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Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

> Attaching profit motives to basic infrastructure

Water, food, housing, healthcare, telecommunications, computing (including artificial intelligence). I guess it's "socialist" to believe that these baseline needs should be, and can be, free for all of humanity.

One day we'll look back and laugh at the stupidity of our current state of civilization, that we'd need to pay anybody anything to live on this planet that provides all those things and more for free. Pity us, future people, I hope we grow up soon.

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> Water, food, housing, healthcare, telecommunications, computing

> planet that provides all those things and more for free

This planet does not provide healthcare, telecommunications, or computing for free (unless you consider nature's "the sick get eaten" approach "healthcare"). Housing is only free if you either don't value the labor or you are fine living in caves. Water and food could be free if you're only interested in drinking from rivers and foraging for fruit, otherwise we're back to whether or not you value the labor in farming or building the infrastructure for water collection and transport.

(for the record, I think those things should be all funded by taxes. I just think it is silly to claim the planet provides those things for free. We created those things, through millennia of toil.)

It's not free but that is why it's useful leverage in such a skewed economic environment. Some people are too greedy and a subset of them are too rich. They do not act in the interest of their subordinates or even the country they claim to care about. Sociopaths who would rather build a billion dollar bunker and watch the world burn compared to leading society in any way that matters have taken over.

Managing resources is a basic function of government. Spooking people out of using their government to manage them is an ancient strategy that broken, wealthy people use to elevate themselves.

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