The indignity of no work
economist.com
economist.com
Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but the idea of a Universal Basic Income seems to be getting more popular. (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) Particularly I guess as it begins to look like modern capitalism may not actually be good at providing jobs for everyone who needs one.
Potentially UBIs could be very good for the world, freeing people to work on things they personally desire and value, and in some ways redistributing the 'means of production' back to the little guy.
Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford.
As these services collapse so to will higher paying ones; lets see a doctor get up early to wash the floors of her practice since she can't afford to hire a cleaning staff and still charge patients a reasonable rate.
Certainly, some businesses will not be able to hire as many (or any) dishwashers/etc, but those that they do hire will have to be paid more. But that is a natural extension of decreasing the supply of labor.
The higher price that businesses will pay for labor will also push them to invest in capital (automation).
IIRC, the idea is to get that money by taxing capital and making it cheaper to hire people. As you indicate, getting it by taxing labor leads businesses to automate away labor, making it even harder to get that money from taxes on labor.
Think of it: that $5 an hour job currently costs a company $10 an hour or so. Without taxes on labor, they could pay $7 for a win-win situation. Even paying $5 would still be win-win, as the employee would have his basic income plus the $5 an hour.
Right now, that's not the case yet. But it's not hard to imagine a future where it is. Many menial jobs are getting automated and it's just getting worse and worse.
Soon, we will have to do something about it. These protests and revolutions are spreading like the plague. And social unrest is bad for everyone, including business. One day, it will become a necessity.
Just look at countries like Japan and Korea. Too many over-qualified people and not enough jobs. People are hired to do menial task like tearing tickets out of machines and handing it to people in a car. Suicide in these countries are skyrocketing because of hyper-competition.
In the rest of the world, these people don't commit suicide, they just gather into a big crowd and start protesting, violently.
There is definitely enough money to make work. The goverment just has to be smarter about allocating its budget.
In the Eastern Europe protests (Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey), people are protesting political corruption and abuse of authority, not poverty (in fact, I'll go as far as to say that many of the protesters are well-off middle class people, not the starving poor).
Unless they want more money, of course. Hands up everyone who might want more money than the minimum needed to survive.
F'rinstance I don't begrudge anyone a roof over their heads, but right now in the UK it is causing an enormous political storm trying to roll back "... with a spare bedroom or two, in the postcode of your choosing" getting tacked onto this basic right somewhere along the line.
The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work.
And what, exactly, do you propose that we do about this "oversupply of cheap human work"? If we simply ignore it, there'll be hell to pay. The old saying, idle hands are the devil's workshop, is based on millennia of human experience.
Suppose that all the dishwashers in the U.S. were suddenly to find themselves both (1) out of a job, and (2) as a result, unable to earn enough money to feed themselves and their families.
Now consider that for some of these people, retraining them to seek out and hold other jobs might not be much of an option. There are some people who, for whatever reason, simply can't learn the necessary skills / behaviors / motivations. (If you're inclined to scorn that notion, or such people, consider how little we really know about human learning abilities and motivation; such people are more common than you perhaps imagine.)
Are our unemployed dishwashers going to sit around passively and accept their fate, watching their families do without while they see others around them prospering? Not bloody likely --- they're going to try to do something about it. And some percentage of them are going to make trouble, e.g., by robbing or cheating others, dealing drugs, rioting, etc.
From a purely-pragmatic perspective, if we want to keep our vaunted social order intact, then we're going to have to figure out how to keep people (A) occupied in reasonable contentment, and (B) reasonably-well fed, -clothed, -housed, etc. This is a brute fact, which we can like or not, but which we disregard at our peril.
That's only true if you give things to people only on condition that they do something, anything, useful, harmful, obsolete, whatever you can call a job.
Food is cheap, housing can be cheap if it gets detangled from financial speculation and protected against rent seeking behavior. That's not excessive burden to keep all the people fed, clothed and housed and even entertained at minimum standard without making them do stuff.
Only obstacle is the mental one. Hate towards freeloaders, that makes people pretend they do useful things and makes other people create schemes that help to pretend.
People hate the idea that young father could get food or other things for free. He should be given at least a pretend job where he can simulate doing useful stuff away from his growing up kids.
Interestingly people don't mind the freeloading descendants of rich people. They didn't contribute themselves but their ancestors contributed so much. Unlike the ancestors of young poor father. He should be severely scorned for any of his attempts at freeloading.
Less sarcastically, automating that part of dirty dishes would not solve the whole problem of dirty dishes, would directly cost a lot and would make life more boring (standardized dishes!).
Not sure what you have in mind. Standardised thing would still be hand washable if you can't afford machine that washes and stores them.
About your ironic remark... I'm not sure if you consider current state of dish washing technology an optimum that we need not to progress any further from, or that you are perfectly happy at the current pace of the progress of dish-washing technology. I don't. And if we already had washer cabinets, I'd be wondering why they can't be integrated into a table or why we can't have mobile robots to collect the plates. Although I wouldn't call lack of robots a disgrace because robots are hard. I believe combining washer with cabinet is not and it doesn't exist mostly because of silly cultural thing called "but my plates would be boring then" and "what would humans do with all additional free time"?
Plates to large to fit in a dishwasher or that can't be washed or microwaved didn't acquire prestige premium as far as I know.
We made horses obsolete for transport, and now nobody HAS TO ride a horse (99%). You can do it for fun.
I would argue that today, most people who ride horses enjoy doing so, where the same could not be said for times before modern transportation.
This is much cheaper and considered socially acceptable or even laudable (depending on the country, certainly in the US). Businesses with a large share of their costs in unpleasant labor either do this or get destroyed by the competition. That's capitalism.
That's untrue. Switzerland is having a national referendum on whether to offer one, and stipends from oil or casino money, while not enough to live on at this point, already exist in a few places. You may be correct that there's not enough money to give everyone enough to live on, but it's far from sci-fi.
(There is plenty of money in the world, it's just tied up in things like insane finance industry salaries, or $500k/yr/person for imprisonment, etc.)
And historically? People looked after their own menial tasks, where they were small enough, and where the tasks were too big for individuals (like roads, or building a town hall) the community got together and did it.
There's 248 million people ages 16 and older in the US, of which 63% are in the labor force[1]. So 156 million people are available for work (not all of whom are employed).
Total population is about 330 million.
If each of them were to get a basic monthly stipend (this is everyone, including infants) of $1200, that's $396 billion per month in payments.
Per working individual, that's a tax burden of $2538 per month. And that's just for this program - there's also the rest of government to pay for. Military, roads, police + fire protection, and so on. This also assumes that the basic stipend replaces all other existing entitlement and welfare programs. Which isn't likely, because politics.
Yes, the working individual will also receive a stipend payment, reducing their net tax burden to $1338. But for an hourly employee, that comes out to about $8.35 per hour worked that goes to tax. Even with the new $10.10 minimum wage proposal, that leaves them just $1.75/hr as incentive to work, vs. just staying home and living off the stipend.
[1] http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states it pays more than $15 per hour.[1]
In fact, in 33 states and the District of Columbia, welfare pays more than an $8-an-hour job. In 12 states, including California, as well as the District of Columbia, the welfare package is more generous than a $15-an-hour job. In Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, D.C., welfare pays more than a $20-an-hour job, or more than 2.75 times the minimum wage.[2]
[1] http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/work-versus-wel...
[2] http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/why-get-welfare
Of course, there are incentives to work still, but $1200/month and accompanying tax raise may kill them for many more people than now.
To really calculate the cost of ABI, you need to subtract the cost of welfare.
That's the fear that leads to all the specific help, but the experiments with unconditional cash show that is not what happens.
First, the Mincome experiment in Manitoba (confusingly, while "Minimum Income" is something different than "Basic Income", the experiment did test "Basic Income"), which ran for five years in the 1970s and found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
Second, there was a case in London recently where a large lump sum was given to each of 13 long-term homeless men.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-t...
Third, unconditional income on an Indian reservation (derived from Casino profits) showed a substantial improvement in the welfare of children from poor families:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/what-happens...
You can absolutely find nits to pick about all of these, but they are not "remote places with extremely poor people having no experience with the welfare state". I'd love to see an experiment conducted in Chicago or wherever else, but if people in all of the above, diverse situations (some of whom certainly have experience with a welfare state) behave one way it starts to be perverse to expect something different for an arbitrary new group of people (which isn't to say we couldn't be surprised or shouldn't do more research, to a point).
[1] https://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-tpi.htm
[2] https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=4363
That gives ~$6500/person. That seems reasonable. Given if you distributed all money evenly worldwide the profit motive would disappear and things would be bought and sold at cost.
But yes, I've gone waaay into sci-fi.
But, back in the real world, Australia basically has one. So you're full of shit.[1]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
[1] http://australia.gov.au/topics/benefits-payments-and-service...
We have a nurturing social safety net and it provides some minimal payments for those who are experiencing hardship. These payments are temporary and a meant to help individuals survive while they get up on their feet again. The selection criteria is quite forgiving because the system is setup to err on the side of overpayments rather than risking people in genuine need to go homeless. Therefore, there are a small group people who take advantage of the system, but it is not designed to be anything like a universal basic income.
A basic income of ~$10k/year is provided to everyone (who needs it, i.e the unemployed). Depending on what kind of other needs (rent, children, school, etc) other benefits are available as well. It is not temporary, and you can live on it for your whole life if 10k/year is enough for you.
It was designed EXACTLY to be like a universal basic income, it has only (in the last 15 years) been eroded to a "temporary unemployment" scheme in peoples minds.
So you may be an Australian, but you seem to lack the knowledge of your own welfare system.
Tell me, if it isn't a universal basic income, then who is not 'eligible' for it? (Excluding people who already earn more than the basic income of course).
A UBI means everyone gets it, regardless of their other income. What you describe sounds is a means-tested minimum income support, not an unconditional basic income. UBI proponents oppose income-based means-testing for a number of reasons, including both additional administrative complexity and the fact that income-based means-testing reduces the incentive to productive work by creating an range in which additional outside income has reduced or no impact on total income, whereas with UBI no such range exists.
Australia's productivity is evidence that "reduced incentive to work" is FUD not fact.
