Ok, so I think I'm finally ready to weigh in on the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood and the selling of aborted fetus tissue. Fortunately, PolitiFact has weighed in on this. It turns out that while it is illegal to sell such tissue, it is perfectly legal to donate it for a fee - a fee that is meant to recoup the losses of storage, transport, and so on. So, even if PP is donating for a fee, it's still not breaking the law, assuming that the fee is "reasonable" (and we'd have to do a lot of accounting to determine whether that's the case or not).
So, at issue is not whether it's legal, but whether it's moral. The question started out as "should Planned Parenthood be profiting off of such tissue," but as PolitiFact notes, they're not profiting:
"The amounts she cites do not appear to be out of the ordinary, but no
one knows because there is no registry or compendium of fees charged by
organizations (or) institutions supplying fetal tissue," said Arthur
Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York
University’s Langone Medical Center. "When she haggles about fees, that
does not appear to me to be trying to profit."
But it also seems wrong for Planned Parenthood to profit from abortions because of the inherent belief that abortions are bad. Ergo, if they're able to sell fetus tissue at a profit, it's in their best interests to try to abort as many babies as possible, rather than try to provide alternatives to abortion (such as prevention, parenting, and adoption assistance). It would represent a conflict of interest.
But we know that this all hinges upon this inherent belief in the immorality of abortions because we don't have the same arguments against similar conflicts of interest in other arenas. For instance, hospitals have the same guidelines, and can donate aborted fetus tissue or human cadavers of all age, with similar fee requirements. We don't question their ability to do so, because we recognize that there's a valid medical need for it - namely, that scientists and medical students might be able to use the bodies for study.
Which raises the question: what do the people angry at Planned Parenthood think PP is doing with these fetuses?
Again, this comes down to the issue of "us vs them" or self vs other that I've talked about before. On the right, there is a constant campaign to smear Planned Parenthood and other providers of abortion and abortion-related services as monsters who are out to murder babies. And when you vilify an "other" in that way, it's easy to imagine the other as capable of any number of atrocities.
Sure, they may not say that Planned Parenthood is grinding up fetuses and turning them into food and food-fillers for our fast food industry, but they're also not saying that they're donating them to research. By leaving the question open, and by filling the minds of those listening with monstrous ideas, their minds fill in such horrible ideas as "what ifs."
Senator James Lankford (R-idiculous) set off some controversy by arguing that abortion is a men's rights issue, which of course was immediately pounced on by just about everyone. It reminded me, though, of some things I used to believe about abortion, and so I thought I'd share some conservative arguments from my past that go beyond simple Biblical arguments (which I already dissected in my last post, Unplanned).
First of all, let's talk about the men's rights argument goes. Basically,
I had something to do with the pregnancy, too.
The sperm involved in creating the embryo is an extension of my body.
The embryo is therefore 50% mine, and 50% her's.
And since it is equally mine, I should have an equal say in what happens to it.
Which would be a perfectly fine argument if the embryo was being grown in a Petri dish (and if you accept that "mine" doesn't imply property ownership but legal responsibility). If it was being grown outside of a human being, and if women's eggs could be harvested as easily as male sperm, then the effort put into creating the embryo would be truly 50/50 on the part of the biological progenitors and all of the work would be on the doctors and scientists tasked with successfully growing it to viability.
Of course, that's not what happens except in perhaps one out of every billion or so births, so the argument then proceeds that the role of women in the process must be questioned.
There is a song that came out in 1998 by Everlast called "What It's Like."
The basic premise of the song is that you really have to be in the same situation as someone else to understand "what it's like" to be stuck making the choices that person is having to make. It tells three stories in between the choruses, and I liked the first and the third easily enough, but the second I mocked. That story goes like this:
Mary got pregnant from a kid named Tom who said he was in love
He said, "Don't worry about a thing, baby doll, I'm the man you've been dreamin' of."
But three months later he said he won't date her or return her call
And she sweared, "God damn if I find that man I'm cuttin' off his balls."
