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Current Events » in reply to "Are jobs obsolete?"

Re: "Are jobs obsolete?"
TB — (archived)

One of the problems with the essay is it makes the mistake, common nowadays, of thinking of a "job" as a mechanism of distributing wages and benefits to a person.

In the free market, a "job" is somebody doing something or making something useful that someone is willing to pay him for.

If nobody is willing to pay for it, there really is no "job." This is why jobs come and go, and why entire industries come and go.

Rushkoff is simply trying to cut to the chase, and assumes that we (who's "we?") can just distribute the wages and benefits, and whether or not somebody does something to earn it is completely irrelevant.

The wealth still has to be produced, and for the foreseeable future, people are going to have to produce it.

It doesn't take a lot of thinking to see where this idea would end up. And of course, that's where nobody wants to go with the discussion. The planet is littered with the ruins of those who thought they could "fix" the process.

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