Let's pretend everybody has to work their butts off even though agriculture and manufacturing are incredibly efficient. Let's structure society so that people have to slave their lives away at utterly pointless jobs just so folks like you can feel like they aren't moochers.

You are and your ideas are unassailable.

No kidding. There should be no monopoly on distributing published works. Any other book seller should be able to sell wool at whatever royalty rate Amazon is paying.

And yet the author left me wanting more. These are all things that can be learned ... and you're helping!

How about a simple change to eliminate distribution monopoly. Copyright holders, in order to sell their work, have to make their work available to all distributors at a fixed price. So if you write a book, yeah you could fix the price at some astronomical value and publish it yourself, but if you get someone else to publish it and they pay you $X per sale, then anyone else can publish it as well as long as they also pay you $X per sale. Then we could get away from the ridiculous balkanization that we have now. Kindle and Nook (and Sony!) readers would have every book, Netflix and Hulu would be worth watching and so on. In fact, you'd have a million such sites, all with better content then now, and all competing for eyeballs.

You might take a free market approach to such jobs. If you can't pay enough for someone to actually want to do it, they maybe it doesn't need to get done that badly.

Why do we all need jobs if it's possible to make all the shit we need with fewer people? Maybe what the world needs is not more jobs but equitable distribution of corporate ownership. If you have everything you need, maybe you shouldn't work all the time. Maybe you should read a book or write one, or work on your own non-profitable projects?

Yeah, probably.

As long as they don't come here and take our jobs! It's the damndest thing. They get to a rich country and all they want to do is work work work work work.

It's because wealthy, educated women have more autonomy over their own bodies than poor, ignorant women and women generally don't want to have billions of kids while there's always plenty of men who think otherwise.

I wonder why this is modded insightful? Whether you get Social Security or Medicare entirely depends on whether you elect politicians who are willing to support those programs. It's entirely within the ability of Congress to painlessly save social security, and it's even within their ability, though this is much harder, reform the health care system from the crazy system we have now.

Why would you vote for someone who lies to you about this?