Also seems to ignore the fact that the simplest way to lift the 99.99 percent is just to give them some of the 0.01 percent's money.
I think it would be better to invest in solid infrastructure, education, healthcare, affordable housing, rehab, crime reduction, etc. so that everyone has a legit chance of improving their standard of living. There are some really hard, poverty skewed cultural problems that need to be solved and simply giving people money isn't going to do that.
The benefit of investing in all of those infrastructure related things is that it creates jobs for people that want them. Hopefully enough people fight their way out of poverty that the next generation will have people with the knowledge base and skillset to improve things even more. I honestly don't think we're going to get a solution to poverty, petty crime, etc. until we're able to engage a lot more people that have lived in that world. Our supposed "leaders" just don't understand it well enough to come up with viable solutions.
The biggest hurdle is filling the government with people that actually care and want to improve the world as a whole. I don't know if that'll every happen :-(
Give cash to a rich person and they make a bet on what they think people will buy. Consolidate the wealth and we're back to central planning / command economy.
Paying taxes + low income housing + free drugs + drug addiction clinics > me or my children getting stabbed by a desperate addict.
Why? It was working people who created that wealth.
Being super rich and using that advantage to usurp all the productivity gains of the whole world doesn't make them working people. The working people are the ones that actual do the work, not the ones that control the capital.
Things like Jeff Bezos getting a $500 million yacht make me sick. What kind of resources does that take? How many lifetimes of work go into it? How many schools could you build instead? Hospitals? Houses? How about spending $500 million dollars building water filtration systems for developing countries?
No one should be allowed to squander resources and labor like that until every person on the planet has food to eat, clean water to drink, and a safe place to sleep.
No, the simplest way is for the 0.01 percent to pay them to do things, not give them money.
Give 10,000,000 to a rich person and they but some property or “invest” it in some hedge fun that makes the world worse. Give 10,000 to 1000 people they spend it. All of it. At local businesses which pay tax. For homes they need. And it eventually ends up in the hands of the rich again anyone because they are so good at extracting wealth at every opportunity
Also, since you admit that it all eventually ends up in the hands of the rich again, the alternative of "give the money to the non-rich" doesn't solve the problem anyway.
That's not what UBI does. UBI gives money to everybody whether they need it or not. Sure, for some of them it will be "life changing", but for many it won't. So UBI is very inefficient at getting money to people who need it.
Rich people, in addition to paying people directly for goods and services, which those people would not produce in the first place if they didn't need the money they can sell them for (so paying them is directly giving them money they need), can (and many do) donate to charities that do a much better job than the government does of figuring out who actually needs the things they provide.
If the market will figure that out so fast, then the way for poor people to become not poor is to become part of the market. Produce things that other people want, and sell them.
Giving people money as a one-time gift to help them bootstrap their way to doing that is a great idea. Rich people do that all the time; they're called "angel investors". The government can't do that; certainly that's not what UBI is.
The key point you are missing is that if you just give people money, and they spend it, and don't produce anything, you haven't helped the situation at all. You've made it worse. It's not enough for the market to figure out what people want; someone has to produce those things. Money flowing back and forth between people depends on everyone producing something. If money starts flowing to people who aren't producing anything, the incentive to produce goes away, and the market will stop being able to provide the things people want, because nobody has any incentive to produce them.
In fact, the arguments being made in this discussion about rich people being inefficient at spending money are based on precisely this observation: the rich people aren't producing anything to match up with all the money they have. And the argument for redistributing that money to others who will make better use of it is that those others will produce more with it than the rich people do. The fact that the others will also consume more is just looking at it from the other side. Nothing can be consumed until it is produced. So you can't just give people money for them to consume it; that's just as bad as the rich people having it. You have to figure out how to use that money to produce more. And that's something governments simply suck at doing.
Also, people pay other people for goods & services that the people with the money want to pay for. The nature of my life should not be determined by the preferences of the people who've managed (frequently via heredity) to hoover up outsize chunks of wealth and power within the economy. As a human being, I do not exist to satisfy the wants of the rich (though I might choose to pursue doing so as means of making a living). The options available as a way to make a living should not be controlled by those who have already been successful.
I don't assume that. I was merely contrasting your complaints about the bureaucracy required for the government to distribute money to people with the reality that any system for distributing money to people is going to be ... bureaucratic.
I also don't agree with your assessment of things as they are. You claim that the bureaucracies are bloated, but have no evidence that the things they do can be achieved with less bureaucracy. Most regulations exist to check the power of the rich (or some subset of them), not to enable them (or some subset of them). Creating wealth does not involve navigating a complex maze any more than simply being alive does.
Nope. Private charities like churches are not bureaucratic. They distribute money to people based on personal knowledge of those people and a personal judgment on the part of the church community that those people deserve charity.
> You claim that the bureaucracies are bloated, but have no evidence that the things they do can be achieved with less bureaucracy.
Many of the things that bloated government bureaucracies do should not be done at all. So it's pointless to ask for evidence that they could be done with less bureaucracy.
> Most regulations exist to check the power of the rich
That's what we are led to believe. I just don't think it's actually true. A whole new mess of regulations got put in place after the crash of 2008. Yet the rich are even richer now than they were then.