And then she heads for the clinic and she gets some static walkin' through the door.
They call her a killer, and they call her a sinner, and they call her a whore. (source)
And my mocking basically called her a dumb bitch for believing Tom, and saying it was all her fault for getting pregnant. I wholeheartedly agreed with those who were expressed in the last line, calling her a killer, sinner, and whore.
To summarize what leads to this idea,
When a woman gets pregnant, it's her fault. She is responsible for birth control, responsible for declining or accepting sex based on whether or not she would like to get pregnant, and responsible for being able to resist force or coercion, no matter her age.
If she slips up on any of these points, she's irresponsible, and should therefore be given more responsibility by forcing her to care for an infant she does not want.
Meanwhile, the man should be forced to provide care for the infant, even if that means that the man should be forced back into the woman's life, even if she does not desire that (such as if she was raped or if the man turned out to be an ass who no one would want in the child's life).
I didn't place fault in the hypothetical Tom for failing to wear a condom, or for running the other way. That's just how a man sometimes behaves.
My favorite line to say in those days was this:
I'm pro-choice, I just believe that the choice was made the day the woman had sex. She already chose to have the kid.
Which is an awfully easy way of looking at the world. If every woman actually had that choice, then perhaps that would be a fair way to see things. It's hopelessly optimistic about the power available to women in this day and age, even while it reflects a willingness to grant men the power to spew their progeny far and wide without repercussions.
It was, therefore, when I realized that choices could be considerably more complicated than that that I changed my opinion. I had already accepted rape and incest as valid reasons to get abortions, even though I didn't like it, because of the belief that women should have at least that much control of what happens to them. But then I started thinking about hypothetical situations, and imagined a woman who had been raped by someone who she didn't feel she could report, for whatever reason - perhaps because the shock of rape by someone she was so close to her left her struggling with complex emotions she had to spend time struggling to work out. Should this woman be denied access to an abortion, knowing full well that she hadn't dealt with the emotions yet that would enable her to be a fit parent, and knowing that she was raped and therefore hadn't had a choice?
The answer was a resounding "no," of course. But, if abortion was only available in the case of rape or incest, then she wouldn't be able to have one unless she either drummed up the courage to report it or she was legally compelled to report it - that is, her report is forced out of her. Forcing a woman to do anything, especially after she has been a victim of force, seems cruel and unusual. The resulting realization is that abortion has to be legal just because we can't know the circumstances that led the woman to that place. We don't have to like abortion to still consider it necessary.
(and to the haters who say "well, you're describing an extremely weak woman, that's a very negative view of women," I say, "perhaps, but I was a fledgling liberal at that time, so it's certainly possible I still held some negative views of women from my days arguing against abortion rights." But, I have also since met a woman who had exactly the story I describe above. I won't name names, and I won't share details of her story.)
A nineteen-year-old boy has sex with a fourteen-year-old girl. It seems clear in such a case that the boy should go to jail, since he has committed statutory rape. The girl isn't legally old enough in almost any state to give consent, and the boy should have known better.
But what if it was physically impossible for him to know better?
tl;dr: the girl lied about her age, and admitted to police she lied about her age. In court, she and her mother both stood up before the court and confessed about what she had done and pled for the boy not to be given a harsh sentence. The boy didn't know her before hooking up with her, and thus had no way of knowing she was lying.
Maybe you feel like it was still wrong of him, based on beliefs about sex before marriage or a perception of society's "hook up culture" - but those two things are legal and people have the right to have sex with whomever they want so long as both parties consent. It's not justice to take out your belief against premarital sex on anyone (and if you truly believe it's wrong, you also likely believe that God will sort it out after death). Barring such a belief, the only question is one of whether it's the responsibility of both parties to verify each other's age - and, for anyone under 18, people are not required to carry ID, which can make such verification impossible
But let's assume you can twist it around in your brain to the point where you still feel you must convict the boy and punish him for the act. What is right?
