With automation cutting more jobs everyday and the rise of drones in the military, we are facing a new situation. For the first time in the history of mankind the rich don't need the rest of us. We (everyone who isn't rich) have become dead weight. They don't need us in their factories, farms or their armies. Automated plants can provide everything they need and their missile defenses and drones can protect them.
Lets say, just for the fun of it, that the top one percent decides to let the bottom ninety percent sink or swim on their own. They refuse to pay any taxes that support or help. The poor can't find work and since the taxes are down to nothing, there are no safety nets. The slums start to grow in america like they do now in the third world.
Knowing how the right looks at healthcare, I am thinking that there would be little or none available to the poor souls who live in the slums surrounding the shrinking cities. It would only be a matter of time until the overcrowded and unhealthy conditions would start diseases. How long would it take before the bottom ninety percent wasted away?
Could it be that I and all my liberal friends are standing in the way of progress. I have read that the black plague that wiped out so much of european humanity also set the stage for the industrial revolution. The abundance of food and housing made for a better life for everyone and resulted in betterment for all mankind.
Back in the sixties there were countless books and movies written about how the earth would be changed by atomic wars. They all painted a pretty gloomy picture but at the end the survivors, the few that made it, walked out into the sunlit plains of a new world. In one movie the man and the woman were named adam and eve.
This view that good results can come from bad events are part of human nature. So in the spirit of looking for the sliver lining of this dark cloud we are under, I am going to think of the recent republican victory as being like the black plague, or a nuclear war. Just a necessary evil that paves the way toward a greater good.
You cannot look at the republican party as a force for evil or good. They, as well as the democrats, are no more than the left and right rein in the hands of the wealthy as they drive the wagon the rest of us have been pulling. But now they have automated power, they don't need us to pull them anymore. we can't keep up and now dead weight slowing them down.
The real concern is what the rich will decide to do with all this dead weight. Now that there is only one man who stands in their way, and he might be in their pocket as well since he has never revealed himself to be a true liberal.
We were like a kid trying to climb a greased flag pole. We had hoped to reach the flag and win freedom and happiness for all but we lost our grip and now we are slipping down slowly but surely. How far down will we descend? Where will it stop?
We should know pretty soon now.
The rich will always need someone to look down on but they don't need that many. They need poor so they can throw them a few crumbs and feel good about it but they don't need that many. The rich need someone to boss around but they do not need that many.
We will find the rich can make do with a lot less of the common people than there already happens to be. It might be advisable for some people to get off their ass and do a little something useful. While the rich do not need many common people they won't need any useless people. Those who have been life time govt. benefits teat suckers and are teaching their kids to do the same might give it a little thought.