[LikesToLose]

You admit there are problems to solve? Like what, human nature?

The problem with your whole philosophy is that you don't see yourself as greedy, but you are. You want to have an "upper middle class" livestyle, without having to work the majority of your life. I put upper middle class as around $80k per year, maybe your expectations differ some, but let's just use this as an example. The US average household income is about $42k per year and that includes the huge incomes generated by the ultra wealthy. How do we acheive $42k? In general, people dedicate themselves to a productive career that has a high expected return, money being only 1 of the measures of return. They work overtime, they get an education, they show up to work on time, all the time, earn promotions and move up. They also find other ways to generate income other than being an employee, like starting a business of some sort, investing time, energy and money into 'passive income streams'. In short the average of $42k is achieved by an average dedication and talent.

To reach upper middle class income of approximately twice the average, it requires above average investment of dedication and talent, or another way, is that to get above average returns, one must generate above average results. A network technician makes more money and has more interesting work than a grocery bagger because her has invested more effort in learning his trade and has more talent to invest in his career. In many cases, 30, 40 even 50 years of dedication are devoted to a given profession to earn the current average.

Real estate investing would be another great example. It offers great rewards and is capable of generating this passive income stream. Some sort of asset building enterprise such as this would allow you to build an income of the upper middle class without having to work in a shorter period of time than working. Perhaps as little as the 10 year period of which you speak.

What will it take to get there? Let's see: Education in successful real estate investing, tenent management, local city ordinances, taxes, accounting, household repair. Experience: You must become an expert in all of these facets of the business and only time will and learning from mistakes will make you an expert. Time: You will have to devote additional time to the business, outside of a normal job. It is not uncommon for small business owners to spend 100+ hours a week working for themselves. In real estate, you may have to fix a leaky water line immediately to avoid a $4,000 repair job on the floor support. Risk: You are putting a $100k property into the hands of someone who doesn't have enough responsibility to keep a good credit score. There is an element of risk there I think.

Now lets get back to your ideals of communism, where everybody is able to achieve an income of twice the average, only by taking their turn doing some work. I would love to work for 10 years, not really have to dedicate anything but my time and achieve the same results. That would be great. Maybe I could bag groceries for a while, or work on the loading docks, then when I'm thirty, I can retire and pull down $80k a year retirement for the rest of my life.

The problem is that in order to have the things I have today, someone had to take a risk, start a business, build my car, my lawn tractor, my backup generator, my kids Christmas presents, wife's spa days, etc, etc, etc. All the [censored] I buy that makes me upper middle class. But nobody is putting forth any sort of above average effort, because like me, why would you take any risk or devote anything extra? Who is going to open a hardware store, a spa, start a factory, make the toys. There is no reward. After ten years, or twenty, or however long you dedicate yourself to a pursuit, you get the same thing as if you dedicated the minimum. What about doctors? They study for about 12 years post high school before they actually become doctors. If you choose to be a doctor, do you have to work your whole life or 22 years, because your schooling isn't considered working? Or do you just study for 10 years, and retire and we have no doctors?

Which all leads (at great length) to the fact that we couldn't achieve today's average income of $42, with the current extrordinary, lifelong effort that we put in. To acheive $80k household income with 10 years of minimum effort is not some lie by the ultra rich to keep you working, it is basic fact. Who is going to produce the stuff that you want with your upper middle class income? And if you can't buy the same stuff you can today with $80k, are you still upper-middle class?

Foreigners? What, the Chinese don't deserve to live in your utopia and you expect peace? This can't be right because that would turn them into the slaves and there would be revolt and war. So now we have to take the world average salary of 59 cents per year (Just making that number up) and give everyone double the American standard of living. That's great, except that the US has about 5% of the populate and uses about 30% of the earth's resources. Perhaps there is some math that I'm not aware of, but this doesn't seem possible.

There are no robots or current technology that can solve these problems. If you want to imagine a magical solution that we can mine all the resources we need from astroids and that a robot can be invented and produced for pennies that will handle the grunt work and allow everyone to live very high on the hog for nothing, then take a look at the industial sector, all the way back to industrial revolution. This is the biggest area of productivity increases from automation ever, IMO and 'greed' messes it all up.

Let's focus specifically on clothes. Clothes used to be made from wool sheared from the family sheep by dad and woven by mom. People generally had only a couple sets of clothes that they wore every day. If they were lucky, they had a nice set of clothes for Sunday church. Now, along comes automation and the farmer sells his wool to the factory and buys clothes. But of course, the owner of the factory needs to charge more for the clothes than he pays for the wool because he has to pay for the machines and the people that run them and he of course has to eat, too. So the farmer raises more sheep that wool he uses and the wife doesn't have to make clothes anymore, so now, she helps raise sheep. But the net effect some people work in the factory, some people raise sheep and some people are out of work because clothes are being made more efficiently and there is not enough demand for wool for everyone to raise more sheep.

Now, this would be fine, except for 'greed'. For some reason, people want newer clothes. They want different sets of cloths. Follow this increase of efficiency to today. We now have closets full of clothes for every member of the family and people keep buying more and more. If people were satisfied with what they had, we would all still were very durable, wool tunics like they did in medieval times. I want better clothes than that and so do you.

I also apparently need 2 cars and three tvs, a cell phone, 3 VCR's and 2 DVD players, a Playstation, hot tub, etc, etc, etc. Is it that people can't afford a house on 1 income or that they can't afford all other crap that didn't exist before 1950?

No increase in productivity will ever lead to your utopia, because human desire has no real limits. You say 'upper middle class' lifestyle. That means that you can buy or do almosts anything you really want to. What you really want is to be one of the ultra rich and have no finacial limits placed on you, but you don't want to have to work for it. So to make yourself feel better and superior to capitalist pigs, of welfare cheats who want to government to buy them cable and a color tv, you invent this utopia and it is everybody else buying into the myth of capitalism that prevents you from having what you think you are entitled to. We are all fighting for a slice of a limited pie, except you want to magically make the pie 1000 times bigger and split it equally.

Have a great day
Mark

PS: True democracy is as scary as pure capitalism.