we would have hoped it would. Here’s why and how to fix it.
Concluding Remarks
The above is so far from comprehensive as to make me cry, but it’s a start. I do hope that you will read it and come away with a far better idea of why the economy sucks for most people, and a clearer understanding both that it is intended to suck, why it is intended to suck, and how the old, better economy was lost.
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A patron has generously offered to match donations up to a total of $600. That would be sufficient to push the fundraising drive over nine thousand, meaning I would write the Construction of Reality booklet.
If you can afford to give without hardship, please consider doing so.
I will update this post with running totals so people know how much of the matching offer remains, and kick it back to the top when the matching offer has been exhausted.
Update: And we have a $250 match, so $350 of matching funds remain.
Update 2: Another $220 received, so $130 of matching funds remain.
Update 3: Matching funds have been reached. Thank you all. The booklet will be written.
Most of Detroit hasn’t reported in and Detroit leans heavily Clinton. Even so, this is amazing; polls were showing Bernie down 20 percent to Clinton.
I’m assuming this is based on trade. “Free” trade has destroyed Michigan.
As for Trump, well, no surprise.
Update: Note that a win here only keeps Bernie in the running. He needs to start defeating Clinton by significant margins in order to win. Still, I couldn’t see how Bernie could win if he couldn’t win a state like Michigan, which is almost tailor-made for his message, so this is good news. A couple polls off by 20 percent in his favor in big states and Bernie could still pull it out.
Second Update: Looks like a win for Bernie in Michigan, but note that Clinton won Mississippi with 86 percent. In other words, she won the most delegates today. Bernie MUST start knocking some out of the park soon.
African Americans voted 30 percent for Sanders–that’s his best showing yet.
19- 30-year olds showed up as much as retirees. Can’t remember the last time that happened.
Fundraising Update: Book Reviews Unlocked, Just over $1,000 to “The Construction of Reality” Booklet
The current fundraising total is $6,105 in one-time donations, and $595 in recurring donations (including ongoing donations from before this drive.) Counting recurring donations at 3X, that means we are at $7,890.
We have achieved the first goal of 18 book reviews. Twelve will be on books important to my understanding of the world such as Jane Jacobs “Economy of Cities,” and the remainder will be on various issues of interest.
We are $1,110 from the e-booklet The Construction of Reality.
I had originally intended to end the fundraiser about now, a month from when it started, but because a number of people have stated they donated hoping for the book, I’m going to hold it open a little longer to see if we can make it.
The booklet will between 30 to 50,000 words, and will discuss how ideology, technology, geography, and other factors create the world in which we live. All donors will receive a copy, and it will be available for others to purchase.
As with all my fundraisers, please don’t give if you are in financial difficulties. Otherwise, remember: Even if you don’t care for the book, the more I receive, the more I will write in general. So if you like my writing, please give.
I’m very happy with how the fundraiser has gone so far. This is the best result of our three fundraisers.
Thank you.
Though good on some issues, Trudeau has bad policy on a lot of important issues, such as TPP and the horrible anti-civil liberties bill C-51, but in his own way he is a genius. I am aware of no modern leader who does symbolism of photo-ops better than Trudeau.
This sort of thing is why feminists keep losing effective abortion access.
And by “this sort of thing” I mean preferring the “identity” candidate over the one whose policies are actually good for the group in question.
“She is one of us, so she must be better for us.”
No.
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Remember during the Greek crisis when I said that one of the reasons why Brussels Eurocrats had a low opinion of national democracy was how the whole refugee debacle was unfolding…even back then? The “Brussels solution” to the refugee crisis, which hadn’t even taken on the dimensions and scale that it has now, was essentially that refugees arriving on the shores of Greece and Italy, at least 160K of them (now a laughable pittance), would be divided up among EU member countries by economic weight. This would mean that Germany and France and so on would still be taking the lion’s share of them, while Estonia very few of them, but everyone would be participating in the process without effectively putting the entire burden on peripheral countries.