For the sake of determining what's appropriate, let's assume for a moment he knew her age and acted anyway. Then the question of punishment should be one of recidivism - that is, will he do it again? If he is a child predator, with a history of attempting to engage in sexual activity with underage girls, then it's entirely appropriate to give him a long prison sentence. (I disapprove of sex offender registries in general, but that's another argument.) But, if he's a first offender who simply made a bad judgment call, and punishment can be expected to encourage him to make better judgment calls in the future, then a short sentence is appropriate.
And not long ago, judges had the authority to make such calls.
An editorial in The Independent, out of the UK, explains the problem as it transpired there. It is similar to what happened in the states.
it was hypersensitivity to the outrage [early release murder cases] caused that led
Labour to coin its most effective catchphrase ever: "tough on crime,
tough on the causes of crime", promising ...
to take the civilising steps that would discourage the young and poor
from setting off down the wrong road, while vowing that it would also
come down brutally hard on offenders.
Successive hardline home secretaries cleaved fiercely to the
pledge to be tough, and as a result the discretion that judges had long
enjoyed to discriminate between cold-blooded, premeditated murder,
murder caused when the intention was only to warn or to wound, and
murder committed in the heat of passion or at the wish and request of
the "victim", was abolished. All were "murder", all were equally
iniquitous crimes, and all would be punished by the same tariff: life.
This, it was decided, was the most effective way to stop the
right-wing press from pouncing at regular intervals. But the resulting
rigidity reduced the judge to a robot, and cast a blanket of moral
uniformity over actions that ranged from the unspeakably vile to the
merciful.
The problem is, we decided we needed to be tough on crime, and somewhere in the process, we reduced the ability of judges to actually judge anything. In many cases, as the editorial describes, we make judges simple robots who merely assign the preordained punishment to the crime. In other cases, though, thanks to our system of electing judges and this belief that judges must be tough on crime, we choose judges who will be over-the-top and make decisions that are based solely within a narrow definition of morality that happens to fit the minority of people who turned out to vote on election day. We don't choose judges on their ability to make wise decisions, but rather on their ability take someone the rest of us would let walk free, look him in the eye, and say "f#%! your life, I have a political agenda to make."
And it further doesn't help that so many of us have this "the law is the law" belief that was expressed to me in argument on Facebook that this boy should be punished as harshly as he is. When you say "the law is the law," you're really making a claim about how perfect the law is. You're making a claim that, even though it was written by human beings (notably flawed) in a written language (notably plagued by interpretation issues), and even though it is extremely narrow in its scope and the possibility of human interaction is always necessarily wider in scope, that it is perfect and should never be questioned.
That was originally what judges were for - to interpret the law, and make decisions about whether it's appropriate to apply it in certain situations. But, we believed they were too loose with it, so we took that power away from them, or found other judges who more fit our narrow beliefs. That was originally what juries were for, to decide not only whether a person was guilty of breaking a law, but whether it was even right to apply that law to their case (jury nullification is a thing, but no one ever talks about it).
The last couple of weeks, there's been a big story in the media about Planned Parenthood and attempts to sell the remains of unborn fetuses to science. I have no interest in debating whether that's true or not, or whether it's right for aborted human zygotes to be sold. I would instead like to talk about why right-wing groups consistently try to find problems within the organization as part of their attempts to defund it.
I've talked previously about how within Fundamentalist Christianity, we were taught to see the world in "us vs them" terms, that we were having to wage war for our very souls. We were also taught that abortion was evil - that life began at conception and that abortion was therefore murder. Their key passages to prove this are:
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalms 139:13, NIV)
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you..." (Jeremiah 1:5a, NIV)
As with the creation of the Heavens and the Earth, Fundamentalists see the creative acts ascribed to God in the Bible as being entirely dependent upon Him - ergo, every child is literally a miracle of God, rather than something that would happen anyway. This act of creation is instantaneous rather than a process - the initial cell combination of sperm and egg is God's Will, and it cannot spark the engine that will churn out a human being without God's Will. God knew He would create such a child before the child's conception, which means that the child is part of God's plan.