You're forgetting the fact that a basic income would obviate all means-based welfare programs, unemployment insurance, social security, etc; this means 2.3 TRILLION dollars (1.03T from means-based welfare programs and 1.3T from SS) in savings. Also, it would be enormously strange if we gave a full basic income to every infant, toddler, child and teen in the United States. It seems pretty obvious that kids would count as an adjustment to your received basic income that's <100% of an entire additional basic income. For comparison, a single-person household on average gets $200/mo in food stamps and a family of four gets $500/mo, which works out to children costing 1/4th as much as an adult (and note that food stamps are more sensitive to additional children than housing costs are). The percentage of the population that's below 18 is somewhere around ~25%, so depending on the multiplier that takes ~$600B off of the cost. This means that the actual incremental cost of the program would be roughly $200B(with the weak-link assumption here being the multiplier of a child's cost). This is obviously a large sum of money, but considering the scope of such a program, a revenue increase of that magnitude would honestly be relatively trivial. This is particularly the case when you realize that if you raise tax rates just enough to cancel out the basic income for, say, upper-middle class or higher, you end up with no net tax increase for anyone and an additional bump in revenue (equivalent to a reduction in cost from limiting the basic income to everyone below a given income level, without the administrative hassle of means-testing).
I'm not saying the math WILL definitely work out, because I don't know what the basic-income figure would actually be (especially given C-o-L differences), but there's enough extreme inaccuracies in the bound you're giving that it's not really useful.
You think we should get rid of that in favor of a basic income of ~10k for everyone? That's going to suck pretty bad for the retired.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion if you do think that but the vast vast vast majority of Americans are going to disagree with you.
http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/
Even if social security was completely removed for a basic income of 10k (I'll clarify again that I'm not endorsing that figure as a blanket basic income), it would be a cut of a couple thousand a year, not a cut of more than 10k as you claim. Hell you could even keep all the net SS+basic income payouts the same and social security costs would drop to 1/5th of what they are now, saving over a trillion dollars.
Also, That was like, one third of one fourth of my post. The fact that your estimate was way way off (far from "simple math") is barely changed by excluding social security.
The importance of different pieces of your post shouldn't be measured in word count, but in dollars. I picked the part that matters the most (by far) from this perspective.
I'll assume that you don't actually disagree with my original comment from the fact that you're resorting to picking successively more microscopic nits.
NOTE: I don't mean politics in the negative sense, I mean it in the sense of ones beliefs/experiences/political-stance/etc.
He's pointing out that it's a practical impossibility. The money for UBI has to come from somewhere, and any money a government has at its disposal comes from: 1) extortion (ie. taxation), 2) printing, 3) borrowing.
Those are the three options, and none of them are a sustainable way to fund UBI, because the amount of money needed is so massive. You can't get something from nothing, and everyone can't get something from everyone else.
I'm not convinced that it is NOT financially viable. Especially in Switzerland where the governance is exemplary compared to other countries. I believe it is, only a real world example will convince me and Switzerland IMHO is the perfect country to run this experiment.
The fact that you equate taxation with extortion for example, shows that you have a different, not necessarily wrong, starting point than me.
It's not about the "quality" of your "governance", ie. "how satisfactorily you're enslaved". It's just that all money a government hands out to people has to come from somewhere, and each of the ways of acquiring the money has negative, compounding consequences.
> The fact that you equate taxation with extortion for example, shows that you have a different, not necessarily wrong, starting point than me.
True. But if you think about it for a moment, you'll realize it actually meets the criteria for extortion. You're handing over your money under threat of violence, even if the violence is X steps removed from where you are now.
No one would pay taxes without the threat of violence. If you were just asked nicely: "would you like to support yet another war in the Middle-East with a few thousand dollars?", you'd just decline and go on with your life, and that's exactly why they don't just ask nicely, they force you to pay.
I agree with the rest of your points, but not necessarily with this one. Many people do pay taxes voluntarily, because "it's their civic duty", and roads and schools and all of that.
If it were genuinely voluntary, they could just stop any time they wanted to, without any negative consequences. We all know they can't - they'll be forcefully hauled into jail, and their property will be confiscated.
You claimed people pay taxes voluntarily, but that is incorrect. Even if some people don't mind paying them now, they can't stop either. Your willingness to pay them is separate from whether you have a choice.
If I take your laptop, is it extortion when you demand its return? At some point you may resort to violence (or have someone else do it on your behalf), so, that's extortion right? I would say no, because we have collectively agreed that property rights should usually be enforced - the mere fact that I possess your laptop doesn't mean it is rightfully mine. Likewise, we have collectively agreed (through the process of government, with all its flaws) to pay certain amounts in tax in certain situations. Asking for something that in someone's possession but that they don't actually have right to is not what extortion is.
Oh come on.. :p It's my laptop, my property. But if I tell you I'm going to hurt you if you don't give me your laptop, that is extortion.
> Likewise, we have collectively agreed (through the process of government, with all its flaws) to pay certain amounts in tax in certain situations.
"We" can't collectively agree on anything, because we're all individuals, and we all have the exact same rights as everyone else (which don't include making binding decisions on behalf of complete strangers).
Imagine there are 10 people in a room, and 9 of them decide that each will eat five of the hottest chilis in the world. Does that mean the remaining one has to eat them too, because they have "collectively decided" to eat chilis, or does he have the right not to participate?
Of course, the 9 people in the room have a sound and reasonable argument that murder is wrong (perhaps their argument is "it infringes the rights of others"), just as, we may presume, the nine chili-eaters have a sound and reasonable argument they must all eat the five hottest chilis. But in each instance, the tenth individual began from different premises and did not arrive at their conclusion (maybe he is an Incan time traveler and human sacrifice is part of his religious beliefs, and he does not see that there is any objective basis for human rights.)
Enforced collective agreement and societal norms are necessary for society to exists whether you like and agree to it or not. If that makes you a slave, then all of mankind has been enslaved from the dawn of time save the loners in the wilderness.
One of the libertarian's "collective agreements" is that every individual has certain rights.
You're doing a pretty good job at sophistry, but since you happened to use the word "right", I'd point out that decisions don't affect rights.
Compare these two ideas:
1) No one wants to be killed, and therefore, we can
reasonably consider killing someone forbidden.
2) The nine of us want to eat shit, and therefore,
we can reasonably conclude that you must eat shit
too, regardless of whether you want to or not.
Consider for example:
1) Do you have the right to walk 10 meters forward?
2) Do you have the right to walk 10 meters forward,
even though there's someone right in front of you,
and you'd have to trample over him to move forward?
What's the rationale for this claim?
Furthermore, is it moral for your average Sicilian neighbourhood mafia to extort people? -If not, why is it alright for governments to extort people? Does the end justify the means? -What if the Sicilian mafia wants to feed a few poor people with the money they extort from you? -Would that make their extortion alright?
What if the mafia say they need your money to maintain peace in the neighbourhood? You see, without the mafia's protection services, people would be killing each other left and right, and we just can't have that, can we? -Extorting you is necessary for the common good then, wouldn't you agree?
Why?
You're stating this as an axiom. Indeed, you're taking the very concept of human rights itself as an axiom, and that's why everything follows so cleanly for you.
But step out of the box. There is no reason for everyone to believe that. Most people through history did not believe in it. Many of them would have equally rational arguments to the contrary. Your very concept of "rights" as something fundamental is a deeply held Western social norm and "collective agreement." Because 9/10 people collectively agree that we have rights, our rights are protected and enforced.
If they did not agree, your idea of rights would be regarded as a fine bit of eccentricity and people would kill you as a sacrifice to the god Asdkjhf and feel that it was not only right and just but necessary. In other words, your rights would be completely meaningless. They are not an objective construct you can hold up as a shield against all wrongs.
Morality is an entirely different argument. But within the commonly held philosophical framework, a (democratic) government cannot be compared to a mafia because the government represents the will of the people while the mafia does not. But this argument can never convince you, because you have taken the axiom of individual rights to the extreme while not taking other axioms.
Without axioms, we can't figure anything out. You say "human rights", but I'd say "natural rights". To me, the former is a state-centric concept - governments supposedly "protect" our "human rights", but somehow no one seems to figure out that governments are the biggest threat to "human rights" too - history is full of genocides committed by governments/rulers etc.
Rights are an idea meant to draw boundaries for acceptable behaviour, and natural rights is a version based on reasoning, starting from the axiomatic observation that we own our bodies - it's clear they're completely under our control, after all.
Ultimately, it's all about making sense of things, through reason and evidence. That's the only way to figure things out, and to reach logical, sound conclusions about societal issues.
> Because 9/10 people collectively agree that we have rights, our rights are protected and enforced.
This doesn't make sense to me. What does it mean that our rights are "protected and enforced"? -By whom? -The government? And what does a "collective agreement" have to do with whether our rights are protected and enforced?
If you think the government protects and enforces our rights, you're way off the mark. For starters, there's nothing the government does that prevents a random stranger from hurting you, and second, contrary to what they'd have you believe, governments are the single biggest threat to you and your rights anyway.
> If they did not agree, your idea of rights would be regarded as a fine bit of eccentricity and people would kill you as a sacrifice to the god Asdkjhf and feel that it was not only right and just but necessary
Yeah. Rights are an idea. Luckily it's an idea that the vast majority of people automatically adheres to, without ever even thinking about it. Everyone knows you "can't" just go around hurting people or taking their property, but what no one knows is that there's no reason why this shouldn't apply to governments too.
> They are not an objective construct you can hold up as a shield against all wrongs.
I'm not saying that the idea of rights protects me in any way, shape or form. But I would like to clear up the idea, so that people would stop conflating it (along with everything else) with what governments supposedly do to benefit us when in reality they're only harmful.
> But within the commonly held philosophical framework, a (democratic) government cannot be compared to a mafia because the government represents the will of the people while the mafia does not. But this argument can never convince you, because you have taken the axiom of individual rights to the extreme while not taking other axioms.
That argument can never convince me, because it makes no sense when you get to the bottom of it. It's not about cherry-picking axioms to accept. Either something is axiomatic, or it's not, and two separate statements can't be contradictory and axiomatic at the same time.
First, taxation really is extortion, there's simply no way around that. Can you consent to something that happens against your will? (Hint: "No."). There goes your fake axiom about the will of the people. Even if you're willing to pay taxes now (mostly because you're in denial about the extortion), it changes nothing about the nature of taxation. We all know you can't stop paying them.
Second, we're all brainwashed to believe governments are beneficial and necessary. Don't believe me? -Well, does it seem a bit strange that people are arguing for their own extortion? Or that without governments, we wouldn't have roads, or hospitals or education? As if those services can only be provided with money that's been forcefully confiscated from people.
Thinking that people who have been brainwashed into not seeing extortion for what it is actually want it to happen is comparable to thinking that a comatose person wants you to stick a fork in his eye. There goes "the will of the people" again.
But with the wrong axioms, we can figure out things that are false and think they are true. Just because you're taking something as an axiom doesn't mean you are correct to do so.
