I'm very much pro-UBI, yet anti government waste. Too much of government acts, or at least appears to act, as little fiefdoms, employing people with relatively comfortable salaries, no market pressure, and little other controls to ensure they run tightly, efficiently, and effectively.
If you want to raise taxes to only fund UBI, I'm in. If you want to raise taxes because you don't like that some monkeys have more bananas and you think society could make better, unspecified, use of those bananas, I'm against.
Is your issue with government in the abstract or your government?
If the latter, the caring solution is to change the government through voting, vocalizing and organizing. Governments are instituted to maintain a level of civility in a society. Naturally, poverty erodes the means for civility so governments in civilized nations around the world successfully apply their government as an organization sufficient for this task. If that sufficiency falls below their approval, they repair it.
If your issue concerns government in the abstract, then quite simply: you don’t care about people in poverty. If you can’t find the decency to be honest about that, then you’ve got even bigger problems.
UBI prioritizes your economy, not your neighbors in poverty. Note Socialists do not support UBI and for anyone concerned that socialists simply want handouts, this should table that argument once and for all.
Social programs prioritize caring for people by:
- Decoupling access to basic commodity needs from the whims and woes of the market
- Built-in protections from abuse. Uncaring folk like to criticize welfare cash recipients as dishonest and lazy. Social programs that avoid cash also avoid this potential altogether.
I have a positive, but finite, amount that I care about people in poverty.
> UBI prioritizes your economy, not your neighbors in poverty
Giving people in poverty a sustenance level of amount money per month seems it prioritizes neighbors in poverty more than today. To use your own words: If you can’t find the decency to be honest about that, then you’ve got even bigger problems.
It appears too low to effectively help them except in the case that the same effort might also help yourself. This is not caring.
>Giving people in poverty a sustenance level of amount money per month seems it prioritizes neighbors in poverty more than today
The contradictions and other problems really are too long to list here but it shouldn’t be necessary. For someone so concerned with wasting money, advocating UBI over direct commodity distribution is about as hypocritical as it gets.
The only difference is an additional and purely self-serving dependency on market values, which are drastically unstable across time, geography and, social structures. So, while your claim is of course untested, your proposal only further establishes that once it is instatiated, the results will be ever-changing and your claim therefor unknowable.
You might do best to just state why* you would prefer UBI over direct commodity distribution.
UBI would absolutely not help me or my family in aggregate. We would be net donors to that program, likely by a factor of more than 20. I support it not because it's good for me, but because it seems the best way to ensure a minimalist safety net for all members of the society.
> This is not caring.
I understand your opinion.
> You might do best to just state why you would prefer UBI over direct commodity distribution.
I believe that individuals know better how to and will do a better job in allocating cash than any other agent, governmental or not, would know how to allocate commodities to them. I like this cheese, or that bread. I don’t like crunchy peanut butter. I’d rather live on the East side of the city. I’d rather live with roommates and have more free cash; someone else might want to spend more to live alone. Lots of choices to be made to optimize for limited resources.
I don't want a new governmental agency (likely with the usability of the DMV) deciding where poor people live, what they are given to eat, and what clothes they are given to wear.
Money is trivially easy to distribute without creating any parallel logistics operations to buy, store, inventory, move, and distribute physical goods. We already have market-based distribution mechanisms for all of those things.
Give them cash and let them use their agency to decide how to spend it. They'll do a much better job of it than we would on their behalf.
I hope I don’t sound disrespectful, but your ongoing insistance that governments in the abstract are inherently dysfunctional seems to underwrite most of your last comment and this is just such an ignorant roadblock. It’s not a matter of opinion. I take immense issue with many businesses, and most American business traditions, but I would never be so ignorant as to refuse acknowledgement of what they do well or to misrepresent their role in all civilized societies. Why insist such a limitation on your own understanding?
Governments are essentially for the people. They serve to facilitate a common civility. Feudalism was born of the necessity to protect the farmers and their crops with a military. It’s legacy was diminished by a long period of failing to prioritize the people. Democracy + capitalism is not a perfect match; but some of Europe has had the courage to face it’s failures and inches closer to actualizing governments which are for the people.
When you criticize America’s government, you’ll want to be careful. “Business” is probably a more accurate descriptor of what you’re actually criticizing. It’s no secret, either. So when you insist on discounting the configuration of a particular “government”, you’re devolving what could otherwise be a productive conversation. Therefore, I’m going to ignore most of these assaults on proven successes and the potential for future innovation. Without criticality, we an go ahead and just agree we are fucked.
This is not meant as a straw man but it deserves a word or two: When it comes to who should speak for the needs of poor people, how do you reason that you are qualified?
Of course, poor people are not always* their best spokes people, but they do have a type first-hand experience unlike any other.
I’ve been economically lucky compared with many people I know but there were periods in my childhood when my family would benefit and a significant one as an adult. It’s hard to imagine our different experiences are not causal to my position, but the nature of that relationship is far from obvious.
