Hi stickler
I wasn't arguing for eugenics.
I was pointing out that eugenics was something that the author of that paper, and his contemporary fabians (eg HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw) were in favour of, that the paper I cited and quoted from, had that disgusting eugenics flavour about it, even if it never obviously said so.
sorry if I gave the impression that I was in favour of a centrally planned weeding the human garden, I'm absolutely not in favour of centrally planned anything, especially eugenics.
Society's mechanizing, it takes less people to do actual work, and that...ought to be a good thing? But it isn't...because increases in production only benefit the few.
That is true of the united state at present, but there is more happening there than just mechanisation.
human desires are almost limitless, and we're not short of ideas to fill those desires, so, there should be no limit to new areas of employment to fill all of those wants, as mindful foot masseurs or whatever.
Mechanisation does indeed bring the benefits claimed, but approximately 50% of all benefits do not go into us contributing to bettering each others lives by offering goods and services that people are willing to pay for
that approximately 50% goes towards hampering, restricting (and even caging and killing) people and towards producing bads and dis services that people would not be willing to pay for (I know very few who would volountarily choose pay to have Iraq Afghanistan, Libya and Syria bombed out of their own pockets).
that theft makes many activities that otherwise would have been worthwhile and beneficial to engage in, no longer worth doing. You get to see what some of the tax money got spent on, paraded in front off you, but you'll never see what that money would have been spent on, if it hadn't been taken from productive people in the form of tax.
There are also a whole pile of laws and tariffs that mean that we get the same or less services for higher price. I'll cite the example of the American tariffs on cane sugar imports. Why should you pay more of your hard earned to get cane sugar - or the vastly inferior corn syrup (Archer Daniels is a major political donor - need I say more)?
Without paying so much for the sweetener - how much more could soda pop makers pay their workers?
What lower sales volume but more diverse sodas would it be worthwhile for people to produce if Americans were allowed to buy cane sugar at world market prices?
Up until the 1920s, there was no such thing as long term unemployment. There was only short term unemployment, as inefficeint businessmen went out of business, or new technologies replaced older ones, eg the automobile industry rendering the horse buggy makers and buggy whip makers obsolete. It maybe took the guys who found themselves without a job, a few days or weeks to find new jobs.
Something changed in the 1920's. J M Keynes (not sexy) identified it as wage rates being sticky (they wouldn't go down), so the labour market no longer cleared, and people were left long term un employed for the first time in history. I'll let you guess what things had changed
A policy of banning mechanised cotton picking machines, excavators and combined harvesters in favour of people doing those jobs by hand would not be of any benefit to our material wellbeing, or our emotional happiness. Those are obvious examples, but the principal still applies in less obvious areas too, like tailors with needle and thread.
