sillygoose

Any ideas, then?

> I think it's a fair question, but it seems hypocritical to ask immediately after asking: "why would anyone else have the right to decide how their property is allocated or used".

Why would it be hypocritical? I'm not advocating for someone else using your property, nor for helping some through harming others.

> However, every study I've seen done on this issue has shown that unconditional cash transfers to impoverished people tends to be used reasonably well[1]

Didn't we already conclude that evidence is really quite meaningless in this discussion? It's not difficult to find statistics and articles to support the idea of redistribution.

It is difficult, however, to explain why anyone's money should be "redistributed" away from him, considering it's his property. If a rich person's kid has a shitload of Lego bricks, should some of them be taken away from him to be redistributed to poor people's kids?

> Certainly there will be some people who choose not to use redistributed income well, just as there are some people who have lots of capital who choose not to use their income well.

What does it mean to use one's income well? Who decides if my use of my income is acceptable? Why would anyone be in a position to decide that for me?

If I want to buy my seventh Ford Fiesta because it will bring me immense joy, can you claim I'm not using my capital or income well?

> This one you'll have to take up with the Supreme Court, Congress, the United States Treasury, and the Internal Revenue Service who all take it as a given that the United States Government has the right to decide how your property is allocated or used.

Well no, I don't "have" to, and that would be roughly as worthwhile as writing to your representative, asking not to get shafted by SOPA/CISPA/PIPA/NDAA/PATRIOT ACT/etc.

Instead, I brought it up with you, as part of OUR discussion here, which you're perfectly capable of continuing by answering my question.

Here's a related video though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngpsJKQR_ZE

Sure, sometimes someone is suspicious because he's actually up to no good. But that doesn't mean detaining people on various subjective suspicions is a good idea.

The choices we make can be moral, amoral, or immoral. Incentives aren't really relevant there.

For example, imagine you're walking out alone at night, and for some mysterious reason come across a little old lady on the street. She'll probably have a purse with her, and that's your incentive for robbing her.

But assuming you're not a psychopath, you won't even think of doing that. Even a psycho would be more likely to just mind his own business than rob her.

> the possession of money and property is a form of political power

Why would it be? Political authority is the perceived right to impose your will on others by force. Political power is the position to do that. Asking someone to do something in exchange for money is a potential trade.

There's nothing immoral about offering a woman $500k for a blowjob. She'll probably do it too. But it's her choice - she'll have to figure out if the $500k would be worth any loss of dignity she would experience as a result of selling you that blowjob. As long as it's voluntary, there's no problem. It's just a choice she'll make, and be responsible for.

> My ultimate point is that there are conflicts between the market economy and the democratic political structure.

I'm not sure what that means. But again, as long as there's political power, people with it will be bribed, regardless of what else happens in the economy. The solution is to abolish political power. You might note that coercion is immoral anyway, and perhaps start a line of questioning from that premise.

You could replace "markets" with "people pursuing their personal gain" there. Of course they will adapt to changes, much like a businessman will just leave the country if he gets tax-raped too hard.

We all pursue our personal gain all the time, and there's nothing wrong with that per se. That's just the way we're biologically programmed to operate.

But go back to what Rod said and take it to its logical conclusion: as long as there is political power, people with it will always be bribed.

But then again, that's pretty much the point of having political power. We're all pursuing our personal gain, and political power is just another means of doing that. The solution, then, is for no one to have political power to begin with.

That's exactly why it's a better foundation for economic conclusions.

Why would you keep requesting evidence even after acknowledging that there's evidence every which way? Anyone can just cherry-pick evidence that suits them, but where does that leave us?

Reasoning based on correct premises works pretty well though.

> I'm sorry for assuming an economic context for my terms — elsewhere in the thread you asserted that "Opposition to UBI comes from people with a clue about economics" so I made the assumption that you were familiar with economic terms.

Let's just say I've seen those terms thrown around, but they're vague and obtuse enough to be practically meaningless. That's hardly surprising, considering their main use is rationalizing government intervention.

For example, no economy can ever reach "pareto optimality": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_optimality .. because every single voluntary exchange leaves both participants better off, because otherwise they wouldn't go through it. Since value is subjective, it really is enough that they both perceive a benefit in the trade.

If you want to argue against that, you'd have to somehow magically know how much I'd be willing to pay for a Ford Fiesta tomorrow at 4pm. But you can't. No one else can. Just like I couldn't possibly know your preferences at some given moment in time.

So yeah, pareto optimality is nonsense, as explained above, and so is a lot of the other stuff involved in these discussions. That's part of why I demanded definitions.

> I don't think there are many serious economists that you back you up on this assertion.

You'd have to look to the Austrian school of economic thought for that, but all of them would agree with me.

> This claims that I would be happier if there were no roads, no water supply, no education systems, no protection from criminals (which technically don't exist because there's no criminal behavior), and no protection from other countries.

All the services you list are provided by people working for a living. Do you want to claim people need governments to tell/force them to work for a living?

> I absolutely would like some of my money taken and spent on those thing.