Yes they can. It just means the system is inconsistent. I'd recommend studying some logic, if you intend to use your mighty powers of REASON to reach TRUTH.
Rational actors may absolutely wish to agree to be forced into something. This is known as a "collective action problem" - where any individual may benefit if they defect, but each individual benefits more if everyone cooperates than if everyone defects.
How about a toy example:
Say we're living in a small coastal village, and storm season is approaching. If we don't build a levee, we're all going to lose a lot more - in total - than the cost of building the levee. But the levee is expensive (more than we can collectively come up with up front) and will take a long time to build (we don't have time to save, before we need to start construction). So we all agree to pay monthly. Come the second month, I'm thinking "Well, I want the levee built, but the value my portion of the funds adds to the levee really isn't worth as much to me as the funds themselves..." If the choice is "Everyone pays or no one pays" I clearly prefer "everyone pays". I prefer "everyone but me pays" even more, but everyone else is only going to pay if we all credibly commit to paying, which means we commit to be forced if we later decide we don't want to pay.
Yes, that's my point. But it's your laptop by social convention. There are very good reasons for that social convention, and I would oppose most changes to it, but there's nothing intrinsic to the state of the world other than what's collectively in our heads and extensions thereof that makes that laptop yours or it "right" that you continue to possess it.
'"We" can't collectively agree on anything, because we're all individuals, and we all have the exact same rights as everyone else (which don't include making binding decisions on behalf of complete strangers).'
I disagree. Yes, we are all individuals. Yes, we all have the same rights. But when my rights and your rights (or my interests and your interests) collide, we need a mechanism for collective decision making.
Asking me if not-extortion is extortion doesn't make much of a point.
> But it's your laptop by social convention. There are very good reasons for that social convention, and I would oppose most changes to it, but there's nothing intrinsic to the state of the world other than what's collectively in our heads and extensions thereof that makes that laptop yours or it "right" that you continue to possess it.
Yeah, the issue of rights is just as complicated as you want to make it. Or you can just reject any notion of rights altogether, if you want to completely filibuster a conversation.
But it's important to realize that reasoning helps us find the "truth" about things. Sure, next, you could go into metaphysics and claim we can't even know if the idea of "truth" makes any sense. But you have to draw the line somewhere, because otherwise you'll never reach a conclusion about anything.
> But when my rights and your rights (or my interests and your interests) collide, we need a mechanism for collective decision making.
A monopoly on violence that enslaves hundreds of millions of people is not necessary for solving a dispute between two people.
Even the two people involved can reach an agreement, but if that doesn't work out, they could let some kind of arbiter/court settle it. They'd do that because they'd both want to move on with their lives instead of wasting time, energy and effort on ultimately pointless bickering.
Reread the comment. I asked rhetorically if it was extortion, to raise the point of why it was not extortion, which I got at in the very next sentence.
'Yeah, the issue of rights is just as complicated as you want to make it. Or you can just reject any notion of rights altogether, if you want to completely filibuster a conversation.
But it's important to realize that reasoning helps us find the "truth" about things. Sure, next, you could go into metaphysics and claim we can't even know if the idea of "truth" makes any sense. But you have to draw the line somewhere, because otherwise you'll never reach a conclusion about anything.'
This really couldn't be more handwavy. I'm not going anywhere abstract - I want the society that works out the best for every individual in the short, medium, and long term, as best we can approach that. If that's where we get by treating the particular things you've labelled "rights" and respecting them with a deontological rigidness, then that's what I want to do. If that's where we get by stepping all over your "rights" then that's what I want to do. I think that it's clear from history that respecting certain rights is very important for medium- and long-term well-being of individuals in society. I also think it's clear that an ability to solve collective action problems is necessary and that massive concentration of power is a problem. My philosophy may not fit on a postage stamp, but that only a marketing problem, and reflects the fact that the world is complex.
"A monopoly on violence that enslaves hundreds of millions of people is not necessary for solving a dispute between two people."
Again, your language is absurd. Establish that hundreds of millions are enslaved - as normal people would use the word, not something you can technically force into place by ignoring important aspects of what people usually mean when they say enslavement - or gtfo.
A monopoly on legitimate initiation of violence is a great thing. Read some Hobbes and look at the violence we see in (for instance) drug turf wars, when recourse to the state is denied. We need to be vigilant to keep the leviathan in check and that initiation of violence to a minimum, but monopoly is tremendously better than allowing competitive violence - monopolies under-produce.
"Even the two people involved can reach an agreement, but if that doesn't work out, they could let some kind of arbiter/court settle it."
How do they pick which arbiter to turn to, if they haven't had dealings with each other before? If it's always a certain arbiter in a certain area, that's just the existing court system.
I got it just fine. But even if the laptop weren't my property (by social convention or otherwise), demanding it back would not constitute extortion without a threat. Either way, I still don't see the point.
> This really couldn't be more handwavy
Sure, but I didn't mean to "prove" anything to you.
> I'm not going anywhere abstract - I want the society that works out the best for every individual in the short, medium, and long term, as best we can approach that. If that's where we get by treating the particular things you've labelled "rights" and respecting them with a deontological rigidness, then that's what I want to do.
Cool. Read up on Murray Rothbard for example. If that's too heavy (I can relate), how about starting with an educational video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RILDjo4EXV8 ? -Watch the videos on that channel, and you'll start understanding that governments are only harmful to economies too.
> If that's where we get by stepping all over your "rights" then that's what I want to do.
Well that sure is fucked up.
> My philosophy may not fit on a postage stamp, but that only a marketing problem, and reflects the fact that the world is complex.
Yep, the world is complex, and so is the vast mountain of bullshit layered on top of Reason & Evidence to make governments look necessary/legitimate/beneficial. Yeah, I don't have the time or energy to try and prove that either. You'll have to go through the process of reaching enlightenment (ie. "waking up") on your own anyway.
> Establish that hundreds of millions are enslaved
If 100% of the fruits of your labour are forcefully taken by someone else, you're a slave. If 50% are forcefully taken, you're a "50% slave". Even 50% enslavement is enslavement, and so, we're all slaves. The degree of enslavement doesn't matter, just like it's irrelevant whether you raped a woman for 10 minutes or three hours - it's still rape.
Yeah, that still leaves you the wiggle-room of pointing out that we get to choose what we do to earn money. But that's more like an implementation detail, and doesn't mean it's unreasonable to call it enslavement. How about "indirect enslavement"? -That seems apt too. We get to choose what to do because the most productive slave is the one who thinks he's free.
> A monopoly on legitimate initiation of violence is a great thing. Read some Hobbes and look at the violence we see in (for instance) drug turf wars, when recourse to the state is denied.
Care to elaborate? What's "recourse to the state" in this case, and how is it denied?
> We need to be vigilant to keep the leviathan in check
The problem is that it's impossible to keep governments in check. They're not responsible to anyone for their actions, after all. You'd think that Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet and countless other mass-murderers would have kind of driven this point home already, but um.. no.
I'll give up now, at least for today. Feel free to make a clear claim about violence or private courts, and maybe I'll address it.
If all you do is make the request, and there is no (explicit or implicit) threat that you'll take it by force or involve police or anything else, then yes it is not extortion for an additional reason. Would you really advocate that people simply let it go? If so, we're having a different conversation than I thought we were. It was a straightforward attempt at a simple existence proof - you had said "things which meet these criteria are extortion", I provided something that met those criteria that was not extortion. Couldn't be simpler; an entirely relevant application of reason to the problem.
"Cool. Read up on Murray Rothbard for example. If that's too heavy (I can relate), how about starting with an educational video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RILDjo4EXV8 ? -Watch the videos on that channel, and you'll start understanding that governments are only harmful to economies too."
I'm familiar with the literature, including Rothbard. Many of the ideas are certainly fascinating, but I reject Austrian school economics because they reject empiricism. There is an infinitude of internally consistent axiomatic systems, the only way to tell whether yours actually has any relation to the real world is to measure and compare (other stuff you've written here leads me to think you sympathetic to this viewpoint, so I don't know why you're so accepting of that stuff).
Nonetheless, as I say later (though you didn't quote it) "I think that it's clear from history that respecting certain rights is very important for medium- and long-term well-being of individuals in society."
'> If that's where we get by stepping all over your "rights" then that's what I want to do.
Well that sure is fucked up.'
Wow, that is some powerful REASON right there.
I would say that clinging to the things you've arbitrarily blessed as rights when better outcomes are attainable is fucked up. Rights are not what I value first order. I value people living long and healthy lives and preferably happy lives, where they can find meaning in whatever ways they derive it.
That said, I'm speaking of principles here. In practice, I'm not eager to trade away most of the things various people have called "rights" - it would have to meet a high burden of proof that it's genuinely a good idea in the medium to long term. To my mind, asserting our rights helps provide security against government; collectively demanding that the rights of everyone be respected is how we keep government in check. But we collectively decide what those rights must be, and should pick them so as to most prevent excess consolidation of power (in government or elsewhere) where that power might be used to inappropriately (... which is pretty much anywhere), but also so as to maximize the benefits government can provide where that does not cost us too much in the other respect.
'Yep, the world is complex, and so is the vast mountain of bullshit layered on top of Reason & Evidence to make governments look necessary/legitimate/beneficial. Yeah, I don't have the time or energy to try and prove that either. You'll have to go through the process of reaching enlightenment (ie. "waking up") on your own anyway.'
I have to laugh a bit here at how stereotypical the above reads of fundamentalist whack-job or conspiracy nut. "I have a privileged viewpoint! Ignore the lies and listen to the prophets and you too can be enlightened!"
I don't see enough actual content there for a real response.
'If 100% of the fruits of your labour are forcefully taken by someone else, you're a slave. If 50% are forcefully taken, you're a "50% slave". Even 50% enslavement is enslavement, and so, we're all slaves. The degree of enslavement doesn't matter, just like it's irrelevant whether you raped a woman for 10 minutes or three hours - it's still rape.
Yeah, that still leaves you the wiggle-room of pointing out that we get to choose what we do to earn money. But that's more like an implementation detail, and doesn't mean it's unreasonable to call it enslavement. How about "indirect enslavement"? -That seems apt too. We get to choose what to do because the most productive slave is the one who thinks he's free.'
I think there are a huge number of aspects of slavery that are missing in our relationship with government. You can choose not to work (or earn less than the standard deduction) and not have to pay any taxes. You can, as you say, choose where you work. You can also choose to leave the country, if another country will give you citizenship, give up your US citizenship, and pay taxes to the other country - slaves cannot choose their master. You're also not likely to be sold away from your family.
Having some aspects in common with slavery doesn't make it 50% slavery.