There is a final passage, though, that requires a bit of willing self-deception to accept. Allow me to digress a moment...
See, so far, we haven't got a living human being in the womb, just something that is knit together. Carrie Gordon Earll, in a post as part of Focus on the Family's "Abortion Series," gives us this passage:
"'If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise' (Exodus 21:22-25, NIV)"
She uses this as proof that humans are not "allowed to take life before birth." The idea hinges upon the idea that she is giving birth to a living, breathing child, which is why the passage says "gives birth prematurely." The second sentence, then, appears to mean that the fetus is not delivered successfully, and that fetus's life is equal to the life of the man who caused the accident, ergo the man should be put to death as well.
Earll jumps around between versions in her article, quoting:
the New American Standard Version 6 times;
the New International Version 6 times;
the New King James Version 5 times;
the Phillips New Testament in Modern English 1 time;
the Revised Standard Version 1 time;
the King James Version 1 time.
If she had access to these other translations, she might see Exodus 21:22 translated as follows:
"When men strive
together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage,
and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine." (RSV)
If men strive, and hurt a
woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no
mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's
husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. (KJV)
In fact, this idea of "miscarriage" instead of "birth" occurs in the Common English Bible, The Message Bible, and the New Revised Standard.
Greg Koukl does a great job breaking down the meaning behind the original Hebrew words, and why they might be translated as birth or miscarriage. Unfortunately, he makes a leap in logic that isn't supported - namely, that Moses chose a word that means live birth. By Koukl's own admission, though, it doesn't:
The verb yasa is a primary, primitive root that means "to go or come out."
There is only one time yasa is clearly used for a dead child.
Numbers 12:12 says, "Oh, do not let her be like one dead, whose flesh is
half eaten away when he comes from his mother's womb!"
He says that the frequency of the word's use to describe live birth, and its infrequency as anything else, means that it must be a living child delivered in this passage; however, he just said it means "to go or come out". That is, when a woman gives birth, it doesn't matter whether the child has a pulse or not, whether it's a stillbirth or not, for the purposes of the word "birth." We often assume it means that the child is alive, but that is not necessary to the word. In the Hebrew language, it's the same way, just as the KJV translates it into simply "depart from her."
If Earll encountered such a definition (and it is in the RSV and the KJV that she quotes), then she is being intellectually dishonest by hiding that possibility from her readers.
If we read the passage as "delivered" rather than birth or even miscarriage, then we discover that the passage doesn't care one whit for the life of the child - the injury is to the mother, who may very well die from an injury serious enough to cause her to deliver early. Thus, "life for life" refers to her life, not her child's.
If we disregard that, then we can accept that the death of the fetus is equivalent to the life of a man, and we can infer from that that means the child is covered by the same "thou shalt not murder" law that covers other human beings. Then, finally we have a "proof" that abortion is murder.
Back to the main thread...
Because abortion is murder in the minds of Fundamentalists, it serves therefore that those who execute abortions (doctors and women who terminate pregnancies) are murderers, and organizations that facilitate this interaction are accomplices to murder.
And, since abortion is legal, and murderers and accomplices cannot be tried in court, this simply frustrates the Fundamentalists even more, which is how we end up with vigilantes bombing abortion clinics in the hopes of stopping abortions from happening. In the mind of such a vigilante, murder demands a death sentence for the murderers, and since the law won't do it, it's up to vigilantes to do so.
In the church, we publicly condemned such actions, but we did so with a side of "but they earned it," because we honestly believed they did.
So the thinking goes: Planned Parenthood, as an organization that facilitates abortions, then, is an accomplice to murder. Rather than bombing it, the only thing left to do is attempt to defund it. If we defund it enough, then perhaps abortions will stop occurring there. Their other services aren't bad, but their abortions must be stopped. Nevermind that federal money can't be used to pay for abortions, and thus defunding the organization means only taking money from their other beneficial programs, because we had to do SOMETHING.
