What most amazes me is how blatant this is. Late-Stage Capitalism in it's death throes?
The last time there was a multi-country, "common-goal of the general people" popular movement like we are experiencing was prior to World War 1 and the movement away from Monarchy to "Constitutional Monarch" on one end of the spectrum and Communism on the other.
The overwhelming opinion of: "We don't have to live like this." has a very strong force of momentum to it.
Aside from what to call it, I do agree that wealth and power dynamics have got so blatant and cruel, especially in the US. In the last few decades, the public has witnessed countless abuses and breaches of trust from the "elites", those in government and corporations that rule their world. There's systematic exploitation, "wealth transfer", power grabs, and consolidation of society as a human farm.. OK, gotta stop my rant.
We really don't have to live like this, there must be better ways for society to self-organize. As the pressure mounts - it's been building up for a long time, and the ratchet keeps getting tighter - I think it's inevitable that there will be public movements to "take matters into their own hands", since clearly the rulers have lost touch with needs other than their own, long ago.
Retirement age used to be the point where people were physically unable to work, with justifications being that past 65 workers were completely unable to do anything useful [0]. If jobs have changed enough that a 70 year old can be productive (and they can) this represents a reversion to an anachronistic mean rather than death throes.
If you want death throws of capitalism, look to whatever [1, 2] changed in the 1970s that delinked wage growth and productivity; the pressure that forced the US to abandon the gold standard is probably also the pressure responsible for a lot of other ills that are building with time. It isn't a fast process.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_retirement
I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that the retirement age was never universally seen as a reward. If a 70 year old can work, they should work. On basically the same principle as when I say that a 40 year old who can work, should work.
If they can't work then fair enough; 70 is a delicate age and life gets really hard past the early 70s. But it is a reasonable policy to say that the official age is 75 and then find a different way of filtering out people who can't work for health reasons.
All those stories about how automation and technology would enable people to work less have two sides. They're very appealing with workers. They're grim horror stories for those who define themselves by how many people they control and how much value they get those people to produce for a low price.
Besides, pensioners aren't even in the same category as unemployed people who you can attempt to shame or starve back into the workforce. Setting pension levels is effectively setting a standard of living for pensioners. What are they supposed to do if it's cut below acceptable levels?
It is very much an economic one. It simply comes down to stuff. If you have 50 million people in your country then you need 50 million people's worth of food and other goods. If 20 million of them are retired or children then the other 30 million has to produce enough to cover themselves and the 20 million. If the balance gets worse with 30 million not working and 20 million working then you're already in a situation, where society can't really continue down that path. And this balance is getting worse in the developed world.
The only way to afford this is by reducing people's quality of life by simply having less stuff for people. This means less healthcare, worse (less) food, less safe equipment, worse entertainment etc.
If you don't have enough stuff, then you don't have enough stud. No moral decision is going to change this.
>What are they supposed to do if it's cut below acceptable levels?
Then it's below acceptable levels. Welfare programs aren't old things. They haven't been around forever. In fact, many would even argue that the way we could afford many welfare programs until now is by borrowing from future generations. Eventually that's going to catch up to us. Some generation is going to be screwed by this.
Sure. Then it becomes a question of who gets the stuff. A situation where you import 50 million people's worth of food, let 10 million waste 20 million's worth of it, and let another 10 million go hungry: is that moral or sustainable?
Remember this is all being eaten by automation from the other end. If you no longer have enough human-requiring jobs that everyone can have one who is capable of working, what then?
Eisenhower:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
But you will always have food waste regardless what system you have. That's something already considered in calculations for how much food a person would need. Not doing so would be foolish, because it's irrelevant what system you have - food will still be wasted.
>Eisenhower's quote.
Eisenhower's quote is interesting, but it leaves out comparative advantage. In this case, money indeed is not the whole story. Somebody that's good at making weapons could very well be rubbish at producing food.
There's also the fact that you need to be able to defend yourself and your interests. It doesn't matter how much food you produce if somebody else just takes it from you. The modern world relies heavily on trade, but this trade requires that there is some military might on most countries. Otherwise they'll just be taken advantage of.