Walmart, Lowe’s, and more are now employing “robot cashiers” – automation allows one cashier to do the job of four. Factories started experiencing this years ago, and as tech improves the problem will become more severe. Automation will soon threaten health care jobs, in roughly a decade. Let’s walk down the timeline here… higher production with less need for the human contribution. What do we do, collectively, when tech allows production of adequate food, shelter, water, and recreation, for all living people, with a 40% unemployment rate? What about with an 80% unemployment rate?

The essence is cheap, incredibly cheap, “robot slave labor”. As energy production becomes cheaper and cleaner, this workforce will become cheaper as well. Even China is losing jobs to automation. This is not science fiction, it’s science future. This is a real 21st century issue. Uneducated labor will become nearly obsolete. Is it right to allow the general populace to achieve prosperity, with better and better wages and shorter and shorter hours? Or do we choose to allow the owners of society to reap the benefits while the vast lower class struggles for even the basics of survival?

Cap executive pay at 40x that of the company’s lowest paid employee. Or even better, mandate that 66% of stock of publicly-traded companies be permanently and equally held by the employees, thus destroying the dictatorship model of corporations and instituting a democratic one.

The current system rewards executives and shareholders for the success of a company, but not the workers. The current system rewards executives and shareholders for the failure of a company, but punishes and displaces workers.

The “owners” (as George Carlin framed it) of our society want virtually the whole pie to themselves, but we ALL helped bake that pie. If we believe fundamentally that people cannot be purchased, then neither can their labors be purchased, since it is an extension of the person. The result of this strong anti-slavery sentiment is that laborer owns their labor, and therefore owns part of the whole that the labor contributes to and sustains. The balance in our economy will be maintained when the workers own themselves, and their time, and that to which their time contributes. Wages are merely a contract for slavery by the hour.

For a hat salesman, Harry S. Truman did pretty dam good.

Obligatory Wikipedia links
Truman Doctrine – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Doctrine

Cuban Missile Crises – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

Harry S. Truman – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S_Truman

So yeah, if you can’t create a job, maybe you could take one, if you’re up to the task.

While Cain does have some what of a point to make, the chance of making even a quasi-comfortable living – much less enjoying the possibility of upward mobility – is all but impossible in today’s political, economic and social atmosphere.

It wasn’t too long ago that one could make a comfortable living right out of high school, support a family, and retire comfortably.

That was the American Dream for most folks – just a chance to work hard, make a good living, raise a good family, and enjoy life.