If I were a science fiction writer, I would write a story about a future world where almost all manufacturing and service work were automated.  I would imagine a world in which the little amount of human labor to make civilization run would be widely shared and the rewards for that work were also widely shared.  There would be so little difference between work and retirement that there would not be any issue of having enough workers to support the people who were retired.

If you can just imagine the possibility of such a world, then you might also imagine that one of the widely touted issues for Social Security funding would naturally disappear.  People talk about the diminishing number of the employed compared to the rising number of the retired.  They cannot imagine how so few workers will be able to fund the benefits of so many retirees. You can see from the above science fiction story that this falling ratio need not be a problem at all.

Wouldn’t it be great if the people were to elect politicians who could try to figure out how to work toward such a future instead of one in which the impoverished workers were heavily burdened to support the impoverished retirees while the wealthy few claimed all the benefits of increased productivity?

How about we start a national or international conversation about this future?

What prompted me to write this post was the thinking behind a comment I wrote on another article.  The reply to my post furthers the concept a little bit.

A hint as to how this utopian situation could play out is in the October 08, 2011 post – Norway: Lighting up Europe. One way to distribute the fruits of such an automated production system would be for the government to make certain essential services free to the citizens of the society. The greater the excess of wealth, the more services that the government could provide for free. (If I am not being clear, the government would pay for the services to be free to the recipients.)

The video below is the interview with Elizabeth Warren that appeared on September 14, 2011.

One person may not be able to change things immediately, but one person can start to say things on the political stage that need to be said and have not been said. She can set the stage for more people like her to be elected. She understands this issue far better than President Obama does. If we don’t start with Elizabeth Warren, when are we going to start?

We need a voice in the Senate beside Bernie Sanders who can speak about the issues facing the middle-class. Bernie Sanders is wonderful, but he is only a single voice. We need a growing chorus.

@elizabethforma is Elizabeth Warren’s twitter account.

The reason for posting this was prompted by  the copy of the twitter message on her web site.

Thanks to everyone who spent time with us across MA today. Tune in for my interview with Rachel Maddow at 9pm ET on MSNBC! #elizabethwarren

I watched all of The Rachel Maddow Show tonight and saw no trace of Elizabeth Warren.

I found Elizabeth Warren on Twitter and saw that the original message was:

elizabethformaElizabeth Warren

Thanks to everyone who spent time with us across MA today. Tune in for my interview with Rachel Maddow at 9pm ET on MSNBC! #elizabethwarren

14 Sep …

Notice the date stamp below the message which does not show up in the copy of the message on her web site.  She was on The Rachel Maddow Show last night.

You’d never see a video like the following on a major American television channel.

If the American public is kept ignorant of what is happening in the rest of the world we can safely avoid following the good examples of others and nothing will prevent us from following their bad examples either.

The article After Claiming Government ‘Doesn’t Create Any Jobs,’ Perry Brags: ‘I Helped Create A Million Jobs’ points out that:

Perry’s state does, however, lead the nation by having the highest percentage of minimum wage jobs. And when it comes to government jobs, Texas is in no short supply, as between 2007 and 2010, 47 percent of all government jobs were created in Texas. In fact, under Perry’s watchful eye, government jobs grew twice as much as private sector jobs.

But any way its sliced, Perry is now taking credit for creating jobs, when just a few months ago he thought he had no power to create jobs.

Why shouldn’t a politician claim to believe  two opposite points of view?  Each one may gain some votes that the other one won’t.  Is that what they call smart politics in Texas?  It worked for the Bush’s.

The article Brilliant Strategist Behind Ron Paul’s Online Tactics Died Broke And Uninsured, Friends Couldn’t Raise Enough Donations says

But as Abramovitch notes, Snyder, a volunteer strategist who eventually became a campaign manager for Paul’s presidential bid, fell ill of pneumonia during the campaign. Snyder did not have health insurance, like the hypothetical example given by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, and stacked up $400,000 in medical bills. On June 26, 2008, exactly two weeks after Paul ended his bid for the presidency, Synder passed away due to complications from his pneumonia. Synder’s family could not pay the bills left by Snyder, so friends set up an online campaign to raise the money for Synder’s procedures.

