If you believe that everybody has a right to food, are you prepared to take away the property rights of land owners so that you can grow the food?
If you believe that everybody has a right to medical care ("medical care" being defined as the services of a doctor), are you prepared to take away the rights of doctors to their labor?
Not at all. Discontinue all farm subsidies. Purchase farm land at fire sale prices. Provide jobs to the unemployed through farming what can't be automated, and automate the rest. Food provided.
> If you believe that everybody has a right to medical care ("medical care" being defined as the services of a doctor), are you prepared to take away the rights of doctors to their labor?
Take their rights away? No. Destroy their income earning ability? Probably. I would provide more rights to nurse practitioners, subsidize their training with job guarantees, and automate most doctor decision making to expert systems. I would invest heavily (through DARPA and the NIH) in continuing the development of vaccines and protocols for chronic illnesses (thereby providing STEM jobs), and leveraging DARPA (again), continue to invest in robotics for robotic surgery apparatus (a la DiVinci Surgical System).
Socialism and capitalism may dine together now, at the table of ruthless efficiency.
It's actually possible to earn more than minimum wage as a farm laborer, yet there is a farm labor shortage and a drive by the UFW to recruit the unemployed met with astonishingly poor results. See http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Berry-growers-UFW-beg....
> Take their rights away? No. Destroy their income earning ability? Probably.
That's a great idea. I'm not sure why I didn't think of it. I guess I forgot that no doctors have ever opted not to accept Medicare.
Taking your epiphany a step further, since software is such an important part of life and the economy, maybe we can destroy the income earning ability of software engineers too while we're at it. I'm sure everybody around here would be happy with the arrangement.
> I would provide more rights to nurse practitioners, subsidize their training with job guarantees...I would invest heavily (through DARPA and the NIH) in continuing the development of vaccines and protocols for chronic illnesses (thereby providing STEM jobs), and leveraging DARPA (again), continue to invest in robotics for robotic surgery apparatus (a la DiVinci Surgical System).
Thank goodness the United States government doesn't have a problem with debt. If it did, all of your investments and guarantees might be impossible to make.
Automation is going to destroy the income of everyone. Unskilled labor? Almost done. Semi-skilled labor? Coming around the corner. Doctors? Lawyers? Code. Are you going to complain that open source software destroys the income of developers too?
I know your type. "I've got mine, fuck you. Get some bootstraps." If you don't like having a social fabric, which includes caring for the weakest among us, Get. The. Fuck. Out.
Of course you don't. That would require you to continue to make arguments that are at odds with economic reality.
> Automation is going to destroy the income of everyone.
So when are you changing your username from toomuchtodo to nothingtodo?
> I know your type. "I've got mine, fuck you. Get some bootstraps." If you don't like having a social fabric, which includes caring for the weakest among us, Get. The. Fuck. Out.
If I take your kindly-worded suggestion, how will you seize my labor? And where should I turn in my property before I leave?
And what of the labor and property of lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, Silicon Valley multimillionaires? You're going to have a hard time delivering and paying for all the promises and investments you wrote of if you're picky about who you're willing to take from.
> Enjoy how you choose to spend your resources, I know how I want to spend mine.
That, my friend, is individual liberty. I'm glad that despite your vitriol, you seem to agree that it's a wonderful thing.
One modest suggestion, however: you shouldn't presume to know how others spend their resources. A person you're quick to curse as cold-hearted might be far more charitable than you ever imagined, and, in both relative and absolute terms, perhaps far more charitable than you.
Cheers.
Even open source software needs support, maintenance, optimization and customization. Even if Linux is OSS, Google still has their own in-house kernel team (and I bet the same happens downstream at Samsung). Apple with LLVM is another example. Some people/companies are willing to pay to get more features/support/bugfixes for FOSS projects, and there's always going to be more work to do.
I can't think of any open source project that was ever finished; for an example of the opposite, look at Wine.
Ancient religious rules required farmers to not take everything from their fields, instead leaving whatever was missed/fallen for the poor to gather for themselves. Notice that it involved the able-bodied poor making the effort to take advantage of benign neglect, and not idly waiting for the farmer to dole out a significant fraction of what he reaped. Contrast this with the modern "basic income guarantee" movement, which requires nothing of the able-bodied "poor" yet requires productive workers hand over a good chunk of their earnings; this new notion is hardly pragmatic and reasonable save to those who would benefit from it (aye, many would be quite satisfied living thereon).
> Contrast this with the modern "basic income guarantee" movement, which requires nothing of the able-bodied "poor" yet requires productive workers hand over a good chunk of their earnings
I don't believe anyone has put together how much is going to need to be collected to provide a basic minimum income. Also, if you subsidize energy (renewables), food (subsidized agriculture), and healthcare (all of which is going to benefit the populace as a whole and is therefore a sunk cost), there should be a minimal cash outlay as a basic income.
Is that a question? Because damn. The lack of empathy or even respect for people's basic humanity is just astounding.
Is it not self-evident that a homeless man's right to be alive and healthy is worth more than my right to the BMW my family could have purchased instead of paying income tax?
There are good arguments to be made about the efficacy of the state vs. growth prompted by a free(r) market in actually achieving that goal, sure, but when you make such a plain insinuation that property is worth more than life... I don't get it. I will never understand the ideological fascination with property rights at the expense of all else.
Unless your notion of individual rights includes "the right to not pay tax" it's quite a fair way to provide a social safety net.
Tax revenue, when it's growing, grows linearly. Debt, however, grows exponentially. That explains why the total debt burden of the federal government, if you include unfunded liabilities, exceeds $70 trillion even though federal tax receipts last year were above $2.5 trillion.
Panera Bread founder and chief executive Ron Shaich has built a fortune selling pumpkin muffins and croissants to America's middle class.
But this week, he's trying out the SNAP Challenge in an effort to find out how the other half lives by limiting grocery purchases to the average benefit amount shelled out by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It's not much.
A typical food stamp recipient receives just $4.50 per day in food aid, according to Feeding America.
Emphasis mine.
If we want to lower the cost of food aid, cut out the middle man. Buy the farm land, automate as much of the farming as you can, and directly manage the distribution of the food.