I'd like to quote here who should be your favorite economist: In the long run we're all dead.

The upcoming crisis will cost countless jobs (and possibly countless lives) and it will have nothing to do with tech unemployment. How about we worry about the problems at hand and not the ones that may come up in 2050? Because for tech unemployment to ever become a problem we need to live long enough.

But I guess you want wealth redistribution now? In other words, you want the government to take away your neighbor's property at gun point and hand it to you?

At least he finally admits it. Yes, we should all share and sit around and sing kumbaya, and it shouldn't matter that some people are stupid and lazy and self-destructive and wasteful and ignorant, we should just go right ahead and give them an equal share of everything others have worked hard to earn.

Right. I'll get right on that.

some insightful posts here.

Because the Soviet system worked so well. AKA "We pretend to work, and the government pretends to pay".

For the record, jobs went to 3rd world countries because American workers got greedy and were being lazy. It got to the point where so many factories were unionized and demanding obscene pay to do very simple jobs and slack off a lot. For example, the union workers destroyed the one great American steel industry. So everyone saying greedy corporations sent jobs overseas should take a long hard look at the facts and realize that greedy workers demanding $30 an hour to tighten bolts on an assembly line caused management to look for a better alternative.

AND everyone has this cheapass mentality nowadays and they want rock bottom prices for everything, forcing companies to find ways to lower production costs. Decades ago the American consumer was very picky about quality, warranty, brand loyalty was stronger, etc. Nowadays the culture is all about getting the cheapest price.

That, my friend, is called a False Dichotomy.

For the record: All civilizations that collapsed before were extremely centralized. Some of them, like the Easter Islands, directed all their ressources towards one goal, and worked "as one". Our civilization as it is can't collapse in it's entirety because it is still too de-centralized. Politicians are working hard to change that, but they are not yet there. We can, of course, have a world wide financial collapse - again, because the financial world is too interconnected and too centralized.

Interestingly, the problem of centralization and interconnectedness was entirely ignored in Jared Diamond's otherwise very interesting book "Collapse". Wonder why? It is the topic of Vernor Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky" and Dimitry Orlov's "Five Stages of Collapse". Interesting reads, all of them, for those who wonder why and how civilizations collapse.

Give me one historic collapse of a de-centralized civ (not conquest) and I will consider you less of a narrow minded totalitarism monger. What I mean is something like the Greek civilization. It never collapsed and in a way, it still survives.

Modern civilization is too technologically advanced therefore cannot become more decentralized than some threshold, after which hi-tech products will start to disappear (space flights at first, then jet airliners, then microprocessors and so on). I agree that many countries now are too centralized, but going "all-in" to decentralization is not a good idea!

There are examples when small decentralized civilizations were conquered by a more centralized one due to superiority in the technologies [related with above post].

It is indeed a question why people are like that. Why do Western tourists in India or Thailand eat McPinkSlimeBurger (TM) when you can get 1001 excellent and healthy dishes within a 50 yards circle and for less money? If you can answer that question, you know why Anarchy has to fight uphill battles. Anyway, libertarian societies just need reforms from time to time. But how about collectivism?

Collectivist ideas may look good, but every time in history they ended like this:

No you can't - Killing fields, Gulag, KZ are not things companies come up with. Companies want to sell. Killing your customers is bad for business.

The only company that ever killed substantial numbers of people on their own accord was AFAIK the East India Company. And that company grew so big and ugly that it turned into a government. But even they killed orders of magnitude fewer people than collectivists like Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao or the Holy Inquisition.