Here, I will elaborate on the practical and ethical logic of this plan: Peripheral EU countries were, I might add, intended to be burdened with the bulk of refugee processing, by the Dublin treaty, which demands that refugees be returned to the first country in which they arrived, even if they manage to make it to countries with less capricious refugee processing. It was part of the generally awful “safe third country” trend that degenerated immediately into a purely political tool with often little relationship to the reality of migration and refuge. Dublin was signed in a time when refugee influxes were comparatively small. For peripheral countries, accepting the burden of shoreline refugee processing was a no-brainer compared to the benefits they thought they would get by being cooperative with EU-interior countries’ desire to be in control not only of immigration, but of arrival itself, a luxury that is physically, morally, and legally impossible for shoreline countries. However, when refugee arrivals are not so small, Dublin is unenforcible. It is the public acknowledgement of this that is blamed for the influx into Germany right now — what people are calling Merkel’s “invitation.” The alternative was not to acknowledge this and to attempt to deport migrants en masse back along the Balkan route, to countries not willing or able to process the full load. The Merkel administration’s act of acknowledgement (aka the “invitation” in many quarters) was both politically and morally the right thing, even if it has the character of one of Merkel’s time-buying tactics. It was the right time to buy time.
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Why is it impossible for peripheral countries to control their own borders, particularly those on the sea? It comes down to a matter of rescue. Dragging refugee boats back to the shorelines from whence they came requires the legal cooperation of the countries on those shores, some of which are producers of refugees themselves. One may indulge in a false European fantasy of omnipotence, but Europe does not have the ability to impose refoulement on many of the “origin” shoreline countries. So the question becomes: Do EU-peripheral countries have an obligation to rescue those who come, at least, by sea? The legal and moral answer is: Yes. Once they are rescued, the requirement to do something with them — meaning, of course, process their refugee claim — falls upon the rescuer.
But if the burden is too large for peripheral countries, of course they have an incentive to send refugees on towards the center. Not merely an incentive, but in some sense an obligation. Hence, as I said, the Dublin suspension. But why is the burden so large? It is large, particularly in this instance, because of the size of the migration from Turkey. Why is the size of the migration from Turkey large? It is large because the size of the migration from Syria and other war-torn countries is large. Turkey hosts many more refugees from this crisis than all of Europe. (I will leave aside for this post the extent to which Turkey contributed to creating these refugees.) So do many countries neighbouring Syria, particularly Jordan and Lebanon. They all, one way or another, must accommodate a refugee crisis far larger than what Europe has handled. They do so very imperfectly, with the expectation of foreign aid and the desire to prevent the situation from becoming permanent. (Lebanon cannot simply make a million people its permanent residents and future citizens, but the EU, as a whole, certainly can.) But the situation is such that it is entirely possible that many of the refugees will never even have the opportunity to safely go back to Syria.
Of course, many of the refugees are not actually Syrian. These are the dreaded “economic migrants.” The problem is, with no legal way created for Syrian refugees (or other refugees) to arrive in the EU without illegally crossing borders, but no ability to have a future, even for many of them in Turkey, Syrians must take clandestine approaches to moving westward. This effectively creates a massive flow of refugees, which creates an elaborate market and services which non-refugees can exploit. (The distinction between economic migrants and refugees is morally and functionally dubious, and we may have to rethink the entire basis of citizenship and sovereignty to de-couple it from territorial borders, but that is for another time.) In order to stop economic migration, one must either stop refugees entirely or one must provide another route for refugees in the hope that that will dry up some of the illegal transit market. To stop refugees entirely, one must either drown them or treat them so terribly on arrival that they act as living warnings against attempting to transit (this is the Australian “solution”) and view their present precarious situation as the same or superior to severe maltreatment. Needless to say, much of this could have been avoided by earlier action resettling Syrians — and others! — away from the Middle East.