Just delete "government" and I might agree with you. On the other hand, even though I largely agree with the content of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs", I think that actually the onus is on those who claim "it doesn't need to be done" to explain one or both of (a) how we ended up with "the doing" in the first place (b) what happens when we get rid of "the doing"
When I said "Most regulations exist to check the power of the rich", I did not mean to imply that they were always effective. However, I also did not mean to imply that they exited to limit the wealth of the rich, merely their power. Particularly in the USA, the concept of seeking to limit wealth accumulation seems to be an anathema to a sizable chunk of the population. Seeking to limit power does not, as naive as this might be.
Regarding churches, I and millions of other people categorically reject systems of aid and redistribution that are based on the personal moral judgement of a handful of people. The bureaucracies we've tried to replace that with do not always do quite what we intended (by a number of different metrics), but they do at least attempt to be (more) value neutral than private charity.
It's easy to create a dewy-eyed view of small, personally-connected communities where things are done "based on personal knowledge of those people". Big cities are full of people who fled that kind of society - the judgement, xenophobia, myopia, and expectations.
In theory, sure. But as the saying goes, in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they aren't. No such "simple" system of taxing and redistributing has ever actually existed. The incentives to complicate and manipulate it are too strong.
The fact that you, for example, don't have any goods or services that, say, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos wants does not mean Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have all the wealth and you have none.
Wealth is not a fixed thing. Wealth can be created. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are rich because they founded companies that created enormous amounts of wealth. Say what you like about Windows and Amazon, but Windows made personal computing available to everyone, not just the affluent who could afford a Mac, and Amazon has made cheap products and easy, fast shipping available to everyone, not just the rich who could afford to hire personal shopping and delivery services. And the wealth those companies created had to be spread among everyone, by the very nature of what they did. Windows would have been useless if it were just Bill Gates' personal OS, and Amazon would have been useless if it were just Jeff Bezos' personal shopping service. The whole point was to make those things available to everyone.
Similar remarks apply to everyone who creates wealth. The people who grow the food you eat grow more than they need just for themselves. Then they trade the excess for other things they need or want. The same applies to you. Want some food? Create some wealth that you can trade for it.
The real complaint that can be made about the "1 percent" or "0.01 percent" or "elite" or whatever term you want to use, is that they have created a system that makes it harder for everyone else to create wealth, by putting all kinds of regulations and complications in place that only they know how to navigate. But you don't fix that problem with more regulations and complications. Nor do you fix it by just confiscating what the rich have now and redistributing it; that only works once. You fix it by scaling back all those regulations and complications so more and more people can create wealth themselves instead of having to wait for a few "elites" to do it.
Taxation ensures that all of society benefits as the collective wealth increases. It pays for shared resources, and provides for a shared safety net. Taxation isn’t confiscation, it’s the cost of doing business and thriving in a complex society. Trickle down and deregulation are awful policies that only destabilize.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/15/business/us-vsibm.html
Your reference takes a viewpoint that is, to say the least, questionable. IBM didn't even comprehend the PC market. If they had, they would never have given the license for MS-DOS to Microsoft. Nor did they comprehend the market for graphical user interfaces when they told everyone in the late 1980s that yes, OS/2 would be wonderful when it came along but there was no rush, they were much more concerned about coming out with new mainframe hardware and software. Bill Gates didn't want to wait that long, and the result was Windows. IBM had no clue what he was even doing until it was too late.
If you want to look at what antitrust law really accomplished, look up what happened to Alcoa Aluminum. Their "violation" was providing aluminum more cheaply and in greater quantity to their customers than any competitors could. Their breakup in an antitrust lawsuit made aluminum more expensive and scarcer, causing huge costs to industry and ultimately to consumers. Your rosy view of the benefits of regulation is a myth.
> Taxation ensures that all of society benefits as the collective wealth increases. It pays for shared resources, and provides for a shared safety net.
If that was all our tax money was used for, I wouldn't complain. But it isn't.
Not to mention that much of the money the government spends doesn't even come from explicit taxation; it comes from printing money, which has the same economic effect as taxation--us ordinary citizens have our buying power reduced--but is more politically palatable because most people don't understand what is being done to them.
Money is a completely unnatural invention - nothing about it is “natural”, so I don’t see this as a strong argument.
Not unless human society itself is "unnatural". The reasons why money gets invented are common to all human societies that get beyond the tribal stage; money is as natural as the human societies that invent it are.
Society is created by humans. Therefore it is man made, not made by nature. You don't have to change nature to change society, you can change society by changing humans, which is a very specific subset of nature and not very representative of nature as a whole.
The problems that can easily be solved by money may be natural but we still get to decide how we implement money and the way we do it can create human made problems.
Okay, then that just means "unnatural" is not a bad thing, unless you think society is a bad thing. But if you think society is a bad thing, why are you taking advantage of the benefits it provides? I assume you are, because if you weren't, you wouldn't be able to post here.
> you can change society by changing humans
Really? And how do you propose to do that? Particularly without grossly violating the rights of the humans you want to change?
Second, giving people money does not improve their lives. It can have the negative effect of making them dependent on receiving money, like a big part of Africa is now after decades of outside help. "Teach people to fish, not give them a fish", but this should not be perverted "give them the money to go to college and learn something with no market value".
And not the last, take money from the rich to give to the poor sounds sometime like a justification for rape: give people what they need, even without the consent of the people you take from. Sounds really cool when you tell about Robin Hood, not so cool when you give an analogy.