You are absolutely correct. The community or state take on the burden and tax the citizenry, so we as a civilization must decide: support all similarly challenged individuals to the greatest degree possible? Warehouse them efficiently with little regard for quality of life? Or sacrifice all runts?
You are absolutely correct. The community or state take on the burden and tax the citizenry, so we as a civilization must decide: support all similarly challenged individuals to the greatest degree possible? Warehouse them efficiently with little regard for quality of life? Or sacrifice all runts?
Some argue the worth of a civilization is revealed in precisely this choice.
And as it is technologically possible for everyone on the planet to enjoy a basic middle class lifestyle, we *can* go with option 1 part and parcel. We just seem to prefer to worship billionaires.
Technologically possible is debatable, since we are not all equal as human cultures. Look at Ethiopia: there's land a-plenty and the nation needn't ever have suffered the famines it became synonymous with in the1980s.
But the communistic regime let party officials confiscate well-tended and profitable lands and farms, making it pointless for anyone to grow more than they themselves needed, ensuring any disruption would result in starvation.
Also, foreign aid ensured the regime could remain in power, keep the people down and even "tax" refugee and expat ehtiopians by holding their kin hostage in the homeland, since the regime completely lacks incentive to change.
Now compare it to Norway, which was a dirt-poor barely industrialised nation during the 19th century and who went from this state to one of the most prosperous, peaceful, least crime-ridden and most high-trust societies inside two generations after gaining independence in 1905.
Point being, each people must develop along its own cultural path, thereby being able to by itself determine what and how to solve problems (and decide what is a problem in the first place) if it is to achieve post-scarcity levels of production/distribution. Imposing a cookie-cutter model or ideology, be it neo-liberalism or corporate capitalism or communism, doesn't work for that very reason: ideologies are culturally coded to start with.
I cannot recommend Francis Fukuyama's works on this topic enough, not just because of his learning but becasue he has shown himself willing and capable to change his position when reality doesn't act according to theory.
> Point being, each people must develop along its own cultural path, thereby being able to by itself determine what and how to solve problems (and decide what is a problem in the first place) if it is to achieve post-scarcity levels of production/distribution.
The problem is, most cultural paths just lead to poverty.
However, even if they do we are left with these alternatives:
Either leave them alone to let them learn how to work their way out of poverty - as all european nations did.
Or try to "up-lift" them. Look at 20th century history. Look at all the money spent in Africa to zero net benefit for anyone save dictators and corrupt officials.
The only thing aid ever achieved was making a problem permanent: it's the well-known well-studied welfare-trap on a national, even global level.
> Or try to "up-lift" them. Look at 20th century history. Look at all the money spent in Africa to zero net benefit for anyone save dictators and corrupt officials.
Well, the "up-lift" strategy did work in India. Of course, that was before the World Bank and WTO were taken over by woke/green lefties.
> Convesely, the Industrial Revolution led to poverty as-yet unseen anywhere as people became surplus to machine-labour.
Um, no. The only reason that seems like a reasonable claim is that you have a ridiculously rosy picture of what pre-industrial society was like, heavily influenced by leftist propaganda.
Leftist propaganda tended to point out pre-industrial society as an even greater evil, arguing that Schlaraffenland was achievable once "the workers" had taken control of the means of production.
The industrial caused immense suffering, poverty, starvation and pollution - that is simply the facts. Then, our societies achieved a new equilibrium and an increasing focus on service-industries developed alongside the initial seeds of the welfare-state, causing poverty-levels to drop as new labour-markets developed.
Now, we enter the post-industrial era, so far looking to be one of increasing poverty, both relative and real in the West as increased financial pressure via mass-migration takes an ever-increasing bite out of GDPs, pushing taxes ever higher and beyond the point of no return on the Laffer curve.
And then a new equilibrium will be established, once technological progress reaches a new impasse (the latest one being between 194- and 199-).
Don't look at economy in terms of money when looking at pre-industrial society - look at things as what a normal meal was, or how many hours per day someone had to work.
Here's a clue: a 17th century farmhand in Sweden had a much shorter workweek than a 20th century industrial worker, and paid about 10% of his income and wealth, such as it was, in taxes.
The industrial worker has at least a 40 hour work week, excluding lunch and travel-times, and pays over 50% in taxes on his income alone.
Because the industrial society made control and taxation easier than ever.
> Leftist propaganda tended to point out pre-industrial society as an even greater evil, arguing that Schlaraffenland was achievable once "the workers" had taken control of the means of production.
