Scenario A-
Person X decides to have a child, knowing that the child will be born severely crippled. Person X finds this to be desirable because the child will now be utterly dependent upon Person X, who will use this as leverage to control the child throughout its life.
Can this be condoned?
Scenario B-
Person X decides to have a child, knowing that the child will be born with an illness. The illness is sure to kill the child within eight years of birth.
Can this be condoned?
Scenario C-
Person X decides to have a child, knowing that the Earth is so polluted that no more crops can be grown, and currently stored food will run out within 8 years.
Can this be condoned?
In other words, is it okay to create humans that are given no options, or very few options with which to live their lives?
I would answer that clearly, this is not acceptable.
Humans have an innate fear of death. Once given life, they cannot reject it easily. In addition, humans have an innate preference for their own well being, and will put others through considerable trouble for their own sake, especially when the alternative is death or a near equivalent.
Therefore, a human who can do nothing but suffer and then die, or a human who can only obtain resources through a life of theft, should not be created.
Humans are naturally empathetic. Even from a more psychopathic outlook, humans at a low enough standard of living are heavy anti-utility objects. In other words, at a low enough standard of living, others will sacrifice their well being willingly, as a moral necessity. This too does not imply that the target should be considered a positive loci of utility. It is closer to a form of blackmail.
In explanation-
Scenario D-
Person X creates five million people in the depths of space, granting them just enough air/gravity/etc. that they somehow, just barely survive. In response, an interstellar civilization builds all of these people a planet.
Can this be condoned?
If our latest Person X was allowed to continue as he pleased, he's now offloaded some 90% of the cost of reproducing onto others. This gives him a huge competitive advantage. Suddenly, he has almost complete control over who gets to live in the next generation, and on the sole basis that he's willing and able to manipulate his competitors with threats of leaving innocents to a fate of natural torture.
Even if we assume that no one is actually directly hurt as a result of Person X's actions, and that the civilization would have made some new planets anyway, we can see that Person X has managed to override the decision making of his competitors with his own, without demonstrating in any significant manner the superiority of his direction.
As such, it should be clear, when creating sentient beings, the tools necessary to achieving that entity's will should also be supplied. Anything less is slavery, blackmail or torture.
Throughout history, this logical necessity has been largely ignored.
There are two primary reasons. The first is that it implies the killing of babies, which humans find naturally repulsive. This is an instinctual response built by evolution for evolution's own purposes.
The second is slightly more complicated, and will be broken down further into two pieces-
A- Throughout history, morality has been treated in a generally Darwinian, or rather, tribal manner. In other words, negative utility effects created through invasion of foreign territories was not included.
B- Given A, the human body represented a valuable asset. Occasionally wars could be won using metal, or horses, or stones, or some other limited resource. However, normally speaking, a war was won using the human body. Nothing else was as finely controlled, as agile, as energetic, as enduring or as powerful as a human. The energy generated through eating, the control granted through the brain, the mobility of the legs, the leverage of the arms- these creations of evolution were difficult to compete with. Even in those cases where machines replaced the arms, or where animals replaced the legs, it was almost always the case that arms and legs were still scarce, since they were needed to control the machines or the animals.
Winning in war was essential. Invading foreign territories netted new resources. And even if you didn't want a war at the moment, everyone else was eyeing your territories.
Essentially, humans evolved to see children and other humans as an asset, to continue having children even in the face of famine and plague, because humans were necessary to winning wars, and even if there were too many, they could easily and profitably be consumed in warfare.
In other words, so long as wars could be won with infantry, we could not produce more human bodies than we could employ effectively.
Thus, anyone with an operable human body, was easily leveraged for profit.
Note that while the female body was not of equivalent military worth, it had the obvious advantage of creating male bodies. Throughout most of history, this was considered the female's main worth, and they were kept pregnant.
Men were raised to be zerglings, and women were the hatcheries. It was simple, primitive, easy and barbaric.
However, around 60 years ago, somewhere between 1957 and 1960, everything changed. The age of profitable warfare was brought to an end, by the ultimate weapon of mutually assured destruction.
An age of peace began between nuclear powers. Slowly, people came to realize how savage and evil warfare is. As a moral awakening, it remains, in many way, inadequate. However, at the least, very few wish to return to the era, to the policies, that characterize this segment of history. And, at the least, we want to believe that we're better people than the ones before us.
