Martin Ford links to a New York Times story on a Japanese sushi chain that has slashed operating costs by replacing workers with robots:
Efficiency is paramount at Kura: absent are the traditional sushi chefs and their painstaking attention to detail. In their place are sushi-making robots and an emphasis on efficiency.
Absent, too, are flocks of waiters. They have been largely replaced by conveyors belts that carry sushi to diners and remote managers who monitor Kura’s 262 restaurants from three control centers across Japan. (“We see gaps of over a meter between your sushi plates — please fix,” a manager said recently by telephone to a Kura restaurant 10 miles away.)
Absent, too, are the exorbitant prices of conventional sushi restaurants. At a Kura, a sushi plate goes for 100 yen, or about $1.22.
Such measures are helping Kura stay afloat even though the country’s once-profligate diners have tightened their belts in response to two decades of little economic growth and stagnant wages.
Ford writes in response:
McDonald’s has already announced plans to install touch-screen ordering systems in over 7000 European locations. To me, it is not difficult to imagine many of the ideas being utilized at Kura eventually being deployed throughout the fast food and beverage industries. If automated preparation and off-site store management work for sushi, then why not for burgers or lattes?
One important thing to take away from the sushi story is the way in which a stagnant economy can be a driving force behind increased automation. Almost any type of restaurant food is a discretionary purchase: if the price is too high, people can and will refuse to buy. That presents a real problem if—as is the case now—businesses are seeing significant increases in the price of the food commodities they must purchase. For a business that is squeezed between rising input prices and tepid demand, investment in labor-saving technology can represent one of the few viable paths to continued profitability.
The bums will always lose? In the future, everyone will be a bum.
Our wondrous emerging neo-noir world is doing a great job of making human beings obsolete. The benefits – more efficient production of goods and the like. The downsides – they’re putting more and more people out of work for good. How are businesses going to reap the benefits of this new world if no one can get the jobs necessary to enjoy the income that allows them to spend money on frivolities like eating out, going to the movies and buying the latest tech-toys?
A guaranteed minimum income, funded by radically progressive income and wealth taxes, and replacing all other existing government entitlement programs, is the only way to keep the economy from collapsing. It will also be more efficient and more fair than the existing welfare state, which is why that well-known Marxist radical Milton Friedman was a proponent of it. Production without consumption is as worthless as a mouth without an anus, and with automation destroying more jobs than are being created, options for maintaining balance are running out.
But hey, all you CONservatives and LIEbertarians can keep sucking billionaires’ dicks while screaming bloody murder about SOOOOOCCIALISM!!!!!!! at anyone who resists the rape of this country by the Wall Street banksters. Keep screaming and clutching your dog-eared, sticky-paged copy of Atlas Shrugged all the way up to when the angry mobs YOU helped impoverish show up at your front door. The welfare state is the price the rich must pay to keep from being lynched en masse by the people they’re fucking over. Revolution insurance, as Xamuel put it. Open your wallet or dig your grave – it’s your choice.
And if you think the police and your bodyguards can protect you indefinitely, you might want to ask Louis XVI, or Nicholas II, or the Janissaries how that worked out for them.
{ 111 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve never understood why we have to pay to live on a planet we own?
Sterilization and euthanasia would be cheaper.
That’s a recipe for revolution. Imagine how many workers McDonald’s has.
In Response to NickyG :
Because the Political, Military, Religious, Economic, Corporate and Media Elite have a monopoly on coercion and force purposed just to extract revenue from you if you don’t.
Intriguing…what do you suggest that minimum guaranteed income be? $18,000 a year? $25,000 a year? 50? 100?
[Tied to the cost of living in a particular area. Some might get as high as $50,000 a year, others $25,000 a year. - FB]
Will this minimum guaranteed income be subsidized by the government?
[Yes.]
What type of price controls will be enacted to ensure that those making the minimum guaranteed income will be able to purchase goods and services?
[An investigatory committee that will punish price gougers and receive the bulk of its funding from successfully prosecuting the guilty]
How many businesses will be able to afford to pay both the minimum guaranteed income and the high taxes and regulatory costs necessary to support such a program?
[All of them, once Social Security and welfare are gone.]
You sneer at “CONservatives”, yet you fail to grasp that the welfare state is actually a socialistic construct designed to create and maintain a permanent underclass of people whose only value is that they continue to receive government handouts in order to vote for those who will continue to give them government handouts.
[Give the money to everyone, not just the underclass, and that problem will solve itself.]
Ferdinand,
Please stop writing on economics. You really suck at it. People said this same shit with the spinning Jenny, and every other mechanical contraption that came around. Your talk of rising food prices talks nothing of the results of the various attemps at QE.
[The difference now is that old jobs are being destroyed faster than new ones can be created. - FB]
Furthermore, you take no heed of the repercussions of having a guaranteed income. Murray Rothbard, who destroyed Friedman’s argument on this issue, is rolling in his grave. But obviously, you were too lazy to even research that.
[Oh, so you're a devotee of the Austrian cult. Lovely.]
“Keep screaming and clutching your dog-eared, sticky-paged copy of Atlas Shrugged all the way up to when the angry mobs YOU helped impoverish show up at your front door. ”
Ah, the same shaming tactics you complain so much about when the government or feminists use them, all the while completely ignoring that what happened in this economy was the farthest thing a free market supporter would consider his style of economy/government.
[You mean like how the Soviet Union wasn't truly communist?]
Seriously, quit being lazy and actually study economics, instead of spewing bullshit out then shaming everybody preemptively who might see that you dont know what you are talking about.
[I studied enough economics to know that people like you and your idols couldn't be more divorced from reality.]
Friedman eviscerated by Rothbard:
http://mises.org/media/2322/media.aspx?action=author&ID=766
KMK, I have a masters in economics from a place that rhymes with Shawns Mopkins. Pretty good school, don’t you think? What I was taught was proved wrong by the crisis. I turned to the so-called Austrians. Goldbugs. Good for them.
Ferd is right. Without a livable, minimum income for all the nation will explode. That’s all.
Some people will be necessary. My old physics teacher used to talk about the widening gap between people who knew how things work versus end users.
In some places in Europe, they have a sort of “guaranteed income.” I understand that in Great Britain there are housing allowances, universal healthcare, food stamps, free utilities to those who qualify. Throw in a library card and free gym membership, you’re set. As a rough approxiamation, those on a fixed minimal income, like those few in GB and our own retirees on social security, seem to be very unambitious. There has not been a revolution in art, the humanities and free time activies since the welfare state began. It appears that minimum income produces sloth.
To be a conspiracy theorist, I might say that most of humanity is or will become unnecessary. They served their purpose by making the industiral age, and then the computer age possible. I can see utility in the NWO POV having an elite lording over a vastly reduced population.
KMK, I have a masters in economics from a place that rhymes with Shawns Mopkins. Pretty good school, don’t you think? What I was taught was proved wrong by the crisis. I turned to the so-called Austrians. Goldbugs. Good for them.
Ferd is right. Without a livable, minimum income for all the nation will explode. That’s all.
Looks like you need to go back to school.
Rothbard v Friedman. Rand v Marx. Rubin, Summers, Greenspan, Tyler Cowen, Volcker, Bernanke.
I’m tired of Jewish economics. Shall I just be honest? I don’t trust them. The arguments are always taken to their most extreme conclusion. Either the nation is to be turned into a kibbutz or some dystopian libertarian toilet.
You want economics? Read Ezra Pound. Study the Greenbacks from Lincoln. Read Plato. If you’re really brave, look into what the National Socialists accomplished with social credit in Germany (most incredible economic transformation in the history of the world – no invasion of Poland needed).
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Hartley-Ezra-Pound-on-Money.html
A guaranteed minimal income works because it doesn’t rely on inflation. It’s directly taken from taxes.
For example, say there was no social programs of any sort.