If pressed Marx would admit that, although even he spoke of primitive communism. Most leftists wouldn't, especially the ones following Rousseau.
> The industrial caused immense suffering, poverty, starvation
Not compared to what had come before.
> Don't look at economy in terms of money when looking at pre-industrial society
I'm looking at things like average calories consumed, what percentage of people could afford to have children, what percentage of women had to resort to prostitution.
Jeremy, you and Rikard have raised some very interesting and difficult questions, to which I freely admit I do not have answers. But here's a thought...
If the rise in autism, allergies and the other tribulations troubling your stepson are in fact vaccine injuries, how about the billionaires in the pharmaceutical industry be held liable for his lifetime care?
We might see a very rapid decline in such disabilities if the concept of Responsibility was seriously revisited in these the late stages of our civilization.
I’d put a lot more stock in enviro-chemical soup as a significant causative factor; and I believe legislation there is wilfully ponderous, obliging a plaintiff to show direct action of agent X to cause condition Y or some such.
T’would be better if it was onus legislation, obliging the mfr to prove Agent X safe, period.
And making a case for autism as distinct for financial support (especially based on disproven vaxxophobic theories), is the wrong direction. MEDICAL SUPPORT should be free period, and society’s general position here re: all disabilities is the key.
The last thing we need is a(nother?) non-medical “your condition may not qualify for support according to bureaucracy” layer.
I disagree with you regarding "disproven vaxxophobic theories": I think the evidence is in regarding a causative link between childhood vaccination schedules and autism.
And this leads to why I also disagree with the contention that "medical support should be free period."
The whole concept of Universal Healthcare fell apart for me once I put this together: I am a healthy person who works at being healthy. I haven't used the "services" of the medical profession for at least a decade and a half. Why do I have to pay for other people's health care, especially when they refuse to listen to any advice from a demonstrably healthy, well-informed person like me?
Don't get me wrong - I have great admiration for people who do the work of caring for the less healthy among us. But we have to get past the victimhood model of healthcare. It's just a license for the pharmo-medical industry to keep siphoning off our wealth, and our well-being.
The patient data of Dr. Paul Thomas, comparing health outcomes of vaccinated vs unvaccinated children in his practice, sure struck me as evidence that vaccination increases rates of many chronic health problems. 2 minute video:
From a purely epistemological perspective, secure identification of the causal agent is historically the last element to be identified in a casual relationship. Examples of "if we do X, Y happens, but we don't know why" vastly outnumber cases in which we do know why. Insisting on a causal agent before admitting an obvious relationship is pure midwittery.
We always use the fallback explanation "It's Multifactorial" when we haven't identified a cause for a symptom cluster (syndrome) or diagnosis.
When I was a schoolboy I do not recall any "peanut allergies" , nor any autistic children in a school of 5-600. Now there are 2-3 in a class of fewer than 30. Consider the Bradford- Hill criteria and reconsider your certainty. I have learned three new concepts through the Covid Plandemic- Cancel Culture, Gaslighting, and Blue (or Red-) Pilling.
Despite enjoying many lectures and dinners with attractive representatives, I am aware that the pharmaceutical companies have a fiscal requirement; after the 737Max crashes I also began to understand the concept of "captured regulators."
Late to the show, I now understand the corruption and lies perpetrated by our medical journals, authorities, and mainstream press.
There is a vastly different rate of childhood autism in the unvaccinated Amish community as compared to the rest of the (largely vaccinated) American population, and increasing rates of autism have tracked very well with the ever-expanding childhood vaccination schedule.
For years, I would say to myself, okay, that means there’s a *correlation* between vaccines and autism, but it’s not *causation.*
Then I saw the documentary, “Vaxxed: From Cover Up to Catastrophe”:
This documentary (banned everywhere!!) provided me with enough circumstantial and anecdotal evidence to realize that, yes, vaccines cause autism.
Some will condemn “anecdotal evidence” as weak, but what I’m talking about here is the parents who told their stories of taking perfectly happy, healthy children for a routine vaccination… and then saw them turn into autistic zombie shadows of their former selves.
These parents know and understand their kids like no scientific investigation can ever hope to.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield puts it best:
“There can be very little doubt that vaccines can and do cause autism. In these children, the evidence for an adverse reaction involving brain injury following the MMR [vaccination] that progresses to an autism diagnosis is compelling. It’s now a question of the body count. The parents’ story was right all along. Governments must stop playing with words while children continue to be damaged.”
