IRC and Study Hall lurker here, thought I'd post a Reddit-tier ramble not up to par with the rest of this site. Without further ado, my first post:

I've been all over the spectrum. I'm highly skeptical of big corporate capitalism these days, but I do believe in free markets. The rules of classical economics are logically sound, but they're not very humane.

The sad truth is that employees are expendable, and only paid as much as there are people able and willing to do the job. Today's job shortage and labor surplus means low wages and benefits for those lucky enough to land a position. If there were no minimum wage, as there isn't in much of the so-called "third world", McDonald's employees would be paid less than dirt - that is the true market value of unskilled labor in the 21st Century.

At UMass Amherst, I had the pleasure of attending a live seminar featuring economist Thomas Piketty, who popularized an important truth about wealth today: r > g. That is, returns on capital exceed economic growth.

At the time of its $1B acquisition by Facebook, Instagram had just 13 employees. Can you really blame firms and startups for trending toward minimalism? They're reaping megacorporate profits on their capital without any of the dehumanizing bureaucracy of a staff exceeding Dunbar's Number. HR lied to you, you're nowhere close to your company's "greatest asset". This is r > g in the real world: when employees go from being an asset, to a liability.

Today's wealth trends toward massive consolidation into the hands of monopolies or duopolies like Apple, Google, Walmart and Amazon. These companies are so lucrative, so productive that we should be living in an age of abundance, but we're not. Expendable employees work more hours than ever for less reward.

I believe we might actually be on the verge of realizing the dream of Marxist utopia, but not in the way you might expect. When Americans think of socialism or communism, they think of authoritarian interpretations like Bolshevism, Maoism, Nazism, or Juche. They don't think of more libertarian interpretations like prehistoric tribes, Nordic countries, The Venus Project, or Bernie Sanders.

I'm a proponent of "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" with relatively free markets. I wish for a society where people work not because they have to, but because they want to, whether for profit, or for self-actualization and fulfillment. Personally, I want more of the latter out of my work, because profit is often funneled directly into consumption.

I find society's overconsumption quite disgusting - obesity, environmental damage, conspicuous consumption, resource depletion, you name it. We slaughter 9.08 billion chickens every year in America alone to satisfy the population's craving for McNuggets, and that's not even getting into how wasteful beef is. I don't know if we'll ever see an end to such detritus, but I'm somewhat hopeful for virtual reality and lab-grown meat to be able to fulfill people's desires more sustainably.

We don't have the tech or resources to automate every unfulfilling, expendable "job" right now, but we probably will by midcentury. The question is, will society opt to adopt something like Basic Income, or will we continue to romanticize manufacturing and revert to the way "we've always done it"? Trump makes me unoptimistic.