Is it scarcity that the libertarianists/right wingers are trying to preserve with their

[applegrove]

Last edited Fri Jan 3, 2014, 10:59 PM - Edit history (3)

right wing agenda? Think of Paul Ryan wanting to voucherize medicare. Because at some point there will be drugs to completely fight ageing. And then people will never die if they have things like medicare and other social programs. If the research is done by private universities and only doled out to people through private insurance then only the rich will live forever and the middle class and poor will die sufficiently to make room for all the rich to live forever, forever. Is this the "why" that explains their actions to date? And the why in that they don't care about the environment? Because only the rich would then be able to always fend off environmental catastrophe and poison? Abnormally long life will be scarce?

[El_Johns]

1. Yes.

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.

And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process - by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute - the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away...

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

http://www.panarchy.org/orwell/war.1949.html

[applegrove]

2. Well I'm not against capitalism. I think that has made man on the whole wealthier. I'm just

against unregulated capitalism and people like Paul Ryan deciding how we should live or die. I don't think he has demonstrated enough greatness to be making those decisions for us. We should be having a discussion together.

[El_Johns]

3. I don't understand how you jumped from the orwell quote to being "against capitalism".

The quote explains why the rulers value scarcity & war.

And Paul Ryan isn't the one who's deciding the world should spend a great deal of its wealth on destruction.

[applegrove]

5. Oh Paul Ryan is wanting vouchers instead of medicare as it is. That is deciding who lives or dies

in a future where health may be almost limitless if you have money - Paul Ryan is also against Obamacare I assume. That is what I was referring to. Sorry if I assumed you were against capitalism.

[El_Johns]

6. Did you read my post? It's just an Orwell quote about scarcity & how it serves the 1%.

Ryan'/s vouchers are just another tool with which to create scarcity.

(Edited because I didn't mean to sound aggressive, just a bit mystified)

[applegrove]

7. I may have been a little quick of the mark. This quote got me:

"they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away...". I read it out of context. I'm sorry.

[El_Johns]

8. Does the privileged minority have a function? Is capitalism = to "rule by a privileged minority"?

[freshwest]

4. Yes to all of the above.