You lost any credibility you possessed when you invoked Wakefield.
Wakefield *is not* a doctor. Wakefield is a scammer who conspired with parents of autistic children to falsely claim a connection between MMR vaccine and self identified "digestive disorder" in children who already had been diagnosed with autism, *in order to promote his own alternative vaccine*. Wakefield is a fraud who falsified medical records for his own financial gain.
Autism is genetic.
Autism is not apparent at birth, it is a developmental disorder which presents as the child grows; it is coincidental that it presents at a similar age to vaccination schedules, since vaccination is regularly scheduled in young children.
"For years, I would say to myself, okay, that means there’s a *correlation* between vaccines and autism, but it’s not *causation.*"
There isn't a correlation between vaccines and autism, so your statement is evincing a false premise. To have persuaded yourself that there is proven causation is delusional. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a delusion is defined as: A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g. it is not an article of religious faith).
Autism rates in the Amish population are not a useful control group; the *whole point* of Amish society is distinction from "modern America". Amish are a restricted gene pool, different diet, different environmental stressors, and too small a sample size for significance to boot.
Social contagion. Perverse incentives. Over diagnosis. Historic underdiagnosis. Vested interests in education, disability funding, social work. Medicalisation. “Diversity” (meaning that the weird kid needs a labelled condition), shitty parenting, “it’s always been that way and now we’re better at recognising it”, good parenting, snowplough parenting.
Take your pick, there’s plenty of plausible explanations for an increase in diagnoses which aren’t vaccine related.
You’ll understand I’m not interested in ceding control of public health to a proponent of tinfoilia. (You have to pay because childhood poverty, malnutrition, and the many attendant ailments that share map overlays with poverty and/or industrialization, are not the fault of those most affected but instead are negative externalities of our nicer life opportunities. Don’t think of dis-ease as individual; it manifests individually but infects or affects the community or society.
I agree with you that there is are some arguments to be made for publicly funded health care. The problem is, we have such a corrupt system administering that health care.
How many public health dollars were spent on covid vaccines? Or covid countermeasures (ventilators, midazolam, remdesivir etc.)? Or paying off hospitals and doctors to go along with the scam? And how much are we paying for all the vaccine injuries, those that have already manifested, and those that are yet to manifest?
I “chose” not to take the vaccine, yet, as a tax payer, I have to fund all of this?
If we are going to have a debate about the pros and cons of publicly funded health care, we have to find a way to make sure the “health care system” is not a slush fund for the pharma-medical complex.
> And as it is technologically possible for everyone on the planet to enjoy a basic middle class lifestyle, we *can* go with option 1 part and parcel. We just seem to prefer to worship billionaires.
True, in a sense option one is in fact technologically possible. However, the only reason society is capable of reaching and maintaining that level of technology is due to the incentives inherent in capitalism, what you derisively dismissed as "worshiping billionaires".
The number of non-subsistence humans has grown remarkably over the past century and the proportion in penury has dropped. Industrial economies are almost incomprehensibly productive, but also considerably destructive to the natural environment, soil, and biosphere.
Why do you think the globalists want us culled down to 500 million or so?
When I read Thomas Malthus at age 15 and then saw the projections from the Club of Rome I was a proponent of constrained population growth.
I have travelled to many places on earth and seen much open land, I don't think we all need to eat bugs at this density. Even Japan is now worried about declining population; between visits 4 decades apart I still could see considerable open space.
We eat diesel: look at tractors, trucks, trains, and ships. The current assault on energy consumption is the rate limitation on continued growth, wealth, and sustenance. This is targeted at the wealthy productive western economies of course- China and India are building coal power plants as fast as they can, and third world countries are not rushing to build windmills or solar farms.
So "technologically possible" is a rather disingenuous statement.
You are absolutely correct. The community or state take on the burden and tax the citizenry, so we as a civilization must decide: support all similarly challenged individuals to the greatest degree possible? Warehouse them efficiently with little regard for quality of life? Or sacrifice all runts?
Some argue the worth of a civilization is revealed in precisely this choice.
And as it is technologically possible for everyone on the planet to enjoy a basic middle class lifestyle, we *can* go with option 1 part and parcel. We just seem to prefer to worship billionaires.
Technologically possible is debatable, since we are not all equal as human cultures. Look at Ethiopia: there's land a-plenty and the nation needn't ever have suffered the famines it became synonymous with in the1980s.