Next suppose the tax rate was set at a flat tax of 20% of income. Of the taxes collected, have them divided in equal share amongst the population.
So say 1 trillion in taxes are collected for a population of 300 million citizens over 18, everyone receives 3333.33 dollars. Only the most frugal could live on that allowance alone, so people would still need to work. However, no one would starve and everyone would be able to afford the most basic of necessities, food and shelter. (BUT NOT HEALTH CARE! So what?)
No money would be printed to create such a system, so there would be no inflation.
Small businesses would thrive due to everyone having some extra spending money; internet businesses would develop everywhere; the more successful of small business would hire others and reduce unemployment significantly.
And if people were to abuse the guaranteed minimum income, and just leech from the system with never working? Well then the government would pull in less taxes and the people’s guaranteed minimum income would decline, forcing people to work.
Guaranteed minimal income removes gross inequities between citizens without inducing inflation and increasing the demand side of the curve.
I am a libertarian and whole-heartedly support this idea. Anyone who’s read the “Dying of Money” will understand why a guaranteed minimum income is the only way to keep an economy moving. Without things are going to hyperinflate and collapse.
i support replacing all welfare programs with a minimum guaranteed income, with the stipulation that people choosing to take advantage of that over a certain age also submit to voluntary sterilization or birth control such as a depo shot or IUD that is not subject to user error.
want to have a family? great, get to work. don’t really feel that enthusiastic about working? that’s cool too.
“Friedman eviscerated by Rothbard:
http://mises.org/media/2322/media.aspx?action=author&ID=766”
Rothbard attacks the idea of negative income tax, and not a guaranteed national income.
A negative income tax means you MUST make 20K a year, or whatever. That is obviously a bad idea. A guaranteed national income is the reverse; THAT WHICH PEOPLE RECEIVE IS PROPORTIONAL TO TAXES PULLED IN. So if the nation is a nation of bums, the guaranteed national income will be equally pathetic and people will starve regardless.
A guaranteed national income is just a way to make sure the rich cannot exploit the poor through unfair business practices while also giving the poor enough breathing space and leisure time to innovate and create new products for the economy.
And think about the example I provided above: a 20% flat tax? That’s fucking [b]nothing[/b], we currently have taxes over 45% in this country to support nothing but a bunch of state-run corporations.
Socialist.
[Sociopath. - FB]
i was always under the impression that job numbers were positively correlated with technological progression. the digital age requires more maintenance than the manual age.
So your job got replaced by a little black box.
Here’s an idea: Get a job making little black boxes.
Why should society reward those who fail to adapt?
[Except that only so many "black box" makers are necessary, and aren't enough to replace all the old jobs. - FB]
samseau: “So say 1 trillion in taxes are collected for a population of 300 million citizens over 18, everyone receives 3333.33 dollars. Only the most frugal could live on that allowance alone, so people would still need to work.”
$3333 is a LOT of money unless you live in some really weird place or have a silver spoon lodged up your ass.
Tech-5: “So your job got replaced by a little black box.
Here’s an idea: Get a job making little black boxes.
Why should society reward those who fail to adapt?”
As we all know, there’s an infinite supply of jobs and all you need to do to get one is to ask for one.
Any real world work experience should demonstrate why a guaranteed minimum income won’t work. People do nothing when you stop watching them, much less pay them to so nothing. A permanent dole won’t lead to a better world.
[So? Better have them doing nothing than the pretension of having them do makework jobs. Or incentivized to pop out more bastard spawn for WIC dollar$. - FB]
I’m confused about why a violent revolution of have boys tearing apart the future the elites want is a bad thing. Men, collectively, could only benefit from that kind of chaos, and feminism would never survive it. A guaranteed minimum income would basically lock the state’s power in place forever and create a privileged class of bureaucrats.
Sounds great Ferd. Why dont you get it started. I’ll let you know where to send my check.
if they are going to put us out of work then they must put us all on the dole. or put everyone back to work and to hell with the machines.
@Jack
yeah, but if we can’t have work then what will we do? there is not enough social cohesion among the boys to do the right thing. they are busy trying to band each other’s lady or steal each other’s money while hiding behind the law and “the american way” in a religious quest to prove to roissy that they are alpha. guys like that can’t do what you mentioned. so we will need a dole or work. what to you say?
This argument is interesting when followed to the extreme. What happens when machines become as capable, or more capable, than humans? I’m not talking about machines “taking over”, but a scenario where no human labor is needed for anything, and in fact not prefered as machines are more efficient and don’t goof off. How do you fairly divide up production?
In this scenario, that is prefered. It’s a scenario like having too many domestic cats and dogs. How many people will need to be “put to sleep?” Who will the machine’s owners find desirable to keep and those not to keep? Perhaps every person will be allocated his own set of machines making him self sufficient, but then you need to allocated a guaranteed “minimum income” of raw material.
“So your job got replaced by a little black box.Here’s an idea: Get a job making little black boxes. Why should society reward those who fail to adapt?” – Tech-5
The economic plan of the future; if you’re unemployed get accepted into MIT….because that’s totally doable you lazy bums!
This author was also crying bloody murder when Henry Ford invented the Model T and the horse-and-buggy industry was under threat. Oh no, whatever would happen to all those workers employed making buggies! Surely the government should step in and protect this industry from the rich corporate robber-baron Henry Ford. Cars will cause unemployment, therefore we should prevent their creation!
Honestly, don’t talk about economics. I’ve read treatises on it and I can tell whether or not someone is knowledgeable on it. You are not.
For those who have 3 minutes and want to know why the minimum wage is economically destructive:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/148209-employment-minimum-wage-maximum-stupidity
Schiff. Just another fundamentalist. He actually makes the case that American wages have to decline to match Chinese wages. The International (something or the other). What did Henry Ford say?
The point of an economy isn’t so we all have jobs, the point is production. Jobs are a means to an end, but not the end. The point of an economy is that we become so productive that we can work less.
Everyone in the Soviet Union had a job. Obviously, government jobs are make-work jobs and are a net drain on society, and no surprise the Soviet Union collapsed.
You mean the United States? Why should I give a damn if it explodes? I want it to explode.
Ferd, it’s pretty bad when you have to troll your own forum.
“Schiff. Just another fundamentalist. He actually makes the case that American wages have to decline to match Chinese wages.”
Ok well tell me when you actually start wanting to talking about eocnomics, instead of just shooting the messenger and wincing about what you don’t want to hear.
Here’s a basic lesson. Prices have to decline in a recession. We are in a recession. Wages are prices. They were bid up to artificial and unsustainable levels during the boom period as a result of an irresponsible federal government. They have to come down if there’s any hope of recovery.
Dozens of bailouts later, trillion-dollar economic stimulus plans, artificial 0% interest rates, propping up of home prices, all the aforementioned meant to keep prices high, and surprise surprise I’m still waiting for this recovery.
@ Ruby
It was a rhetorical question but thanks for playing along.
“The point of an economy isn’t so we all have jobs, the point is production. Jobs are a means to an end, but not the end. The point of an economy is that we become so productive that we can work less.” – Mike
Commerce should serve society, society shouldn’t serve commerce. The Chinese get this and recognize the value of social harmony. Political economy should never have been renamed “economics” because it misleadingly separates the subject from political and social ends.
To all the CONservative and libertarian cocksuckers,
Theories, quotes, worship of dead white men and other assorted bullshit does not matter. You know why?
It comes down to this-
People stop caring about a system that does not benefit them.
As long as we had enough well paying jobs, most people benefited from the system. Therefore we could maintain a small non-white underclass. Today the underclass is increasingly young and male.
We can either keep things working or let the system come apart- over ideology. So what will it be? Do you really want to go up against educated and young people who know that they have nothing to lose?
Do you feel lucky?
ahh…. “does not” should be “don’t”. I changed the sentence structure-content at the last moment.
