This ignores power differences though?
The market isn't particularly free when people need to eat
It'd be much freer with guarantees for basic necessities
The market isn't particularly free when people need to eat
It'd be much freer with guarantees for basic necessities
> It'd be much freer with guarantees for basic necessities
You do know that would literally just make the problem worse, right? I mean, it sounds good to someone who can't work for legitimate reasons (small percentage of the population), but it also sounds good to everyone who has the capacity to earn their necessities, but would rather have it handed to them instead. It also sounds really good to politicians who seek (re)election by promising everything for free, knowing perfectly well that nothing is truly free. That kind of reasoning is what got us into this inflation mess.
Also, the "free" in "free market" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does.
Nope. You'd be wrong. It's the trillions of dollars unnecessarily printed by the fed. A large part of that went to business owners who didn't actually need it, but took advantage of all the "free money" (and who could blame them when the gov't practically gave it away). That money was quickly invested into real estate and equities markets, leading the way for inflation in the rest of the market, albeit with some delay.
And we're not even at the worst yet.
Depends what you think "the problem" is. To my mind the biggest problem is the hours of human life wasted on performative make-work while most citizens in a supposedly rich country barely spend any time on things that are actually fulfilling for them.
> Also, the "free" in "free market" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does.
On the contrary, this looks to be one of the minority of cases where the term is used correctly (which makes it a bad term, but I fear we're stuck with it).
The idea that citizens of a rich nation has some natural right to live a fulfilling life just because the country happens to be rich, is hubris on the one hand, and also entitle on the other.
People work to obtain the resources to live off. Some can produce _more_ (due to luck, or skill), and those are the ones who would be able to give up productive work and focus on "what's fulfilling" (aka, climb up the maslow pyramid).
Some people don't get to do that climb - that's just reality of scarcity of resources today. Until the day the world becomes like star-trek, where people's basic needs a completely covered without any labour input from any humans (in which case, they spend time exploring the galaxy!), it cannot be that all people fulfill their higher needs in the maslow pyramid.
> People work to obtain the resources to live off. Some can produce _more_ (due to luck, or skill), and those are the ones who would be able to give up productive work and focus on "what's fulfilling" (aka, climb up the maslow pyramid).
But the biggest factor that enables them to produce more is the society around them. So the idea that the surplus should go to the individual rather than the society seems pretty entitled. If we're a rich country, we should be able to allocate those riches in a way that produces the most benefit.
> Some people don't get to do that climb - that's just reality of scarcity of resources today. Until the day the world becomes like star-trek, where people's basic needs a completely covered without any labour input from any humans (in which case, they spend time exploring the galaxy!), it cannot be that all people fulfill their higher needs in the maslow pyramid.
But the patterns for how we'll live when resources are virtually unlimited will be set today. And by most objective metrics, we're already far past the level of having enough for everyone to live on - even the very poorest have food and shelter (and most rich countries manage to provide them with healthcare and education). Conversely an increasing fraction of increasingly many jobs is, as I said, performative make-work rather than something that actually increases societal resource output; those jobs are a dead-weight loss.
We need to start being ok with people working less and retiring earlier. Otherwise our lives won't get better no matter how much more productive we get.
If living in such conditions is better than working some of the jobs that sustain large parts of society, I'd say it's about time to reevaluate some things. Are we ok with a society designed to sacrifice some percentage of its people's lives?
Instead, we should tax incomes that have very little to do with human work like CO2 taxes or land value taxes to fund UBI. In essence, the UBI grants people a basic CO2 exemption and a small share in the land of the planet. I would argue that is fair.