If one is not willing to let refugees drown or to torment them, and one is not willing to let an EU country become a “warehouse of souls,” then one must permit refugees and potentially non-deportable economic migrants to proceed. This is essentially the route that Angela Merkel chose by suspending the Dublin Treaty. She and her government treated Greece very poorly in the financial crisis, but, in this, she effectively attempted to both rescue Greece and the dignity (i.e., appearance of unity) of the Union, and bought time to find a more permanent and less haphazard solution. While I dislike many of her policy choices, and I don’t believe the bandied-about (and probably sexist) claim that she suddenly became “soft-hearted,” or something. Give credit where credit is due: I do believe that she did the right thing for the European Union and for the refugees simultaneously.
The problem is that the only country that is willing to take refugees is Germany, and it will eventually be politically unsupportable for Germany to be the sole player in this game. While proportionately falling far short in terms of actual numbers, compared to some Middle Eastern countries, Germany has still taken on a million refugees (and/or economic migrants) and has, under stressful conditions, started to organize the terms of their integration. Even then, Germany has done what its alleged EU ‘partners’ have been unwilling to do. If there must be refugee transit within Europe, the only fair way to implement it is by the very redistribution proposal I mention above.
Unfortunately, a large number of EU states, particularly the so-called Visegrad states of Eastern European countries, are simply unwilling to share any burden at all, even a couple of dozen. That is due to naked racism (and yes, you can be racist against Muslims, even though Islam is not a ‘race’; you don’t need a ‘race’ for racism to occur, quite the contrary). The expansion eastward was ill-advised; these countries suffer in part from a post-communist nationalist ‘adolescence’ that is not really compatible with European convergence, and from that, an effective requirement to be a participant in dealing with refugees from on-going conflicts in the very much neighbouring Muslim world. Unfortunately, and further, even countries that were considered core European countries, such as France, are not willing to be part of a common solution to the refugee crisis.
Europe has so far flailed around attempting to come to a resolution of this impasse. While I gave credit to Merkel above for doing the right thing by suspending the Dublin treaty, unfortunately, her solution, possibly a matter of necessity, has been to attempt to bribe Turkey to accept deportations. The political situation in Turkey is not pleasant, to put it mildly. Ankara is in the strange situation of being both partly at fault for the refugee crisis, and yet for a power that is partly at fault, it is still not possible to force it to handle the entire burden. Consequently, one either deals with Turkey, or one doesn’t deal with Turkey, at which point, the choice between letting boats sink or rescuing them and taking on the refugees once again presents itself. Dealing with Turkey involves paying it money, giving it better access to the EU economy, and directly shouldering some of the refugee burden. For both good and bad reasons, the deal with Turkey is not universally popular in the EU, and there have been a number of false starts in which the deal has been claimed to have taken effect, when it has not.
This whole situation has now come to a head with Austria conspiring with other EU and non-EU states to cut off Greece, unless Greece gets “control” over its borders. Make no mistake; the “control” in question is a weasel-word. Greece has an indefinite sea border with Turkey, and no ability on its own to force Turkey to take back anyone who leaves from the Turkish coast. Greece was receiving tens of thousands of migrants before Germany suspended the Dublin deportation process. So what “control” could they possibly mean? That question is certainly rhetorical.
No, the only solution that has a modicum of humanity involves European countries sharing the burden, which is what was proposed for months in Brussels and is the principal position of Germany, Greece, and Italy. But if this doesn’t happen, it amounts to additional evidence in favour of Brussels’ contempt for national democracy. Make no mistake: I think that this contempt, given the conditions under which the EU has been constructed, is a mistake. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a grain of truth to it. Unless the European Union countries can come up with a joint solution to the problem, the whole thing will fall apart. And if the joint solution is boat pushback in the Aegean, then the whole thing isn’t worth keeping together.
