[quote=@catchamber]
Not every society where one is unable to gain employment leaves such people to die. Some do, but I find policies held by such societies unacceptable.[/quote]

That was a bit of hyperbole to drive the point home, but not the point itself. I suppose what I am really trying to say is that the contract is invalid because there is no choice involved. It's like being told the only way to engage with society is to eat shit or, conversely, to eat shit. We have to engage with society because, well, we are human, we are more or less built to do that. Most production has been made capitalistic. Statistically speaking, a majority of the people have to live this way, we couldn't all be entrepreneurs even if we really really put in the effort and all had the talent. The current contract stipulates that a certain number of people must work in the service industry, for instance. 

[quote]They don't just sit down and receive money. They manage the division and efficiency of labor, ensure that the facility meets certain standards, and that everyone is compensated as their contracts dictate. If you consider this an effortless set of tasks, you should totally become a CEO.[/quote]

Managers do that. I do believe most people doing that are being paid more than their worth, because I don't buy the roundabout logic of "Their worth is what the market says it is because the market decides their worth." That being said, yeh, you are describing managers. CEO's delegate most of that type of work.

And for the record, I believe anybody in this thread would make an acceptable CEO if we were given a sixth month training course and the opportunity to try. As it stands now, either the stars really have to align for you, or you have to be born to it. 

[quote]In my view, everyone that owns property has the right to retain said property. It doesn't matter if you're an aristocrat or a prole, or if a plurality, majority, or everyone but you thinks otherwise. A society asserting its autonomy and independence from an oppressive government is one thing, but using such conditions as a pretext to steal property is another. In the case of the American Revolution, the colonists were refused the right to representation, and had a claim to independence by virtue of the social contract's violation. In the case of the factory owner and the workers, the employer didn't violate the contracts, so the workers have no claim to repossess her property.[/quote]

This argument is mostly an argument to status quo. You could take this exact same argument and condemn Frederick Douglas violating his own legal status by running from slavery. Both the slave and the worker can claim coercion was used to put them in their place, and if the law of the land fails to recognize that claim, both are within their rights to press the claim by force. For the slave, by stealing themselves away from their master, and for the worker, by claiming the means of production from their employer. 

[quote]Not all revolutions require theft, as societies can peacefully and voluntarily transition from one government to another.[/quote]

Somebody loses every revolution. Even the Glorious Revolution, possibly history's most celebrated bloodless revolution, required the theft of the crown from the Stuarts. This is assuming we are talking about social revolutions and not technical ones like the Industrial revolution, which is another type of thing. 

[quote]Personally, I don't believe in classes. I also don't believe that all welfare and taxes are theft, as it's possible that one could create a government where citizens can refuse to pay taxes on the basis that they lose the right to benefit from public services.[/quote]

You don't believe classes exist or you don't believe they should exist? Because it would be an uphill battle to prove the former. Remember, we are talking classes, not castes. Inter-class mobility doesn't prove the lack of classes. If you can draw a society up by distinct differences in access to portions of that society, then you have classes, and arguing against them is arguing against language. For instance, if you can draw separate bubbles around "People who have the means to buy off a politician" and "People who do not have the means to buy off a politician", you've discovered a class. That's not the only line to draw, but one of many. The argument of people opposed to class warfare is not "There are no classes" but rather "These classes are already in their just and natural positions within society." 

[quote]In my view, everyone on this planet is poor, as they are dependent on the rest of society to provide them with goods and services necessary for them to survive and prosper.[/quote]

All you have discovered is that no man is an island. This detail might be important in a crisis, but so long as society is set at it's normal pace, saying all men are poor because they aren't off-the-grid hermits is sort of silly. Like, it sounds cute, but it's irrelevant.

[quote=@catchamber]
I agree that current corporate law puts significant authority in the hands of shareholders, primarily those that outrank colleagues with fewer shares. I suggest drafting legislation that forces them to become, or limiting your economic support to, companies that guarantee a greater voice to the employees and the shareholders with fewer shares. Shareholders contribute capital, even if they generate it through automated trading. Simply stripping them of wealth and hoping that fixes everything is as foolish as scrubbing a toilet once, and expecting it to stay clean forever.
[/quote]

I feel you are sort of in a weird spot where you think the legal system is in the business of creating laws in, like, an almost scientific sense. You can't really dicker with the internal trading mechanism of capitalism without slowing it down. Any time we pass a law regarding the inner workings of capitalism, we have to consider its effects on trade. Requiring Wall Street to, like, research the ethical code of every company they invest in is just simply impractical, especially when you consider how bundled up the trade system is. 

Your analogy in this case seems to assume that we're talking about a reset revolution; that we strip the investors of their capital, distribute it, and all go to wall street to start a bidding. In a hypothetical Marxist revolutionary scenario, assuming everything goes the way it is expected to, the process of capital accumulation is simply stopped. Instead of portions of labor going into growing pools of individual capital kept by a small cabal of private investors, everyone receives exactly what they put into the system.

[quote]Automation isn't the issue, but how it's applied. FarmBot Incorporated provides open sourced automated farming units that could indefinitely feed the unemployed.

To provide a rebuttal to the Grapes of Wrath quote, "Why the fuck did the man with a tractor accept a contract that turned their asshole into a gaping chasm?"[/quote]

Yeh, how it's applied is the issue.

The political right has a very valid point about how Soviet style Marxism ended up playing out. By putting everything in the hands of a single-party government, the revolutionaries created A: An untrustworthy 'Party Class' of officials and bureaucrats who took a hold of private capital and behaved with it much like any aristocratic class with different privileges than the rest of society, and B: Wrapped up their entire economy in one single fragile social structure. 

That's the problem inherent with basically the popular liberal ideas of how we fix the automation problem. Capitalism has many faults, but it is a very good system for diversifying the assets of a civilization. It's more unstable than total state control, but that problem can be fixed with a comparatively more limited amount of interventionism (unless you are a libertarian, then you see it as an issue of needing more virginal bodies to throw to the volcano god Capitalism.) If we fix automation with government programs to the point that we are all absolutely reliant on the government, we face the creation of a brittle societal core. If the government goes through crisis, the entire system freezes up. This happened to the Soviet Union, and it is happening now to Venezuela. When you put all your eggs in one basket, and you then drop that basket, you lose all your eggs.

If a theoretical left-wing revolution avoids the creation of an ossified state core, and instead successfully manages to divest the productive energy of the society to the people as a mass, this problem goes away. To put it simply; if you require the government to give you everything and that government collapses, you lose everything. If everything is owned democratically by the mass of people, well, it would require humanity to collapse all together to bring down the society. 

I'm not married to the ideas I am arguing for here by the way. I totally recognize there are some glaring flaws here. But I think, generally speaking, any place where you deprive the general population of power is a net negative, whether this be in government or in the economy. Shit, I think the only political idea I am totally married to is the idea of civic engagement as, like, some sort of 11th commandment.