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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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They're also at the mercy of nature and all it entails. And nature is fucking brutal.
And they do pay to exist, just not money. They spend their time seeking food, expend their calories seeking more, risk their well-being to defend what they have from competitors, etc.
And that's how we would live too without exchanging money for good and services. It's just a resource, and no species is free from having to gather and manage resources.
No free lunch
You're right, we all need to acquire resources. The thing is that by law, we don't have the ability to use property without the owners' permission. So unlike a butterfly or something, we can't just do our thing, we have to give over some portion of our energy and acquired resources to other people.
Many people worked hard to start a business or buy land. But not all of them, many people's wealth has some proportion derived from other people's labor. It would be impossible to sort out individually whether an individual "ought" to have what they have. But to avoid reverting to the "natural" state (I'm stronger / there are more of us so I / we are going to take this) we should guarantee that all people have some minimum standard of living.
Even in nature there is property. A lion will defend its territory from other motherfuckers. They will even kill. There is "property" in nature and it's fucking brutal. The butterfly example is ridiculous. You can't compare 1 butterfly with 1 human. A butterfly does not need a lot of resource but human does.
Property is what you're able to keep without having to defend it constantly. There is no property in nature.
You're right nature is brutal. Do we want our lives to be like that? If a homeless person sees a billionaire should they kill them and take over their mansion?
No. The point of society is that we can all have better lives working together than by living as animals.
What I'm saying is that we are not the only species that "pay" to exist. Money is the abstraction of work. That first sentence is a joke, it's ridiculous, it's infuriating. It's not an argument to anything.
I’m with you on this. I get where they’re coming from and we are being taken advantage of but the argument being used is lacking in cognative thoroughness, it’s like a surface or second layer thought being mistaken as deep thinking. I think there’s enough automation in the world that we all could be living much freer lives with more time for building connections, learning and creating rather than having to spend all available waking hours repeating soul crushing tasks to simply pay for food, shelter and some basic future security. Trying to push this idea with flawed arguments is dumb because there are so many flawless ones available.
Honestly, there is probably a good justification to be made that they should. Billionaires hoarding money are a big part of why the homeless exist.
You can compare a “butterfly just doing its thing” to a human though you are right in that don’t need anywhere near as much resource even when factoring in size and lifespan. Even still it follows the same idea, take the plants around it for example. You could argue for many insects and animals this is a limited renewable resource (property albeit unclaimed). The butterfly must work to acquire the nectar. If another animal comes and eats those plants the butterfly must now work harder to acquire the same amount of resources.