>You're going to say that that's theft at gunpoint probably, and I'm going to say I don't have any moral problem with that.

No I'm not going to argue that it's theft at gunpoint, actually. But thanks for trying to paint me into a corner.

What I am saying is that the world is complicated and just because the robots can make enough stuff or grow enough food in a theoretical sense doesn't mean that utopia is suddenly achieved.

>Lastly, I think your viewpoint is pretty evil honestly. So there is a robotic surplus sufficient to feed the world multiple times over in this scenario and people still starve because fuck you I own the robots and I'm only going to help myself? If that's the world there will be a revolution and I'll be on the side of the dirty hippies.

You don't even know what my viewpoint is so I don't see how you can characterize it as evil! I can't believe how quickly this turned into "you must be a dirty libertarian so fuck you!"

I don't particularly LIKE taxes and a world where taxes magically didn't have to exist but I still got to use roads and schools and fire departments and police and stuff, I'd be OK with that. But since none of those people work for free, I accept taxes as necessary even if not my favorite.

> then the government can tax the robots productivity at 10% to achieve the same thing.

OK what you just said there is that the government is going to take all the useful output of the robots and leave the owners with no useful output. If the robots can produce 10x whats needed and the government takes the first 1x then what the owners of the robots do with the other 9x? Nobody needs the other 9x, so by definition they couldn't sell it.

Disagree with me? OK great, I want to sell you a million liters of air at 1ATM for $0.001 per liter. Wait, you already have more than enough air? And everyone else does too? Fuck who is going to buy this air so that I can make good on my investment?!?!

If the robots were going to be taxed at 10% of productivity you'd basically see the total robot workforce get reduced by 90%. If you spend a billion dollars on a factory you need to get your money back and if you can't sell the excess capacity then you're going broke.

The best scenario I can think of is that the robots become so cheap that eventually everyone becomes largely self-sufficient. But even then you'll still have problems because of land ownership; if you can make everything you need just so long as you have access to land then the price of land will go way, way up.

Maybe once you get to space everyone can have as much of whatever that they need and we can achieve rough approximations of utopia but maybe not. Maybe once we get to space everyone wants their own 500 ft luxury spaceliner and there's not enough raw materials to go around.

I think part of the problem is that human desires are basically unlimited. Maybe not everyone has infinite ability to consume, but the human race, collectively, could consume nearly infinite amounts of anything. So any attempt to imagine "well what happens in the future when we can easily satisfy everyone's current desires" accidentally ignores the idea that in the future people will probably have desires that are bigger than they are today.

There was a time when many people shared a large single room house in Europe in the middle ages. Then someone invented the fireplace and the nobility gave themselves their own rooms. Eventually it became common for everyone to have their own room. Then, everyone has their own house/condo/apartment though sometimes shared between several generations. Now in the US it's quite common for a single person of 25 to have their own 1BD apartment or even a whole house. 500 years ago you'd have to have been filthy rich to have that. Today it's possible for someone with a high school diploma and knowledge of a skilled trade to afford it.

500 years from today I agree that meeting everyone's current demands will probably be a joke and the robots will be able to do it all. But what new desires will human beings have that we can't even imagine right now? I'm not saying that a Star Trek economy could never exist, but that I don't foresee it happening do to the fact that human nature will probably be the same.

I apologize for characterizing you a certain way. The viewpoint I was "painting you into a corner" on is unfortunately imo super common on HN.

I think you have a contradiction in your viewpoint though. On one hand you say that human desires are unlimited, and on the other hand you say that if you tax robot productivity by 10% that means that the owners can't sell the other 90%. How is it possible that nobody needs the other 90% if human wants are unlimited?

What I'm saying is that basic human needs are NOT unlimited. A human being is an animal that needs a certain amount of food, clothing, and shelter to stay alive. And furthermore, in the world we live in today, not every human being gets all the food, clothing and shelter necessary to survive. That's an empirical physical fact of reality. What I'm proposing is that the 10% surplus would be sufficient to provide for these needs, NOT for everything that anyone's heart could desire. Now it's possible that in a Star Trek future, the robots could even produce 100x what every human being needs to stay alive. In that case, you could give every human being 10x what they need and still have a 90% surplus. And because as you pointed out, human wants are unlimited, the owners of the robots will still be able to sell the 90% surplus.

