Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "This is why we can't have nice things" video.

  1. There's a fundamental incompatibility between an economic system that requires constant growth (obtained through methods like planned obsolescence) and the fact that the ecosystem we live in has physical limits. If every company has to sell more, more, more of everything forever, eventually something much more fundamental than a light bulb will break.
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  2. I think there'd always be some human jobs, though. Teachers, child care workers, chefs, scientists, engineers and the like. And artists of all kinds. Basically people in professions that help others, or people in professions that create and discover. Education would be essential in that post-scarcity society. If people don't understand the world around them their horizons will get smaller and smaller and they'll end up being the ones who sit around all day.
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  3. The basic problem is there are hidden costs our economic system wasn't built to recognize, because it was created (or sort of evolved into existence) hundreds of years ago when people thought the Earth was limitless. For instance, there's no purely economic penalty for cutting down the last tree or catching the last fish in the ocean, even though those actions would deny trees and fish to all future generations. It's actually the opposite: rare trees like Ebony and rare fish like Bluefin Tuna become more valuable as they get harder to find, which increases the pressure to harvest them all. Carbon taxes are an example of governments trying to make a hidden cost quantifiable as a monetary penalty. The costs of climate change which are usually paid in an indirect manner by people far away become an actual tax we pay when something we do leads to the release of carbon dioxide into the air. In theory this kind of feature bolted-on to capitalism should make the system more efficiently price goods and services, and lead to the reduction of hidden costs. But the subject is still new and experimental.
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  4. "To "fix" our system this way, you'd have to bolt on a tax for a lot of things. And it'll fight you at every step, and every individual facet of improvement." Absolutely. And places that don't impose these kind of taxes will be more attractive to industry than those that do because of lower operating costs. So the tax has to be adopted as widely as possible before it can even work properly. There are definitely challenges. "...The only change it makes is towards more profit, which even with infinite resources, isn't a direction that leads to betterment of human existence by anything other than coincidence." Well, you're getting into a much larger issue than just fixing capitalism. I agree with you that capitalism isn't the sole requirement for human fulfillment (no matter how many people seem to think money is all you need), but it is the best system available for the distribution of goods and services. I think we're going to need that system for a long time to come, and anything beyond that is a different matter. An equally important matter, but not something you can fix with goods and services.
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  5. Thank you for explaining your ideas! I see what you mean now, and you make a lot of sense. Those are indeed problems that capitalism can't solve. If anything, a laissez faire economic system would only make them worse by concentrating capital in fewer hands. How do you efficiently price labor when it's no longer needed? If it's a choice between "efficiently" impoverishing billions and solutions like universal basic income, then we should absolutely explore the UBI. It might be the key to a whole new kind of economy where everyone's basic needs are met, but to go beyond the basic you need to mentally add to the world in some way.
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