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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 02 2014, @07:22AM
Toppling the ruling class
There is a considerable weight of opinion among economists, if not outright consensus, that the post-scarcity model is inevitable.
There's a fellow who said something related:
"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet." --William Gibson
Note that Socialist candidate for Seattle's city council Kshama Sawant (an Economics professor) campaigned on these issues (and won).
The problem is that no one knows how to get from here to there
FDR had this figured out following the previous bust of the boom and bust Capitalism model:
After someone reaches the income level of Very Comfortable (at that time it was $30,000), the marginal tax rate becomes 100 percent.
(He settled for 94 percent; Reaganomics reversed things and look how that has turned out.)
When you only need 90% of the workforce to create the goods and services for 100% of the population, what do you do with the remaining 10%?
You give everyone a paycheck and send them home.
When there isn't enough work for everyone, everyone simply does a little less of the existing work.
They do this at a cooperative that has been around since 1956 [googleusercontent.com]
(orig) [rdwolff.com] (and which is now much bigger).
The elephant in the room in the USA since 1968 has been that worker productivity has gone up but wages haven't [thinkprogress.org].
France figured this out years ago and shortened the work week there (and keeping wages up).
The problem we have in the USA is money in the electoral process [movetoamend.org].
-- gewg_