Obviously, I felt the same way at one point in my life. Planned Parenthood was the poster child for abortion clinics. As a 20-year-old IT worker for a local IT company, I was given the task to go to a Planned Parenthood office to fix several computers. (Interestingly, no part of me said I should be a conscientious objector to that - we didn't think about rejecting work just because our client did something we didn't agree with.) I felt like I was walking into the gates of Hell. I tried not to make contact with the women sitting in the waiting room of the office, who I imagined were all there because they wanted to have abortions, and I judged them for it. I thought I might accidentally wander into some doctor's office where an abortion was actually being performed (nevermind that Planned Parenthood doesn't do that in Oklahoma - my level of education about the organization was limited at best).
My experience was somewhat different from what I expected.
While I did see some information about abortion - one small pamphlet on the subject, if I recall correctly - everything else was about mostly unrelated activities, such as breast exams and other women's health issues. There were several resources about adoption, and contraception information was probably the thing I saw most.
And the employees weren't hateful people hell-bent on killing babies; instead, they were people who were just trying to help others as best they could.
It was an eye-opening experience, but the ways in which it was were unexpected and unplanned.
It would be another 7 years before I started becoming a liberal, but that would be the last time I badmouthed Planned Parenthood. Perhaps a field trip should be a requirement for everyone.
The latest "ZOMG SHARIA LAW" post I saw on Facebook is that the mayor of Seattle is introducing Sharia Law (compliant home-loans). I mention that last part in parentheses because it's never the headline of the story and it's always clear that the people responding to it have either not read it or not understood it.
It's illegal to pay interest in the Muslim faith, and there are some organizations- some of them governmental - that help with this problem, as it's pretty much completely impossible to buy a house, a car, or even anything online without that help.
But before you go apesh€t over this, understand that it's also against the Bible for Christians to pay interest. This is why it was in The Merchant of Venice that Shylock wanted a pound of flesh - interest was seen as being that damaging to a person.
The term in the Bible is "usury" - and here's what the Good Book says:
"If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest." (Exodus 22:25)
"Suppose he has a violent son, who sheds blood or does any of these other things...
He lends at interest and takes a profit.
Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he is to be put to death; his blood will be on his own head." (Ezekiel 18:10,13)
"But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked." (Luke 6:35)
Perhaps you've seen this image. This appears to be the original, even though it is available in much better colors elsewhere, it is the earliest copy and the only one attributed that I could find:
Acker, Charlie. "Spoons made me fat." The Libertarian Enterprise, # 672. May 27, 2012
The implicit argument of this picture boils down to this: Arguing that guns are responsible for crimes or, more specifically, murders is the same as arguing that spoons are responsible for fat. Many Republicans or self-proclaimed Libertarians I know posted the picture on Facebook not long after.
Today, I saw another argument of a similar vein on Facebook (I included my reply):
It's an amusing argument, but of course, any time spent thinking about it proves both of these analogies are horribly inadequate. Spoons and keyboards are only tools, but guns can be so much more than that. Both keyboard and spoon analogies depend on people not questioning them, but rather simply having a knee-jerk reaction of affirmation, because they agree with those people's thoughts on gun control already. I don't need to talk about that here - confirmation bias is already a well-known phenomenon.
But, I do think it'd be helpful to do two things: First, explain where those comparisons break down; Second, create new and more accurate comparisons that would be helpful to share in their stead.
First, we already know that guns have a storied place in our society as tools that can solve problems beyond simply protecting life. I talked about this recently in my post, "Hitting Where You Aim." To briefly recap: because we see guns as the tools of "good guys" used to stop "bad guys," and because we're all good guy in our own stories, we always see guns as tools we can use to stop whoever we perceive as bad, whether or not those persons really are.