This may be the first time ever that I embarrassed for an author. Calling Milton Friedman a “well-known Marxist radical”? And then slamming Libertarians? That’s like calling Jesus a Muslim and then slamming Christians. Does the author know who Milton Friedman was? Has the author read “Free to Choose”? The book is one of the principle gateway books to Libertarianism. I’m starting to wonder if I’m missing something. Was the author being sarcastic and I missed it?
[Yes, I was, and you have failed. Massively. - FB]
By guaranteed minimum income, I assume it is what Milton Friedman called “the negative income tax” in chapter 4 of Free to Choose under the heading of “What Should Be Done” and was put forward as a replacement of ALL of the welfare programs existent in 1978.
Hah. Real world experience proves that welfare for all the underclass (and guaranteed minimum income is just that) simply doesn’t work, unless you simply put them on “designated areas”, aka matriachal gheeto hells. Fuck that.
And worldwide wages WILL decline, one way or another. Is called Recession.
But then, my perspective is biased. I live in one of the massively left-turned Latin American countries. I see the world that massed welfare causes and I HATE it. I wish that every single welfare-sucking fuck were killed because they have becone in a bunch of criminals that threaten myself and those like me.
Between the world of “designated areas” and a vast bureaucrat class and a revolution, I’ll take the latter. Let it burn.
My theory is that as the divide between rich and poor grows over the next century the rich will seek out a safe haven country yet to be determined. Currently the rich still need most of the poor to do manual labor, but as your post highlights over time more will be automated and those not working in technology, finance or law will become unneeded and undesired (most industries, whether farming or fabricating, will become “technology”).The USA may not enforce its border to the south now — but it will then — and its border may have to retreat in order to do so.
Here’s how the SWPL states could retreat while maintaining their “ideology”: first, the Fed Gubmint along with the poorer southern states offer guaranteed incomes but only in southern states. This would create the necessary migration of all the poor to the south. Then, in the name of justice and human rights, the USA could give the southwest back to Mexico. Voila! The poor just disappeared!
“So say 1 trillion in taxes are collected for a population of 300 million citizens over 18, everyone receives 3333.33 dollars. Only the most frugal could live on that allowance alone, so people would still need to work. However, no one would starve and everyone would be able to afford the most basic of necessities, food and shelter. (BUT NOT HEALTH CARE! So what?)”
That is an interesting idea, but it presupposes ALL of the tax money collected is distributed out as an allowance; it does not take into account defense, highways, tax collections and the thousands of myriad other government functions and regulatory agencies. It would be impossible (taking all of this other spending) to redistribute all tax monies collected.
AD- you make a very valid point about people not caring when the system no longer benefits them. However, those hordes of young educated people you prophesy showing up on billionaire’s doorsteps or wherever is rather specious. I would expect educated people (regardless of age) to understand that taking something from someone (and then restricting or eliminating their ability to produce more somethings) and giving it to another because “its only fair, man” defeats the whole purpose of production.
Redistribution only works when there is something to redistribute.
I don’t understand why you people keep talking about a revolution, the poor are not fit to start a revolution they never have been. It’s the middle class, that always provides the backbone for one. Though, the way the middle class has been getting screwed over these days, that might be something to worry about.
I liked some of what you had to say in some of your articles (like the nerd article), but I don’t like your attitude of little research and total confidence in your conclusions. Obviously, it isn’t a problem that people are thinking of ways to work things without human labour. Before mass producing industry people worked long hours to get little pay. Technology is a good thing for us all. Your argument is ridiculous.
A world without a few losers is a world where there are no winners.
I responded to everyone inline to save myself some time.
Dat_Truth_Hurts:
A world with too many losers is a world where there are no winners.
the problem here is that when people are given this guaranteed income the distributors of it – the wealthy and other less wealthy taxpayers – aren’t able to express their morally superior position by shaming the people who have to get by through suckling the government teat.
what has happened is that the people who require this income have become like children – feeling entitled to their parents’ earnings – when we should really be treating them like Dark Age paupers – tossing them a gold coin and then slapping them if they make eye contact.
To continue from above, in our modern age we are not able to rationalize that the poor are less-than. I think if it became acceptable to view aid to the poor as charity rather than duty – as LIEberals argue so that we preserve the self-esteem of the reproductive class – then it would be more acceptable to those whose pockets are being raided.
Here in Europe, minimum wage persuaded lots of people to replace their workers with machines. Others moved their businesses to Asia, where the welfare state is less-developed and labour is cheap.
Why should anyone work?
LOL OK This already happens for non white males.
I agree: let’s try it with white males too and let’s see what happens.
“McDonald’s has already announced plans to install touch-screen ordering systems in over 7000 European locations.”
Keyword: European. Do someone really imagine USA minority thugs configuring a touch screen for a meal?
“And if you think the police and your bodyguards can protect you indefinitely, you might want to ask Louis XVI, or Nicholas II, or the Janissaries how that worked out for them.”
This is BS, the rich can have drones and automatic weapons around laser fences and stuff. If everyone’s job is replaced by a robot (as you just said), why not a (robo)cop.
Oh BTW this is already happened in Industrial Revolution. People making clothes and furniture by hand got their ass kicked and this was good for the world (quality aside).
We need less government intervention. Everything the government touches is handled inefficiently, as well as costly.
Mike:
I know dick about economics but this sounds like it makes sense. In that boom period people buy tons of shit they don’t actually need, like expensive cars, iPhones, fancy HDTVs, over-priced clothes, houses they can’t afford…the list goes on. People go into debt buying frivolous shit, the American economy in particular is built on this house of cards.
When wages go down, people get back to the basics. You know, food, shelter, PS3.
I’m a conservative not because I like capitalist swine, but because I want people who look and think like me to live on and thrive.
“Technology is a good thing for us all. Your argument is ridiculous.”
I used to agree with that statement, but I’m not sure if it will hold true in the future. If you read Robin Hanson’s crazy but brilliant blog, he often mentions how for most of history most of the population lived at subsistence levels. Technological improvements prior to the industrial revolution did not enrich anyone but the richest. Perhaps the IR through today has been an aberration and not the norm and we are headed back into a world in which most people live at subsistence levels and a very few are very rich.
It’s true that when technology made agricultural work less labor intensive work in manufacturing simultaneously appeared and ex-farm workers had better paying jobs thanks to technology, despite everyone’s fears. For the past 200 years, technological improvement have been for the common good. But will this positive creative destruction hold true ad infinitum? It’s hard to say that a mere 200 year period of human history represents an eternal economic truth.
Taken to its extreme, if we lived in a world of all-pervasive robotics and artificial intelligence there would be little work for anyone but the best scientists, the best engineers (even managers and salesmen would need to be engineers (or really hot chicks)) and the best litigators (and some politicians). Nobody with less than exceptional abilities would be needed. Of course, it’s hard to know how long it will take to get to that point (maybe never), but we are headed in that direction and it exists as a possible state of affairs.
Part of what makes Marx so silly was the strength of his convictions about historical destiny. It’s every bit as foolish to accept the capitalist ideal as if it were a matter of scientific certitude. According to Tyler Cowen median income has stagnated since 1973, while the rich have gotten much richer. Perhaps median income is headed for a huge nose dive it will never pull out of. Who knows?
I’d support a guaranteed minimum income as long as it would be coupled with eugenics. Otherwise humans would devolve into wet voting sacks of meat.
Also people are really not getting why this [GMI] might be necessary. “Black box that replaces a human at task X” making technology keeps getting better and better, while humans are if anything declining in ability.
Humans with IQ’s under 65 are already basically obsolete, people with IQs below 90 struggle to find a place.
What happens to humans when not only Blacks and Mestizos become obsolete (African Blacks arguably already are) but White Gentiles, East Asians and even Askenazi Jews?