For you, capitalism has consistently meant freedom. For me, it has meant moments of awe for the wonders of capitalism soon to be fraught with sudden peril and lasting threat. I don’t think guilt on either end is necessarily useful, but the dreadfulness of the poverty experience in America is reason alone that it’s not easily shared. Some films have tried, like Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy. The lack of natural story arc is a problem, but the real dealbreaker is invoking what it is to be robbed of one’s dignity.
Dignity is complex, but the day-to-day of poverty in America leaves no doubt of it’s fragility. The dizzying network effect of ever-more-tangling dependencies intercut with penny counting, truth-stretching, psychological escape, false hope, begging, crime, self-doubt, and the many flavors of shame have a way of defining it’s importance.
This can’t be said enough: The purpose for social programs is not to provide freedom, but to provide security against loss of health, life and dignity.
Freedom is fallacious. The limits to one’s freedom are defined by their relative power over others. It’s risky and has many exterior dependencies. It’s unnecessary but nice to have.
Security and dignity are far more meager and far more important. Loss of these defined by one’s means for survival and health. Loss of security and dignity has tremendous direct physical and mental health consequences, and is the most common gateway to violence, crime, and suicide.
Poor people know not to fuck with the latter. Poor people have cutting experience with the countless ways that money’s value is dependent on those who have more of it.
>I don’t want a new government agency deciding where poor people live, what they are given to eat, and what clothes they are given to wear.
In a life of poverty, the difference between a government deciding and nobody deciding incredibly often the difference between sickness and health, hunger and nourishment, or life and death.
Direct commodity distribution done well (by an educated, compassionate, and civically engaged population) is drastically more efficient, drastically more effective, and drastically more humane. Of course, it might require a little innovation. Hopefully you don’t hate innovation.
>>Direct commodity distribution done well (by an educated, compassionate, and civically engaged population) is drastically more efficient, drastically more effective, and drastically more humane. Of course, it might require a little innovation. Hopefully you don’t hate innovation.
Your proposed "solutions" put simply DO NOT work. Source: I have lived through them in the Eastern block. Others live through them right now in Venezuela. Hopefully you don't hate history and facts.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin
Citation needed.
It appears you believe the proper purpose of social programs does not include freedom. Others believe that spending more money than today, in the form of the most flexible instrument we have, money, will create freedom and allow everyone to have basic security against starvation and other loss of dignity. No waiting period. No qualifying event. No requirement to prove you’re jumping through arbitrary hoops. No restrictions, other than the same budget constraints that most anyone works with.
On the dignity point, no one will see you going down to the warehouse to get your government issued block of cheese or whatever some central authority has decided is best for you. Instead, you shop at the same grocer as everyone else, making your own selections for what you need.
I don’t hate innovation. Hopefully you don’t hate freedom or believe it should be reserved for high-income people. See how stupid that sounds?
Food stamps are an in-between solution which are neither direct distribution of commodities nor cash.
You seem to prefer we move towards more direct distribution; I prefer to move towards cash. Differences of opinion like this are why we have a democratic/representative process to end up deciding.
And if you claim to care about poverty, maybe you should care about the efficiency of the programs that are supposed to be helping poverty. Maybe you ought to care whether they really do some good, or whether they just employ a lot of middle-class bureaucrats. Note that it's not the middle-class bureaucrats that we're really trying to help.
So for all your ripping sokoloff for his/her alleged lack of compassion, you seem to have your head in the sand. You act like government programs actually do what they say on the label - as if passing a program to help people actually helps them.
Some of those program probably do some good. But they could do more. If you actually care about the poor (instead of just claiming you do), you have to care about the efficiency of programs that are supposed to help them.
The problem is that you can't decouple commodity needs from the market because life is suffering.
Why not? Isn't that what agricultural subsidies are for?
Also, UBI by its very acronymm is Universal, meaning everyone gets the same amount. That's the only fair way to do it, and would negate criticism of cash recipients being "dishonest and lazy." Yes some pay more than others, but that's simply a re-implementation of our current progressive tax system.
I think it all basically comes down to your view on government - can they do the right and best thing, or can the individual make better decisions for themselves. By disempowering the invididual, you may even the outcomes, but you disadvantage those who would most benefit from achieving more in life - which in turn, benefits society.
UBI is another attempt to save an economic system which works for you but incentivizes maintaining a class of desperate and powerless citizens. Each of these ill-fated attempts punishes another slew of innocent generations of poverty-ridden lives, in the name of ignoring the root issue of misaligned incentives. How many chances do you believe the ruling class to deserve?
The issue may not be the amount that you care but that your caring evidently depends on what you get out of it. That’s not caring. Try again.
>Giving people in poverty a sustenance level of amount money per month seems it prioritizes neighbors in poverty more than today.
The contradictions and other problems really are too long to list here but it shouldn’t be necessary. For someone so concerned with wasting money, advocating UBI over direct commodity distribution is about as hypocritical as it gets.
The only difference is an additional and purely self-serving dependency on market values, which are drastically unstable across time, geography and, social structures. So, while your claim is of course untested, your proposal only further establishes that, once implemented, the results will be ever-changing and therefor unknowable.
You might do best to just state why you would prefer UBI over direct commodity distribution.