By abandoning the previous glorification of warfare, we dismissed the people's honor. Humans could no longer justify themselves merely through patriotism. Honor was abandoned.
However, humans are innately competitive. We create rankings. We rank. We try to surpass the neighbors. Previously, patriotism, faith, proving yourself as a loyal member of the tribe- this was the ranking system. But, as warfare regressed, so too did our hostility towards outsiders. In turn, we abandoned our admiration of insiders.
To replace this we needed a new ranking system.
The 1960's were, generally speaking, boom years. Employment was easy. Work was available. Everyone could find someone to pay him for his actions. This, was a consequence of a larger trend-line reaching all the way to the 1700s and a short term catalyst, the general destruction caused by world war 2.
Jobs posed a convenient solution. Everyone had them. They contained a clear hierarchy. They were sustainable.
For 30 years the American economy continued expanding the job pool. Simultaneously, population grew rapidly. America assumed that anyone with a functional human body could make himself rich, and for the most part the facts did not pose a contradiction.
In 1990, the jobs peaked. Americans blamed the lazy youngsters, they blamed the ignorant, the emotional, the greedy and the selfish, they assumed it could be solved.
The solutions they desired were implemented. College graduation rates climbed, government financial engineering exploded, government job programs expanded- America created the modern three prong system of education, financial engineering and nationalization.
The result was laughable.
After all, the problem wasn't that sinners weren't doing their part, and needed to be educated and disciplined. It was that the elites were automating all of the jobs.
Work, is basically the art of redistributing painful things to those most able to bear the weight. Jobs are simply a particularly servile form of work.
On any particular issue, a human will admit that eliminating a job is a good thing. The utility is obvious.
However, as jobs began declining in availability, the moral fabric of America was threatened once again. Just as the nuclear bomb destroyed Christ, and opened up a new era of sex and science, robots are destroying the concepts of responsibility and productivity.
As of now, these forces are still the fringe. Although labor force participation is falling rapidly, is has not yet fallen so far as to bring about significant change to the average person.
However, there is no reason to believe that the fall will end. None of the answers are working. None come even close to working. Simultaneously, the catalysts are accelerating.
Meanwhile, children continued to be mass produced at a geometric rate.
Without anything to kill them, population is doubling roughly every fifty years. In itself, this is clearly unsustainable. At that rate we'll fill everything reachable under the speed of light within 8000 years.
Of course, obviously, we cannot sustain current population growth for 8000 years. Earth will run out of space, the sun will run out of energy, etc.
The point is, the human body is not innately self sufficient. The total employable population is limited.
That said, the physical maximum of employment is not equal to the maximum efficient use of employment, and here is where automation enters the picture.
We cannot yet rely heavily on lights out factories. However, to efficiently employ farmland, only one farmer is needed for around 7 million dollars worth of farmland. One worker on a drillship is needed for 6 million dollars worth of oil drilling equipment. One worker in a textile mill requires about fifty thousand dollars worth of machinery. An employee at a major game studio requires around 2 million dollars in capital. An employee in a hospital requires about thirteen thousand dollars in capital goods.
In comparison the average net worth of an American is around 300000. The median net worth of an American is around 45000.
Some jobs still exist. Obviously. Most people are still employed.
However, most critical jobs require large amounts of capital. In most cases the shortfall of capital goods eclipses the value of the worker. We cannot leverage a larger population to obtain more oil. We cannot leverage a larger population to farm more food. It's mathematically impossible. Even for jobs such as those in a textile mill, or a hospital, the capital costs are cripplingly high-
This is because the above figures only work correctly assuming all capital is geared towards production, a logical impossibility. In reality, humans need houses (100000 dollars) cars (30000 dollars) and other capital goods for their own use. About half of our net worth is locked away in consumer goods. In addition, the economy cannot be freely retooled to completely ignore goods that do not provide much in the way of employment per unit of capital. In other words, to give everyone jobs at textile mills, our asset allocation would have to be about 1/6th textiles. Hospitals would need about 1/25 of our asset allocation.
Construction work is largely done using labor. It's a major source of jobs.
Once oil, electricity, food, housing, clothes, health and entertainment are addressed, that basically covers what people want and need. Of course, education exists, but I don't care because it's a sham. Of course, education is another major source of capital free jobs.
It's easier to be capital free when you don't actually do anything. That's why jobs in government intensive industries produce so many jobs at such a low cost, explaining healthcare and education.
