Some says the world has too many humans. Some says that life is precious and we should make more children. I am, as you all know, is always a moderate. I am not going to say whether there are too many humans or not. However, I do know that certain kind of humans are already too many. How do I know? Unemployement. If they're not employed and not willing to work at a job at the wage the market gave them, that means we already have too many of those and need to stop producing them.
You see, the market price is a sacred number where the supply and demand is balanced. If price is lower than say, cost of production, we have one thing obvious. Oversupply. How do we reduce supply? free ganja for unemployed childless people. People that prefer weed rather than having children and can't even afford those weed shouldn't make children anyway. Now, most libertarian will scream that it's effectively socialism. Again, I am a moderate here. I can tolerate or even endorse a little socialism or facism.
In the past I have supported mandatory porn consumption to reduce rape, mandatory concealed gun ownership to reduce crime, and minimum wage for all sexual intercouse with women to improve women's dignity. This is just another small government that actually can solve problem.
Do you want to support another children from cradle to grave or do you want to give free ganja for could have been parents?
Unemployment is by no means a safe measure of an "excess supply of people".
Consider for a second a world where all work is done by friendly robots, and people can devote all their time to leisure.
This world has full unemployment of people in some sense, since nobody is working. However, this worlds is abundant of things created by labor. So labor is not demanded and therefore is not a scarce resource.
Even though labor is not needed, nobody needs to be sacrificed so mankind can achieve some survival objective either.
Even though this seems like a fantasyland far-fetched scenario that might never really happen, that could be the extreme case of one of the technological trends occuring in the present time. Perhaps understanding the magnified consequences of such trend in an extreme scenario could work as an effective tool of explanation for what's going on today.
Technology gradually turns labor efforts less important for any individual to accomplish the set of basic things needed for his survival and overall dignified existence. That's a matter of fact, by the way, not an opinion. Even considering the perceived evolution of minimal requirements for what's considered dignified existence, that's as hardcore a fact as it can get. People worked harder in the past, and people leisure more today.
Hence more and more people are opting not to lend their available time as labor, raising unemployment figures. They are unemployed, but they are not necessarily starving or subjected to insufferable living conditions. In many ways, most of them are better-off than many employed people from previous generations. But such unemployment is completely voluntary and a healthy result of people making their own decisions concerning the use of their time.
The oil rich Persian Gulf countries resemble a lot this "robotic utopia".
Due to their commodity based enormous wealth, local populations seldom have to work at all.
Labor is not performed by robots, but imported as immigrants, mostly from the indian subcontinent, while arabs leisure and spend lots of money. They invest money too, but these investments are largely managed by western firms, or else recklessly wasted in ridiculous projects by sheiks who like to think of themselves as money geniuses.
First, nothing is free except for maybe air and sunlight, and that depends on situation.
Second, Individuals give things to others, Governments force redistribution of scarce resources from one group of individuals to another. Most wealth redistributed by government is from the rich to other well connect rich, followed by young lower middle class to old upper middle class folks. (The problem is of course that the first group of rich have capital that they use to make society wealthier, the other groups get their booty at their expense. The poor are especially hurt by this as their largets sources of employers and customers are diminished by this redistribution.)
Third, Would it not be more prudent to just decriminalize ganja and let poor/middle class/rich people make their own decisions about consuming it?
Fourth, Every issue with the poor is the result of government force. Just remove the govenrment off the backs of the poor and the the market place will as it always does, respond by providing more choices at a wider range of quality and prices. The entrepreneurs in the poor areas will be able to produce what the poor demand thus lifting up all folks.
Well if they don't want to work fine.
But if they want money and their productivity doesn't match their need, we call that oversupply.
Locked. Genepool is only allowed 2 crazy threads per page.
"As in a kaleidoscope, the constellation of forces operating in the system as a whole is ever changing." - Ludwig Lachmann
"When A Man Dies A World Goes Out of Existence" - GLS Shackle