Do the work of 70 slaves!

Which does of course raise the issue of 70 unemployed slaves…From Openfarmtech

Which we haven’t figured out yet. Apparently back in the 1800s a slave cost about as much as a luxury car costs today. In 2009 you can pick up a slave in Haiti for about $50. And slavery is worse today than it was in the 1800s

There’s an interesting series of talks by the guy who wrote The Wire here – about The Wire being about the end of The American Empire.

(part 1 of 3 etc)

I’m in love with the idea of being able to work 2 hours a day to support ourselves – which (as far as I can gather) is one of the aims of the Open Farm Tech project… and at risk of seeming cavalier (as I already have) about one of the (if not THE) worst on-going, trans-millennia tradgedy that humanity has managed to inflict on itself… most of us are (in a diluted sort of way) still slaves. Most of us will spend most of our lives working just to survive… so someone else can get rich. It’s ok. It’s livable. We could do better.

For vast swathes of humanity, NOT being a slave is a life-threatening condition. We’ve created this system based upon scarcity where for the majority of people, if you’re not part of the system, you can’t feed yourself – even if you did have a machine that can do the work of 70 slaves – because the land is owned by someone else, and we’ve let this system evolve where you can’t own/use land without going through a (long) period of dilute slavery.

I’m rapidly coming round to the idea that the biggest problem we have isn’t corporatism, it’s the monetary system. Corporatism is just a byproduct of this.