The socialist vision is basically that scarcity need not longer exist. On the basis of new technologies, especially robots and artificial intelligence people will receive a basic universal income whether or not they have a job. Since there will be plenty of everything, money will not be necessary to receive all that one’s heart may desire. This is the socialist vision of the future based on “science”.
But the current prospects of production by robots and machines rather than human labor affect the universal basic income notion. Currently and for the forseeable future, If the income were to be universal, the society could not financially sustain anything more than an amount sufficient to cover the most basic personal needs of the recipient. If a person were prepared to live at a subsistence level, there would be no necessity to work. Recipients of the basic income could live modestly without a job. Higher income taxpayers could also.
Socialists are enthusiastic about this vision of the future. Science and technology are seen as the engines to get us there. The only things standing in the way, according to their view, are the traditions of the past –- social and religious traditions and customs that stand in the way of progress. Society’s reactionary hold on institutions that limit man’s possibilities include religion, marriage, social relationships (which once even condoned servitude and slavery), sexual constrictions, and so on.
The vision is much like the social world constructed by storytellers who can certainly not claim to be social scientists. Thus, they make such claims as that we can understand life and economics through the medium of Star Trek. Some modern fans anxiously peruse the films and literature to discover how to construct a Star Trek vision of an economy beyond scarcity and the need for money.
The modern party strategists who decry President Trump as anti-science, place their faith in their notion of the science of climate change. That science is deprecated by many genuine scientists who are not caught up in the politicization of “global warming” and who do not have a personal interest in promoting climate change ideas. During the presidential campaign raging in 2020, it was particularly irritating to hear totally unqualified political people berating the President’s attitude on science. He attacks phony science and scientists, not science per se. It appeared to me that in the presidential campaign of that period candidates were offering little more than senility, socialism, specious science, sedition, and silliness. But back to the issue of Star War science.
As society’s outputs of goods and services increase along with advances in science and technology, it does in fact become possible to produce the same amount of final products and services with less labor. Robots, as it were, work along with people, or perhaps in the place of some people, in producing a cornucopia of nice things. Socialists anticipate that fewer and fewer workers will be needed to direct robots in producing the amenities of a wealthy society. It is assumed that no human labor will be required because technology will eliminate all the jobs.
That there may be a tendency in this direction is not to be denied. We have been waiting, however, for this superabundance for a very long time. The Luddites come to mind. Luddites were groups of workers in England from around 1811–16 who were organized with the objective of destroying manufacturing machinery. These workers, afraid of being replaced by machines and losing their jobs, were utterly convinced that the use of machines reduced employment. They wished to sneak into factories at night and destroy the machines that threatened their jobs.
People laugh at their naivety today, because scientific progress doesn’t throw people out of jobs for long. We have observed over the last two hundred years since the Luddites, that as fast as technology eliminates some jobs, creative people wanting to make a buck (the nasty “capitalists” whom the socialists disdain) think of many new commodities and services which absorb the unemployed back into the market. As this is being written, unemployment in the economy of the Trump watch is at record lows in spite of the fact that we no longer need telephone operators, elevator operators, or many other workers of the past. The demand for highly-trained/educated people in business leadership is much greater than the available supply. Those with STEM skills in the economy also have no difficulty in finding high-income employment.
But the socialists can’t wait to “disemploy” most of us so that we can spend our time avoiding work, consuming drugs that were always frowned upon by reactionaries in society, and enjoying plenty of uninterrupted time with our devices. Younger generations appear to have no labor aspirations when there are pornography and video games to take up their time.
Associated with the notion of technological unemployment/leisure is the now famous Universal Basic Income. The original idea was one that almost everyone loved. Conservative economists pointed out that an income simply handed out to the poor, unemployed, sick, etc., would save us the cost of a huge bureaucracy of lawyers, social workers, clerks, and other assorted public servants who are involved in getting and keeping needy people taken care of. We wouldn’t have to pay to test the incomes of the recipients, prove whether individuals were really disabled, or perform a lot of other services to decide on how to redistribute incomes.
When such income becomes universal, however, rather than directed to the poor and needy, it would take huge amounts of money for everybody to receive support. In other words, across the vast numbers of people in the economy with their vast needs and wants for commodities and services, there are simply not enough robots to produce that abundance, nor enough robots to supervise them in their productive efforts. Nor is there any likelihood that this picture will change in the foreseeable future.