BTW, I don't actually believe this is practical to implement today. So I wouldn't advocate this level of massive redistribution. However, in a hypothetical super productive future society, I might.

P.S. If you want to hear my reason why this society ISNT as good as it sounds (which has nothing to do with taxes or the morality of redistribution) see my post here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7255952

Thanks for arguing like an adult. It's greatly appreciated.

I do agree that I have a contradiction in my argument; you're spot on. I'm going to chalk that up to not fully explaining things.

The first gallon of water per day I REALLY NEED to drink. The next I'd really, really like to have to brush my teeth and wash a bit. The next 5 gallons I still really want for washing and cooking. The next 20 are for bathing and laundry. The next hundred don't do me anywhere near as much good and eventually the utility I get from an additional gallon of water goes below the $0.01 per gallon that I pay my utility, so I don't use more.

This kind of decreasing marginal value happens everywhere in the economy. For a lot of things (like energy) the demand is nearly flat but for large portions of the economy the demand is highly nonlinear. In other words, doubling the price might reduce consumption by 80% or more.

In those situations if you take the first marginally very valuable portion of the production away from the factory owners they have to raise prices on the rest to recoup their losses. But the increased prices bring volume down, which could potentially increase prices again.

I am sure that there are some situations where the 10% surplus really would be enough to provide for everyone's basic needs (however the hell you define that) and not totally fuck over the factory/robot owners. But there will also be large swaths of the economy where you can't.

I do think taxes are fundamentally immoral because I can't get past the theft-like nature of "pay the taxes or you'll go to jail" but I'm pragmatic and understand that taxes are better than a completely uneducated populace. And honestly I'd be much happier with a world where taxes were only 10% in total rather than the 20%-40% that they are now. I just don't think you can feed, clothe, shelter, etc the whole world on 10% of total production. It would be great and I'd love to live in that world but I really feel like there's something that would prevent it; I can't put my finger on it but I'm pretty sure it's there.

Well we're debating a totally hypothetical situation. The premise to begin with is that we're talking about a far future post scarcity society. If you want to say that's implausible, sure, I might agree with you, but that's not the issue.

As far as the theft like nature of taxes, we'll just have to agree to disagree. The concept of theft in and of itself only exists in the context of a society where laws exist and are enforced. That society can only exist with taxes. In the jungle, there's only what you can carry and what you can protect, and what stronger people want to take from you. But I can't say more without understanding where you get your morality from. If you get your understanding of morality from religion for example, most major religions justify allowing the government or head of state to use force to sustain that government.

P.S. As far as the marginal value of goods; yes I think you are right in that if you took 10% of each good (like fresh water) and distributed it that way it would probably cause huge economic problems. My guess is that any workable way of implementing this tax would be more complex and progressive, much like our current tax system doesn't tax everything equally. For example, luxuries would probably be taxed more, and basic necessities such as water would probably be taxed less. I have no idea what the details of such a system would be, it would probably take a lot of thought to work out what would make sense.

Part of my hesitance to be persuaded that a Star Trek economy could possibly work is that in some senses it already has. In the 1850s 90% of the people in the US were farmers. Around 1900 that number shrank to 30% and today it now stands at about 3% so farmers can now grow 30x as much food as they used to be able to. But even given a 3000% increase in productivity there are still people starving in the world.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/

Why is that? Well part of it is that making a single farmer 30x as productive involves a LOT more capital. You need tractors, plows, planters, sprayers, combines, and somewhere to store it all. You also need a lot of fuel to make everything go and maintenance to keep it all working. Worse, most of these items can't be co-oped between farmers because they'll all need them at the same time. It's not uncommon for a farmers to have several hundred thousand to several million dollars worth of equipment.

In response to the complexities you've mentioned I think that's the whole of the problem; implementation. The technology exists to feed the whole world at least twice over and probably a lot more. It's not being done in part because of logistics (getting the food there isn't trivial), but primarily because of the political and economic issues. How do we decide who pays for it? I can't see human nature changing, you know?

I guess maybe I have a hard time accepting the premise that somehow the world will get to a place where you can work for a couple of days and live on that for a year.