'Care to elaborate? What's "recourse to the state" in this case, and how is it denied?'
Harry Brown covered this quite approachably in "Why Government Doesn't Work".
If I'm selling peaches, and someone comes along and says "this neighborhood is my peach selling turf; stop selling peaches or I'll shoot you", I can report it to the police. If I'm selling cocaine and someone says the same, and I tell the police, I don't get assistance. Likewise, if someone steals my peaches versus if someone steals my cocaine. Making individuals responsible for enforcing their own property rights against one another leads to violence between individuals (and, ultimately, gangs). You don't see Jim Beam doing drive-bys of Seagrams distributors - but you did during prohibition.
"The problem is that it's impossible to keep governments in check. They're not responsible to anyone for their actions, after all. You'd think that Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet and countless other mass-murderers would have kind of driven this point home already, but um.. no."
Any technology can be misused, and government is no different. A pile of disasters, from which we've learned some (though, I agree, not enough), by no means demonstrates impossibility of avoiding them. We've seen plenty of times the violence that can come about from too little government as well, and it can easily compete (in terms of percentage of the population) with the travesties you cite.
"Feel free to make a clear claim about violence or private courts, and maybe I'll address it."
I'm not sure what you're demanding of me, here.
I pointed out that taxation meets the criteria for extortion: you're giving up your property under threat of violence. It's clearly a match.
You asked if me demanding my laptop back would constitute extortion, which we both know it doesn't. There are two reasons why not: 1) the laptop is my property (regardless of "how"), 2) there is no threat. This is why my original reaction was: "Oh come on".
But now you're saying the laptop was an example of something that meets the criteria of extortion without being extortion.. and that's just not true.
>>> I want the society that works out the best for every individual in the short, medium, and long term, as best we can approach that. If that's where we get by treating the particular things you've labelled "rights" and respecting them with a deontological rigidness, then that's what I want to do. If that's where we get by stepping all over your "rights" then that's what I want to do
>> Well that sure is fucked up.
> Wow, that is some powerful REASON right there.
What you said is comparable to me declaring that I'll just shoot you in the kneecaps and take your money if I ever come across you, just because I want the money, so fuck you and fuck your well-being.
So that's perfectly alright if it results in a "good outcome", as defined by.. who? Me? -Obviously, you don't have a say because you're the one being robbed to achieve whatever good outcome I might have set my sights on.
Do you see why I talked about the end not justifying the means? Your way of thinking is like Stalin's or Mao's. They had lots of good outcomes in mind when slaughtering hundreds of millions of innocent people. In other words, your way of thinking is, in fact, fucked up.
Don't talk about good or better "outcomes", that's a misguided, mass-coercion-rationalizing attitude. You don't know "the correct outcome" for a society - there is no such thing, and above all, you can't arrange for it to happen through coercion.
What people could do, is follow the golden rule - do unto others as you'd have done to yourself. That way we'd actually reach the best possible "outcome" for everyone, which is something you'll understand if you accept Austrian economics.
.. speaking of which:
> I reject Austrian school economics because they reject empiricism
Oh this again. Boo-hoo, it's not a "real science". Well so fucking what? Does people's behaviour work like mathematics, or.. is it perhaps, unpredictable?
Austrian economics is based on observations on how people actually behave, in reality. Since economies consist of millions of people making exchanges, that's the best possible basis for a school of economic thought. It doesn't take much to understand this once you stop insisting on clinging on to your preconceived notions of what economics should be like.
> collectively demanding that the rights of everyone be respected is how we keep government in check
Really now? How's that working out so far? Does it work in the burgeoning police state of the US? What about North-Korea? Did it work in Mao's China?
Please wake up. There is no way to keep a government in check - it wields absolute power over a geographical area, until the masses stop believing that someone else has the right to rule them, that is.
> But we collectively decide what those rights must be, and should pick them so as to most prevent excess consolidation of power (in government or elsewhere) where that power might be used to inappropriately (... which is pretty much anywhere)
No, the only version of the idea of rights that works and is tenable, is one that is based on sound reasoning. If 100 people "collectively decide" that you don't have the right to own a spleen, I'm sure you'd agree that's not a particularly good way of defining rights. Sure, a spleen is an extreme example, but it could be anything really. Any collective decision where you're harmed without you harming anyone is obviously wrong. Taxation is not a collective decision, especially when neither of us was ever asked, nor were our parents. In fact, ordinary people have never been asked if they'd like to be extorted. That's kind of like, not how extortion works, after all.
> I have to laugh a bit here at how stereotypical the above reads of fundamentalist whack-job or conspiracy nut.
Here's a conspiracy theory for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=yuC... .. it's just that it's "the official conspiracy theory". That's exactly what governments would have us believe. Does it sound believable?
> You can also choose to leave the country, if another country will give you citizenship, give up your US citizenship, and pay taxes to the other country - slaves cannot choose their master
Being able to switch from Prison A to Prison B doesn't mean you're free though. Again, the most productive slave is one that thinks he's free, and that's why we're not outright slaves. Here's more on that: http://board.freedomainradio.com/page/books/the_handbook_of_...
> Making individuals responsible for enforcing their own property rights against one another leads to violence between individuals (and, ultimately, gangs).
Government doesn't change that you know. If someone decides to rob you, a police officer won't materialize between you and him to prevent it. If someone wants to hurt you, he'll evaluate the risks vs the "reward", and make a decision based on that. Luckily, the vast majority of people won't hurt you with or without a government.
> You don't see Jim Beam doing drive-bys of Seagrams distributors - but you did during prohibition.
Prohibition is something the government did. You're just helping my case by bringing it up.
> Any technology can be misused, and government is no different.
So now government is a "technology", as if it's something we, the people, "use" to our benefit? :P Nice going there.
> A pile of disasters, from which we've learned some (though, I agree, not enough), by no means demonstrates impossibility of avoiding them
Well, now you're saying we need "better government", but that's like asking for "better enslavement". Once again, governments are. not. responsible. to. anyone. for. their. actions. Please let that sink in. Do you get that because there is no higher power than government, there is nothing to keep them in check? Do you get that because of that, there's nothing governments can't do to us individuals?
It takes a massive uprising to topple a government, and then it's always just replaced with another. Oh, and along the way, lots of innocent people are beaten, tased, killed, and tortured by the government, just like in the Ukraine or Venezuela these days. Wake up? The solution to a group of sociopaths in power hurting everyone is not to replace it with another. The only solution is for the masses to stop believing that they need to have a group of sociopaths rule over them. That belief is the belief in political authority.
Not necessarily. Money can be printed out of thin air. It is printed out of thin air right now, mostly by private banks (I know they're not technically printing money, but Fractional Reserve Banking and other shenanigans have the same practical effects).
Of course, once you're explicit about printing money, you need to be careful about inflation. But we shouldn't fool ourselves: we never ever lacked money. Money isn't scarce. What we may lack however are resources (both renewable and fossil), and labour.
But in this era of massive unemployment, it looks like labour isn't the bottleneck.
This is the crux right here.
The government no longer providers you money as BI. It provides you with the right to housing (build up), the right to energy (one person can only use so many KwHs/day), the right to worldwide communications (I think we can all agree the price of moving bits is going to continue to fall), the right to food, and the right to transportation (electric self-driving vehicles).
With enough wind, solar, nuclear power, with self driving cars, with automated manufacturing and farming, you don't need money. You simply provide for your citizens their basic essentials. The people who want to work, will. The people who don't aren't a burden, because robots don't resent.
(1) Automation is on its way, and will continue to eat jobs. It won't be possible to create as much jobs as technology is taking away. Take self driving cars for instance: soon there will be no bus driver, no truck driver, no taxi driver. Some of them will work in control centres and "supervise" 50 vehicles at once, but that still means many people who will need another job. People will have free time, whether they want it or not.
(2) This is a cultural problem. I guess much of it will go away once we solve (3)
(3) is less costly than it sounds. We just need to be rational about crop management (which is currently insane, thanks to globalization), the use of technology, urbanisation… It's a huge problem, but not an unsolvable one. We will need the political will to do it though, and that won't happen until western countries become democracies[1].
[1]: Current western countries are not run by the people. They are run by elected elites, which happen to represent the interests of the businesses —the only special interest that is not called such. Therefore, current western countries are not democracies. They're plutocracies. Now, I think this is most true in the US, and less true in some European countries.
(2) Yes, of course, people will start giving away their possessions really soon now. As soon as there will be communism, which is right around the corner. I'll believe it when somebody gifts me a yacht and a beachfront house somewhere in Mediterranean. BTW, how exactly you would have your magic robots make everybody their own beachfront house in the Mediterranean?
(3) Yeah right. We just need a set of magic technologies which would do something that was never done and nobody has any remotest idea how to do it, and every attempt in the past to do it ended up in spectacular and very bloody disaster. Technology is not magic, it can do a lot but it can not change human nature and it can not produce everything out of nothing for free.
(4) Businesses are people. You're just trying to dehumanize them because these people stand in line of your agenda. While you are glad to describe how people would gift you their possessions and work for you for free, you still realize fat chance they will. So you just say - well, those not true people, those are "elites" and "businesses" and "special interests" (as if anybody but people can have interests!) and as soon as we disenfranchise them and take power to the real people - abundance and happiness will ensue. Too bad this all was already tried a hundred years ago. With exactly the same words and exactly the same promises. The result was and always will be - blood, hunger, suffering, misery and death.
> But we shouldn't fool ourselves: we never ever lacked money. Money isn't scarce. What we may lack however are resources (both renewable and fossil), and labour.
Money is a representation of value - you've had to earn it somehow (unless you're the government ofc). In other words, money represents labour/resources/services etc, and those are scarce even if our fiat currencies can be created out of thin air seemingly without any limit.
The point here is, again, that you can't get something from nothing. If a government wants to implement UBI, it can't just distribute grains of sand to everyone - it has to be something valuable and useable as a means of exchange, and that places limits on what the government can feasibly do.
I'm open-minded but not convinced that printing money for UBI is an awful idea.
Printing money and sharing it out equally results in inflation, very likely, which affects people with existing wealth/savings more. The result is that money is very effectively redistributed, in a way which the existing income-based taxation system is unable to. Isn't that exactly the goal?
Also, I wasn't only advocating printing money by the state. I was also suggesting we stop banks from printing money as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-reserve_banking Monetary policy is too important to let private special interests control it.
Also, the current way of dealing with money, even for a state, is to think in terms of budget, deficits… while it should instead think in terms of money supply. The state would then increase the money supply through various spending, and decrease through taxes. Deficit would be zero by definition. Only inflation would remain. (My guess: inflation should probably be kept between 3% and 10% per year. It should definitely not be null.)
