this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
1458 points (93.6% liked)
Memes
45546 readers
1067 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And then surely people will start doing logistics for your fantasy farm in their free time right?
I mean, if they want to, sure. Point is society wouldn't be reliant on that since everything necessary for society to function would be taken care of during the said 20 hour workweek. I don't care if somebody wants to set up a tomato farm or a donkey ranch or whatever on the side, as long as they don't exploit or mistreat anyone.
Logistics would be the job dedicated to moving goods and services around to the place they need to be in. It's not something that would appeal to most but it is a critical job in any modern society.
Set it up with a nice graphical interface, label it "Logistics Simulator 2024" and you'll have people fighting each other for the privilege
Throw some drone trucks in there and baby, you got a stew going.
Until you spend thirty five minutes explaining to the receptionist for the intermittent carrier why rerouting through Chicago makes no sense when carrying freight from NYC to Hoboken NJ.
You act like there wouldn't be multiple plans submitted with obsessive communities arguing about best practices and min/maxing efficiencies before accepting routes.
I see you have never dealt with trucking companies before. I had a truck puck up in St Louis in June one year and break down in FL for three weeks delaying the arrival in NY for several months. There's no need for the truck to be in FL because that's not a direct route and we had filled the truck but that's how dispatch directed it.
So your argument against doing something a different way is that something that already happens now might happen then...
It's something that happens regularly. Trucking companies are often not run by the well thought out people you would hope.
That's mostly because the people running them are interested in making money and maybe aren't doing it with the same passion. Besides, I'd say logistics, being something that critical to modern society, would be one of the things included in that 20 hour workweek I mentioned. People would still have jobs, but they'd be left with so much more free time than they do now, time that wouldn't need to be spent on side hustles and the likes because society would be geared towards covering needs, not making money.
It's also 24/7 so there'd be people working weird hours. Capital gets that work done even in communist countries (capital or direct coercion).
But if you set up a farm and hire someone then it's suddenly capitalism again? Does this paradox have a name?
Why would you need to hire someone? If it's a farm meant to provide food for people then it's commonly owned and the people who work there are state employees, the purpose of the farm being to make food, not profits.
If it's something you do because you want to and out of passion, then why would you hire anyone? Sure, you might want some help, but then you just get people who are passionate about it as well, and you share the produce. Like a community garden.
Sounds good. Can't wait for factory workers to share their hydraulic brakes out of passion /s
Are you dense? I said everyone would have a regular job like they do now for 20 hours a week, except with more control over the workplace. The farm mentioned is something you would do in your free time because you want to.
So a farmer just stops working on their farm after 20 hours and then goes home (to their farm, because they live in a farmhouse) and just ignores their starving animals because he has a different hobby and can't work more than 20 hours a week? Or does he have to hire people to work the rest of the week, which goes against your views (capitalism)? Or does he work for free outside of those 20 hours to not spoil his harvest and kill his animals? Or does he somehow split the work from the 20 hours off and sell those to the government and then sell the rest to another market (which is again capitalism)? Or are you just a dumbass that doesn't understand anything about how the world works?
What you describe is controlled capitalism. People can decide themselves what they want to do and try to get things done in the most efficient way directly without government interference.
The problem current capitalism faces is that there is too little control, too much allowance for monopolies, that sort of shit. Tax the crap out of the rich, limit what you can do "if you create polluting materials, you have to recycle them yourself", "you cant corner more than 10% of a market", etc, but allow people to freely do what they want to do. That would be capitalism, actually.
Yeah that is not how society works, that is not how anything works at all. You don't work 40 hours a week just to make somebody rich even richer. If they could pay you only for 20 hours, they would. You work 40 hours because you CAN have a job which is because they need somebody to do that work. If they don't need you, they won't pay you for nothing dummie. If you work on something not required, congrats, you have a dumb boss that wastes resources and you lucked out. Most people just have normal jobs that NEED to be done. Just saying "lets do communism and we only work 20 hours a week" is beyond naive. Reality is "Lets do communism and half of us will starve to death!"
I would suggest you look into socialism more because it seems to me you are mistaken in some aspects.
Capitalism is the economic system in which individuals can own the means of production themselves, so basically an entrepreneur owns a company and everyone working there are employees with no or very little ownership over the business.
Socialism is the economic system where the workers themselves own those same means of production. What you think of as socialism is most likely the Marxist-Leninist version implemented in the USSR.
Their thought process went like this: the people all own every business, but if everyone was the boss, nothing would get done. So they considered that since people, at least on paper, vote for their leader and the state supposedly represents the people, then if the state owned all businesses it would basically be the same as if everyone owned those businesses. The issue here is that the politicians and bureaucrats who make decisions regarding those businesses, being human themselves, will tend to skew them towards their own interests. Personally, I still think it is better this way than having billionaire leeches that drain the wealth from multiple countries, but that's besides the point.
This isn't the only socialist system imaginable, though. It could be as simple as the workers that are employed somewhere get a share of the company for as long as they work there instead of wages. That way, you get paid a portion of the profit, and as a shareholder, can vote on decisions about the business. It's important though that only people who work there get those shares, no outside investors or sketchy things like that to take away the power from the people. There's no business owner in this since everyone basically owns their workplace and bosses are democratically elected. This is market socialism, you'd still have market forces and all that entails, and I think it would be the easiest change to make if we wanted to give up on capitalism.
Then there's syndicalism, in which unions and syndicates own their sector or industry and manage them themselves. Every worker joins the union when they get hired, and they vote for stuff like leadership, rule changes, charters and the like. These syndicates then coordinate with eachother to ensure everything is working as intended and produced at the rates they are needed at.
As for the 20 hour workweek... it's very reasonable if you look into it. Each one of us not only has to work hard enough to earn for ourselves, we also have to earn for those who are unfortunate and cannot work through taxes, which is a good thing, but we also have to work hard enough to earn for the leeches doing nothing, like the billionaires on top. Every employee has to get paid less than ehat they're worth, since if the employer would give them every bit of money they produce, they wouldn't be profitable. And that's not even getting into people working jobs that don't help society at all, such as landlords, insurance agents, marketing people, etc. If everyone worked in fields necessary for society to function, we would all work 20 hours a week.
It's pretty clear that basic economy lessons have failed you.