I want to take readers through some of my previous writing on ideology and character, and how they help form the societies in which we live. Taking the time to read these articles (a short book’s worth), should vastly improve your understanding of the world and the articles to come. It should be worth your time, even if you read the articles when they were previously published, as, at the time, they lacked both context and commentary, and were not collated to be read together so that the connections were obvious.
(I have a lot of new readers, so I’m going to kick this back to the top. These are some of the most important articles I have written–Ian)
Baseline Predictions for the Next 60 Years
While not an article about ideology, the above is an article about where our current ideology and character are going to take us: To the brink of disaster and possibly beyond, while continuing to impoverish and disempower larger and larger segments of the human race. This might be a slightly optimistic piece; there’s some reason to believe our actions in the world’s oceans could destroy the oxygen cycle, and if this is so, events will be much, much worse.
What Is an Ideology and Why Do We Need a New One?
Too many people think ideologies are some airy-fairy nonsense, while they themselves are “pragmatic” men and women operating on common sense and facts. Such people are amongst the greatest of all fools: Our entire society is based on interlocking ideologies; the primary of which are neo-liberalism, capitalism, human rights, and socialism. It is not obvious, nor was it obvious to most societies that have ever existed, for example, that food should be distributed based on money; nor that ideas could be property. How we organize things, our particular ideas about markets and their role, and our ideas about who should lead us, are ideological. If we want to change society, we need to be able to control markets so they aren’t producing a world that makes us sick, unhappy, and, in increasing numbers, dead.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
How to Create a Viable Ideology
We may look at current trends and realize that if we don’t reverse them–and reverse them fast, billions will suffer or die; but creating an ideology which can reverse these trends requires us to understand what makes an ideology viable and powerful. An ideology which does not create believers willing to die, and to kill, on its behalf, will lose to those that do. An ideology which cannot prevent people from selling out, from betraying, will definitely lose in the current world, where there is so much money available at the top to simply buy out (for billions) those who create something new, so that anything new can be neutralized into nothing but a monetization scheme.
Our Theory of Human Nature Predicts Our Policies
The ideas of an ideology determine how our society is run, and, of those ideas, none is more important than what we make of human nature.
A Theory of Human Nature Suited to Prosperity and Freedom
If we are trying to create a prosperous, free world, our policies must be based in a theory of human nature that is both true (enough) and which leads to policies which create widespread affluence and human freedom.
Ideology and character are intertwined. Character determines what we do, what we don’t do, and how we do it. The character of large numbers of people determines the destinies of nations and of the world itself. If we want to make the world better (or worse), we must change our own characters. Those who fail to understand how character is created (and changed) will never change the world–except accidentally.
How Everyday Life Creates Our Character
Along with, as noted, our destiny. I always laugh at radicals who want more schooling, because schooling is where people learn to sit down, shut up, give the approved answers, and do what they’re told. Working life, as an adult, continues this process of learned powerlessness and acquiescence, and even in our consumptive and political lives we continue the trend; choosing from the choices offered, rather than producing what we actually need for ourselves.
How Everyday Life Creates Sociopathic Corporate Leaders
Those who lead our corporations control most of our lives, even more so than the government, because they set the terms by which we live, die, and can afford the good things in life. Our daily lives are prescribed by these people, from how we work to what we eat, to what we entertain ourselves with. We need, therefore, to understand the character traits for which our leaders are chosen, and how the process of choosing works. If we can’t learn to create and choose better leaders, we will never have a better world.
The Difference Between Ethics and Morals
If we want an ideology that tells us how to create both a better world and the people with the character to create that world, we must understand what sort of people they should be. To accomplish this, we must first understand how they treat other people–the people they know, and more importantly, the people they don’t.
The Fundamental Feedback Loop for a Better World
The shortest article on this list, this is also one of the most important and speaks directly to how money directs behaviour and how that directs our choice in leaders.
