[Baltar]

Originally Posted by InterfaceLeader

Unfortunately, as in Edwardian Britain, if you let salaries get driven down too far the workers can't afford to eat, let alone pay for brain surgery. Before Russia turned 'communist' or China turned Socialist, the people were quite literally starving in the streets.

I don't know much about China's history, but you're wrong about the Soviet Union. More people starved under the communist regime than under the czarist regime that preceded it. Read this: Overpopulation.Com » The Soviet Famines of 1921 and 1932-3

In the space of little more than a decade the Soviet Union managed to inflict two devastating famines on its people and provide a blueprint for how governments could and would transform limited natural disasters into full blown starvation. The famine of 1921 began with a drought that caused massive crop failures, including total crop failure on about 20 percent of Soviet farmland (1). Although certainly a disaster of large proportions, such periodic drastic crop failures were not unknown in Russia. A similar drought struck in 1892, for example, which led to the worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia.

The comparisons between the droughts ends, and the tragedy begins, when the Bolsheviks reacted markedly different to the natural disaster. Tsarist officials arranged for the delivery of food supplies to the affected regions which, in combination with private relief efforts, kept deaths down to 375,000 to 400,000. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, simply ignored the famine until it was largely too late. Unable or unwilling to admit natural disasters could strike in the worker’s paradise, Lenin took actions to protect himself politically but did nothing to prevent the starvation. In May and June 1921, Lenin ordered food purchases abroad, but earmarked them for the politically important cities rather than for starving peasants. Bolshevik leaders avoided visiting the areas suffering from famine.

Originally Posted by InterfaceLeader

Just because someone can be easily trained, doesn't mean something isn't hard work. I would not enjoy cleaning up sewerage, it would be 'easy', but hardly satisfying. If you clean up the middle classes sewerage and don't even get paid enough to feed your family, there's something out of whack. Without sewer workers, we'd be drowning in the proverbial, and just because sewerage workers are 'expendable' is no reason not to treat them like human beings.

The point is that supply/demand shows that it's a lot easier to find people to perform physical hard work than mental hard work. Just because some jobs are dirty and physically exhausting doesn't make them eligible for high wages (and in the future we'll probably have automated robots doing most menial work). Many countries have minimum wage laws to help out the poor, but these have to be kept in check or they can negatively affect the economy.

The world has never been a fair place, although things have improved significantly for a lot of the world's population in the last 100 years. However, economics is a subject that's fairness-blind, so there's no point in trying to reconcile the two. In the end the only way we're going to have humane economic fairness in the vein of what you desire is if a lot of things become commodities. In other words a Star Trek kind of world where energy is cheap, food is abundant, and most physical objects are abundant commodities. This can happen eventually (possibly even in our lifetime) because of advancements in nanotechnology. But that's the only way it will ever happen. The current economic system is based on scarcity, and can't be transformed into one of abundance without actual physical abundance being present.

In a presentation on "The Top Ten Impacts of Molecular Manufacturing," Phoenix predicted that products made using a mature molecular nanotechnology would cost $1 per pound to make. After nanotech factories hit their stride, molecular manufacturing will provide more manufacturing capacity than all the world's factories offer today. We will see the advent of cheap solar power and cheap energy storage, and inconceivably cheap high-powered computers the size of wristwatches. The components needed to put a kilogram of material into orbit would fit inside of a suitcase. Nanotechnology would make it possible for 100 billion people to live sustainably at a modern American standard of living, while indoor agriculture using high-efficiency inflatable ten-pound diamond greenhouses would help restore the world's ecology. The ultimate limit to economic growth seems to be heat pollution, the waste energy radiated away from nanotech devices.