Wasabisoft

Capitalism contains a fairly efficient and fluid value system: a person, item or service is worth whatever demand for that person, item or service is willing to pay.  Any particular commodity in our society is worth more than a comparable commodity if it possesses some quality that the prospective buyer finds useful.  However, in our society there also exists a curious disconnect that appears to revolve around undue assignments of value; consider, as a baseline example, that a member of our society is allowed to vote (and thus wield extreme power over the direction of our nation) irrespective of their value to society (i.e., why should felons be allowed to vote?).  Similarly, the cutoff for when a growing child is allowed to vote is an arbitrary constant almost completely unrelated to value: age.  What exactly makes an 18-year old D-student more competent to vote responsibly than a 17-year old genius?  Voting and citizenry rights aside for a moment (well… probably another article will be in order very soon): value of an individual, from a societal viewpoint, seems like it should derive from the individual’s demonstrated potential to contribute to society, just as value of a commodity is determined by the commodity’s degree of usefulness to the buyer.  So it seems to me that if we, as a society, really gave a shit about our fellow citizens and their well being, then we could best help the disadvantaged to improve their value by enabling them to raise their potential.  The most effective manner by which I believe we can achieve this is by supplying our citizens with biological contentment, allowing them to focus upon skill/education development opportunities.  And, yes, when I say “supplying”, I mean that society should foot the bill.

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