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Comment by PickledHotdog | Hacker News Reader

Who's to say that "contributing to society" is entirely encompassed in the idea of "work" though? Perhaps those posters contribute in other ways?

Plenty of valuable contributions are made outside of traditional "work"

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You can contribute in any way that people who have worked to create food, shelter, useful energy, clothing, and other items that you want are willing to exchange for those contributions.

Call it work, call it art, call it whatever you want, but those people aren’t likely to bust their ass so you can enjoy the fruits of their labor while returning nothing.

I’m in favor of people contributing to society and I find meaningful work to be necessary to my own well-being but the idea that people need to make something productive in order to compensate others who do is laughable in a world where capital gains are so superior to wages.

Why? Labor with capital is incredibly more useful and productive than labor alone. We aren't any smarter today than people a couple hundred years ago, the main difference that makes our lives much easier is we've built up various forms of capital over the years.

> Why?

Because people who owns the capital don't have to work and still hugely profit from society that's why.

Also we innovated and built machinery not capital. Don't confuse the abstraction we use to track ownership with what is actually owned.

We built machinery, processes, IP, etc using saved and invested capital. That machinery wouldn't be built without the capital. And thus labor would be nearly valueless. The machines and processes also stop functioning when the ownership structure is destroyed as we have recently seen in the Venezuelan oil wells. With capital its very much the virtual (ownership) driving the creation, maintainance and operation of the real (machines, processes, etc).

Much work is really damaging and is worse than doing things that don't pay.

Like what?

Every single useful open source program that was made by a community

I mean, isn't that just working for free? If the only means towards contributing to society were through things like open-source, you would essentially be saying that society should be run off of volunteerism.

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