The article did not say whether Ron Paul learned his idea of letting the uninsured depend on charity from this experience with his campaign manager or if he has held this opinion for a long time and the experience didn’t change him.

I guess we know there are no leaks in Ron Paul’s heart from which he is bleeding.  At least Ron Paul can hold onto his convictions no matter what.

For those who can’t get enough of Elizabeth Warren, you can follow her YouTube channel.

The video below is of her appearance at a Framingham diner on the day she announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

Since I have cousins who live in Framingham, I am anxious to hear from any of them if they were present at the time.

I mentioned the book by Dean Baker, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, in a previous post.

Here is the excerpt that exemplifies what the book is about and what so agrees with the points I have tried to make on this blog.

For the most part, progressives accept the right’s framing of economic debates. They accept the notions that the right is devoted to the unfettered workings of the market and, by contrast, that liberals and progressives are the ones who want the government to intervene to protect the interests of the poor and disadvantaged.

But this view is utterly wrong as a description of the economy and competing policy approaches. And it makes for horrible politics. It creates a scenario in which progressives are portrayed as wanting to tax the winners in society in order to reward the losers. The right gets to be portrayed as the champions of hard work and innovation, while progressives are seen as the champions of the slothful and incompetent. It should not be surprising who has been winning this game.

In reality, the vast majority of the right does not give a damn about free markets; it just wants to redistribute income upward. Progressives have been useful to the right in helping it to conceal this agenda. Progressives help to ratify the actions of conservatives by accusing them of allegiance to a free-market ideology instead of attacking them for pushing the agenda of the rich.

For the last three decades the right has been busily restructuring the economy in ways that ensure that income flows upward. The rules governing markets, written by the rich and powerful, ensure that this gravity-defying outcome prevails. The right then presents the imposition of rules that it likes as the natural result of unfettered market forces.

Whenever you are in a position of defending progressive economic policy, remember the above description.  Do not fall into the trap that President Obama so often does of justifying his policies on the basis of making the income and wealth distribution more fair because it is more moral.  In truth, we need this change in distribution because it makes the economy work better. Instead, you can talk about how the current situation is such a perversion of the principles of free markets.  You can talk about how the current rules are so detrimental to the workings of the economy that the Republicans claim that they are such experts on making run efficiently.

When the Republicans say they want to encourage job creation by loosening regulation and lowering taxes, remind the audience how this makes no sense in the Republicans’ own terms of how a smart investor should invest.  They are saying that if we only make it less difficult for entrepreneurs to produce more goods that are already in over supply compared to what people have the money to buy, these entrepreneurs will gladly invest in producing goods for which there are no customers.  Somehow, the Republicans must expect us to believe that these entrepreneurs are going to make money by putting the output of their factories into warehouses.  Maybe they think that the profits from building warehouses will more than make up for the loss in producing goods that can’t be sold.  This is almost a twist on the famous idea from the book Catch-22, where one of the protagonists lost money on every transaction, but he made it up in volume.

Is Jon Stewart still stuck in that crazy world where our politicians are expected to make sense?

I particularly liked one of the comments on The Daily Show web site.

The audience at these debates is way scarier than the idiots on stage (even though one of those cretins could end up president…).

There is also something to be said for the comment by RajV on The New York Times blog.

The attitude of the audience and that of the speakers barring CNN’s Wolfe was utterly shameful, and clearly shows why these jokers should not be allowed within 100 feet of the White House, at the risk of destroying everything that this country stands for.

The moderator may want to ask Rick Perry his views on the breathtakingly ignorant, fundamentally-inspired revisions of science and social studies textbooks in Texas, thanks to his political appointees, and if he plans to promote such colossal classroom ignorance on the national stage. His fundamentalist past is a liability to the Republican party. He and Bachmann should be soundly rejected as a lesson to the Christian Taliban in this country.