No people shouldn't be killed to reduce the population even though there are those who seem to advocate it. Education and birth control are the key. Probably limiting tax deductions for children to two in the US would help. In the US we seem to have a lot "born agains" who feel it is their duty to have large families even if they don't have the wealth to support one. Similarly we have people in impoverished nations who believe they have to have lots of children so some will survive to take care of them in old age. Education and some retirement programs would solve the problem there.
Laissez-faire capitalism has proven to be a big failure. When you have dense populations as the earth now has you need structure not a bunch of free-wheeling goons plundering the resources. We are probably observing the death throws of capitalism. A wise choice would be to eliminate big business (by breaking them up) and making the worlds government be mostly socialist as a safety net and allow small business. This method appeases those who are individualists and want to be their own boss by allowing them to have restricted size businesses. I notice the failure of some many of the socialist experiments was the governments trying to run everything including small businesses. That is inefficient. I've been thinking about this stuff ever since I was involved in TM back in the 70's and got interested in Bucky Fuller's ideas in his books. He'was nailing this problem years ago. He was one who saw we could get to a state where there wouldn't be enough jobs for everyone and the solution would be to pay those who didn't work. As domesticated animals we've been trained to believe that "work" is somehow sacred which is BS. Work is just a means to an end. If it is not necessary then it is not necessary. Creative people will be creative whether they get paid for it or not. Marshall Brain's article uses the example of Linux as such a phenomenon. Scott McNeely, the head of Sun Systems, sees the "open source" model being extended to other things. Old systems of economics weren't made for a world which has been shrunk to the size of a pinhead because of the Internet (which the elite would love to destroy as it challenges their power). James F. Newell wrote: > Getting rid of everyone displaced by automation would create a process > which would lead to human extinction in the end. Of course we do have > to get our birth control up to an adequate level, but I see no reason > to kill people. It would be better to have people work towards > discovering all the spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and other > knowledge which would make it possible to advance all humans to the > most advanced state of consciousness possible. > > Of course, one of the science fiction dreams is to move people into > huge orbital colonies in space, which would solve the population > problem. There are enough metals in the asteroids, a very large number > of cubic kilometers if iron, aluminum, etc. so that would not be a > problem. However, it is so expensive at present to lift mass into > orbit that we couldn't afford to send the first factories into space, > and large numbers of humans. One current cost for sending a human into > orbit I recently read was 100 million dollars. If it were to cost 100 > million dollars per person, it would be a bit difficult to transport > most of humanity to orbital colonies in space. But if we could get the > cost of lifting mass to orbit way down, we could do it. I can't > predict. It depends on what new technology we discover in the future. > > Jim > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Nelson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > >> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <noozguru@> wrote: >> >>> Since I have heard a number of interviews with people advocating >>> stipends due to the decreasing jobs market I went on a search for >>> > some > >>> of them. Here's one proposal and the author has done his homework on >>> the subject: >>> http://marshallbrain.com/25000.htm >>> >>> More detailed information on the impact of technology on the >>> > workforce: > >>> http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm >>> >>> >> snip, >> Maybe, with the population reduction proponents working on it, >> there wont be any problem after all. N. >> >> > > > >
