“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
? Richard Buckminster Fuller
Everyone has to earn a living. Everyone has to have a job. But the compensation for that job, and the job itself may not require that we engage in PRODUCTION in the marketplace. But instead, that we police all society against free riding, we care for and maintain the commons, and provide emergency care and support for one another.
If one performs these duties then of course, one is due compensation for them.If one does not perform these duties, or worse, violates them, then one does not earn compensation on the backs of those who do police, care for, support and provide production. Production is not the only valuable activity in society. In fact, it appears, that labor and clerical work are of near zero productive value. As such, we are all of us due compensation for our policing and maintenance of the commons, including the criminal, moral, ethical and material commons.
There are ‘negative jobs’. The negative job is to actively police yourself and others against free riding on the backs of others. This is a full time occupation without vacation, days off, or commissions. It does not require that you learn a skill other than moral behavior, and it does not require that you engage in production. It does require that you deny others the ability to engage in criminal, unethical, immoral behavior, or lax or destructive treatment of the commons.
Fuller is wrong. We all must have a job. We must be paid for our jobs. But the job of production is increasingly limited to minority of highly productive people. While the job of preventing criminal, unethical, immoral, and destructive behavior is increasingly abandoned by those who suggest that they are due compensation for merely existing. Which simply means that the most degenerate among us have the greatest claim to the productive efforts of others. That cannot be, in an rational or scientific world, considered moral by any stretch of the imagination.
Labor has no value in production. But labor has enormous value in the defense of life, liberty and property via the suppression of all criminal, ethical, immoral, conspiratorial, corrupt behavior.
Profit from production is a luxury good earned by those with greater talents and ambitions. But that luxury good requires the active suppression of free riding in all its multitude of forms in every part of society: criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, and corrupt behavior.