Life is not a zero-sum game
Imagine a fake world with fake creatures where all anyone needs to do is move bushels. Everyone in this world has one job. They pick up bushels and move them. Everyone gets everything they need from this bushel-moving activity.
So now the world is in stasis. Everyone is equal. All are cared for and fed and thrive equally in bushel-world.
Then one bushel-mover called Bob invents a bushel-moving machine.
This machine is capable of moving *all bushels for everyone*. It requires only sunlight.
Bob uses his machine and spends his extra time doing “other stuff”.
Nobody in this simple society has “lost” anything by Bob’s invention. Bob has merely gained extra time.
Now look at humanity. We have done much of the same, automating the crap out of everything. We have machines to make machines in a leveraged system that produces more than enough resources for everyone on the planet.
But unlike Bob, who just wanted to catch up on reading, we choose to:
- Allow billions to starve
- Worship the Bob’s of the world
- Stop anyone from copying each others inventions machine
- Claim rights over all the resources of the world, beyond what anyone needs
- Hoard access to all resources
Imagine if Bob moved *all the bushels in the world* … and then let them rot rather than share them.
We didn’t have do do those things. And we can still can have a reasonable balance of capitalist, libertarian and socialist ideals.
But it is certainly not intrinsic to the system that there *must* be losers. We just made that shit up.
