this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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me_irl
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What are basic resources though? All people ever want is more. More than they had yesterday. More than the guy next door. More than Timmy whose parents took him to Disneyland in 3rd grade.
Capitalists, maybe. Most people would be happy with a quality of life equivalent to what the middle class currently experiences.
The middle class is a term that is so nebulous it might as well be meaningless. Families making 60k/year and families making 300k a year both consider themselves middle class and those are very different lifestyle qualities.
There’s plenty of research that shows people are happier when they earn more money than their coworkers. Absolute quality of life improvements don’t translate into happiness nearly as much as we’d hope.
There's also plenty of research that shows that people's earnings reflect how happy they are, but only up to a certain point. Different studies have different numbers for that point but it's pretty much always above the actual median income. After that the line flattens and for some even goes down. So yeah, it's not always a direct money = happiness but you'd have to be an idiot or intentionally obtuse to say that people wouldn't be happier if they didn't have to agonize over how they'll pay their bills/save for their future.
There’s no amount of money everyone can make that’ll get us all to stop agonizing over bills. Sure, billionaires today generally don’t have that worry but that’s only because they’re richer than everyone else! If everyone was a billionaire then you’d be spending billions to pay your bills.
What would make everyone happy is to achieve post scarcity as a society. The problem with that is that we’d then simply grow in population until scarcity came back. We’re never going to have infinite resources so that will always be possible.
We're already post scarcity on food, housing, and medicine. So let's make those free.
Who is going to do all the work to make all that stuff if it’s free?
In a market economy? Government employees.
In a communist economy? People who want to, same as they did for 100,000 years before money was invented.
Government employees are going to take over the farms and grow all the food? That’s not a market economy.
Furthermore if all that stuff is free then why are people still working?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8rh3xPatEto
- Captain Picard
Yes, I’ve watched TNG, the entire series, many times. We’re not even close to that! We don’t have replicators, we don’t have starships to take us to new planets for unlimited land to settle.
By the way, have you ever thought about how the Picard family owns this huge wine estate in France? Not everyone in the Star Trek universe gets their own family wine estate, so Picard’s family is wealthy and privileged even in a society without money.
Oh no, they have the ability to manually produce wine in a civilisation with no money, free replicators, and a synthetic form of alcohol that doesn't give hangovers and doesn't impair your faculties in an emergency. With such extravagant wealth, they could even... checks notes... give free alcohol to wine snobs
...which, to be fair, is exactly what the Picard family does with their vineyard. They devote their time and energy to making alcohol and giving it away for free. Because they're communists.
You’re thinking about it in terms of commerce. I’m talking about the luxury of a huge piece of beautiful land in the French countryside. Compare that to some basic apartment in San Francisco which probably looks like the crew quarters on the enterprise.
But anyone can go to that land and walk around. The transporters are free, you can get there in minutes from any city in the entire world. The only privilege is having a bedroom with a view.
No one can walk around on Picard’s family estate. They own it! It’s private property.
Disneyland is private property but anyone can go there.
They charge you money and can ban you from it at any time. Picard’s family estate is closed to the public. You can’t even go there.
Source?
Watch the show (S4E02: “Family”). At what point do you see thousands of tourists walking around, eating grapes, sampling wine, running through the vineyard, playing frisbee? Right, you don’t see it at all because the place is closed.
Now look at a public beach in China and see what it’s like when a place is open to the public (and this one not even the whole world, just China):
It isn't really that hard to see a natural place for "basic" to be defined. The points where peoples lives go off a cliff for lack of something simple are clearly visible: becoming homeless and losing shelter from the elements/violent people, being denied access to life saving medical care, not getting enough calories/nutrients of food to live.
Basic resources are the fence at the edge of that slope which leads to death. That not everyone gets them no matter what is a failure of humanity.
Well the resources required to not die seems like something we should all be able to agree on at least.
I mean, if you're a dickhead, maybe
Basic resources I.e. food, shelter, and the most basic public services such as libraries, firefighting, policing, comprehensive healthcare, and internet.
Yep. That's how it really works. Lemmy thinks money equals happy. I was far happier at $45K than at $83K. Depends.
Then give 38 thousand dollars to charity.
Only people that are mentally ill. Which wouldn't happen if we actually invested in the wellbeing of our community. I honestly see no point in being so rich if I have to inhabit such a shit environment. Sadly most rich assholes chose to isolate, rather than invest in their surrounding. It's a bit of a shit loop.
I like Swiss trans as an example. Because they're soo good, rich people use em, which means more investment (money and effort) goes in, which means more rich people use public transit. It's the same loop but in reverse.
On a side note I always find it funny seeing presidents on the news commute. In Europe, often enough they have like 2 people accompany them as they just fucking walk next to regular citizens, meanwhile in the US, Russia and China, anybody hopping the designated perimeter gets tackled.