Why? Why should an able-bodied person get free food, housing, and healthcare as a basic right?
Shouldn't an able-bodied person at least be required to have a job to obtain any of those things?
What possible societal benefit could such a policy have?
The hope is that it can be administered in a way such that it will not greatly harm incentives to be successful either, merely dampen the curve by some percentage: so there are still rich and poor people, but the rich people maybe will only be 20x as rich as the poor instead of 200x. It's still much better to be successful than to be on welfare, both in terms of prestige and social standing, and material comfort (you can think of it as an order-preserving nonlinear mapping). And there are some arguments that it may help economically in some cases: by raising the floor of what bad outcomes look like, it becomes more plausible for individuals who don't have a family safety net to take risks.
As for what possible societal benefit, the Scandinavian societies are fairly nice places to live, partly as a result, though making like-for-like comparisons in economics is notoriously difficult. They certainly have lower levels of severe poverty, crime, homelessness, etc. But there are many books arguing for and against these views, so I'm not sure I can convince you in a comment.
"And therefore there is no great loss if we remove fear of dying from the list of motivators to work."
It's unbelievable that our species is still debating whether or not "fear of dying" should be a motivator of everyday behavior at work.
Find the US city where you'll die if you don't have a job. This supposition is simply untrue.
While working solely to live longer and live decently doesn't have quite the same ring as working solely to avoid dying, the meaning of his statement seems clear.
Furthermore, homelessness and malnutrition also increase the death rate. There are lots of homeless and hungry people in the US.
So while you might not immediately die due to being unemployed, as there are a variety of safety nets, being without a job will, statistically decrease your expected lifespan. Food assistance does not prevent people from going hungry. Homeless shelters are packed to the brim, and in some cases quite unsafe. You can't get non-emergency care if you are unemployed and broke, at least until Obamacare kicks in (or if you are covered by Romneycare).
This is part of the difficulty with the USA's current healthcare debate. It's simply impossible to offer to every person, every imaginable medical care. There are not sufficient resources.
So from a philosophical perspective, how can there exist a fundamental right that cannot be fulfilled?
And then from a practical perspective, someone is going to have to decide where to draw a line. Someone will have to decide who will be given what procedures. The effect of this is that, at the very least, our rights (and not just these new positive ones) will be tossed around like political volleyballs. And at the worst, it creates an explicitly class-ful society, where some people are granted privileges that are withheld from others (which is the universal outcome in all Communist nations thus far)
[1] "Positive rights" are those where we say that someone must be given something, as with food, shelter, or healthcare. "Negative rights" are when a person is guaranteed to be free of something, as with freedom of speech (government may not limit speech), freedom from double jeopardy, etc.
Consider, for example: a headache could be a symptom of brain tumor or other problem, the best diagnosis of which would be through an MRI. We'd like to catch these things as early as possible, so we'd like to do MRIs on everyone who is a possible victim. But imagine that every time a patient walks into the doctor's office with a headache, the doctor orders an MRI for him. How long do you think this practice can be sustained for?
The fact is that in a world with scarce resources, we must make decisions about how to allocate those resources. When the field of medical care is controlled by politicians, then politicians will be making those decisions. The questions over who is covered for what maladies with how much treatment becomes a political question.
So you can expect that maladies that cluster on easily-identifiable demographic groups will receive a disproportionate amount of funding. For example, one might expect that because gays may comprise a voting bloc and suffer from HIV more than others, politicians will pander to them for votes by allocating funds for HIV treatment that are out of proportion with the number of sufferers and the severity. By contrast, other maladies -- say, my Crohn's disease, which has weaker demographic ties -- are likely to be relatively overlooked.
And in the end, although the GOP is certainly using hyperbole in referring to "death panels", someone is going to have to make a decision at some point that treating this 90-year-old geezer just isn't going to have the ROI in terms of quality-life-years saved, and that it's not cost effective to continue treatment.
Anyway, my claim is that when the politicians can decide what and how much you're getting of something, it's difficult (in my mind, at least) to call something a "right". What other rights do we have for which the politicians get to make the decision about how much of that right each of us is entitled to?
And there is the problem. Someone has to make this judgment call. It's all a matter of opinion. And it changes over time, there's no single objective answer. Today, "take this Z-pack and keep the wound clean and dry" is a completely ordinary treatment; a century ago it was sci-fi, that wasn't even available to the hyper-rich. When does it cross the lines from experimental to esoteric to mundane?
by the way, many rights are regulated by laws created by politicians
That's only sort of true, at least in the USA. If something is understood to be a right, then those regulations are limited to only what can clear various tests as defined by the courts. Enumerated rights like speech, for example, are protected by a strict scrutiny test; at the other end of the spectrum is the rational basis test.
But in the end, these are actually judged by the courts. In other words, it's ultimately the non-political branch of the government that makes the call.
By contrast, these positive rights are entirely driven by political caprice.
(Caveat: I'm referring to Federal regulation here. It may vary somewhat state-to-state, because of how state Constitutions are designed.)
