"Its been fine in the past, and we've always found new jobs to replace those lost for people!" is great, in theory, except for the tiny bit where we aren't finding new jobs to actually replace those lost. Sure, we have been scraping by and finding jobs for people to do, but this is not actually the same as replacements for said jobs. True replacement jobs would have continued on with similar benefits and standings as what were lost.

True replacement jobs for the 50's and 60's manufacturing positions that the US lost would be providing young adults with the ability to afford personal transportation and buying property... What is the home-ownership rates of mid twenties to thirty year olds in North America today? What was it in the 50s? How many are buying brand new cars off the lot vs getting by with a used car or no car at all?

Automation is also posed to obliterate the usefulness of human employment in sectors like transportation and shipping. Call centres and customer support sure aren't immune. (Ever used a company's 'chat support' rather than calling in and waiting on hold? Would you be overly shocked to find out that most of what you see might not have been an actual human doing most of the work, but rather a human guided bot processing half a dozen clients at once?)

Humanity is inventing tools to replace ourselves at a far greater rate than we're inventing new worthwhile things for humans to do to "Prove they deserve to exist".

Maybe it is time to go back and rethink this idea that a human should sit in some job for 40-60 hours a week in order to 'prove' they deserve a place to live, food to eat, and clothes to wear.

Did you take a vacation this year? Why do You deserve a vacation more than the guy who asked if you wanted fries with your last fast food order? (Oh, and his job is fast coming to a useful end. Why would I even want to stand in line and tell another human what I want when I could place that order on my phone before I even get there to pick my food up?)

Making jobs redundant isn't the mistake.

The mistake is continuing to assume capitalism should carry on as is, isolating more and more wealth and power in the hands of an elite class while happily allowing more and more control and effective capital to slip from the hands of the majority. The mistake is in thinking that there is nothing wrong with some humans being able to afford private jets or buying and selling entire islands while those working in their companies may barely be able to afford food, rent, and clothing, let alone being able to afford things like vacations, travel, or reasonable retirement.

Why? It is our nature, and this is not going to change any time soon. It's an evolutionary thing buried deep inside us, and you cannot educate that away in a hundred years, let alone in our lifetime. We like to believe that we are so superior, the image of God. But we are primitive animals. Evolved animals with an opposable thumb over-proportionally sized brain, yes, but still only animals.

Yeah yeah yeah, it's our nature and evolution and all that, except the vast majority of people on the planet don't get to satisfy that "evolutionary thing buried deep inside us" inside capitalism either, but learn to be content working under a boss that gives them a decent wage, at the very best case(hundreds of millions don't even get that). So riddle me this : How come the masses revolt so extremely rarely against the relatively few that hoard vast amount of wealth and resources, if greed is such a fundamental and deeply-buried evolutionary trait of human nature? Most of the time they seem to be quite content with what they've got. Doesn't really seem to compute with the whole "the greed is strong in humans" concept.

Also, some good reading about actual experts in darwinian biology:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/

(whether it's "No to Nuclear" or a svastika flag, there's no real difference)

...oh dear lord.

(Yes, apparenty it's only losers with no 9-5 job and no lawn to mow that are worrying about such minor things as whether their children or grandchildren will have to face severe poverty and unemployment, racism, catastrophic climate change, or a thermonuclear war!)

Making jobs redundant isn't the mistake.

The mistake is continuing to assume capitalism should carry on as is, isolating more and more wealth and power in the hands of an elite class while happily allowing more and more control and effective capital to slip from the hands of the majority. The mistake is in thinking that there is nothing wrong with some humans being able to afford private jets or buying and selling entire islands while those working in their companies may barely be able to afford food, rent, and clothing, let alone being able to afford things like vacations, travel, or reasonable retirement.

those working in their companies may barely be able to afford food, rent, and clothing, let alone being able to afford things like vacations, travel, or reasonable retirement.

.

You are making a bold assumption that a company can afford to do that.

Since every one likes to pick on McDonald's .... they employ 420,000 people. If they game everyone a $2 raise, that would equate to $1,260,000,000 in extra expenses every year.

Now let's throw in 'cheap' health care for another $1,890,000,000 .

If every one who worked McDonald's made $15 an hour that would be about $4,410,000,000 in extra expenses ( $9,450,000,000 for total employee wages ).

( I am assuming a 30 hour work week to get these numbers )

those working in their companies may barely be able to afford food, rent, and clothing, let alone being able to afford things like vacations, travel, or reasonable retirement.

.
You are making a bold assumption that a company can afford to do that.

Making jobs redundant isn't the mistake.