Regarding the push buttons at McDonald’s: all that cuts out are the cashiers. The majority of McDonald’s workers are pushing the food around. It’s when they make robots to move the food around that hundreds of millions of jobs will be shed. Imagine a McDonald’s that works like an ATM with no workers, just a single engineer remotely monitoring many locations at once. Is that so hard to imagine?
The case for an minimum economic wage is social not economic. The Austrians are absolutely correct that the best way to optimise wealth in a free market economy is to let capitalism do it’s job without restriction. Minimum wages introduce inefficiency into the system decreasing maximum possible wealth.
However the Austrians are complete morons in thinking that human well being can simply be reduced to what can be measured on the balance sheet or accountant’s ledger. The loss of a job is more than just the loss of an income, it’s the potential loss of a house, education, social status an so on. Economic decisions have social implications.
1850-1910 can be considered the golden age of free market capitalism, yet during that period the capitalistic system gave birth to monster that is still eating away at the core of the west and is destroying the foundations of capitalism. Socialism. A lot of otherwise intelligent conservatives have their head up their arse when it comes to the social consequences of economic decisions.
Socialism did not arise out of thin air. It arises when Darwinian capitalism intersects with human nature. All you dumb bastards who are parading your economic credentials might do better to study some history and social science.
The smarter Austrians, while acknowledging the work of Mises, broke off and went to form the Ordoliberal movement, the basis of which formed the Social-Market Economy.
Optimising the the Western system for wealth only leads to its eventual destruction. The minimum wage does decrease potential wealth (in the short term) but long term actually allows wealth to increase, by not unleashing social forces which will destroy the wealth generating system. It’s all about 3% growth long term growth instead of a quick 10% which kills the system.
Slumlord makes a good point: one extreme tends to lead to the other. If you want to avoid communism avoid extreme capitalism. The excesses of the New Deal were a reaction to the excessive austerity which preceded it.
I have a post on this topic over at Collapse: The Blog.
The gist of it boils down to what slumlord just said: “production is the point” is a statement of social priorities. And production has not been a social priority for something like 80 years now.
The rich don’t have to share their wealth with the starving masses; they can hide their stash in secret bank accounts around the world and move to a place where the starving masses (and US tax agents) can’t follow them.
Since the Index of Economic Freedom was created in 1995, Hong Kong has held the number one spot, while the USA has fallen from fourth place to ninth. Yet the poor in Hong Kong enjoy a guaranteed minimum income of $12,000 per year, plus free health care and free public housing. There is no sales tax, and the rich pay a flat 16% income tax. How is this possible?
It’s simple: As other countries listen to Mr. Bardamu and impose higher taxes on the rich, Hong Kong builds more luxury apartment towers to accomodate all the rich people moving there. The government enjoys more tax revenue, and the poor benefit when these new arrivals hire cooks, maids, nannies, drivers, etc.
So the rich won’t pay for *your* guaranteed minimum income, but after they leave you can help me tear up their golf courses and plant vegetables on them. Subsistence farming is way more satisfying than a shitty minimum-wage McJob anyway. Two billion actual subsistence farmers might disagree, but what do they know?
“What happens to humans when not only Blacks and Mestizos become obsolete (African Blacks arguably already are) but White Gentiles, East Asians and even Askenazi Jews?”
mitchell heisman.
The high numbers for GMI that Ferd is suggesting in the comments (25 – 50K) could never work. To support it you’d have to tax the rich at a level that would chase them out of the country. Don’t forget that the rest of the world is becoming a more attractive place (I’m lookin at you, Brazil) to live. Emigration is always an option. Rich Jews could easily head for Israel, others could head for SE Asia or South America. If the USA continues to stagnate we will reach a point when emigration not immigration starts to become the bigger problem. Brain drain ain’t just for Europe anymore.
Nope, the female underclass gets welfare. The male underclass practically gets nothing.
In all realism, machines can’t simply because humans exist off of the theoretically infinite food chain powered by the sun while robots would only exist of off finite minerals. Robots powered by solar energy would be useless as photosynthesis yields little returns, defnintely not enough for beings that actually move, and bio-machines aren’t even a suggestion as NOBODY, not even the most idealogically driven elite or the most retarded poor man, would allow their existance to be dependent on the good will of a different organism.
But from a hypothetical standpoint, if robots could truly replace humans as sentient beings and not just finite tools, then ALL humans, including the elite, are screwed as the robots would figure out that the elite are far inferior to them. If machines never evolve beyond being finite tools, then underclass humans would need to survive considering a BUNCH of disasters unrelated to human activity that would destabilize society completely without men to enforce order. Of course the “elite” would be too stupid to realize these truths and probably try mass genocide anyway.
The the self-styled experts in economics on this thread: The fact that technological innovation and mechanization in the past replaced old jobs with new jobs doesn’t mean that it will do so in perpetuity for eternity. If you think it will, please actually point to a new economic sector that promises to employ millions of low to moderately skilled workers. In recent years, economic growth has not correlated with job growth.
That said, I don’t think that the minimum income guarantee will work *unless* you can fund it from royalties taken from resource extraction, as per Alaska with its “permanent fund”. Paying for it via income tax seems like it would be too punitive for the average worker, although I don’t know if anybody has actually run the numbers. More importantly, such a method of funding would not be sustainable in a world of perpetually increasing unemployment.
What’s more likely that the passage of a guaranteed minimum income is the expansion of an informal economy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn2xvM9z8Zc
“A world without a few losers is a world where there are no winners.”
true my friend. however it is often the “winners” who are the losers.
I think I need to get that on a bumper sticker.
Quoted for truth.
Jared wins the thread!
This is among the biggest bunch of crap that I have ever seen. The obvious questions are of course, 1) Who pays? 2) What are you going to do to the people who don’t want to pay for unproductive deadbeats? 3) How is such a society ever going to compete, that is to say survive, against cultures with the ethic that, “Those who do not work, do not deserve to eat?”
Honestly, wake the fuck up and learn to deal with the real world instead of The World The Way You Think It Should And Screw Anyone Who Says Otherwise.
I think this is a very good article. We are moving towards the world Kurt Vonnegut invisioned Player Piano where the machine increasingly do most of the work. Interesting, Charles Murray wrote a book called In Our Hands, before our worthless elite ruined the economy, that proposed giving all natural American citizens a check for $834 a month after they turn 21. This way people would no longer get rewarded for having kids on the doll. The book is quite good and thoughtful and similar to Ferdinand’s post:
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Hands-Replace-Welfare-State/dp/0844742236
Ferdinand,
don’t be afraid of change.
Should cell phones not have been invented because it put some folks out of jobs?
Should we all go back to walking and riding in a horse and carriage because cars put people out jobs?
Should we all go back to building our own homes instead of hiring contractors because at least we all used to know how to build stuff?
Should we shut down the internet so folks can go back to getting their news from newspapers only?
When one door closes another one opens, another opportunity is being created for somebody, somewhere to create a new invention that creates jobs in another sector of the economy. When jobs leave this neighborhood or that state or this nation they don’t vanish into thin air, they just go somewhere else.
So if you want to guaranteed minimum income, thats fine.
If you want to stop innovation and jobs from going overseas, that’s fine.
But you should realize that the only end to this work stoppage is that while all these other countries are getting ahead America is stagnating and eventually, all these other poorer countries will surpass us in quality of living.
How is such a society ever going to compete, that is to say survive, against cultures with the ethic that, “Those who do not work, do not deserve to eat?”
Protectionism. If don’t play by our rules we won’t play the game.
The responses in this thread show why America is doomed. Too many people believe in the wrong things; we will go down in a burning building quibbling over what color to paint the rooms
lol says:
“$3333 is a LOT of money unless you live in some really weird place or have a silver spoon lodged up your ass.”
What the hell are you talking about? That’s below poverty level in America. I guess Americans are really weird or have a silver spoon lodged up their ass.
