RE: Philosophy 101, #7: What is Meta-Utopia?
The problem with utopia is that people are not created with equal abilities or opportunities. The vast majority of people on this planet are more or less physically tied to a location due to income.
I probably shouldn't say this but not everyone can earn a living blogging on Steemit. Someone is going to end up having to make the pizzas, build the cars, dig the ditches and grind the peanuts to make the peanut butter.
How do you avoid the inevitable animosity that someone with a labor intensive, dirty job is going to feel towards someone living in a floating community in the tropics?
Different social and political values are one thing, different economic classes are an entirely different (and dangerous) animal.
Although from the amount of importance some people put on weed, I guess a certain segment of the population would be happy if they could spend most of their lives stoned & eating the free pizza they bring home from work.
Making pizzas, building cars, digging ditches, or grinding peanuts are not in any way incompatible with Nozick's "utopia". To the contrary, this sort of specialisation, division of labour, and voluntary exchange of goods and services is essential to prosperity. And as long as there are people who are willing to pay to have these things provided for them, there is a possibility for others to earn from providing them. Certainly some will find more success than others, both because of individual differences in talents and interests and because some will have more luck. Some level of envy and animosity is probably inevitable since they are part of human nature, but freedom requires not letting that envy lead to impositions on other people's lives and justly acquired possessions.
That's the tricky part.
The whole push for a $15.00 minimum wage in Washington State has led to an actual decrease in wages for the very people it was supposed to help because, surprise, employers cut back on their hours because they couldn't afford to pay it.
It doesn't help that our culture is centered around consumption and that people are constantly assaulted by advertising that they're somehow inferior if they don't have the latest iPhone or if their car is more than a year old, etc.
And on the opposite side of that you have people making fortunes shuffling paper or even just digitally "trading" numbers who don't actually produce anything. You can see that in the people who use bots here to milk the reward pool dry without producing any valuable content.
At least there is good content being created here.
Tricky it is, yes. And there is no easy solution. But it is not impossible either, and the key I believe is education. Like you say about the minimum wage; people push for it because they mistakenly believe that it is beneficial. With improved economic understanding, people can realise that minimum wage laws are a bad idea. Similarly, people can learn to understand that a market economy is not a zero-sum game, and they can learn to see the difference between those who acquired wealth by providing productive services for others (like entrepreneurs) and those who acquired wealth by extracting it from others by force or fraud (like politicians), and direct their natural feelings of envy and animosity only towards the latter group.
I agree 100%.