If we were to try to extend the spoon analogy to that, we would have to see spoons employed in our culture as tools to save people from hunger by making them fat. In fact, we would elevate the position of obesity to one of our highest aspirations in society, rather than shaming people for being obese or overweight. We would show advertisements and movies and TV shows where someone's life was saved because they had access to a spoon and the ammunition (food) necessary to use it. And the result? Every time you felt the slightest hunger pain, you would immediately reach for your spoon to try to satisfy it.
We have something close to that, though.
Replace "spoon" with "sugary snacks" in that scenario and suddenly a lot of things click into place. We do advertise the crap out of sugary snacks, and thanks to governmental intervention and a lot of engineering know-how, we've removed barriers to access for such snacks. They're some of the cheapest things you can get. In advertisements, people often reach for snacks to satisfy their slightest hunger pangs. In fact, Snickers advertisements used to carry the phrase, "Hungry, why wait?" The premise being that Snickers is always readily available. And, when you have that sudden urge to eat and you have something readily available, that's what you tend to choose.
This more closely fits the model of guns. You see advertising constantly telling you that you can use it to solve your problems, and when you own one, it's readily available should the mood strike to solve such problems.
Thus, here's a better version of that original picture:
We have a basic belief in this country - people who work hard can improve their situation in life. We celebrate success stories about poor students who studied hard and got college degrees and went on to make something we generally define as success that means that they earned enough money to live comfortably and send their own kids to college. We celebrate stories about people who were bullied throughout school but learned to deal with it by making people laugh, and who went on to become successful comedians. We celebrate the dropouts who start up companies in their garages, companies that are now worth billions and billions of dollars.
And by celebrating those stories, we hold out hope for ourselves, that through our own hard work and intelligence, our willingness to take risks and struggle through adversity, we too might be able to earn a better-than-average life for ourselves.
Often we see the failings of others to achieve that kind of success, and we put the blame squarely on their shoulders for doing any number of unforgivable sins - not going to college; not getting the right degree in college; having children too early or out of wedlock or with a spouse who was a bad choice (perhaps because he or she had the audacity to drop dead at a young age); getting hooked on drugs, even legal ones like alcohol; or simply making the wrong choices about what employment to accept. We blame people, and we believe that if they just worked harder, if they just had better education or educational opportunities, if they just were willing to try, they could have money, too.
We assume that somehow magically tens of millions of jobs will open up that are higher pay if the people who are working minimum wage would just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
And sometimes we believe that despite evidence to the contrary in our own lives, as is the case with many people I know who are low income and yet believe these things.
It's always *other* people who are making bad choices, who are taking advantage of the system, who are lazy slackers who don't want to work...
But someday soon, we're not going to be able to think that way, because we're all out of jobs:
This video is a pretty spot-on take-down of the future we're staring at. I can speak to it myself. In that video, he describes "automation engineers" who are working actively to program computers to do the jobs that humans used to do. That's exactly what I do for a living. Companies like it because once the programming is done, a small team of engineers can handle the work that used to take hundreds of people, and at a fraction of the cost. This means the companies can lower their rates to compete in the market, and when competition isn't strong, it means they can also increase their profit margins.
That's because humans are huge portions of the costs companies pay. The space that you use to work - bathrooms, break rooms, your desk, and so on - costs money, in addition to simply payroll expenses, insurance, taxes, and so on. A computer that can do the job of hundreds can fit in a cabinet that is less than a square yard or meter.
And as this video notes, we programmers are getting better at replicating your abilities on a computer level.
Eventually, every job will be replaced by a computer, and then only the heads of companies and their immediate support staff will be human jobs. In that day and age, it's not feasible for every human being to be a CEO - even minimizing space for computers, there isn't enough room for all of those companies, given that a single company can supply all of a given type of thing. Ford could successfully manufacture every car in the world, Apple could make every computer, Samsung every phone. While competition breeds innovation, we've seen that that's still true when there's very limited competition, when only a handful of companies fill every role in a given field. There could never be a thousand successful cell phone manufacturers, let alone millions.