DID YOU ACTUALLY READ what I said, a 20% FLAT TAX. So if you make 20,000 a year, you pay 4,000 in taxes, and get back 3,333 as a national guaranteed income, meaning you actually pay only 666 in taxes.
dave:
“That is an interesting idea, but it presupposes ALL of the tax money collected is distributed out as an allowance; it does not take into account defense, highways, tax collections and the thousands of myriad other government functions and regulatory agencies. It would be impossible (taking all of this other spending) to redistribute all tax monies collected.”
It doesn’t presuppose shit; my numbers were a 20% flat income tax for redistribution money. If you want to pay for a military (a small one) and SOME roads (just national highways), just add another 5% national sales tax.
So the solution is more welfare?
Efficiency always gets rid of jobs, but in the past new businesses would start with new jobs. This isn’t happening now because of government’s onerous and ludicrous taxes, regulation and bailouts of the politically connected .
The government that created this problem is not going to be the solution.
Who is we? USA or the world?
Unless you want to end all international trade or put up enormous tarrif barriers, you are going to be competing with cheap labour from China, which depresses wages for those who have a job, and corporations are going to have the option of moving to low-tax countries.
Unless you close the borders to stop competition, you are going to see wages in the first world converge with wages in the third world, which limits how much tax revenue can collect.
Certainly you could scrap the current welfare system and introduce an allowance for every citizen, but it would have to a be a small amount in keeping with your existing tax revenues. Note that almost all western governments currently spend more than they take in taxes.
Personally I expected that there will come a day, maybe 20 years away, when machines are dexterous and efficient enough to compete even with cheap Chinese labour, and there are mass job losses all over the world as a result. I think in this siutation it is inevitable that governments will provide all the unemployed citizens with perpetual benefits, funded by modest corporate taxes. If all countries are moving in the same direction you don’t have to worry about tax competition.
Eventuallly I think this will morph into a Universal Allowance for all citizens, with only a few being lucky enough to have jobs (this will be high-status).
But the allowance will be at a level that allows a basic life, and the people who supplement this with work will be much better off.
If we reject the current environmental luddism and embrace 4th gen nuclear power (e.g thorium) and eventually fusion, then a century from now the basic allowance could support a very comfortable life by today’s standards, and we’ll get something like Iain Banks’ Culture.
So although I’m libertarian leaning, I think we’ll end up with a social democratic model because we need some way to look after all the surplus labour. If the technology is good enough you can support the non-working population on a relatively low tax base and not stifle innovation. The key is transitioning to nuclear energy (solar’s great for a low standard of living, but you needs heaps of energy if you want to advance to a robotics based society).
Except most taxes are paid by small businesses and entrepreneurs, not the big-shots doing the fucking over.
You’re in essence saying “because Rockefeller fucks people over, let’s take money from the small family business and give it to parasites who do nothing”
Great logic…
A guaranteed minimum income is acceptable to me as long as those receiving it give up the right of reproduction.
Revolutions require competence and ability, much like entrepreneurship. In fact, Steve Jobs was a hippie revolutionary before he founded Apple Computer. If people can make money through entrepreneurship, there is no basis for a revolution. The free-market system itself is the ultimate insurance against revolutions. A welfare state is unnecessary and superfluous.
As I said before, I have no problem with a guaranteed minimum income providing those on it undergo mandatory sterilization or some other kind of birth control.
cough, cough, there is, ahem, speculation that Advocatus Diaboli is FB’s alter ego…. Didn’t AD talk about giving money to peeps in Afghanistan?
Anyways, there was an old book called Brave New World that went over some of these ideas…..
Given an ungratifying minimum wage job or a minimum income, many would take the later I believe…
Also, the reasons for many “entitlement” programs was closer to the Roman’s giving bread and gladiator shows to the “unwashed” masses than out of any sense of altruism….
Interesting how this post is in contrast to Kievsky’s and Dat-Truth_Hurts a few days back-almost diametrically opposed….
So, are the problems of society fixed by making people smarter? By giving the bottom a “free ride?” Obviously, it isn’t easy to come up with an answer and any changes in one sector will produce changes in another….
Anonymous: “3) How is such a society ever going to compete, that is to say survive, against cultures with the ethic that, “Those who do not work, do not deserve to eat?”
Where can I find this magical land where suitable work is effortlessly available to anyone who wants it, and where it is not possible to be unemployable? It sounds like a cool place.
samseau: “What the hell are you talking about? That’s below poverty level in America.”
I’m not an expert on life in America or anything, but I’m entirely certain that $3333 per month can’t be below poverty level.
Delusional. The citizenry of this country just got finished getting ass-fucked by Wall Street elites and didn’t do a goddamn thing. Not a torch or pitchfork to be found anywhere from sea to shining sea.
The idea that the fucked-over masses will ever rise up in this country is really just too good to be true. It will never happen.
lol:
“I’m not an expert on life in America or anything, but I’m entirely certain that $3333 per month can’t be below poverty level.”
My numbers are per year; i said 1 trillion in taxes collected over a year.
Actually the key is to start working on technology so that we can colonize other planets. ‘economy’ only works as long as it’s expansionistic. We are stagnating on the little ball of mud, the adventurous and the smart and the innovative and movers and shakers have no new place to GO to escape the confining walls of this civilization.
All of the greatest increases in prosperity and wealth and status were accompanied by the opening of new places to go, new frontiers to conquer, new world for the intellectual and disenfranchised to go.
Once again, our race, collectively, is fucked on this little ball of mud. It’s like trying to keep sourdough starter contained without pouring off the excess occasionally… it either spills out, or you stop feeding it and it dies. This planet has become too small to hold us in, and we need to either spread out or stagnate and die.
FB: There are so many comments here that I cannot read them all.
But I after reading about 30, I didn’t see the obvious comment that I was sure someone would make:
IF THE GOVERNMENT GIVES BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMEN A FINANCIAL LEG UP, THEY WILL NOT PUT OUT FOR A NUMBER OF GREAT MEN WITH JOBS WHILE AT THEIR YOUNGEST AND SEXIEST. THEY WILL DATE THEIR OWN AGE. MATHEMATICALLY, MEN DON’T WANT THIS SITUATION LONG TERM.
I had to capitalize that because it’s the meaning of life in a nutshell.
The elites would sadly be correct in trying to impoverish everyone because a world where every family is prosperous results in American feminism and cute 18 yr old girls walking hand in hand with undeserving 18 yr old boys.
I’ve seen how places like the Czech Republic were once playgrounds for older western males but now, because the country turned around economically and is practically a western country, young women laughingly reject all older men and search out same age guys and support feminism.
I don’t just recommend but implore all men who want to get laid to go to a place where 18 year olds are not subsidized by a government acting as the sugar daddy and where the economy is not booming.
A socialist government competes with would-be sugar daddies and a sugar daddy can be any beta provider or alpha who’s dating someone 20+ years younger, even if she rarely asks him for money, but part of the reason for the relationship is that she sees him as financially secure and a backstop safety net for her. Stable marriages can come from that and, better, a bunch of women can have the babies of a man who’s child support payments are big for them but not much trouble for him.
Rich men will worry less about the minute possibility of a revolution and more about the terrifying prospect of seeing a college girl with a slouching loser her own age.
Or the terrifying prospect of not being able to get a woman pregnant because of progressive tax laws and progressive child support laws that take money from the man based on his income and not based on a flat rate that would be more than enough to raise the child well.
I could go on, but I think any guy who has traveled the world and measured his sexual success will note that it’s always better when there are no competing sugar daddies like a government (or for that matter, a rich father).
Men get laid more in times of war.
ROTFL at dirty old man sex-tourist wannabe Jerry’s comment
“The idea that the fucked-over masses will ever rise up in this country is really just too good to be true. It will never happen”
Alone, they won’t. Whenever this happens, they are crushed like at Waco or Ruby Ridge, or subverted and ridiculed like the Tea Party.
Uprisings happen and succeed when sponsored by an ascendant rival faction within the ruling class.