Monetary policy influences all other policies, because you do need a budget to do anything. (A budget in resources and manpower, but money is too convenient to do away with.)
My point is, money is too important to let a few powerful, not-even-elected entities control it.
And yes, the numbers do work. You just need relatively high tax rates (>= 50%) to support the Basic Income -- but no higher than already exist in many European countries.
A family of 4 could live on £12000/year not luxuriously but with the basics, somewhere like Wales. A single person could not live on £3000/year in London.
Basic income allows people to better choose their own destiny. I can move from London to Wales, or move from Wales to London, knowing in both cases that I'll at least have a basic income to cover moving costs and minimum expenses while I set myself up.
That nets me a different quality of life in each place, exactly as it should. Choosing to live in London means you share the resources with a much higher population density and take the (many) positive and negative consequences of that.
You still need to work, but you have more freedom to negotiate; at least, you have gained a decent Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) - if things go horribly wrong you can still move to Wales :)
Greater London, bigger than the next ~7 largest urban areas in the UK put together. A lot of infrastructure would need rebuilding if 10% of the UK population were going to quickly up and move to the remote hills and North Wales towns.
Welfare and healthcare are run by different govt departments.
But my point stands: I'm not including the NHS budget in mine, for this.
As it happens, I'm also skeptical of the numbers working out in the Swiss proposal, but they're crazy high.
> generally as the supply of dollars goes up, the price of a loaf of bread goes hardly up in any noticable way, financial assets / Silicon Valley valuations / houses go up significantly (so the country thinks they got "wealthier"), and bread-loaf prices in USD-aligned weak-currency/underdeveloped/perpetually-"emerging" economies go up quite significantly
Not to worry, dollar supply inflation greatly delays consumer price inflation on your shores thanks to the massive oversupply of USD already circulating all over the globe, looking to find a way "home" ;)
Interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
There is some flexibility - trust in USD is still very strong and US can print quite a bit before negative cycle kicks in but it defintely could not print as much as needed to make everyone rich.
If the dollar ever started to inflate like crazy, I bet it wouldn't stay the world reserve currency for long. Also, keep in mind that some of the larger countries have been looking for alternatives (like the EUR) for years.
I'm not saying that being born a citizen of Brunei is a raw deal, but their wealth is pretty dependent on the needs of much larger countries.
Sorry, but that last part is utterly dumb. There is enough of everything for everyone, money is just one of the abstractions we built for convenience's sake. Most of these abstractions for power have gone out of hand, but I assure you that there exists a theoretical parallel universe where basic income is implemented at a global scale.
You can actually see this in practice if you visit Cuba. In Havana there are 3 families living in one apartment with cardboard over the windows for normal people, and there are gorgeous ex-Colonial villas with landscaped gardens, where well-connected Party types live.
And how is that different from the US? Besides "party types" being Ivy Leaguers and silver-spoon fed people?
Whereas in real life you see people working their ass off all their lives still working at Walmarts at their 70s, while heirs, privileged slobs and frauds who haven't actually worked a day in their lives are living the dream...
Citation for this fact?
Total estimated energy potential for renewables in the US (wind/solar/biomass/etc) is 481800 TWh. The US used 25,776 Twh of energy in 2010. That's a lot of renewable energy. With that much renewable energy, you can desal all the water you want. You could even replenish aquifers by condensing water out of the air when power is cheap (at night, when the wind is blowing hard).
We have enough land for food production, which is for the most part automated (http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/demographics.html ; "There are over 313,000,000 people living in the United States. Of that population, less than 1% claim farming as an occupation (and about 2% actually live on farms). In 2007, only 45% of farmers claimed farming as their principal occupation and a similar number of farmers claiming some other principal occupation. The number of farms in the U.S. stands at about 2.2 million."). As we continue to automate farming, we'll be able to feed more people with less effort. Ergo, there is enough food for everyone.
So, let me run through this:
* Energy * Water * Food * Communications infrastructure
Ahh! Transportation! I missed that. Self-driving electric cars fit the bill. Also, efficient traffic management algorithms ensure our existing roadways can be used at maximum efficiency, thereby removing the need for more roadway.
Did I miss anything?
A $10k/yr income for every American would cost $3T.
Current US gov't spending is over $6.4T.
Actually you could support UBI by just taxing 1-2 people in the whole US.
The richest 2 people in america have around 120 billion dollars between them. 100B are enough to directly give $5000 to 20M people under coupons and welfare today.
Even $1000 are more than the yearly income for billions of people in places with far less physical resources than the US (and close enough food prices). Heck, 200 million Pakistanis live with a national GPD of around 250 billion dollars for comparison ($1300 per person).
And the richest 400 share around 2 trillion between them. We haven't even touched the trillions they save from off-shore accounts, shady accounting etc. And that's for private citizens, one would also want to extent it to corporations.
Also, you won't be giving a basic income to anyone making above a certain amount (no reason to give it to someone already making several tens of thousands of dollars a year).
Not to mention that these people, unlike Warren Buffet or Trump, cannot hoard the money they get, so those get re-invested in the economy pronto.
Lets say you tax away that 2 trillion, which is mostly illiquid productive capacity rather than easily redistributable liquid cash. That'll provide a $7,200 basic income for about 275 million Americans for one year. Then what?
Of course, in real life, you can't redistribute Zuckerberg's wealth as cash. The most you could do is give every American a few shares of FB, a few shares of MS, etc.
Also, you won't be giving a basic income to anyone making above a certain amount (no reason to give it to someone already making several tens of thousands of dollars a year).
We already do that. It's called "welfare", not "basic income".
Not to mention that these people, unlike Warren Buffet or Trump, cannot hoard the money they get, so those get re-invested in the economy pronto.
You are confusing consumption and investment.
Buffet and Trump invest the bulk of their income. Buffet invests in railroads and insurance companies, Trump invests in condos. Peter Thiel invests his money in companies like Facebook, Linkedin and Deep Mind.
Consumption is when you spend the money on stuff like big screen TVs or food.
Absolutely disagree.
Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean that undesirable jobs (such as the ones you describe) will have to increase pay and conditions to correctly reflect the job's undesirability. To me, that's an awesome result!
In the specific case of being a doctor: it's possible (but unlikely) that desirable jobs such as doctors may have to take a relative paycut to cover other expenses.
I don't see that as the worst thing. Doctors deserve to be paid according to their skill, yes, but at the moment have entrance requirements which are disproportionate to the job at hand. This effectively limits a desirable career to the already-privileged and means the system is not necessarily accurate at identifying the most skilled candidates. If poor, skilled people are more securely able to fund themselves through medical school, that would also be great!
I'm not a doctor, but sometimes I wonder if it's easier than it seems. It's not hard to diagnose the basic and obvious stuff and do good work by only addressing the basics. Repeating something like that doesn't take talent, but you do have to make sure you actually know it and the best way to do that is to have an external authority on the matter.
Sometimes I also wonder how much work has gone into keeping MDs an exclusive club by national societies and the gatekeeper schools for no other reason than to maintain exclusivity and prestige (and money). Do the requirements have studies to back them up, or did a council just decide with an informed opinion? Both are respectable, but I'm still suspicious there's artificial supply limiting going on.
Apart from that, you'd have to rewire America's litigious tendencies and opportunities, or else a flood of new doctors would make malpractice insurance skyrocket. That'll change the 'worth it' formula for sure.
I'm also not a doctor, but I imagine that large part of doctor's paycheck is for staying alert when treating a hundredth patient with "obvious" cold/indigestion symptoms, which are actually masqueraded symptoms of a serious disease.
Combined with small tax increases or a cut in some of the U.S.'s other massive expenditure programs (i.e. the military), we can pretty easily afford to pay every adult U.S. citizen above the poverty level to do nothing.
OK ya, what you're arguing for and what most of the other folks around here are arguing for isn't the same thing.
It's a little messy but we already pretty much have what you're talking about with a patchwork of unemployment benefits, welfare, medicaid and various forms of disability insurance.
The math doesn't work.
BUT, and I only realized this recently, my education has allowed me to live largely outside the traditional workplace. I've worked just under 9 years out of the 18 since I turned 18, with the longest jobless stretches lasting about 3 years. My last office job ended 1 year ago and I've become so busy with online contracting that I don't plan on going back.
So I know that it can be frustrating to hear about fortunes being made by startups and entrepreneurs, but it’s helped me to step back and not look at the money. The vast majority of people have no or nearly no wealth (in the form of assets that provide income). They only have cash flow, and most of that money is wasted on things they don’t need. When you look at the people who really are living on a fixed income below the poverty level, remarkably, they treat it as an asset (like a retirement account), using the disbursements to pay for necessities. So a person on $10,000 per year welfare has the equivalent net worth of something like half a million dollars when you consider taxes. It’s no wonder that they don’t want to give it up for a regular job. And this really, really pisses fiscal conservatives off to no end, because they only see the world through the lens of means testing.
To get to the point, my education has provided me the lifestyle of someone with the equivalent wealth of the government having to shell out half a million dollars. That’s a fantastic return on investment for an ~$80,000 four year degree. If fiscal conservatives were serious about reforming welfare, they would be open to the idea of extending public education four more years to cover college. They would also be open to something that will probably always be unfathomable to them, that money and quality of life can be independent variables.
I don't think you understand how money works. If there are available resources then there can be available money.
There's as much money as the regulator of the currency cares to create. Money is fungible.
Money isn't real wealth, and you cannot create more resources than you have simply by creating new wealth tokens. However, if what's ailing you is that the exchange tokens aren't equitably distributed, that does turn out to be a problem that can be addressed, directly, by creating and distributing more money.
The incentive effects are an interesting case to contemplate, but the more I think about it, the more that chasing revenue-generating opportunities of themselves seems to be more a part of the problem than of the solution.
Sorry, but the idea scales from almost zero spending into infinity. You can not claim that there isn't enough money.
Our future looks very interesting because our machines promise to make goods very, very cheap. But they also promise to put almost everybody out of work. Left to a market, most of the population will starve, and very few become very rich. But almost any level of basic income will solve this, even if today it's too little.
How much money? Basic income doesn't imply a specific amount.
>Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant...
This is probably false. Even if the basic income is enough to live off of, people will still want more money for luxuries. But instead of having to work 50 hours a week to scrape by, they'll be able to work 20 hours a week and live comfortably, even at low wages.
And if you get to the point that you actually have more jobs than people to work them? You either lower the basic income, or you let inflation do it for you.
Better yet, automation ceases to be a bogeyman for unskilled workers. If jobs get automated away, we can increase the basic income to compensate. On the flip side, we can actually incentivize automation by increasing the basic income, leading to a future where we stop making humans do dumb jobs just so they can be employed.