Since we provide police protection to unemployed people, should that also mean we provide them ponies? What are the limits of this argument you're attempting to make regarding "providing unemployed people things for free since they get police protection"?
as a society grows wealthier, it could grow more humane
You're assuming that it's humane to teach people to not be self-sufficient. I would argue that the cycle of dependency created by not incentivizing people to get up and go work for a living every day is inhumane. Often, it is done by politicians who benefit from the perpetuation of that cycle for reasons of maintaining their power base.
You never answered the question about providing police protection. Instead you changed the subject.
Any system of decision making is arbitrary at some point. "Letting the market decide" is no different, it just absolves society from culpability of life outcomes. In many ways, it's not that different from people who claim things happen because of "God's will."
And one of the benefits of democratic government is that society gets to answer these questions. You can see the very different solutions countries like Denmark and the US have come to (and Denmark has done more for unemployed people than the US has without resorting to giving them ponies).
>You're assuming that it's humane to teach people to not be self-sufficient. I would argue that the cycle of dependency created by not incentivizing people to get up and go work for a living every day is inhumane. Often, it is done by politicians who benefit from the perpetuation of that cycle for reasons of maintaining their power base.
This is a straw man argument. There is incentive for people to get up and go work for a living. Denmark has an unemployment rate is 6%, and their welfare state is far, far more generous than that of the US. I would suggest your anger at unemployment benefits is misdirected.
It is assumed that you get more focused, happier and more committed working people, because they can choose their work based on whatever motivation drives them. That could be money, curiosity, laziness, skill, chance etc. It is also assumed that people would be willing to take greater risks, since they can be sure they a) won't become homeless and b) won't starve.
If society provides a safety net for everyone, you don't have to build your own while trying to do all of the above work on top of creating a baseline of security.
Personally, all the people I know who inherited their money are useless and/or dysfunctional. I'm not saying that none find the motivation to do much with their lives after their needs are met... but to assume that enough of society is going to behave that way to change the way that society works seems to be wishful thinking.
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/08/03/new-freakonomics-radi...
Selection bias. You're specifically selecting for people whose only money is money they inherited; failures, in other words.
There's a lot of children of rich people who are quite successful in their own right. Bill Gates, for example, did not come from a poor home. And the other thing you have to watch out for is reversion to the mean. It's unlikely Gates' children will outdo him.
So you don't know a lot of people who inherit then. That is probably because most of those people do not show off this money and you will never know.
You only see those that show of and why not to say it? what you want to see based on your prejudices.
I have known a lot of people who inherited, some of them are useless or dysfunctional, some of them are really resourceful and know how to make good use of his money. E.g the creator of "Zara" inherit a small clothing store: http://www.zara.com/
Now is one of the biggest in the world.
Half of the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, physicist of all time came from wealthy families, so they could dedicate time for non-primary necessities, a luxury even today.
Didn't communists in the USSR find that when you give everyone a "right" to have all their basic needs met and when you took away their motivation to work hard to succeed, a lot of people decided not to work or they decided to work at things that the community didn't need?
Then, to make up for the fact that there was no reward incentive model, they had to bring in authoritarian force.
The most insightful criticism of communism that I've ever heard was from a bunch of Romanians I know who grew up in a country under control of the Soviets. When they hear Americans or other Westerners espousing pseudo-communism as a solution to society's problems, they get apoplectic. They can't even begin to grasp why a society that has discovered and nurtured capitalism would turn to empirically failed socioeconomic models.
Seriously, if you're going to want to stand on someone's shoulders to move society forward, why Karl Marx's?
Friedman wasn't a Basic Income proponent. He was a proponent of negative taxation. He was only interested in being consistent with the way we treat income tax and welfare. He felt that the welfare manager's job of determining exactly how to administer relief to recipients was something that couldn't be done properly. He preferred just giving cash based upon income levels on a sliding scale.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
Given the abuse of the Welfare system over the half century since Friedman supported negative taxation, I don't doubt that he would have different views and controls for such a system were he alive today.
A lot of ideas sounded good 50 or 100 years ago that we have tried but have failed. It doesn't mean we should keep trying them.
The entire interview is online at:
"This argument has several problems. I’ll discuss two of them. The first problem with it is that BIG cannot be accurately characterized as something for nothing. All societies impose many rules on every individual. Consider the discussion of homelessness above. Why can’t homeless people build their own shelter and their own latrine? Why can’t they drink out of a clean river? Why can’t they hunt, gather, or plant and harvest their own food? They cannot do these things because the state has made rules saying they don’t have the right to do these things. The state has imposed rules saying that almost all the resources of the Earth belong to someone else. Those of us who benefit from the rules by which our society distributes ownership of the Earth’s natural resources benefit every day from the state’s interference with the propertyless, and we pay them no compensation. A state without BIG is the state that has something for nothing.
BIG is (and should be seen) not as something for nothing but as the just compensation for all the rules of property and property regulations society imposes on individuals."
Not the way that you assume, no. Huge strawman here.