This basically leaves manufacturing and construction as a source of rational work. However, there is no reason to believe that those won't change. Even if they don't, they only encompass a certain percent of our asset allocation, so we still reach a shortfall.
Other jobs, such as waiters, retail sales and gardeners exist, but they're non-essential. As such, as capital increases in productivity, such jobs will be pushed to the wayside. Furthermore, they'll be increasingly competed for. Finally, they're just fundamentally not worth doing.
In other words, labor is losing its role as a limiting reactant. It has already lost functionality in most fields. This is unique within history. Evolution has not prepared us for this reality, nor has culture, which was also evolved, though not in the biological sense.
Different actions will lead to different results. What I expect to happen is the blind stupid path- population growth continues geometrically. Fake jobs are created to employ all these useless people. The economy becomes increasingly nationalized, until it all collapses in a new round of war and famine.
We could, theoretically, allow the poor to starve. The rich could sit back and laugh at the stupid cattle and their unending sex. However, practically speaking, this can't happen, because the poor will vote and riot, and the rich will sympathize with them even if they don't. Even if the rich were willing and able, this scenario is still not optimal, since it involves starving millions of people to death, and likely involves imprisoning and/or slaughtering them to keep them under control until then. And, the slaughter is likely to never end, as new people lose their jobs or their fortune but continue to have children.
The alternative is birth licensing. Or, in other words, redefinition of the human body. We can't live like hunter-gatherers in the modern age. Everything is already owned, and we'd lose 98% of our productivity if we went back. So why do we expect people to make do just because they have arms and legs?
Parents should be required to provide adequate capital to their children.
In the modern age, capital can easily produce a return of 5%. A human can live off 7000 dollars a year with no difficulty. In other words, 140000 dollars is an adequate replacement for a job.
Of course, very few Americans own 140000 dollars, much less the 280000 they would need if they wanted to maintain their own living standards. A direct imposition of a 140000 dollar requirement per child, would effectively wipe the 99% from the gene pool.
This is neither necessary nor desirable. It is within our powers to give everyone in America 300000 dollars.
It is not necessarily within our powers to do so immediately. That isn't an issue. The government would immediately owe everyone 300000 dollars, and the recipient can immediately have a child. The debt would then be transferred to the child.
Of course this program would require scaling back the omnipotent rights of a parent over a child. Children should be allowed to own their own assets, free from parental meddling. Upon birth, money would be transferred, where it would be kept in sequester until the child claimed it.
As to the standard required to claim the assets, I would wait for the child to ask for the money, or until the age of 10. The money wouldn't be released immediately, but once the trigger is met, would be given over the next ten years.
While the assets are in government holding, the government would invest it, targeting a normal and safe return through some sort of government ETF. The interest would be added directly to the related asset pool.
So, where will this money come from?
We could redirect it from government waste, AKA, the vast majority of what we currently spend on the military, the education system, bankers, healthcare and the police. In addition we can end social security (and no one will have to live in deprivation since... they're getting 300000 dollars.), welfare (see above), and... basically everything. One 300000 dollar payment would replace our entire welfare system, all of our fake jobs, everything. The government would be left with a military comparable to what every other nation in the world gets by with, those few police who aren't chasing traffic offenders and drug addicts, a mail delivery network, some roads, anything it spends on research, and a large number of minor programs that don't really cost anything anyway.
The government already spends about 20000 dollars per person per year. Assuming 2/3rds of its spending were redirected, it would take 23 years to give everyone 300000 dollars. In the end, rich and poor alike benefit, compared to the current system (where taxation isn't cut by 2/3rds in 20 years), or the basic alternative (where the rich and poor fight it out on the streets)
We could also sell government assets. Since these are already publicly owned, no one has any special claim. It's already "the people's" wealth.
Federal oil, coal, mineral and gas reservoirs could be worth over a hundred trillion, potentially sufficient on their own to pay off everyone in one go. It's unlikely a buyer could come up with the cash to buy all that in one go, but just opening the land to leasing would provide a major income stream until they sell. The government owns around a third of America's landmass.
It could also raise trillions by selling its gold, by selling most of its offices, by selling dams, lakes, rails, by selling debt owed to the government and other assets. Individually each item doesn't add up to much, but together its a significant, if difficult to ascertain, net worth.