This isn't properly a basic income, because you don't get it if you work, and in addition you need to exhaust all your assets first. This provides some perverse incentives, along with some bureaucracy to keep it all organized. But when it comes down to it, once you exhaust your savings and unemployment benefits, there's an income floor of $24k/yr, which is like a basic income except you lose it if you save money or find a job... which if anything worsens the disincentive problem. I'm not sure just extending it to a proper basic income would be worse for finances, and suspect it could be better.
Such tax might be beneficial even now in some places. In Japan and Italy so many properties were bought out by people intending to profit from the rent that price of accomodation rose to the point that most young people can't afford to live alone and stay with parents instead.
Is it fair for me to think that universal basic income, if it has any chance of achieving its stated goals, is insufficient by itself at least when expressed as "give every living adult $x/yr" and nothing else? Now if the only effect of UBI is making a new $0 baseline and nothing else being changed on average, then it can't hurt that much by itself, so it may be worth trying in a limited area (such as a smaller country like the mentioned Switzerland) just to get an experimental result on record before trying it out on an economy the size of the US. But when you have to do all this other stuff to make UBI achieve its goals, like have the government build housing (it already does and has done that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green), it makes me wonder why even bother with UBI itself and instead just get busy with the other things.
Competition.
If you give money to me and the people bidding against me, the money will end up in landlords' pockets for sure.
UBI funds have to come from somewhere. Depending on the source of the money, UBI will either create low inflation or large inflation.
As a matter of fact, I suspect that recent min wage increase by feds is an attempt to induce inflation. All this money are going to be spent - basically creating larger money supply in consumer sector, and, maybe finally inducing some inflation feds are trying to start since 2008. Look at priced tags of recent tech acquisitions - some sectors of economy already value money much less than consumer sector.
Competition across sectors example is land lord can ask for a 10% increase, but the renter is totally free to say forget it and downsize to a rental at the original rental rate, while buying a xbox or whatever with the new income. Or paying off that .edu loan. Or paying for healthcare. Or whatever. Mandatory expenses like healthcare, tuition, iDevices, they're free to go up as high as they want and probably will. Most things are not mandatory.
Price compression is the $10M skyscraper penthouse isn't going to change because its a rounding error, but this could have a huge effect in a slumlord area. Where I live is in between, I already make about 3x median household income so going to 3.5 or so isn't going to change much.
http://mattbruenig.com/basicincomecalculator/
Happily, it suggests lots of proverty reduction is achievable with a very manageable percentage of GDP.
One of the first serious issues you'd have to consider is migration from other countries to your model country with basic income. There's billions of people out there who'd happily live on basic income in some first world country and I'd absolutely encourage them to do so, given what the first world's riches are built on (but I digress...).
The few soft UBI trials commonly found in citations were too short-lived to tell whether we were simply observing a Hawthorne Effect at work or if the outcomes were sustainable.
We could start by simplifying the system, and replace that welfare system by an equivalent ABI (the salaries of currently working people will probably need some adjustments). It would be insufficient of course, but that would be a start.
On the other hand full employment through monetary policy is pretty much science fact. Yet neither the United States nor the EU even pretend to pursue it. (China pretty much does, however. It works pretty well for them.)
It's not like providing a decent living for near everyone is this unsolved problem which, if could only we find the correct technocratic solution, we could just roll up our sleeves and implement.
The problem is that a lot of people are against doing it. At all.
It's a direct form of wealth transfer that requires zero force, no "putting people in cages because they can't/don't pay" nonsense.
For social spending, you do the same: print new money that's a percentage of GDP, and let citizens allocate their share to various social causes (police, fire, education, natural disaster relief, etc.).
As a concrete example, if the USA produces 15 trillion in GDP for the year, you could print 3.75 trillion for basic income, and 3.75 trillion for social income. The 3.75 trillion for basic income would be split evenly among the 330 million people, amounting to $11,364 annually per person. Each person would also have $11,364 to allocate ("appropriate") for various social causes.
Taxation is eliminated. Everyone is fed and sheltered. Growth in wealth is shared equally. Anarchists still get to keep all of the money they earn (remember: no taxation). IRS is gone. All of the tax-funded welfare programs are gone, but we've got plenty of money annually to dedicate to social welfare programs. People don't have to give money to the police if they care more about education. There's no need for a minimum wage, or tracking people's incomes. There's no downside (in terms of extra taxation and lost benefits) to working more. And on and on.
This is entirely doable today, at a purely technical/administrative level. Once robots are doing the work of the labor class, and 40% of the country literally has no jobs, and won't, ever—then it'll become a social necessity.
That's why the problems in this article don't keep me up at night: not only is the solution easy, it's far preferable and way more democratic and fair than what we have today.
For extra humanity, create a global currency, peg new money creation to the world's annual GDP, and do a basic and social income for everyone in the world equally, full stop.
Because everyone will have this currency by default, natural market forces will causes businesses to want to sell things in that currency (people have it, and want to spend it).
The currency itself is stable (tied to GPD growth, not politician's whims).
Once some businesses decide to take it (and they will, see above), then those businesses getting that income will also spend it at other businesses who accept that income, making those businesses even more successful, causing other business to also accept the currency, and so on.
And remember: everyone has some of this currency. Who is going to have it, and not spend it? I'd venture to say the percent of people flushing their basic income down the toilet is in the low single digits at best.
It's a virtuous cycle, and no force should be needed to keep it going. Think about it: who in their right mind would move to another currency that wiped out their entire existing and future wealth? As another commenter pointed out, $11K a year is like having $500K in wealth paying out an annuity. Who would voluntarily give that up for some alternate currency that makes them poor?
Even today, look at how hard it is to modify a social welfare scheme. It's not because the government has guns and the desire to use them, it's because people really, really rely on social stability.
But yes, you're right of course: like all fiat money schemes, it only works because people want it to work. IMO people will want this to work, and furthermore: it's in each individual person's self-interest that it works.
Without taxation, what leverage does the government have over demand for the currency? Fiat money works because it can be used to pay taxes at the very least. With taxes out of the way, the government-issued currency would be no better off than a so-called altcoin.
Personally, I think the government declaring that basic incomes will be paid in the currency is enough, but I see no reason to disallow other methods.
Another example is to do what the dollar says: this [currency] shall be legal tender for all debts, public and private.
Another one would be that banks could only accept that currency, and make loans in that currency.
There's a lot of options, but you're right: we'd need to get creative about it. As CS people, that's basically our job description and it's a good challenge, and I think, a solvable one.
Thanks for your comments, I do appreciate it. I certainly don't have all the answers.
have a look at what happens to indigenous groups that are given handouts.. massive alcoholism.. obesity.. huge problems.
people will have to work and improve themselves. the struggle in life is important along with risk taking.
but, the dynamics of pay may change to compensate for the amount of leverage we can get today in society
Completely agree. I think the dynamics of getting a basic income when everyone gets the basic income are different than when a subset of people are living off of the work of another subset of people, who don't benefit (in fact, are penalized).
In the scheme I proposed, no one is penalized for success, and no one is penalized for not wanting to participate in capitalism. Society is not penalized because capitalists are out there making additional wealth for themselves.
I really do think the non-initiation of force, the lack of penalties, and the universal equality changes the dynamics of social welfare programs for the better. It's very much like The Incredibles: when everyone is special, no one is.
I firmly believe that a universal basic income won't reduce the struggle in life, it just shifts it from the bottom of Maslow's chart up a level or two or three. I think we can all agree that's a good thing, no matter your political persuasion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
Mincome was an experimental Canadian basic income project that was held in Dauphin, Manitoba during the 1970s. The project, funded jointly by the Manitoba provincial government and the Canadian federal government, began with a news release on February 22, 1974, and was closed down in 1979.
The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a guaranteed, unconditional annual income caused disincentive to work for the recipients, and how great such a disincentive would be.
It allowed every family unit to receive a minimum cash benefit. The results showed a modest impact on labor markets, with working hours dropping one percent for men, three percent for wives, and five percent for unmarried women.[1] However, some have argued these drops may be artificially low because participants knew the guaranteed income was temporary.[2] These decreases in hours worked may be seen as offset by the opportunity cost of more time for family and education. Mothers spent more time rearing newborns, and the educational impacts are regarded as a success. Students in these families showed higher test scores and lower dropout rates. There was also an increase in adults continuing education.[3][4] A final report was never issued, but Dr. Evelyn Forget (/fɔrˈʒeɪ/) conducted an analysis of the program in 2009 which was published in 2011.[4][5] She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating. In addition, those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did. Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidences of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse.[6] Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations with health professionals.[7][8]
Those problems are far more complex than you're making them out to be. Besides that, your claim of handouts is simply false. The social assistance given to Status Indians comes with a great deal of stipulations, some of which are extremely harsh such as restrictions on who you can marry. Further complicating the issue are the problems of reservation living conditions, cultural alienation and simple boredom.
Universal Basic Income sidesteps these issues because it doesn't come with any crippling lifestyle restrictions. It's simply a form of income security that benefits all people by raising them out of poverty and reducing the fear and hopelessness associated with unemployment.
This is entirely doable today, at a purely technical/administrative level.
Perhaps. But from a political standpoint, it's utopian and most unlikely in the near term.
What's stopping us?
This would have obviously bad effects, causing people to great lengths to avoid holding cash. I think income or sales tax is the only way to distribute large amounts of money from the rich to the poor.
It matters a great deal how the money is put to use, and why, and what limits are set on the increase in the money supply. For example, it's obvious that fractional-reserve lending would not work if the fraction was 0/100 (i.e. no reserve). Similarly, large-scale money printing doesn't work when it's arbitrary and up to political whim.
Also, a nitpick: M2, not M0, is traditionally what is used to forecast inflation.
Reserve banking doesn't cause inflation in itself as long as the reserve ratio is fixed, because a given percentage increase in M0 will result in a similar percentage increase in bank reserves (M1). So it is really down to M0, which is also the quantity that the reserve bank manipulates through its open market operations in order to execute monetary policy.
>I'll also point out that M2, not M0, is traditionally what is used to forecast inflation.
That is not relevant. Forecasting inflation under the current policy regime is a completely different matter from forecasting the inflation that your proposal would cause.
But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? No, of course not. Instead, since the 1970s we work 100 hours more each year.
As a society i feel that we should be using the technical achievements to give us more time for the things and the people that we love. Is that too much to ask for?
Greenland
Lithuania
South Korea
Guyana
Kazakhstan
China
Belarus
Slovenia
Hungary
Japan
Obvious caveats about national suicide stats apply.
