1. I don't really understand this point.
2. Yes, but the unemployed rust belters can' be re-trained for something else, so let's pay for their education and maybe support them financially while they learn. But paying them an income to sit on their bottoms is not a useful allocation of tax dollars. Social assistance and EI programs can take care of this, or roll them into a single program if you want.
But getting rid of the eligibility requirements is ridiculous. China has 1.4 billion people working tooth and nail pumping out production to overtake the west economically and you're talking about music on a street corner.
3. Ok. But changing goalposts on thy fly.
4. The answer was never Marxism, it was regulation, taxing the rich, education, social safety net etc.
5. Sayings like "Free lunch" and "money doesn't grow on trees" are truisms that still apply today which you seem to be forgetting and so im using them as a reminder.
6. Neither of us can predict the future. If there's mass unemployment then as I said tax the rich people who own the robots and get people to be trained to work where human interaction has value like teaching, nursing, sales, therapy etc. Deal with it as it comes, future hypotheticals are a lame excuse for the naive idealists to implement their utopian schemes.
7. I've said my peace on this issue in our convo, I just keep repeating myself. We can agree to disagree.
1. In short, as time goes on there is not enough work to do.
2. China will have the same problem. At a certain point there will be so little work that the social utility of doing anything will outweigh the utility of monitoring benefits. I think that's a good way to think of the economics.
3. Something that wasn't on the radar 30 years ago is not 'changing goalposts', it's an emergent problem. Nobody was talking about climate change 50 years ago either, they were talking about 'pollution' so talking about an emergent problem isn't 'changing goalposts'.
4. Marxism is also a framework for critical analysis and as such, it is a perspective that can be used to examine (modified) capitalism in various stages of history. Marxism hasn't connected the dots adequately to their utopian end state, and the various attempts (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Hoxha, Kim) have provided a less desirable path for the west than gradually adding more social programs to capitalism.
5. "Fear God and work hard." - David Livingstone; "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! Labor is life." - Thomas Carlyle
Human wisdom is based on the conditions that produced it. Our world will soon be even more remote from the world that produced ancient truisms.
6. Yes, 'taxing the rich' may well be a path to this, but you included "sales" in your list which is also going to be redundant. Keeping in mind the abundance we are delivering, the absence of equity in distribution and the coming decline in population a kind of capitalist-communist mix is coming that your old truisms would never have foreseen. A kind of extended family of humanity will be here some time next century assuming we don't destroy ourselves.
7. We don't disagree much at all. I appreciate your values, I am only trying to get you to imagine beyond the horizon a little.
Cheers...