These are the facts that underlie the addition of the word “basic” to the universal basic income notion. If the income were to be universal, the society could not financially sustain anything more than an amount sufficient to cover the most basic personal needs of the recipient. If a person were prepared to live at a subsistence level, there would be no necessity to work. Recipients of the basic income could live modestly without a job. Higher income taxpayers could also justly receive this small support, even though their diligence in educating themselves and working at a regular job permitted them a more affluent level of living.
Of course, in a star trek environment as envisioned by socialists, future affluence beyond scarcity would have everybody living well whether employed or not. Again, the socialists are simply in too much of a hurry to arrive at their utopia. We are not even close to that situation yet. The socialist candidates for the U.S. presidency in 2020 have, in fact, totally lost their grip on reality. Their “vision” reminds me of the euphoria of socialist economists with the availability of computers somewhere after the middle of the past century. The Soviet economy, with its central planning, simply could not keep up with the calculations involved in managing a massively large economy with a single economic plan. Under the market system, everyone plans for himself or his firm, or his corporation, or his multinational corporation. But under socialism the government takes over all of those organizations and imposes a single national plan. Knowing precisely what every producer in every city and town in the whole country, and in every hamlet and farm is to produce next year, knowing everyone everywhere who will consume a part of the total output, knowing where everyone will work and how much with what equipment, etc., and what price everyone, everywhere will charge for every commodity and service produced is simply an impossible joke.
But with computers the economists all said: “Hooray, we can calculate everything at super speeds. What they didn’t stop to realize was that all the necessary data had to be gathered, sorted, and assembled for the computers to process. Moreover, it had to be good data, which was not distorted by agents who would gain from tilting it advantageously for their own purposes and private gain. After a year or two of trying to computerize the entire socialist planning system, they simply had to give up on the whole effort. It simply could not be made to work, even with the huge bureaucracy.
The socialists of the present are trying to change the world by having political representatives advocate thoroughly delusional ideas and policies. Modern socialists are as out of touch as the Luddites, or the Soviet economic planners.
The Green New Deal was presented as a ruse to get people to think in terms of the way socialists envision the future. The assumption that we must reduce man’s carbon footprint on nature suggests the wisdom of ending the era of the automobile, completely redoing the housing stock so that it consists of environmentally friendly structures, and much more. Perhaps at least part of the proposals for change reflect anticipated technological advances that will occur in any case. But the implementation of those changes will occur gradually and most remain a long way off, if they are achieved by market forces rather than through planners’ preferences and hypercentralized techniques. If we proceed in destroying our economy with dumb ideas, it will not support the economic development processes that will one day give us a more high-tech world. Proposed, ill-considered changes would simply leave us with insufficient resources to maintain our current level of economic prosperity.
The socialists’ beliefs about finance are dangerously primitive. They suppose the implementation of foolish plans simply requires spending some money. We have all those billionaires out there who can fund anything if they just pay their “fair share” of taxes. Besides, the government can always print more money to pay for free healthcare for all (all Americans and any foreigners who want to come to California for a free ride through life). In my forthcoming book, as many economists have already pointed out, it will be shown that if we taxed all our wealthy people (say at incomes of $600,000 per year or more) not 70%, but at 100%, we would not come close to having enough money for everyone’s health care or the “Green New Deal.”
It is also primitive and immature to think that printing presses could produce enough funds to accomplish unrealistic fiscal objectives and massive increases in output. Consider the real economy (the productive resources working at any given moment in time, setting aside the money economy which pays for their use): increases in new infrastructure, housing, and other economic assets, can only be achieved when there are enough machines, laborers, and time actually to construct the new world. An increase in the money supply beyond what the productive resources of the real economy can actually produce will only result in inflation. More money would be chasing the same supply of available goods. We wouldn’t get greater output from our productive resources as the money available increases, we would just get more expensive output as producers increase prices to ration out their products and services to money-holding buyers anxious to snap up what they can get. So the reality of what our economy can actually produce is not influenced by having the government produce more money. Such simple economic facts are totally ignored by the unbridled, immature enthusiasm of socialists like AOC, who are able to convince other economically ignorant socialists that there really is pie in the socialist sky.