“cute 18 yr old girls walking hand in hand with undeserving 18 yr old boys.”
One of life’s most beautiful sights.
This is a pretty dumb article, though the question is an interesting one.
I know, we could ‘create jobs’ by abolishing intrastate trucking and pass laws making goods come in on ox cart. That would create a demand for oxcarts, more oxes, and drivers.
Who is we? USA or the world?
Trade imbalances stop real fast with the gold standard. There’d be no trade with China, (and hence Chinese downward wage pressure) when the gold ran out.
It’s a good idea and long overdue. My only issue is actually making it happen.
There is a certain percentage of people at any given time who aren’t good for anything except possibly spare parts. It doesn’t matter how good their genetics, education, and upbringing may be, I can’t look at third-generation Hiltons, Bushes, Kennedys,etc and not think: “what a shame, those kidneys and livers could be giving an actual productive member of society a chance”.
By the same token, there will always be people who want to work, and whose genius will shine through regardless of circumstance. We can probably do better than put the next Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison to work in a coal mine.
I’m on board, Ferd, assuming your plan goes hand in hand with population control so that everyone can sustainably live like lower middle class white people in America.
The future seems to be one of less and less middle class and even upper middle class employment.
For example, IBM’s Watson defeated the top jeopardy winners a few months ago. They are now feeding in medical information into this machine so that it can be a doctor’s assistant (the machine assigns probabilities for different diagnoses). In 3 years some hospitals will start using it.
Obviously, as this technology matures, it will reduce jobs available for doctors. (I also imagine that radiology jobs, legal reserach jobs etc will be sharply reduced by technology like this).
What I am saying is, there will be fewer jobs to go around – even for the bright and dedicated. So for those who say no to Ferd’s idea, what do you propose?
Should cell phones not have been invented because it put some folks out of jobs?
Cell phones cause brain cancer.
Should we all go back to walking and riding in a horse and carriage because cars put people out jobs?
Yes. Walking would do the the overweight fatasses of America some good.
Should we all go back to building our own homes instead of hiring contractors because at least we all used to know how to build stuff?
Yes. Knowing how to make and build stuff again would be a step away from the pathetic, dependent pansy slave-children we’ve become in this age of supertechnology.
Should we shut down the internet so folks can go back to getting their news from newspapers only?
The internet has created more problems than it’s solved. Plus, I heard once that something like 80% of it is porn.
@Ferdinand
One reason why the MRM is so weak is that the men divide too evenly between social conservatives, small government libertarians and socialists, who are basically political enemies. And they are enemies because their vastly diverging viewpoints lead, in the real world, to vastly diverging sexual climates in places where one ideology has dominance over the others.
I’ve lived long enough to know that social conservative communities and socialist communities are both hell on Earth, relatively speaking, in terms of sexual opportunities for males compared to more libertarian environments.
Both the former (neither of which are individualist in outlook) actively conspire to keep people dating their own age, which is only in the interest of older women, 18-21 year old males (less than 5% of males) and married losers with “Cognitive Dissonance” who don’t want other men to have the fun they opted out of when they got married to someone who has since aged a lot (even if they married a much younger woman themselves but now she’s not so young).
You can run a website where “everyone has their own opinion” and help the MRM remain so weakened, or you could recognize more often when there’s just a big circle jerk going on where some commenters really don’t wish other men the best at all.
I realize the feminists do well uniting themselves on some basic values while dominating social conservative politics, socialist politics and the now-subverted Tea Party. But at least they know what those basic values are and stick to them.
The most basic feminist value is, of course, stopping older men from dating younger women. This is the fundamental drive, the Prime Directive, of feminism that can be found in religious evangelist women, Marxist feminist women and many Tea Party women (many of whom are religious evangelist women pretending to believe in small government).
The Prime Directive of men, biologically speaking, is to mate with younger, hotter tighter women all the time. Anyone who shows an agenda against other men choosing to do this is, or should be, recognized as a troll. Any man who has a problem with other men dating much younger women, is the worst example of a White Knighter and doesn’t deserve the same level of respect as others commenting on a forum like this.
If the MRM doesn’t confront the Feminist Prime Directive head on including White Knighters who seem to think they are accepted as respected contributors in the MRM community, the other side will keep winning.
As a moderator/host it is important that you clearly see where and how White Knighters (or fems pretending to be males over a long period of time) are trying to maintain a footing for their false agenda on the manosphere, including your blog and Roissy’s. You’re aware that too many White Nationalists care far too much about condemning black culture than about boosting their own opportunities for mating.
In the manosphere, there should be zero room for a difference of opinion on men dating younger women (an individual can say it’s not for him, but those who have a problem with others doing it should be easy to spot).
It’s laughable that anyone purporting to be a “male” could be given any respect on the manosphere who uses the term “dirty old man” and “sex tourist” as if those aren’t radical feminist shaming terms.
There have always been billions of “surplus labor units” in the world, even without automation. The reason is that there are far more people who are lazy, useless eaters who expect a job to be handed to them, than there are bright, ambitious entrepreneurs who actually go out and create jobs. It has always been that way and will always be. The businessmen will always live far better than the proles in a just society, because they are the ones that take all the risk and do most of the “brain work”.
The solution is not a welfare state, it is to practice eugenics instead of the dysgenics we currently practice.
Also, I’d think that one of these armchair economists would’ve brought this up before, but isn’t it a given that if you hand out the same amount of money to each of the masses, inflation will almost immediately wipe out its worth? Duh. Kind of a glaring oversight there dude. If you gave every thug in the ghetto $1000 today, all that would happen is that the price of cell phones, sneakers, rims, and gold teeth would immediately rise to $1100. Econ 101.
Jerry, I called you out on two things: sockpuppeting as Anonymous, and making extreme and visceral assertions promoting sex tourism and objecting to young couples of the same culture dating each other.
I think this a narrow interpretation of FB’s comments. A desparate and impoverished population doesn’t present a threat to the upper and upper middle class simply in the form of revolution, but also in crime. In both Brazil and Mexico, the elites are known to buy into helicopter coops to avoid being hijacked and kidnapped during their commute. What’s so great about commanding greater wealth and status than your neighbor when you live in a country where you can’t even walk across town unmolested by predators who hail from the margins of society? Money that you save on taxes will have to be spent anyway on private security measures.
Still, I don’t view FB’s proposal as much of a safeguard against that. Public assistance doesn’t do much to quell the behavior of lower class chavs in England and ghetto blacks in the U.S. The only way the American elite can avoid the fate of rich Brazilians and Mexicans is through eugenics.
Begby, the money for guarantied income would be generated through taxation and savings (eliminating most other programs) it would not be inflationary since no new money would be needed for it it. As of now if you own anything or make more than a 1000 dollars a month you’re disqualified from most forms of public assistance which is ridiculous since the middle class are the bulk of taxpayers.
Furthermore I’d content nearly all welfare benefits go to women. You mention the ghetto and instantly an image of a welfare queen comes to mind. Key point here; welfare QUEEN. Government benefits are yet another front in the gender war.
Nature is of course the harshest eugenicist. Humankind decided a couple hundred years ago to try and interfere with nature’s course, and the results have been, predictably, catastrophic.
60% of the people alive today would never survive in a natural world where the weak, unfit, and diseased perish quickly.
If you are upset at this situation, you are upset at nature herself, and at the liberal idea that we should encourage the weak and diseased to outbreed everyone else.
@Jerry: you want to talk about tight? Try a 38-year-old yoga teacher and dancer who has been doing Kegels for longer than the Lolitas you obsess over has been alive. And that’s after two kids. With the control she had over her PCG muscles, I couldn’t have gotten in with a shoehorn if she didn’t want me to. You’re missing out, man.
@ PA
So what happens when beta males missed out on the fruits of youth (hot young girls) and now later in life want to make up for it? Should they be shamed? Should they settle for some old cunt their own age? Sure maybe she’s into fitness (1 in a hundred) but she’s still sub-optimal.
