@lcrespom @ramin_hal9001 @pluralistic

Hawking's remarks quite mirror the worry voiced in my recent haiku (senryu):

Progress marches on,
ending any need of work,
but not need of pay.

As to the need for wealth redistribution, I agree it's been going in a bad direction for some time. From my 2009 essay Tax Policy and the Dewey Decimal System (http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/02/tax-policy-and-dewey-decimal-system.html):

"If the wealthy want to be taxed less, they should arrange for society to enrich as many others as possible, in order to have friends who share the 'burden' of taxation. If enough people make a decent enough wage to achieve a surplus, it won't be so lonely at the top. If instead the present trend continues, concentrating the wealth in an ever-shrinking portion of the population, those few wealthy should expect to pay a steep price for membership in that elite club, because the rest of us can't afford to help pay the taxes until we can afford to take care of ourselves."

It's ever more obvious as they accumulate measurable fractions of the world's wealth that they did not and do not produce an equivalent portion of the world's value.

That ALLEGED relationship is the primary 'moral' argument for not redistributing wealth: the idea that a person earned their money. And they just plainly did not EARN such megawealth. THE MONEY earned its own money. MONEY MANAGERS earned it. WORKERS earned it. But the money did not go to megamillionaires and billionaires in proportion to real contribution. Any real morality DEMANDS wealth redistribution because there is no sense in which this magnitude of wealth is earned, deserved, or healthy to ANYONE.

Almost all of megawealth is taxed as "unearned income". That should give us a clue!

And don't you billionaires DARE use the word "pain" or "burden" to talk about such taxation. My 2011 essay Enough (http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2011/08/enough.html) explains how unreasonable that is.

Finally, Climate demands we stop valuing reckless, needless consumption over sustainability, so we shouldn't encourage make-work jobs that directly or indirectly consume resources without contributing to any real societal need. People are trained to hate "couch potatoes", but they are WAY more climate-friendly than many doing unnecessary and wasteful jobs. We have to stop and think about that. See my 2012 essay Corny Economics (http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2012/05/corny-economics.html) for more on that.

Technology and automation should free us from fear of not having needs met. That it is not going in that direction is something we must address now, not later. Because of the power behind all this wealth accumulation, the problem will only worsen and the ability to fight it will only diminish.

#capitalism #taxation #automation #society #wealth #UBI #UnearnedIncome #ethics #Inequality #justice #SocialJustice #WealthRedistribution

If bitcoin's rise is bad for the #environment,

And #moneyPrinting is causing #bitcoin to rise,

Then maybe we need to stop the #moneyPrinter to save the environment? Or maybe bitcoin is using the #energy that it needs to secure the base layer, the foundation of a #newEconomy that respects #LimitsToGrowth.

#fracking #realEstate #moneyLosers #moneyLaundering #landTax #georgism #UBI #wealthRedistribution