But the communistic regime let party officials confiscate well-tended and profitable lands and farms, making it pointless for anyone to grow more than they themselves needed, ensuring any disruption would result in starvation.
Also, foreign aid ensured the regime could remain in power, keep the people down and even "tax" refugee and expat ehtiopians by holding their kin hostage in the homeland, since the regime completely lacks incentive to change.
Now compare it to Norway, which was a dirt-poor barely industrialised nation during the 19th century and who went from this state to one of the most prosperous, peaceful, least crime-ridden and most high-trust societies inside two generations after gaining independence in 1905.
Point being, each people must develop along its own cultural path, thereby being able to by itself determine what and how to solve problems (and decide what is a problem in the first place) if it is to achieve post-scarcity levels of production/distribution. Imposing a cookie-cutter model or ideology, be it neo-liberalism or corporate capitalism or communism, doesn't work for that very reason: ideologies are culturally coded to start with.
I cannot recommend Francis Fukuyama's works on this topic enough, not just because of his learning but becasue he has shown himself willing and capable to change his position when reality doesn't act according to theory.
> Point being, each people must develop along its own cultural path, thereby being able to by itself determine what and how to solve problems (and decide what is a problem in the first place) if it is to achieve post-scarcity levels of production/distribution.
The problem is, most cultural paths just lead to poverty.
I'm not so sure about that.
However, even if they do we are left with these alternatives:
Either leave them alone to let them learn how to work their way out of poverty - as all european nations did.
Or try to "up-lift" them. Look at 20th century history. Look at all the money spent in Africa to zero net benefit for anyone save dictators and corrupt officials.
The only thing aid ever achieved was making a problem permanent: it's the well-known well-studied welfare-trap on a national, even global level.
> Or try to "up-lift" them. Look at 20th century history. Look at all the money spent in Africa to zero net benefit for anyone save dictators and corrupt officials.
Well, the "up-lift" strategy did work in India. Of course, that was before the World Bank and WTO were taken over by woke/green lefties.
> I'm not so sure about that.
You can see that most paths lead to poverty by looking at how horrifyingly poor people were before the industrial revolution.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1638185526078451713.html
In fact, the only known path out of poverty is the one England discovered during the second half of the 2nd millennium.
Convesely, the Industrial Revolution led to poverty as-yet unseen anywhere as people became surplus to machine-labour.
Yes, it eventually evens out but for those being made surplus until a new equilibrium is reached, that's cold comfort.
Oh, and people weren't poor the way we think they were, before the Industrial Revolution. Not here, since we never had a feudal system.
That's the problem with economists using money as a measurement for development - it doesn't show reality.
> Convesely, the Industrial Revolution led to poverty as-yet unseen anywhere as people became surplus to machine-labour.
Um, no. The only reason that seems like a reasonable claim is that you have a ridiculously rosy picture of what pre-industrial society was like, heavily influenced by leftist propaganda.
No, and no.
Leftist propaganda tended to point out pre-industrial society as an even greater evil, arguing that Schlaraffenland was achievable once "the workers" had taken control of the means of production.
The industrial caused immense suffering, poverty, starvation and pollution - that is simply the facts. Then, our societies achieved a new equilibrium and an increasing focus on service-industries developed alongside the initial seeds of the welfare-state, causing poverty-levels to drop as new labour-markets developed.
Now, we enter the post-industrial era, so far looking to be one of increasing poverty, both relative and real in the West as increased financial pressure via mass-migration takes an ever-increasing bite out of GDPs, pushing taxes ever higher and beyond the point of no return on the Laffer curve.
And then a new equilibrium will be established, once technological progress reaches a new impasse (the latest one being between 194- and 199-).
Don't look at economy in terms of money when looking at pre-industrial society - look at things as what a normal meal was, or how many hours per day someone had to work.
Here's a clue: a 17th century farmhand in Sweden had a much shorter workweek than a 20th century industrial worker, and paid about 10% of his income and wealth, such as it was, in taxes.
The industrial worker has at least a 40 hour work week, excluding lunch and travel-times, and pays over 50% in taxes on his income alone.
Because the industrial society made control and taxation easier than ever.
> Leftist propaganda tended to point out pre-industrial society as an even greater evil, arguing that Schlaraffenland was achievable once "the workers" had taken control of the means of production.
If pressed Marx would admit that, although even he spoke of primitive communism. Most leftists wouldn't, especially the ones following Rousseau.