CS, I don’t have a problem with age discrepancies. I just laugh at Jerry making such a drama about it. For example, his spazzing at (gasp!) hot young girls dating hot young guys from their own culture, and not his creepy, aged sex tourist ass.
Commander Shepard, the poster in question “Jerry” is against beta males having access to women at all.
As far as the minimum income goes, I don’t think it result in anything other than subsistence level consumption for everyone, which as someone else pointed out was the state of living for virtually everyone except a very tiny minority in any given society.
People take it as a matter of course that our relative abundance is something that will continue into the future in perpetuity, and that technology will continue to improve. The reality is that we have been trending towards pre-IR subsistence living and rates of technological progress for a few generations now.
To me it seems almost definite that we will in time reverse the gains of the IR by breeding enough mouths to feed to offset the abundance gained by increased production from technology.
This is a lifeboat situation. If we look at the situation globally, it’s literally impossible to everyone to live as if they were an American with $25k/year to spend. America and most civilized places can only exist as they do because so many people everywhere else do not. That is, resources have been hoarded. We produce more than we can consume alone, so each individual can have more than they need. Throughout human history all such disproportionate gains have been offset by population booms.
Today we are simply exporting our resources to places like Africa and importing people from all over the world, which will have the same effect of reducing our technological advantage to nil.
If you have a fully robotic McDonalds then you’ll have lines miles long to service all of the additional customers, who will each get a single french fry for purposes of rationing. Technology doesn’t create abundance in and of itself. You can choose to redistribute that abundance of resources to fewer people or expand the population so that there are more people at bare subsistence.
The former option has only happened once and briefly.
‘economics’ is two guys passing a dollar bill back and forth twelve times and then convincing each other that they each have ‘twelve dollars worth of value’
‘economics’ have forced our country to borrow against it’s future for a century. Now the bills are coming due. our prosperity in the 50′s now has it’s price, and we are paying that price as the economic bubble explodes… we have been living at the expense of others, and now they are fucking us up the ass and improving themselves at our expense.
in a few years i expect that WE will be the ‘third world country’ and the existing third world countries will either stabilize into worldwide poverty or get fat on our carcass.
Brigadon,
‘economics’ also has a dirty little secret. The debts do not have to be paid. They’re fake. The state can abolish them and establish a public banking system with an equity-based currency and the usurious cocksuckers will be looking for work as plumbers.
heh, Jared, you also just confirmed what i said… at it’s core, economics is a pack of lies. What shocks me is that people give their faith to economics the same way they do religions. Then again, perhaps they are not so very different.
@Gordon
Commander Shepard said it right. If you’re truly OK with the 38 year old woman, there would be no need to lash out in anyway at a man of any age gaming and making out with 18-21 year olds. I’m not saying you were lashing out, but @PA has a real mental problem in that he does lash out at this kind of thing.
@PA, by the way, is the only one who pretends to be an MRA who favors the IMBRA law (the part of VAWA that demands background checks for men who date foreign women via agencies).
@Commander Shepard
Yes. But I am surprised that you were the only one to recognize that an attempt at shaming older men was going on. One doesn’t have to have been a beta while young to “want to play catch up” but most of us were beta because there was no training up until the past few years on how to behave alpha.
@PA is purportedly a male, around 38, who is married to a woman in her late 20s. If he was really sexually attracted to this wife, he wouldn’t lash out like he does at the thought of men over 40 dating women 18-21.
His lashing out is likely a sign of PA’s unhappiness with a wife who is hitting the wall and no way to get divorced without losing his shirt.
@PA is a White Nationalist but, unlike “Tyrone” who posts at the Chateau, who is in his exact same position (married in his late 30s to a late 20s wife), PA won’t simply say that his monogamous relationship with the wife is contingent on continued sexual satisfaction and that he can easily find himself in his late 40s being single and looking for women 18-21.
Tyrone has openly said that, if his wife gets unattractive or she dies or they get divorced, he will go to the local brothel.
If PA were to simply admit that, it would solve his animosity.
Tyrone is a White Nationalist who wants to keep his options open even after having chosen to get married. While Tyrone is in the exact same position as PA (married in his late 30s to a woman in her late 20s), Tyrone is glad there are older guys like me who are dating in the 18-25 range, because 1) I help show that there are great options for men over 45 and 2) advice I give can be used by a man who happens to get unexpectedly divorced or whose wife dies when he’s in his 40s or 50s, leaving him single.
Logically, @PA should be glad I’m providing an example of what he would have to do if his wife turned ugly, died or divorced him ten years from now.
Did I say “if”? I guarantee that PA’s wife will turn ugly, die or divorce him within the next 10 yrs. There’s only a bare chance that it will be otherwise (and only if she becomes a yoga freak).
By all logic, just like I get along with @Tyrone, @PA should be asking me for advice on what to do in the case he gets divorced or when his wife hits the wall (which should be about now).
But we don’t get along. And this is mainly because his White Nationalist ideology has too much feminism embedded into it. That’s where he thinks there’s any sympathy in the manosphere for feminist words like “sex tourist”, “creepy” or “dirty old man”.
He still feels that men over 30 who have sex with 17 year olds should have their dicks cut off. I know for a fact that this will be him in ten years when he’s divorced and starting to get better at game.
He’s been improving over the past 1.5 years because he knows his ideology cannot win. A few weeks ago over at the Chateau he shockingly repeated an important theme of mine that a trip to the lap dance bar once a month helps a guy with his game. I know he doesn’t really believe that a man over 40 should be allowed to be serviced to the point of climax by a middle class 18 year old (possibly the daughter of another White Nationalist), but he’s trying to fit in these days so he wrote that.
Does that mean that he, as a married man, is starting to go for lap dances with 18 year old girls because his late 20s wife is hitting the wall? I would bet yes.
I’m sure PA is getting lap dances on the side with 18 year olds right now.
But his brain can’t come to terms with this so he lashes out against “perverts” on line, hanging out here and at the Chateau, pretending he’s a good social conservative White Nationalist who’s against the exploitation of young women by older men. He doesn’t belong here.
White Nationalists like him are like the Nationalist Socialists of Germany: they were OK with the Nurnberg Laws which made sex with a Russian woman a capital offense. White Nationalists, like the Nazis, wanted to suck up to the woman of their race and made the laws those women wanted to protect their own (the women’s) interests.
PA lied above and said “I have no problem with age discrepancies” after stating before that that he feels that the most beautiful sight in the world is an 18 yr old girl holding hands with an undeserving 18 yr old boy.
For heterosexual men older than 22, only a mangina could be happy about seeing an 18 year old 10 with someone else besides himself. But PA went ahead and said that he is happy to see that. Go figure.
Why the fuck is PA even bothering to post on the manosphere instead of on feminist blogs where he/she would feel more at home?
He lied again when he characterized that I wasn’t happy about “seeing two young people of the same culture with each other”. No man is all that happy about seeing a hottie with another man. Real men do something about that and take the hottie away from the undeserving 18 yr old boy.
And what’s with the constant White Nationalist point of view? I don’t give a damn if an 18 yr old hottie is with a white 18 yr old boy or a black 18 yr old boy. She’s still better off not dating her own age.
Unless a White Nationalist is posting about his own rights as a male or constructively discussing game, he doesn’t need to waste anyone’s time posting on Inmalafide or at Roissy’s blog.
@Kyle,
To the contrary, socialism actually hurts the chances for Beta Providers to get laid often enough and I’m very much in favor of helping Beta Providers (upper betas who are willing to try to get laid) in terms of them getting younger and hotter women than they are getting under socialism or American social conservatism (the USA is the worst culture in terms of its norm of same age dating).
I’m also looking out for betas when I note that social conservatism hurts Beta Providers. For instance, if a man serves in Iraq 6 years and then builds a career another 6 years, he will be 30 when he’s ready to get married. If he then meets some asshole White Nationalist social conservative father who thinks he’s too old for the 19 year old daughter, the Beta Provider is screwed in that instance.