The mistake is continuing to assume capitalism should carry on as is, isolating more and more wealth and power in the hands of an elite class while happily allowing more and more control and effective capital to slip from the hands of the majority. The mistake is in thinking that there is nothing wrong with some humans being able to afford private jets or buying and selling entire islands while those working in their companies may barely be able to afford food, rent, and clothing, let alone being able to afford things like vacations, travel, or reasonable retirement.

Yes. Bingo. You got it.

In the capitalist system, increases in efficiency are always rewarded with more capital, and thus it is an incentivized pursuit, but if the trend towards efficiency increases ad infinitum broadly across the global markets, then eventually the system of capitalism itself breaks down. If capitalism is an economic pyramid scheme, and the people at the top are those who operate businesses and corporations to extract wealth from those below them, then what happens when there is no money left to extract from the base of the pyramid because it's all been extracted to exhaustion? Capitalism is a train which is going to eventually run off a cliff and it's time to start thinking about ways to get off the train before it becomes a train wreck.

One really rotten solution is to create menial, frivolous, redundant jobs with no real meaning or purpose, purely for the sake of keeping people employed. That flies in the face of efficiency and human dignity. Eventually, when the problems of unemployment get worse in a few decades, someone will propose this solution though :P

I don't have any answers yet, and socialism and communism seem to be flawed in important ways, but it's at least important to make the realization that there *is* a problem with capitalism and start looking at ways to gradually shift towards something else, and that "something else" should be a system which minimizes human suffering and maximizes human flourishing. We've been stuck on capitalism for so long that we even define the measurement of human flourishing by the amount of capital we possess. That's kind of messed up.

those working in their companies may barely be able to afford food, rent, and clothing, let alone being able to afford things like vacations, travel, or reasonable retirement.

.

You are making a bold assumption that a company can afford to do that.

Since every one likes to pick on McDonald's .... they employ 420,000 people. If they game everyone a $2 raise, that would equate to $1,260,000,000 in extra expenses every year.

Now let's throw in 'cheap' health care for another $1,890,000,000 .

If every one who worked McDonald's made $15 an hour that would be about $4,410,000,000 in extra expenses ( $9,450,000,000 for total employee wages ).

( I am assuming a 30 hour work week to get these numbers )

Congratulations, you've just reinforced how broken the entire concept of the current capitalist system is. "We can't possibly do that because our arbitrary number values don't easily align, so it is impossible to conceive of way that all these resources that already exist can be easily accessed in a more even manner with less stress and uncertainty for a huge portion of the population. Since I can't do the math on a napkin, I guess the entire concept is impossible and we should all give up."

It isn't a company that should be deciding that everyone deserves access to food, shelter, communication, education, medical care, transportation, and general amenities of life that make it actually worth living, it would be a society deciding that these things are important and as a whole should be worked toward.

There are many different avenues that we could take to achieve such goals, but before any of them have any hope of being considered we first need to break through the "communism is evil, they wants to take all my stuff, and they're all lazy" red scare mentality.

those working in their companies may barely be able to afford food, rent, and clothing, let alone being able to afford things like vacations, travel, or reasonable retirement.

.

You are making a bold assumption that a company can afford to do that.

Since every one likes to pick on McDonald's .... they employ 420,000 people. If they game everyone a $2 raise, that would equate to $1,260,000,000 in extra expenses every year.

Now let's throw in 'cheap' health care for another $1,890,000,000 .

If every one who worked McDonald's made $15 an hour that would be about $4,410,000,000 in extra expenses ( $9,450,000,000 for total employee wages ).

( I am assuming a 30 hour work week to get these numbers )

In a pure capitalistic free market, minimum wage wouldn't even exist. A wage would start at the very bottom ($0.01 per day!) and pretty much be an auction until the wage value reaches an acceptable amount for someone desperate enough to take the job. In India, you can hire a security guard to protect your business for $0.04 / hour. If your labor is a commodity, it is also subject to the forces of economics. The more common your skill, the less it is worth because supply is high. The problem is that there will always be someone more desperate than you to take a lower offer until eventually, you are the most desperate one and will undercut everyone else.

The problem with the $15 minimum wage is that it ultimately becomes the same baseline in terms of purchasing power. If McDonalds pays all their employees $15/hour, then in order to cover the costs of the wage hike, they increase the prices of their product (they won't let this mandate shrink their margins). If you currently make $7/hour and it takes you 35 minutes of work to purchase a hamburger, then when you make $15/hour, it'll still take you 35 minutes of work to purchase a hamburger. Hundreds of other businesses do the same thing, until everything is slightly more expensive (yay, inflation!). I'm in Seattle, where the city has passed at $15/hour min wage law to be gradually phased in, and one of the interesting things we're seeing is minimum wage workers are intentionally cutting their hours so that they still receive welfare benefits from the state. Their earnings have to be below a certain cutoff value, so they're incentivized to work less hours to get more value rather than working the same hours to get more value (which is less after benefits). Whoops :)