It’s very good to see someone as influential as Sam talking about this. The idea that automation can be used (intentionally!) to lower the cost of living to zero has been a key component of my personal writing and work for some years now. [1]

There is a lot that I agree with here and some things I disagree with. For example capitalism can encourage value creation but it can also encourage rent seeking. Since I have been focused on the idea of lowering the cost of living I’ve come to see rent seeking as a direct antagonist to that goal. Taking something that could be distributed for free and adding a cost to it makes it much harder to bring the cost of life to near zero. The most common way this is done is with intellectual property, and I’ve found several helpful critiques of IP restrictions [2][3][4] that have led me to believe we’d be better off phasing them out and intentionally collaborating with one another.

But my biggest disagreement with Altman here is about the means of producing equity in society. I think the proposed tax and UBI would be good. But I don’t think it is the best solution.

The elephant in the room here is that Socialists have been working very hard for two centuries to try to understand how to organize an industrial society in such a way as to provide a decent and fair life to all.

We’ve completely vilified the notion of socialism in USA to the point that we never even learn about it. Richard Wolff talks about getting an Ivy League economics education in the USA and never being required to read a single word of Marx.

Unlike many socialists I think I broadly agree with what most libertarians believe, and we simply use very different terminology and frameworks for understanding the solution. So I support for example left market anarchists aka left libertarian capitalists like the folks at the Center for a Stateless Society.

But I think the most significant point is one made by David Harvey, a teacher and scholar of Marxism. Harvey says that wealth redistribution is the lowest form of socialism.

The actual point of socialism is not to capture the wealth from capitalists after they have it in their accounts. Instead you change the structure of the organization so that at the point of wealth creation all of the workers and perhaps all of society has some stake in it. The simplest example comes from Richard Wolff, who draws on Marxism to essentially advocate for an increase in worker owned cooperatives. Such an organization could still have whatever leadership structure they wanted, but they would get a vote on who was in charge and they’d make sure pay was fair for all. Socialism is a complex and well studied subject so I cannot relate it all here.

But I will say, Altman’s proposed fund is one way of ensuring all workers and all of society have a stake. I strongly prefer using means of organization that automatically benefit everyone without the means of a state to intervene. For example the state protects intellectual property restrictions for certain qualifying works. If we were to stop providing those protections, then the moment a work was created everyone on Earth would receive more benefit than if it was restricted. We could provide every book ever written for free. Car companies could start sharing part designs and standardize on parts to reduce costs to all. When the patents on 3D printers expired the price dropped from $25k to $300 in ten years.

I am glad we can ask ourselves how to make this world more equitable for all. Please consider that this has been the goal of socialism for as long as it has existed, and if you reading this are from the USA like I am, you may deeply misunderstand what socialism really means. Regardless of your view I think we can all learn a lot from people like David Harvey. Check out his podcast for a view in to his thinking. [5] See also Economics For People by Ha-Joon Chang [6]

[1] http://www.tlalexander.com/machine/

[2] http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

[3] https://youtu.be/GZgLJkj6m0A

[4] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

[5] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPJpiw1WYdTPmOmC2i3hR4_aR...

[6] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmtuEaMvhDZbNVIDHA-MTVH0s...