> The industrial caused immense suffering, poverty, starvation
Not compared to what had come before.
> Don't look at economy in terms of money when looking at pre-industrial society
I'm looking at things like average calories consumed, what percentage of people could afford to have children, what percentage of women had to resort to prostitution.
Jeremy, you and Rikard have raised some very interesting and difficult questions, to which I freely admit I do not have answers. But here's a thought...
If the rise in autism, allergies and the other tribulations troubling your stepson are in fact vaccine injuries, how about the billionaires in the pharmaceutical industry be held liable for his lifetime care?
We might see a very rapid decline in such disabilities if the concept of Responsibility was seriously revisited in these the late stages of our civilization.
I’d put a lot more stock in enviro-chemical soup as a significant causative factor; and I believe legislation there is wilfully ponderous, obliging a plaintiff to show direct action of agent X to cause condition Y or some such.
T’would be better if it was onus legislation, obliging the mfr to prove Agent X safe, period.
And making a case for autism as distinct for financial support (especially based on disproven vaxxophobic theories), is the wrong direction. MEDICAL SUPPORT should be free period, and society’s general position here re: all disabilities is the key.
The last thing we need is a(nother?) non-medical “your condition may not qualify for support according to bureaucracy” layer.
I disagree with you regarding "disproven vaxxophobic theories": I think the evidence is in regarding a causative link between childhood vaccination schedules and autism.
And this leads to why I also disagree with the contention that "medical support should be free period."
The whole concept of Universal Healthcare fell apart for me once I put this together: I am a healthy person who works at being healthy. I haven't used the "services" of the medical profession for at least a decade and a half. Why do I have to pay for other people's health care, especially when they refuse to listen to any advice from a demonstrably healthy, well-informed person like me?
Don't get me wrong - I have great admiration for people who do the work of caring for the less healthy among us. But we have to get past the victimhood model of healthcare. It's just a license for the pharmo-medical industry to keep siphoning off our wealth, and our well-being.
" the evidence is in regarding a causative link between childhood vaccination schedules and autism."
Yes, it is in: there is no causative link.
The patient data of Dr. Paul Thomas, comparing health outcomes of vaccinated vs unvaccinated children in his practice, sure struck me as evidence that vaccination increases rates of many chronic health problems. 2 minute video:
https://heroesvsvillains.substack.com/p/vaccinated-compared-to-unvaccinated
So I don't care whether a "causative link" with autism has yet been proven to your satisfaction. Why poison children?
From a purely epistemological perspective, secure identification of the causal agent is historically the last element to be identified in a casual relationship. Examples of "if we do X, Y happens, but we don't know why" vastly outnumber cases in which we do know why. Insisting on a causal agent before admitting an obvious relationship is pure midwittery.
Or perhaps "uber midwittery"? :-) as Jason said on Sunday.
We always use the fallback explanation "It's Multifactorial" when we haven't identified a cause for a symptom cluster (syndrome) or diagnosis.
When I was a schoolboy I do not recall any "peanut allergies" , nor any autistic children in a school of 5-600. Now there are 2-3 in a class of fewer than 30. Consider the Bradford- Hill criteria and reconsider your certainty. I have learned three new concepts through the Covid Plandemic- Cancel Culture, Gaslighting, and Blue (or Red-) Pilling.
Despite enjoying many lectures and dinners with attractive representatives, I am aware that the pharmaceutical companies have a fiscal requirement; after the 737Max crashes I also began to understand the concept of "captured regulators."
Late to the show, I now understand the corruption and lies perpetrated by our medical journals, authorities, and mainstream press.
How could I forget? The CDC shredded that information years ago.
No, I mean, there is no evidence that there is a link because there's no causative link.
There is a vastly different rate of childhood autism in the unvaccinated Amish community as compared to the rest of the (largely vaccinated) American population, and increasing rates of autism have tracked very well with the ever-expanding childhood vaccination schedule.
For years, I would say to myself, okay, that means there’s a *correlation* between vaccines and autism, but it’s not *causation.*
Then I saw the documentary, “Vaxxed: From Cover Up to Catastrophe”:
https://archive.org/details/vaxxed-from-cover-up-to-catastrophe-2016_202008
This documentary (banned everywhere!!) provided me with enough circumstantial and anecdotal evidence to realize that, yes, vaccines cause autism.
