What exactly is human progress

Lynn Stuart Paramorre writes in her latest piece...

"What exactly is human progress? If progress is the growth of opportunities, then we should welcome developments that give us more options in how we spend our time and structure our lives."

Human progress is the fight against scarcity. As progress is made goods become less scarce society becomes richer. Production, or the transformation of resources into more desirable goods, is the only way that real wealth is created, and with it the standard of living and quality of life is increased. Progress is not the 'growth of opportunities, although the fight against scarcity increases your overall opportunities in life, you can't ignore fighting scarcity as causal to 'increased opportunities' and more options in how we spend our time and structure our lives'. This end simply can not be achieved without fighting scarcity and acting productively as a means.

"But when we get trapped in the mindset of eternal scarcity and laboring until our last breath, we stop imagining that there could be any path in front of us except more and more work."

Working is simply acting, a human can not live without acting to trasnform resources into more desirable goods that improve the human condition. Not working, or slowing productivity, ultimately means a world of 'eternal scarcity'. If you start imagioning a world of less and less work, less productivity, you WILL get trapped in not only a 'mindset', but objectively, in a world of eternal scarcity.

Further, the only reason we should see less and less work is because productivity is so high, and goods are see plentiful, that there is not reason to work as much, but that happens naturally in the market, not by legislative law.

You can achieve less and less work  by fighting scarcity and productivity, but you can't fight scarcity and be prpductive by less and less. There's two causal chains here, one makes sense the other does not.

And that is the contradiction the author doesn't notice in the first paragraph of her piece, and where I stop reading the rest of it.

"This isn't liberty. It's the exact opposite'!

Demo.org PolicyShop blogger Matt Bruenig on property rights...

"This isn’t liberty. It’s the exact opposite. Every little thing you grab up reduces my liberty, my ability to move about as I’d like. I don’t agree to it."

This isn't logical. This presupposes resources and goods aren't rivalrous or scarce, and such a theory could only exist in world of non-scarcity. Everyone can't both have a right to everything and no right to anything at all. This kind of thinking is fundamentally selfish, as it assumes you have a property right in everything that exists in the world and anyone else needs you to 'agree' to their acting at all.

"Every little thing you grab up reduces my liberty..."

If every person on the planet claimed this line of thinking, then everyone is claiming a right to use everything and denying anyone else the right to use anything at all. It's Absurd, resources and goods are rivalrous and scarce.

"Bob, has decided that he can take things that nobody owns and violently exclude everyone else from them..."

Your view is that everyone has a right to the use of both everything and to nothing at all, and with logic like that no resources could ever be used or employed as a means. Bob can't transform any resource because Jane is claiming the right to it's use and Jane can't transform any resource because Bob is claiming a right to it's use, it's absurd and illogical.

"Jane ignores Bob’s threats of violence and comes into the square of land to play frisbee with her friend."

Jane is doing the same thing as Bob here, claiming a right to the exclusive use and control of a rivalrous resource, land. Suppose Bob shows up after Jane is already using this land and wants to play soccer, what happens now? How is this dispute settled? Does one have the better claim to the use of the land? The Frisbee scenario, in my opinion, is too simplistic, what if Bob built a home there and had been living there for a year, what if Jane showed up and claims he had no right because he didn't ask her for permission to live there and she had a right to it previously! What happens? They both can't have a right to use and not have a right to use unowned rivalrous resources...it's illogical because resources are scarce and rivalrous by nature of their existence...

Further, how did Jane get the Frisbee to begin with? She would have had to claim a previously unowned resource to transform into a Frisbee. The right to exclusively use and transform a resource into a more desirable good (a Frisbee) exists for Jane without Bob's permission, but it does not exist for Bob without Jane's permission?

Self-contradictory.

Rawlsian 'Preferred Distribution' and slavery.

"There's no fundamentally "right" distribution deviations against which are "theft". There are only various preferred distributions."

..it is important that we think of money (income) only as a medium of exchange and focus on the actual resources, goods, and labor that are being exchanged.

Because what is really being said here is not that someone has a right to someone else's income, but that they have a right to someone else's labor....slavery.

By this logic, there was no slavery pre-1860, there was only a change in the 'preferred distribution'...which is absurd. If you agree that it was slavery, then you don't agree with this logic of 'preferred distribution'...if you disagree that it was slavery and only a change of 'preferred distribution' then you have to atleast acknowledge what it really is...you can't redefine slavery as "preferred distribution".

You either have a right to whatever property you can get voluntarily by acting, or you have a right to whatever property you can get involuntarily by other people acting for you. The second example is slavery, and it is exactly what Rawlsianism is.