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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

In the last 100 years yes, there is no debate on this. However, since the mid-80s / 90s, the middle class has been completely crushed to a no return point (in most developed countries, not only the UK) and pretending the system is still working is at best dishonest. We are not even in a financial crisis right now but the system never recovered at all from 2008, in almost 10 years now. I can only guess what will happen on the next crisis... Having a jobless society where all the stability and balance of power is based on jobs is obviously not working very well at the moment.

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But that has nothing to do with the EU! It's a global trend, completely orthogonal, and will manifest itself even stronger in a Britain outside of the EU! This is the tragedy about this whole ordeal - it's those that have voted 'leave' with the most conviction that will be hit hardest by the consequences, because they can not discern macro trends that are and are not caused and/or influenced by the Parliament and Commission.

> It's a global trend, completely orthogonal

Maybe. Maybe not. Developed countries have been largely centralizing power over the last twenty years. It's possible that has effects on the middle class. So Brexit could be a particular reaction to that.

It has everything to do with the EU. It is globalism that has caused this, and the EU is a massive globalist force, pushing globalist policies on people against their will. A nation having the ability to defend itself against economic warfare is the only way to do anything about it.

You know what's an even bigger globalist force? Technology. Everything from your computer to your car is stuffed full of specialized parts and materials from a huge number of countries, many of which can't be produced locally at all or require factories that are economically infeasible without a global market. Saying no to globalism is also saying no to almost all the technological advances of the past few decades.

You can have trade without globalism. You don't need to give up control over your nation to foreign entities.

Good luck not giving any power to Google, Microsoft, Intel,...

You don't rule your way out of not adding value. If you have millions of people jobless, that's a problem with or without EU, with or without capitalism. And no, basic income is not a solution. First, there is no money to maintain millions of people that do nothing. Second, it creates very perverse incentives, especially if those people vote. Hint: they will vote politicians that promise to increase basic income, even if that means destroying the part of the country that produces value (if you want to see an example of this scenario, look at Italy and its pension system which is a sort of basic income for certain privileged classes).

"there is no money to maintain millions of people that do nothing". You underestimate how technological advances boost productivity. Consider driverless trucks: As soon as they are legal, companies will adopt them very quickly because of the obvious savings. Naturally, millions of truck drivers will be unemployed but the overall production stays the same (or even rises slightly). Thus it WILL be possible to pay all of these truck drivers a basic income without damaging anyone else's livelihood. Extrapolate this trend to other industries and you will see that in a few decades, it is completely possible to automate away most work while still paying the former workers approximately what they were earning before.

More fundamentally, you are making the mistake of thinking of work scarcity as a fundamental problem when technological advances are rendering work less and less scarce every year.

Yeah, they have been saying this since the industrial revolution, we are still here.

It recovered. You just dident get any of it.

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