Some will condemn “anecdotal evidence” as weak, but what I’m talking about here is the parents who told their stories of taking perfectly happy, healthy children for a routine vaccination… and then saw them turn into autistic zombie shadows of their former selves.
These parents know and understand their kids like no scientific investigation can ever hope to.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield puts it best:
“There can be very little doubt that vaccines can and do cause autism. In these children, the evidence for an adverse reaction involving brain injury following the MMR [vaccination] that progresses to an autism diagnosis is compelling. It’s now a question of the body count. The parents’ story was right all along. Governments must stop playing with words while children continue to be damaged.”
You lost any credibility you possessed when you invoked Wakefield.
Wakefield *is not* a doctor. Wakefield is a scammer who conspired with parents of autistic children to falsely claim a connection between MMR vaccine and self identified "digestive disorder" in children who already had been diagnosed with autism, *in order to promote his own alternative vaccine*. Wakefield is a fraud who falsified medical records for his own financial gain.
Autism is genetic.
Autism is not apparent at birth, it is a developmental disorder which presents as the child grows; it is coincidental that it presents at a similar age to vaccination schedules, since vaccination is regularly scheduled in young children.
"For years, I would say to myself, okay, that means there’s a *correlation* between vaccines and autism, but it’s not *causation.*"
There isn't a correlation between vaccines and autism, so your statement is evincing a false premise. To have persuaded yourself that there is proven causation is delusional. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a delusion is defined as: A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g. it is not an article of religious faith).
Autism rates in the Amish population are not a useful control group; the *whole point* of Amish society is distinction from "modern America". Amish are a restricted gene pool, different diet, different environmental stressors, and too small a sample size for significance to boot.
"Autism is genetic."
How is it that a "genetic" disease has increased so suddenly, and so rapidly, as it has in recent years?
Social contagion. Perverse incentives. Over diagnosis. Historic underdiagnosis. Vested interests in education, disability funding, social work. Medicalisation. “Diversity” (meaning that the weird kid needs a labelled condition), shitty parenting, “it’s always been that way and now we’re better at recognising it”, good parenting, snowplough parenting.
Take your pick, there’s plenty of plausible explanations for an increase in diagnoses which aren’t vaccine related.
You’ll understand I’m not interested in ceding control of public health to a proponent of tinfoilia. (You have to pay because childhood poverty, malnutrition, and the many attendant ailments that share map overlays with poverty and/or industrialization, are not the fault of those most affected but instead are negative externalities of our nicer life opportunities. Don’t think of dis-ease as individual; it manifests individually but infects or affects the community or society.
I agree with you that there is are some arguments to be made for publicly funded health care. The problem is, we have such a corrupt system administering that health care.
How many public health dollars were spent on covid vaccines? Or covid countermeasures (ventilators, midazolam, remdesivir etc.)? Or paying off hospitals and doctors to go along with the scam? And how much are we paying for all the vaccine injuries, those that have already manifested, and those that are yet to manifest?
I “chose” not to take the vaccine, yet, as a tax payer, I have to fund all of this?
If we are going to have a debate about the pros and cons of publicly funded health care, we have to find a way to make sure the “health care system” is not a slush fund for the pharma-medical complex.
> And as it is technologically possible for everyone on the planet to enjoy a basic middle class lifestyle, we *can* go with option 1 part and parcel. We just seem to prefer to worship billionaires.
True, in a sense option one is in fact technologically possible. However, the only reason society is capable of reaching and maintaining that level of technology is due to the incentives inherent in capitalism, what you derisively dismissed as "worshiping billionaires".
And it is still working, so far.
The number of non-subsistence humans has grown remarkably over the past century and the proportion in penury has dropped. Industrial economies are almost incomprehensibly productive, but also considerably destructive to the natural environment, soil, and biosphere.
Why do you think the globalists want us culled down to 500 million or so?
When I read Thomas Malthus at age 15 and then saw the projections from the Club of Rome I was a proponent of constrained population growth.
I have travelled to many places on earth and seen much open land, I don't think we all need to eat bugs at this density. Even Japan is now worried about declining population; between visits 4 decades apart I still could see considerable open space.
We eat diesel: look at tractors, trucks, trains, and ships. The current assault on energy consumption is the rate limitation on continued growth, wealth, and sustenance. This is targeted at the wealthy productive western economies of course- China and India are building coal power plants as fast as they can, and third world countries are not rushing to build windmills or solar farms.
So "technologically possible" is a rather disingenuous statement.