Every human has some claim on the commons. Do you know how many families have been destroyed by failed businesses? How can you have opportunity when you live in grinding poverty and are easily exploited? While it is true that "hard work" is an aspect of what created wealth in our society, a lot of wealth also comes from the biosphere, natural resources, a cultural commons of ideas, as well as luck and genetics. Why should people not have a claim on at least those aspects of societal wealth even if they work not at all or have not inherited capital from their parents? The issue is ideology which defines how things work at the moment in a certain social system built on certain social assumptions with a certain physical infrastructure that reflects those assumptions and values. Why should jobs be the only justification for a right to consume, especially in an age of increasing automation? From:
    "The Triple Revolution"
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm [educationa...ocracy.org]
"""
    The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
    The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
    There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system.
"""

From:
    "The Mythology of Wealth"
    http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 [conceptualguerilla.com]
"""
Many citizens of western industrial democracies like to believe that they have transcended their "superstitious" pre-scientific past. In fact, a central tenet of our industrial culture is faith in its "rationalism". Much of the political debate centers around "rational" social and economic policy. In fact, progressives frequently fail to take into account "cultural" forces that frequently work against rational policies. Progressives regularly bemoan the "ignorance" that cheap-labor conservatives are so good at exploiting to prevent seemingly obvious improvements in society. In fact, the cheap-labor conservatives have counter-attacked with their own "rational" theory to justify their hierarchical world-view. Some call it "Social Darwinism", though more politically savvy cheap-labor conservatives avoid that term. The purpose of this "rational theory" is to establish that the existing social order is the "natural order". Elites enjoy wealth, privilege and status because of their inherent superiority. The place where this natural hierarchy is established, is that mythical place known as the "market".
"""

A future of increasing automation where the results are not shared is not a world of middle-class millionarie wannabees; it is a world of imprisoned or gassed millionare-wannabees:
    "Manna" by Marshall Brain
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]

Jobs = (Demand - (Stockpiled_Supply - War)) / (Automation * Good_Design)

Demand is ultimately limited (or grows slower than productivity) because the best things in life are free or cheap. With more automation and better design, there is less need for work.
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html [whywork.org]
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. "