Financial Independence
Contents
Definition
FI is when one has the ability to choose what they 'work at' or how much they 'work' assuming that work is required to 'make a living' or survive by providing basic necessities.
How does this apply to work-life integration? Work-life integration implies that one has financial independence - because one naturally does not have to make a distinction between just 'living one's life' and 'making a living'
The Moral Philosophy of Financial Independence
FI has significant implications on moral philosophy through its link to the Distributive Economy. By not centralizing power, then redistributing, we have more direct control over capital, in more distributed circles.
For example, a person who does not like that their company is violating embargoes to Russia can opt out if they make the hiring decisions (are self employed) as opposed to getting fired for raising an objection.
Ie, FI means you can make moral decisions without threat of your means of livelihood disappearing.
There is the argument that the CEO, who has "mouths to feed" cannot just pull out of Russia even if their moral footing is relatively sound. Because of the misery that would cause to his employees. Financial Independence of the employees could solve this, and this can happen in part by the Open Sector providing a safety net.
The solution is the end of Re-Distributive frameworks.
The OSE case of scaling calls for significant bootstrap funding - and that is in order to uphold moral values, in a world where America Got Mean and where upholding moral values is difficult when immorality is structurally built in to various mechanisms. Such as planned depressions with power concentrations as a byproduct, or corporate financial structure where investors instead of producers get 80% of the value. Or extractive enterprise that does not compensate for what it destroys.
There are many cases where dog-eats-dog is present - from patents to planned obsolescence to the general competitive waste engrained in the system. Ie, where the basic dynamic is not love but evol.
With FI we are completely free to act with ethics, without external pressure to do otherwise.
OSE Case: Necessity vs Purpose
Financial independence means that you can pursue what you are passionate about in your life. As opposed to doing what you just need to do to make a living or survive. Most people (probably 95%-99%) are in the second category. There are levels of this. First, do your parents still pay your bills? About 1/3 of Americans are in this category [1]. Second, if you don't depend on your parents, are you working in something that you are passionate about, or do you hate your job? 85% of the population hates their jobs [2]. And the 15% that like their jobs - is it actually what they are passionate about or do they still do that just to make a living? And for the 1 percenters who have ample money - are they doing business as usual (killing and stealing as in robbing nature, future generations, and at the expense of others, such as evidenced by the necessity of armies in today's world, which is connected to proprietary as opposed to peacetime development) - let's Face the Brutal Facts).
OSE promotes financial independence as arguably the most important step to ensure ethical behavior (not killing or stealing, etc), especially for people without balls also known as courage.
For this reason, helping people attain financial independence may arguably be the most important step for enforcing world peace. This does not address psychological maturation for getting along with others, which must be present as a fundamental driver - as opposed to enforcer - of peace. As such, one may go as to conclude that financial independence should be a fundamental human right - though it is not granted for free. One must put in effort, like any honest work. Equal opportunity for attaining independence should be widely accessible.
Statistics
- 10M self-employed in the USA according to the Bureau of Labor Stats [3]. of 330M [4] - that is only 3% of overall and 6% of working population. This one says 30% are self-employed [5]. FIgures may agree if the self-employed counts only the workforce.
- Workforce participation is 60% - is that for working age, or overall? [6]
- About 50% of entire USA population works - [7]
- Freelancers are 36%? [8]. How do you reconcile the two facts? Most freelancers are not self-employeed.
More
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_independence
OSE promotes Industrial Productivity on a Small Scale - with [[[Open Source Product Design]] and Open Source Microfactories as a means to Resilient Economies. A part of this pathway can be expense reduction, because open source economic systems are by definition produce lower cost to the user. OSE has already proven the feasibility of Industrial Productivity on a Small Scale in the early 2000s, as discussed in the 20th century in seminal books such as Small is Beautiful and The Second Industrial Divide.