As such, we need a new concept for what it means to be human. Currently, we expect that a human will contribute in some way to society, and we value that contribution via whether someone is willing to pay for the human to do that thing, and how much. As such, we think that basketball and football stars contribute thousands of times more to society than teachers and nurses and firefighters and police officers, all of whom contribute several times more than barristas and cashiers and customer service reps. But when all of those jobs disappear, what will be the function of humanity? There's only a limited extent to which creativity is the answer - we can't all be artists and musicians and so on, some of us simply lack any such talents.
In that day, we will have to move to an economy that says "sure, you can have your companies making products worldwide, and those companies can even elevate your position in life so that you have the very nicest things, but you're going to have to give back to all the people who got you there, who helped pay for your goods and paid for the roads you delivered those goods on and so on." An economy that recognizes that not every person can work, but that not every person needs to work, because we produce EVERYTHING in such abundance that work is no longer a meaningful measure of how much you contributed to that abundance.
In that day, we will have to set up a society that:
Heavily taxes business
Uses those taxes to completely pay for food, housing, water, clothing, education, medical care, and transportation for everyone, regardless of income or whatever.
Imagine this...
Imagine a primitive microeconomy. A small group of people who hunt animals together for food. There are perhaps ten of them. They work together to build each other's houses, and to hunt food together, and so on. One day, Nirk figures out that Zark is the best hunter, so Nirk says to Zark: "You are better at hunting than I am, and I am better at building and tearing down houses. Why don't you spend more time hunting, and I'll take care of tearing down your house and moving it to the next location? That way, we'll both be more efficient." Zark likes the idea, and so she agrees. The two of them get a few minutes more leisure time each day because they have divided up their work this way. Soon, Tork sees what they're doing, and says "hey, I want in on this. I can make and clean your clothes for you, if you'll do those things for me." They agree, and all three get a few more minutes in their days. Berk joins in to cook the food that Zark brings in, and Jurk takes care of all of the children, teaching them and making sure they're not under foot. And all of them get a few more minutes of leisure time in their days, because they're more efficient.
Eventually, they start inventing things. Mirk builds a device that can hunt animals better than Zark can. And so everyone asks Mirk to hunt for them, but now Zark has nothing to do. They give Zark some menial jobs, but it's not what Zark wants to do.
But, because they're a community, they say "Look, Zark, we're sorry we took away your job. You can keep doing it if you like, but there's no need for it anymore, because Mirk brings in more food than you do. But that's OK. We'll still move and build your house, we'll still do your laundry, we'll still care for your kids, because you are our sister and we love you. But more importantly, we'll do these things because we're still so efficient at them. What would take you all day will take each of us only a few minutes. In our abundance, we can care for you."
Or they can make Zark starve... and then when Mirk takes over Berk's job, Jurk and Tork still feel safe, and so they let Mirk have even more abundance because they feel like Mirk earned it, while Zark and Berk sat around doing nothing because there was nothing for them to do. And then Tork loses his job, too. And finally Jurk does. And now, because Mirk has all the power, Mirk can make the others starve, and keep them from doing any useful work.
And that's just it. In this future age where robots make everything, we will have abundance, and we can share that abundance around. We can, or we can hoard it all in the hands of a few people, and make the majority starve.
But that's not the future. That's now. Every day we become more efficient at our work - so much that not every job is necessary. The current Gross National Income, per capita, in the U.S. is over $55,000. That's per person. Including children. And yet, average pay is less than half that. This means that we could literally have half the population out of work and pay for them at the same average level. Given that roughly 23.3% of people in the U.S. are children under 18, that means our current economy *could* pay every adult $71,000 per year. Even if we said that $50,000 was plenty per adult, we could have *42%* unemployment and still pay for everyone.
But we can't see that, because to get to our low average pay, we've severely underpaid people for many, many years. It appears to many of us that our economy would collapse if unemployment significantly rose, if we started simply paying for everything for everyone.
It's clearly not true, but it's what we think is true.
Some day, we'll be forced to face it. I hope we can get over this ridiculous notion long before then.