It’s been so long since parts of the West were truly prosperous that people have forgotten what it’s like, and forget that it creates a different type of person than a scarcity society.
Late 19th and Early 20th Century Intellectual Roots
Lived experience creates character and character feeds into ideology. It’s worth looking at how various themes of the Victorian era were created by those who lived through that time and the time that came before it.
What Confucius Teaches Those Who Want a Better World
Amongst those who have created powerful ideologies, Confucius is in the first rank; Confucianism has been the most important ideology of the most populous and advanced region of the world for most of the last two thousand years–or more. Confucius was very aware of what he was trying to do, had a theory of human nature, and a theory of character. We would be fools not to learn from him.
Concluding Remarks
I hope that those who are interested in creating a better world will read the articles linked above. What I’ve written amounts to a short book, and the ideas are interrelated. If you have read a few of my posts, or even read all of them, but not thought of or read them with each other in mind, you cannot have the full picture of how these ideas work together, and why the different parts are necessary.
Ideas are often destroyed in practice by those who do not understand the reasons for the various pieces of the puzzle and prescriptions. These people feel they can pick and choose without that understanding. Character and ideology and ethics and every day life are all intertwined; you cannot pick one and say,”This is supreme.” They create each other.
Of course, the above is not a complete intellectual package. Large chunks are missing. My next piece will be a review of some key economic articles, specifically concerning why the world is as it is today: Why we lost post-war liberalism, why we have austerity and neo-liberalism and so-called free trade. That piece comes after this one because without understanding our own characters, the characters of our leaders, and how ideology works, we cannot understand our current circumstances.
I will then be moving on to new articles that focus on technology, geography, the environment, and their effect on societies though the ages, with an emphasis on those technologies and environments which create prosperity, freedom, and egalitarian cultures and explore why they do so. There is an important trend today, an argument, about changing our technology to improve society, but it will only work if we understand how technology changes society.
Originally published Oct 2, 2014. Republished July 28, 2015 and March 6, 2016
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Hilary Clinton recently tweeted the following.
Companies have to start treating workers like assets to be invested in, not costs to be cut.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 4, 2016
On the face this is unexceptional. A business exists to do certain things, and employees are hired to contribute towards those actions. We hire an employee because we think they will do a good job.
Except that in our current system, we distribute goods through money, and most of how we distribute money is through corporations. You have a good life if you have a good job, pretty much. There are exceptions and they are exceptions.
Hilary has also said that she doesn’t favor a $15/hour minimum wage.
This is what happens when you think of people as assets. Some people don’t deserve $15/hour because they don’t “add enough value.”
But they are still people, and they still need to eat, sleep in a warm place, and have the occasional bit of entertainment.
They have value that cannot be reduced to their economic utility.
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If we had a society where everyone lived well whether they had a job or not, then we could make pure utilitarian arguments about employment. But when employment is required for people to be able to live decently, or even live at all, such arguments lead to treating huge masses of people as disposable, and consigning them to awful lives.
Again, this might be ok if we lived in a scarcity society, but we don’t. We produce enough food to feed everyone, we have the ability to house everyone, and so on. This would be especially true if we would dump the doctrine of planned obsolescence and produce goods meant to last pretty close to forever.
There are other arguments, of course, like “What is utility?”, bolstered by findings that blacks, say, get half the interviews as whites with identical resumes. Those are important arguments, but they pale next to, “Everyone should have a decent life, and that shouldn’t be contingent on whether they can make money for a billionaire.”
The economy and corporations exist to serve people, not the other way around. When they do not do so, the problem lies with them. This is not a subsistence farming community, it is not, “You work, you eat.” We’d be better off, in fact, if a lot of the work we are doing wasn’t done, because so much of it does more damage than good, even if it does generate a “profit.”
The core of any decent system of ethics, and thus of any political and economic order, is Kant’s maxim that people are ends, not means. When you forget that, you inevitably descend into monstrosity.