Why?
"One of the biggest failures of Europe's socialism was the lack of any requirement to half the weekly working hours in 70s and 80s."
I wish this idea was more widely discussed, but still the mainstream idea is that more working, produce more value as if 'free time' does not hold any value.
It some scenarios is ridiculous. In Greece for example, the government trying to boost spending, opted for a law that allows commercial stores to open on Sunday. Before that it was illegal, you had to have a special permission to do that.
Of course, the problem is NOT the working hours. The problem is that people don't have money. Apparently the government thins that Greeks are waiting for Sunday to go buy sugar, milk and cigarettes. Says a lot about the level of contact that our (Greek here) politicians have with reality.
"As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work ... if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?"
Yet they're both work.
(he also wrote a couple of books about organic gardening)
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
Anything more than 3 hours of work per day, equates slavery.
I don't think the above quotes are absolute, but are hard to argue against. However, I wouldn't expect any other approach from The Economist which content's quality has been growing logarithmically lately.
Although there's still a taboo around not working, it can't last. The future, as Arthur C. Clarke said, is not full employment, but full-time playing. (Some of that playing will resemble what we now call 'research'.)
Meanwhile, there is work for anyone who has minimal food, shelter and web access. There are many unsolved problems out there and not just in open source software. With dignity galore, because they're important.
https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...
Back of the envelope calculations are also useful. I did one a while back, you can steal the source code and build your own to at least determine affordability. The basic gist is that an inefficient targeted program is vastly cheaper than an efficient untargeted one.
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...
You know we're in new territory when the Economist puts forward something like this without pulling it apart in the next paragraph and explaining why a free market solution is preferable.
Society functions not because people feel compelled to work out of principal, but because if no one worked, the price of labor would go up until people were enticed to do it.
And it's also very strange that eroding the labor supply is painted as a "loss of jobs", when lowering the labor supply means more and better jobs for those who do want them.
Finally, the idea that making poor people better off is bad because they might work less, is ridiculous. What is society striving for in the first place, if not the benefit of its members? Sure, the disincentive to work creates real deadweight economic loss. But this loss has to be weighed against the gain to the people receiving the handouts. It seems pretty clear that the wrong balance between work incentive and reducing inequality was struck in the US, and Obamacare is helping to fix this.
As for automation, I completely disagree - we automate where we can get the biggest gain on output. So if something costs a lot or has high social benefit we should automate it as much as possible so that it can provide more benefits to more people.
We could argue about the extent to which these nonfinancial competitive forces influence (or ought to influence) the market, but saying that they "simply cannot" seems false.
That's not generally my observation of the world. No-skill-required jobs pay less, skill-required jobs pay more. There's a slight bonus for dangerous jobs, but not a heap, relatively speaking. Pleasure derived or not only appears to have an effect on income levels outside of traditional employment and into freelancing territory, for example with starving artists and writers.
Its not work that matters - its the formal exchange of value that occurs when someone pays you for something you've done for them, because they want to pay you that amount and are happy to do so.
The value of work is in the exchange - not the doing, not the acting, not the 'being a worker' mentality - but in actually receiving a great reward which prolongs ones own life and increased ability to survive in the world.
Fat checks are great! Work hard for them: even greater!
On the other hand, the individual mandate and increased price of even the most basic catastrophic coverage does seem to cut into disposable income, which (in a sense) has the equivalent effect of huge marginal tax hike: essentially as the salary increases, essential benefits decrease (no eligibility for food stamps, subsidizing housing, or subsidized healthcare), while taxes increase. Incentive to do anything other than get by decreases, strong incentives are created to cut out other "unavoidable" payments such as by moving to places with less expensive housing costs, even if at the cost of less employment opportunities. Replacing the system that offers increasingly little to honest working poor(1), but imposes regressive mandates to fund what are essentially transfers from working classes to middle-class senior citizens (e.g., medicare and social secure) with a a universal basic income (funded through income tax or perhaps a Georgist "rent tax") would help, but making it a political reality may be tricky but feasible ( see here for an interesting analysis from a "left-libertarian"/classic liberal perspective: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/01/the-positive-po... )
This does not automatically imply that various "mandates" of are always bad policy, the job of policy advocates should not be to hand-wave issues, but to present them in a way such that the public could make an informed choice. There are many times where Krugman does an excellent job of this (indeed, I'd imagine he rightly sees this as the very point of his NYT column); yet, it's odd that while Tyler Cowen (another trained economist) discusses this topic in a great deal in Great Stagnation and Average is Over, Krugman does not mention this and talks about what is really a related, but separate (even if important) matter of income inequality. Honestly, I don't see how income inequality (which is a serious danger for many reasons -- I don't mean to handwave it) has a role in this: if we raised the salary of teachers in Bay Area to that of software engineers, these salaries will still remain minuscule compared to that of top CEOs, but does anyone doubt that this would greatly increase teachers' job satisfaction? The problem with low pay isn't that someone is paid higher, the problem is that low (or no) pay makes life extremely stressful as basic needs and rudimentary wants are harder to fill: never mind being able to send kids to college, it's more about being able to afford a place where kids have a room to themselves while still having room to grade class papers after work -- one can't afford this on a teacher's salary in most parts of Bay Area.
(1) This is what irks me a lot about the debate on this topic. It's one thing to argue that welfare programs are wrong because taxation is wrong (then your job is to prove that taxation is wrong), but if taxation is wrong why not first cut programs that impose a greater tax burden? Military and medicare spending each cost more than food stamps and don't seem especially under-funded, yet it's the food-stamps program that got cut.
If this is not negative, then how is it different for healthcare? It's the same money, only spent in a different way, mostly because american tax code is weird and the government tried to mess with pay arrangements repeatedly which gave birth to various fringe benefits including employer-sponsored healthcare. But at the end of it, it's the same money, isn't it?
>>> one can't afford this on a teacher's salary in most parts of Bay Area.
If you raise salaries for a wide class of employees - what do you think will happen to the housing prices? Also, where would the money come from? California has about 300K teachers. Each 10K of salary increase would cost 3 billion dollars (not counting pension costs, employer's part in taxes, etc. so actually more). Where those additional billions would come from?
But teacher's salary in Bay Are is not so far from software engineer's: http://rossieronline.usc.edu/teaching-salary-california/
The second and third highest paying districts are both located in Santa Clara County, which is also home to Silicon Valley. The average salary in the Mountain View-Los Altos Union district is $100,530, while Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union has an average salary of $92,636.
Considering other benefits like pensions, I'd say not so far from that of many software engineers.
The ACA is apparently not perfect (I, like most people haven't read the law:) ) but I think anything that keeps people from becoming serfs is a good thing.
Your argument about healthcare being money in a different form is flawed. You could make a similar argument for when people used to live in employer provided housing because owning their own homes was impossible for most people. I am sure not too many people would want to go back to serfdom because after all a roof over your head is another form of being paid.
>>> You could make a similar argument for when people used to live in employer provided housing because owning their own homes was impossible for most people.
When and where there was such time? If you refer to real slaves or serfs - they couldn't own property not because it wasn't affordable but because they did not have rights to own anything, being property themselves. Nobody argues for that. However, earning one's own housing or food or clothing or healthcare is in no way serfdom - it is a natural state of a person, the alternative being somebody else earning them and you just take them because you're too good to work, unlike that other guy. But what if that other guy thinks the same? If nobody has to work to earn their own living - who'll be supplying all these nice things you feel so entitled to enjoy?
You can more or less tell who gets employer-based health insurance based what they're paid. I doubt too many people are going to stop working because they qualify for ACA subsidies, you still have a whole lot of things you'll need money for. I see the ACA subsidies as a way to make people more proactive about their health and keep them out of emergency rooms which is significantly more costly to the system.
As far as older folks working less because they are not tied to their employers for healthcare I think this is a good thing. I see more opportunity for younger folks to move into those jobs.
Equivalent of 2.5 million workers is too many or not too many?
>>> I see the ACA subsidies as a way to make people more proactive about their health and keep them out of emergency rooms which is significantly more costly to the system.
This is also proven not to be true. Having insurance, actually, raises usage of emergency rooms by 40%. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/02/s... It was a nice theory, too bad it's not true. But repeating it now, when it is disproven by experiment, is just substituting ideology for facts. It is not going to get us in any place that is good.
>>> As far as older folks working less because they are not tied to their employers for healthcare I think this is a good thing.
What is special in older people that them not working is good? Is that that we want the most experienced workers to be removed from the workforce, so that the productivity would drop, because lower the productivity, richer we are? And when replacing experienced and productive workers with unexperienced workers with much lower output and who also are paid much less, while moving the experienced workers from productive work to tax-sponsored welfare (which the younger workers now have to support with their salary, which is lower to begin with but now becomes even lower from having to support older folks too) - so tell me again, where the good part starts in all this? Because I kind of fail to see it.
The fact that people may run to the ER unnecessarily even with insurance is perhaps a reflection of other problems (maybe too many hypochondriacs Googling :)? ), but that isn't a reason to not make healthcare accessible.
If the choice is between people over say 60 desperately holding on to jobs because they can't afford health insurance on their own, versus young people getting opportunities to start their own lives then the choice for me a rather simple one.
PS: I have no ideological axe to grind in this matter. If we are going to live in a modern society, these are problems that have to be dealt with somehow.
I grew up in a place and a time where people died in gutters (no exaggeration) from hunger and disease, that is the difference between a modern civilized society and one that isn't so. It is a choice that has to be made. The dignity that is afforded to people by social programs is a dignity consequently bestowed upon all of us.
And by "clinics" I mean all those non-ER businesses that purport to offer treatment to the public for a fee, such as private-practice doctors.
Owning property outright might be hard to a lot of people, but there's an easy solution for it - renting. What you describe is functionally renting. The question is - why is it organized this particular way?
There's usually a little classist attitude going on. Labor class 27 will only be allowed to live in labor 27 class apartments, etc. No selecting your own personal lifestyle balance allowed, after all we only hire perfect replaceable cogs so it won't be an issue anyway.
To be honest, I have a hard time believing you're asking these questions in good faith. This is basic stuff.
As a strange quirk they also pay for gas used by these leased cars. As a result, my friend with such lease always tries to do vacation in spots reachable by driving - it's just much cheaper for him, even if he has to drive for two days to get there.
However, we have been talking about housing being provided by employer because there's no other means to get housing, so this is completely different case - here company cars are the function of government-introduced tax law, not of prices of the cars.
