So Tony Judt's Postwar cracked this one open for me. I'm here to share. All the basic wage/neoutopianism stuff can be disregarded with very little effort if you truly understand the problem. Here goes.

So Maggie shut down the coal mines in the UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners'_strike_(1984–85)

I'd put that in a hyperlink, mk, but your markup doesn't work with parens.

Maggie shut down the coal mines because they were very expensive. They ran largely on subsidy. They were a major contributor to British deficits. By shutting down the coal mines, Maggie got rid of coal subsidies. Yay Conservative Party.

Britain went from 192 coal mines to six. 200,000 coal miners lost their jobs. Most never worked again. So the subsidies that went to coal went to welfare instead (plus about 20%). Repeat for the British toolmaking industry, the British auto industry, the British aviation industry. Voila. Welfare state. Not instant; not by a long shot. However, Britain went from a place where industry was subsidized to a place where individuals are subsidized. Quality of life is a tricky thing to manage, but those on the dole are living on a lot less than they were when they were working.

Konrad Lorenz stated that the modern Western lifestyle is the worst evolutionary adaptation since the peacock feather. Male peacocks have a terrible time - they can't fly, they're targets for predation - all so they can get laid. Westerners get up early, drive to work, sit at a desk doing a job they hate, all so they can spend two hours in the evening watching shit on television and eating food someone else cooked. He said this, mind you, in 1966.

Daniel Quinn decided that Lorenz needed an update starring a talking gorilla so he wrote Ishmael. It's a favorite of pseudointellectuals. Quinn makes the point that we were much better off as hunter-gatherers, because we mostly had free time to sit in the sun and fuck. He ignores the part about dying at 28 of a rat bite.

So let's go reductio ad absurdum on shitty jobs. There are no shitty jobs because there are no jobs. There is no society. It's just you, hanging out in the Land of Happy Cows, chasing after deer and turkeys with a pointed stick, eating berries and roots until you're full and contemplating the sunset. Yay. Fulfilling, relaxing, empowering.

How many friends can you have along before resources start to get scarce?

Here's where it all comes off the rails: predators take up a lot of room. Without refinement, without agriculture, without civilization built up everywhere people live, the cap on world population is about six million people. Using intensive agriculture and full-time dedication, the hippies now figure you can just about feed a family of four on an acre... five acres for a family of four was the standard for a couple hundred years. That's why homesteads ran that size. Here's one of my favorite books on the subject.

veen put this together yesterday:

For reference, five acres is about two and a half baseball fields.

If the whole world were arable land we'd probably be fine. It's not, though. About 1/32nd of the earth is arable land. So take Veen's "europe" and divide by 32 - you're at 31,000 m^2.

Five acres is 21,000 m^2.

That's presuming that Amazing Sky God gives us plows and horses and fertilizer and pesticides and all the great stuff you need to live off of carrots and chickens. That's ignoring the entire support industry necessary to make it work. Reductio ad absurdum, we have built up a system that increases our natural environment by a factor of a thousand.

And here's the part that gets missed - you're not working to feed yourself, you're working to keep the system running. Is your job bullshit? Sure. Are lots of jobs bullshit? No doubt. Is the whole system bullshit? That's been pointed out since the invention of fire. But it's a system that allows six billion people to walk the earth, rather than six million, and you can't point to a piece of it and go "we don't need that part over there" without understanding where that part came from or investigating what happens when it goes away.

And you can't opt out of the system. Well, you can, but not without buying your freedom. Five acres of arable land are hard to come by anymore and you're going to need to trade carrots for fertilizer at some point. All you're really doing is moving from the center of the system to the fringe.

Maggie solved her coal subsidy problem and replaced it with a welfare state. I'm gonna go ahead and piss off any British Hubski readers by pointing out that the UK is effectively over - its biggest exports are makework and reality television:

So the choice ends up being pretty simple: life on the dole or busting your ass. If you accept life on the dole, you must accept that someone else is getting filthy fucking rich. If you accept a shitty nothing job, you must accept that someone else is getting filthy fucking rich.

Or, you know, strive. Someone else is still gonna get filthy fucking rich but at least you aren't a bystander to your own existence.