Faith as Political Capital
Faith is not of the material world-so is it the "thin air" we keep hearing about?
There is a writer on Medium who keeps posting that “85 million jobs will disappear in the next four years, plus 40% of all jobs in the next fifteen years. substantiating his claim with the above link, which leads to a story by International Business Times headlined as “Report: Robotics Will Eliminate Millions Of Jobs In Coming Years, But Create Nearly As Many” The first paragraph in the report also makes the point that some jobs will be lost and others, possibly more, will be created as technology evolves at a faster and faster pace.
It is a common disinformation tactic to take a quote out of its essential context to betray its intended meaning. I pointed out the missing context in the comments the first time I read the same quote with the same link in a previous story by the same author, and then again the second time. Eventually, the author responded by justifying the misrepresentation of his referenced source by claiming that he didn’t believe the second and third points in the article, but he was using the article to substantiate his own belief- that jobs would disappear with nothing to replace them.
The author’s substantiating reference did not substantiate his beliefs. His altered version of what the substantiating reference reports is a doom and gloom vision of a future in which there is mass unemployment. If the author were not so certain of the inevitable outcome, he might instead conceptualize the jobs of the future, which is what the organization referenced, in the link referenced by Mr. Brock, does as a report by the World Economic Forum.
Summarization of three key points in the jobs report produced by WEF.
Automation will wipe out 85 million jobs across 15 industries and 26 economies by 2025
New jobs will be created in the fields of data, artificial intelligence, content creation, the “green” economy and cloud computing
By 2025, machines will take over jobs requiring data processing and routine manual tasks (Report: Robotics Will Eliminate Millions Of Jobs In Coming Years, But Create Nearly As Many)
The story by Mr, Brock is titled Universal Basic Income Will Be A Colossal Failure and subtitled “unless we seriously consider how to pay for it”
In a world where there will be massive unemployment, Mr. Brock recognizes a need for a UBI. Mr. Brock’s solution for paying for a UBI is the government playing the stock market and using the profits to fund a UBI, arguing that otherwise the government has only two ways to pay for a UBI- with fiat currency, or raising taxes on the rich. He didn’t say what means the government would use to pay for its stock investments. He is as confident in the profitability of playing the stock market as he is certain about the impossibility of new job creation.
Throughout Mr. Brock’s reasoning, he asserts beliefs as a substitute for research and analysis. This is important because, in the mix with changes in jobs, as the world turns, is an equally rapid rise of the politics of disinformation. In a purely imagined conversation with Mr. Brock, I point out that the article he referenced is about a jobs report by the World Economic Forum, and he dismisses it for being produced by “the establishment”.
My Brock calls his solution (the government playing the stock market), “a commons-focused economy” in which “countries, states, and cities will be shareholders in a majority of these corporations and use their portion of the profits to deliver UBI to the masses.”. Mr. Block supports the UBI- with the comment “who doesn’t like free money?” He opposes funding a UBI using the usual government means, that of printing money or collecting taxes, instead suggests changing the form and function of governments with not a thought of Constitutions, which might have input regarding the government functions he wants to institute.
Mr. Brock’s first objection to a UBI being funded by printing money is not about UBI, it is a conventional argument against unbacked fiat currency, a popular mantra among cyber currency advocates, who pitch cyber coin as inflation-proof because it is backed by limitations imposed on future production of cyber coins, by the digital government of cyber coins. The promotion of cyber currency becomes increasingly irritating in proportion to an increase in advocating cyber currency as a phenomenon that will replace constitutional governments with blockchain governance based on little more than a monetary policy, and/or contracts embedded in the blockchain.
In the present, cyber coins are continually being mined as the imposed limitation on the production of cyber coins resides in the future. The belief that the cyber coins will reach a limit on production, whereafter no further production will occur, rests on a faith in the digital governance of cyber coins built into the blockchain system. invented out of thin air, if anything is.
Digital data compilers are posited as more moral than humans who develop and program them. As we live in a world that is more and more automated in all of its operations, how can we be sure that there are not secret mechanisms programmed into the system? I don’t think most people of ordinary understanding can know that. I don’t know if anyone can, but, getting back to the subject of a UBI being “printed out of thin air”- that just means all fiat currency is printed out of thin air, supposedly not backed by anything, when in fact it is as much backed by faith in a governing system as is blockchain technology.
Another assertion that I see gaining steam in current dialogues is “The United States is a failed state”, stated as fact, or perhaps in hopes of a self-fulfilling prophesy, not as an opinion or a question. In the current political climate, there is some justification for that opinion, given the events on January 6, and the new cultural partisan divide wherein the two sides believe in contradictory “truths”. Whether a state is failed or not comes down to whether or not the people have faith in the government. It is also the same with currency. Being backed by gold does not confer stability, stability is conferred by the larger community of man’s faith in the currency, backed by gold, or otherwise. ( See Churchill’s Greatest Mistake: The Gold Standard — Market Mad House- for an interesting history of the gold standard)
The US government (and any government) is more than a mere monetary system. The US government exists by the rule of law of the United States Constitution, philosophically premised on individual freedom. The USA has its problems but a more deeply entrenched public-private corporate state, than we already have, as proposed by Mr. Brock, is not the solution. If a government is to serve the common good, it needs to separate itself from the interests of corporate profits to serve the common good of all factions, including the natural environment. What happens in Mr. Brock’s solution when the government is confronted with a conflict of interest between its own for-profit investments and the common good? That is an already existing problem, not a solution.
Large corporations are not the whole economy, they are a faction within the economy, but when the government centrally manages the economy, it tends to reduce the economy to large interests, only, and create special interest laws that are oppositional to the concept of serving the common good- defined as a good that is common to all, large and small, rich, and poor.
The Federalist Papers, particularly Federalist Paper #10 delves into a discussion of factions. The fairest and best way to deal with factions is to create laws that apply commonly to all, but even then there is no assurance that the rule of law will be continued to be honored by the participants in the state. As Constitutions are disregarded, and judicial precedence abandoned, the rule of law erodes, and with that faith in government and therein is the failed state and the unstable currency.
I for one do not believe the United States is a failed state. We shall overcome this too, but only if we can return to a mutual standard of truth, which instills faith and confidence.