He may have to date and maybe marry the daughter of a liberal or libertarian who isn’t insane about the girl dating and marrying her own age.
I don’t believe the MRM should protect Beta rights over Alpha rights if there is a conflict. But that is another subject, unrelated to the topic of socialism or the topic of shaming men for dating women 18-21 and for not getting married.
I am a little disheartened? Can this be the same Ferdinand Bardamu whose argument with Lawrence Auster was the skeleton key that unlocked the world of the Manosphere to me? The author of “The Eternal Solipsism of the Female Mind,” and all those other bookmarks I’ve put in my standard file of links to send vulnerable men as the light is beginning to dawn?
Here’s the essential problem: men and women are NOT equal; this is one of the tenets of the great intellectual project collaboratively engaged in by men to utterly destroy the feminist project. Men are more extreme in everything: much more likely to be geniuses, much more likely to be retarded. Much more likely to persist at something to succeed; this is why most of the hair-cutters in America are women, and the highest-paid are men. There’s a biological reason for this: you don’t screw around with the sex that has primary child-raising responsibility, or you don’t get future generations. On the other hand, if you subject men to greater genetic variability (and this is behind the greater death rates of men), then you might one day hit the jackpot, and a gene that is very beneficial might arise in a man. He can father hundreds or thousands of offspring, while a woman who evolved the same gene might pop out 10 kids. In short, men are nature’s petri dishes.
This comes at a high price, with the afore-mentioned genetic diseases and retardation. The reward for men as a group comes when the high performers get high rewards. Ferdinand, when you write that we need spending “funded by radically progressive income … taxes,” you’ve just joined hands with every feminist to exploit the best men, largely for the benefit of the women. (Wealth taxes, OTOH, are not as bad, because those productive men often leave large estates to women, who wind up owning most of the wealth of society). You can find my email through my previous correspondence with you; you’re headed down a path toward distributism, possibly, and I can send you some reading along the way.
Oh, and the stuff about fast food recalls to me Marshall Brain’s story about Manna. If you have not read it, read it (about two hours) in light of the quoted articles in this story. It’s scary in predicting what’s in them.
Nails in the coffin for those who accuse Ferdinand of being a luddite:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101201124345.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100720131856.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100331221414.htm
An economy has to take into account the human element. Under a ruthless capitalistic ethos added with the horrid ingredients of artificial intelligence and a global labor pool with any meaningful global labor protections , we are all expendable. This is not a sustainable situation.
Frankly I’m surprised — no, astonished — to see this kind of post on this site, and from the host! An old issue of the Boston Review dedicated itself to a universal basic income, but the site has been updated so you can’t easily find the 10 responses from other academics. As noted above, classical liberal Charles Murray had a similar proposal some time ago. There’s yet another proposal from a big time philosopher Bruce Ackerman calling for a “Stakeholder Society” (everyone’s giving ~80 grand upon their 18th birthday, but there’s no other govt. redistribution).
I’m a little surprised to see no one has (yet) invoked the so-called “lump of labor fallacy” on the idea of machines displacing human-beings. The Law of Iron Wages goes back to at least Ricardo; in the short-run, living standards of people in rich countries is threatened more by cheaper labor abroad, as much of the world is unemployed/underemployed. In a globalized economy the rich will become much richer and incomes for regular folks will continue to stagnate (as they’ve stagnated since the 70s). I guess people on this forum would rather blame women.
I dont understand why people are so afraid of a large gap in wealth between the lower/middle class and upper class. Typically, the richest people in society are also the most productive ones. Now it makes sense that there would be a large gap in a high-tech society like ours. For example, in the low-tech days of say, cavemen, the absolute best hunter could be perhaps 2x better than the worst. Nowadays, something as commonplace as a computer can make someone literally thousands of times more productive than someone else. How does being wealthy force someone else to be poor? At least where I’m from, anyone off the street, rich or poor, can just walk into a library, get the education to do what he wants and take control of where his life goes. Giving people money for no work does not solve a single problem. It is akin to repeatedly replacing a patient’s heart after failure while at the same time feeding him the same foods that cause his heart to fail.
Ever read any Robert Anton Wilson? He’s covered this topic, and some of his suggestions might be more palatable to the libertarian crowd. The one that I remember (mostly because it knocked me out of hardcore ancap douchebaggery; sure, taxation is theft, but sometimes theft works, and working is what’s important) is a government program that pays people some amount of money a year to invent themselves out of a job.
Roissy wrote an amusing post a year ago that said that, since the Financial Crisis of 2008 began, he was getting laid more often in DC.
He noted that feminists who’d worked at NGOs were now unemployed and no longer really feminists: they were looking for guys like him to shack up with in order to remain living in DC. And that isn’t “sex tourism”.
The above similar essay that PA got her-his panties in a bunch over was just a paraphrasing of that amusing Roissyism (I strongly believe PA is a 38 year old female playing a long term astroturf game here in the manosphere – PA also disagrees with Roissy’s famous post called Repeal The IMBRA Now http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/repeal-the-imbra-now/ saying that men who date foreign women are known by the public as losers, in her opinion with cause, and thus make horrible examples of MRAs).
Now Roissy wasn’t advocating the coming of a Great Depression when he said (some) men get laid more during catastrophes. He was just saying that some men were going to get a lot more sex because of it.
Everyone knows that sex was more available shortly after the 9-11 attacks. Stating this doesn’t mean one is “extreme” or wants another such attack. It just means that, should another attack occur, consider grabbing a pack of condoms along with the extra water and canned goods.
The Beach Boys would agree with Roissy on the Financial Crisis Theory. One of the most profound pieces of music ever written was “She’ll have fun, fun, fun til her daddy takes the T-Bird away”.
The Beach Boys knew how to get laid. And they knew they got laid more often when the hot young woman wasn’t a spoiled brat with a car (at least before they got famous).
Having said all that, nobody who’s successfully tried to game women out of his league, that is nobody actually “in the game”, would fail to understand the above dynamic is at least a factor in how much fun they are going to get anywhere.
This is why Bruce Ackerman, the big-time philospher, probably proposed giving all 18 year old females 80k each after he had his prostate removed.
Seriously, there’s almost nothing more misandrist than giving every hot young woman a T-Bird. Think about it. The Beach Boys had it right there.
@Ferdinand
Some of us are on vacation and can’t get into online arguments unless they’re in real time (scheduled). Can you consider setting up software that will allow real time debate/discussions in case of a serious disagreement?
I’ve found that, without such a mechanism, busy guys can’t show up so much on any given website and former MRA forums like FreeRepublic.com and MensNewsDaily.com just collapsed toward a mean of average intelligence, White Knighthood and feminist trolls trying to keep their cover as “males”. The 2006 loss, to men, of FreeRepublic.com was a serious blow to the MRM and it was because the pro-feminist trolls were always online.
*by the way, regarding PA’s whining about “sex tourism”: I’ve never paid a professional for sex in 10 years and then maybe once or twice in my life. So many young women in America and elsewhere have a whore fantasy, that one never needs to go to a professional. You just have to ask the girl next door if she needs a new dress. You don’t need to leave the USA for that.
Well, I don’t fucking care about the economy anymore. Nor about people’s lot in life.
I just want my few acres, so I can go back to living and turning the rest of the world off. Fuck the minimum wage. I suspect that is how a lot of people will want to return when the going gets rought. Back to the land, and fuck the economy. Food in belly, roof over head, end of story.
The problem with a minimum income/welfare state is not only does it support secularists which support a free and fair culture, it also supports extreme non-secularists (eg muslims) who believe they are are right and going to heaven, you are wrong and going to hell, and therefore the state should treat you differently. The minimum income welfare state will insure that the non-secularists will reproduce as fast as they can.
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