Now in many cases: farmworker housing, worker barracks in some industries, particularly mining, energy, and sometimes forestry or other remote work (say, employee compounds for US oil workers in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East). Factory barracks are commonplace in China and other developing nations. Railroad workers, sailors, and other travelling employees are often lodged by their employers. I've also seen more than one startup in which there was a corporate apartment, though that was usually used on a fairly short-term basis by new hires, or in some cases, by founders or remote employees when travelling to other sites.
One of the earlier examples of this was the Fuggerei in Augsburg, Germany, though more strictly it was an example of social worker housing: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/germany/bavaria/augsburg/sights/...
The "Company Town" Wikipedia article offers more information on the practice. Within the US it's largely associated with extractive industries, as I noted, arising in the mid 1800s and largely dying out by the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Not necessarily. Farmworker housing is offered in areas where there are alternatives, but the needs of the worker population often don't match the needs of growers: periodic work, a mobile workforce, and a concentrated area in which work crews can be picked up and dropped off, as well as a generally below-market income for the tenant population. Similarly, modern worker factory housing often exists to support a large migrant population.
The question I was answering wasn't the "why" but the "when", most specifically that it's still happening now.
Which is to say: few rentals are interested in people, especially full families, who might be staying only a few weeks or months.
This does, of course, vary, but I'm aware of a few specific farmworker housing complexes which address just these needs.
And the point you're trying to make about immigrant or periodic labor is precisely the problem that applies to serfs: they lack the means (or legal ability) to make their own discretionary housing arrangements.
For higher-skilled workers, who have other employment options, this typically isn't the case. Also where employees who operate under union or similar collective bargaining arrangements.
If we take a historical/anthropological view of what the "natural state" of human societies is, they have typically worked to fulfill essential-to-life needs, including defense, water, food, public health, fire response, etc. on a communal basis. The size of the communal unit has varied across times and places in history, from clans to tribes to city-states to nations. And hybrid systems where individuals (or more often, households) are responsible for some things and a larger communal unit is responsible for others have also been common. But the individual standing alone, providing for his or her needs entirely independently of any communal system except for market purchases, seems to only exist in certain philosophers' systems, not as something you really observe historically as the natural state of homo sapiens societies.
Working for the sake of something you want is a positive. Working just to avoid dying isn't.
> suppose that one works only because one needs money and otherwise he would spend his time playing Tetris, walking on the beach and reading medieval poetry. Why is it negative that he still works and not lives off other's money and other's work, involuntary taken?
Because he's less happy, fulfilled and so on than he could otherwise be. If the amount he suffers by working is more than the cost of the taxation that would support him, then yes that's absolutely a negative.
That doesn't sound quite correct. Working just for the money is a neutral, the _negative_ here is involuntary taxation. I agree that it's in a negative (and have pointed out later in my comment a particularly bad form of it), but some kind of taxation is unavoidable (anarcho-capitalism is a fascinating theory, but none of its variants strike me as realistic).
Further, I'm not advocating a system that covers every single type of heath benefits for free. I'm simply talking about insurance against catastrophes and in some cases arguing against government interference -- e.g., the kind that essentially made healthcare go through employers and insurance agencies, as opposed to Milton Friedman's idea of MSAs (a stronger form of HSAs/high-deductible insurance -- something that ACA has actually made more expensive).
Essentially it's about marginal utility: having no healthcare available is much worse than not having certainly elective healthcare but having other healthcare. Likewise earning $0 vs. earning $15k a year (not enough to live on in Silicon Valley, but ok for getting by elsewhere in the country) is much bigger difference than the difference between earning $15k and $30k, which is a much bigger difference than going betwen earning $30k and $45k. No one should be entitled to a comfortable life, but I don't think a system where individuals who are not employable (whether involuntarily or voluntarily) are left to rely on charity alone is one that will ever be created (irrespective of whether or not it could be theoretically justified). I'm an advocate of scraping the current welfare state and replacing it with a simple basic income payment (if that's not politically feasible, I'm fine with Friedman's idea of a negative income tax). This will actually lead to less government interference: less welfare programs, possibly lower (or at least no higher) taxes, and so forth. Here's an argument for this from a well known socialist organization Cato Institute (backed by such left-wing pinko commies as the Koch Brothers): http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic...
Furthermore, in terms of reducing tax rates, I strongly favour slashing military and police spending (no SWAT teams for tiny suburbs), ending the drug war, and cutting middle class entitlement programs (or at least privatizing them or making them voluntary).
> If you raise salaries for a wide class of employees - what do you think will happen to the housing prices? Also, where would the money come from? California has about 300K teachers. Each 10K of salary increase would cost 3 billion dollars (not counting pension costs, employer's part in taxes, etc. so actually more). Where those additional billions would come from?
Raising the salary is not the only way to do so: increasing the supply of housing. I live in Saratoga and lived in Mountain View: the avg price of a resident (averaged between condos, townhomes, and single family homes) is well north of $1mm in those areas. In Mountain View this can attributed to location (and Sunnyvale which is directly adjacent is cheaper, especially the north parts of Sunnyvale closer to Mountain View), but in Los/Gatos-Saratoga this is entirely due to minimum lot sizes (my place is currently worth significantly below that -- but due to being in a small area that was annexed to Saratoga and which retained much smaller lot sizes).
My point also wasn't about the need of higher pay, it was about job satisfaction having more to do with being over certain thresholds as opposed to the bizarre idea that it had something to do with how much I am making in relation to some CEO.
Re: salary itself. This also does not include the pay that is docked to go to unions (union membership is mandatory for teachers in California -- I am all in favour of removing that requirement for unions of government employees). These are closer to starting salaries of SWEs not average salaries of all engineers (my first job out of college was $85k in 2006 at Yahoo -- not exactly a company known for highest wages). Finally RSUs are a huge part of engineer's salaries: $100k in RSUs vested over four years (with refreshers) is common for even new college grads. I am not advocating raising everyone's salary of course. I am in favour of treating teachers more as software engineers: merit pay increases, performance reviews, and no traps like tenure -- much as with software engineers, it should be easy for teachers to switch schools or move to a different area if their pay is not satisfactory (and as with software engineers, it might mean some would leave the profession if they are doing it just for the money and money doesn't suffice, this again is a positive).
I think you mistook me as someone advocating greater taxation -- done in the same manner as today -- I am not; I actually believe we far less meddling in our lives, certain kinds of taxes could be lower (but perhaps other kinds -- e.g., tax on rent per Henry George), and so forth. However, I find that arguing about immediately abolishing all taxation (logical outcome of what you're advocating) are going to work -- I much prefer to acknowledge that the problems much of the left perceives are real, but offer solutions that are less coercive than status quo or other alternatives.
My curiosity is how exactly you came to the conclusion of this being a facist and elitist idea?
This is the core of the thinking behind a dictatorship
> People are under pressure to be sheep already if you work one of these 'jobs'
What pressure? People are asked to work in exchange of money. Which means this system, however imperfect, still sees people as useful and productive and, thus, still gives them a chance
And it's elitist because you are creating a clear division between those that are productive and those that bring no value and that actually are a negative investment (because they do "fake" jobs). You really think you can put a mentality like that in place without creating elitism and potentially an even more uneven society than today?
Asked to work? Most of us Have to. At the bottom rungs, keep your mouth shut, dress like the accepted average, and fit in with the company's culture. No creativity or input actually needed. And no questions trying to learn things. You don't need to know what the management knows. This isn't pressure? How many 32 year olds working in fast food views their job as useful or productive?
Using the 32 year old with the fast food as an example... do they feel they are valued? Likely not. Fake job, but it is a job. I somehow doubt this would change much.
I think you made too big of a jump there. We are already being confronted with a situation where vast quantities of people are no use to the modern economy. The fact is technology is going to replace a lot of what we traditionally considered work. This does not mean that these people are worthless, they still hold social and cultural value to society (well, most people, there will always be people who are a drain on society, but we have that now and I don't think that will ever change).
>... it creates a huge power lobby...
We already have that. And to make matters worse, the current process of distributing welfare is highly political and manipulated by special interests. With a BI, the power stays in place, but at least the bureaucracy and special interests are removed from the process.
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
It looks like technology will continue to allow more and more people to pursue business ventures that are less and less related to filling basic needs. We will still consume, we will still find ways to trade that are mutually beneficial. We will simply have a better standard of living. It seems the logical conclusion is that there will be more opportunity for everyone, not less.
Different jobs and different opportunity is not the same as no jobs and no opportunity.
How do you intend to consume if none of the consumers have money anymore? How do you intend to trade if the market is polluted by expensive middlemen and centralized .gov pre-selecting the winners and losers? If the standard of living were better in a non-monetary economy in theory, how come it never works that way in practice? Opportunities require money and power to take advantage of them, without either they will not be lost.
Why wasn't the (first) Great Depression a paradise on earth? No one had jobs or money. New high technology all over the place. So why exactly would the second Great Depression be any better than the first, if its of basically the same form? Even worse, recall the interesting economic hack used to "fix" the first one? All you need is a world war, and for the survivors, its gets better.
I am arguing FOR a capitalist system. I'm saying I don't understand why the article authors will assume it is going to break down because of technological advances. It has not thus far.
Edit: I see that my second statement in my first reply is poorly written. I meant "this" to refer to technological advancement, not to joblessness.
I also believe job satisfaction is completely independent of a job's contribution or value to society. Cleaning toilets has a definite societal benefit, but it is still menial work that requires little actual skill and is a job most people look for ways out of.
Another example, is that if you are sick and about to die, the value of the cure for you is infinite, so you would pay everything you have an everything you will ever have if you had to. Value != Price.
Well, they got a huge backwater, mostly agricultural country, into one of the big powers of the industrial era. And got to feed some hundends of million of people, have space exploration, very good physics and math, music and arts, and a lot more besides.
So, it's a myth that these jobs didn't produce any value to the society. They just weren't as competitive as the west, but then again, they started from far worse and backwards conditions, in an a land which is cold and unhabitable as hell in large regions. And they had political BS to deal with too.
Not every similar scheme will result in the same results. Stalinist politics and such is not a necessary byproduct of everybody having a guaranteed job.
"One of the largest empires in world history, stretching over three continents, the Russian Empire was surpassed in landmass only by the British and Mongol empires."
(Wikpedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire)
It seems to me that since 1945 the US has been mostly right wing and is turning left radically, while the opposite is true in the EU.
I don't know how this garbage gets onto HN.
The only unique aspect of this piece is it strikes a nerve with you. I know how it gets here, because HN is jam packed with "analysis" that doesn't make any stronger of a case for itself. Vague wishy-washy "Maybe the jobs are gone forever" level points are taken at face value when the rhetoric is headed to more agreeable conclusions.