No you don't. No one wants to be robbed, any more than beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat. What you might be thinking is that you're willing to pay for those services, but that would also apply without getting robbed.

> At the very least arguing economics won't get us to any common ground — I think we'd have to switch over to philosophy before we'd find common ground.

You're right about that :)

For example, if you're really hankering for an apple and you eat one, that apple will be more satisfying than the second one, because the first apple satisfied your strongest craving.

The same can be applied to resources etc.

But more importantly, why would anyone else have the right to decide how your property is allocated or used, even if you do happen to be rich?

Besides, even if you redistribute people's property based on the idea that the end justifies the means, what if the poor people you're helping through harming others don't use the money wisely? What if someone gets $10 and uses it to maintain his alcoholism? -Did your grand vision of increased Societal Utility come true?

Even disregarding morality, which would be.. rather psychopathic, how can you know if people will use the money wisely? What about Rational Actors® and Efficiency®? :)

Of course, it's not like a psychopath could lie convincingly so that he could proceed with his evil plans, so I guess they can't actually let anyone in, ever.

Usually, a "terrorist" is anyone who poses a threat to the established ruling elites somewhere. But we're told we need to be very afraid of some desert loonies somewhere in Hellholeistan. Naturally then, we need governments to protect us by snooping in on everything we do anywhere. For safety.

If not, how would democracy make them any less willing to wage wars?

Yes, and that's.. what? Not acceptable, but not resisted anyway? Do you think "putting scrutiny"[1] on people who support terrorism is fine, but imprisoning people for a tweet is not?

[1] Violating the right to free speech

What Western person in their right mind would proudly proclaim his support for actual terrorists? Do you think there are enough people in the UK to find that many people deranged in that particular way, or do you think some of them might be paid to act like it?

Free speech is limited in the US too, whenever it gets too inconvenient to the ruling class: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/14-speci...

Gold and silver sure as hell did, and that's what I was referring to, which I'm pretty sure you saw anyway, especially considering you brought up gold too.

Actually, the concept of "debasing currency" comes from the government of the time diluting the gold content of the gold coins in use back then.

> That people would stop working because they saw others living on BI.

Alright, so your argument against the idea that people would stop working because they saw others living on BI, is to snarkily suggest that you personally wouldn't?

Surely you understand that other people very much would, even if you personally wouldn't? You'll have to try harder.

How could this system be anything but bad for us?

The problem isn't big evil corporations - it's the fact that there are people in positions to hand out favours in exchange for bribes.

They are undermining the values we hold dear, and corrupting the youth with their hateful message! Obviously, we need to place certain limits on free speech"

What? Of course you have the right to free speech, as long as you don't misuse it!

My point was that people have to do something to acquire the money they have, and no one is going to give it to them "for free". All the money people have represents some sort of valuable activity, time used and effort spent.

So basically, money isn't free. It costs time and effort, and that's a central reason for why there's a limit to how much of it you can take from people.

(Let's not bicker about the financial industry at this point though - they're not actually providing value anyway)

But it makes no sense to say that "money is just created to reflect wealth". I get that wealth is all of the stuff we have available to us, in whatever pursuits it may be useful, and so on. But money is just a means of exchange. It's fundamentally a commodity that has become widely accepted in exchange for goods and services.

Now that's not how our fiat currencies work in today's world, but that's just because governments have abandoned sound money altogether. What I'm talking about - and what you should be too - is sound money. Something that just emerged as money through people engaging in voluntary trades.

Anyway, you're not in a position to complain about my understanding about economics (or taxes or whatever).

> Sure, I'm going to stop contracting at $3000 a week because, hey!, I could just live on $30 a week instead.

Is that supposed to be an argument against something I said? You'll have to explain how.

You want to know what amount of government spending is the most "efficient", but you should first define what you mean with efficiency in that context.

In ordinary life, efficiency involves maximizing output from input, right? A car can be more fuel-efficient than the previous year's model, and so on.

So you want government spending to be "efficient", but all government spending represents a wasteful middle-man between people and their money and whatever goods and services they need. Therefore, all government spending is "inefficient" from the point of view of the people whose money governments spend.

So I'd say that there's no such thing as efficient government spending. What's efficient is people paying for stuff on a free market with free and unhindered competition among providers. Surely you know how competition works, and results in lower prices and higher quality, right? In other words, free competition results in maximal "efficiency" in an economy.

In conclusion, if you want maximal efficiency in the way money is spent, you can't support the idea of any government spending.

All in all, it just doesn't "work".

Two people trading with each other is not, because both perceive a benefit, because otherwise they wouldn't trade.

Opposition to UBI comes from people with a clue about economics. One more time: the money for UBI has. to. come. from. somewhere.

Money is not free, and therefore it can't be just handed out by the truckload without adverse effects elsewhere in the economy. Whoever gets free money is happy, but someone somewhere was burdened more than before and is unhappy.

There's also a limit to how much people are willing to pay in property taxes before they move the fuck out (or stay away to begin with).

In a nutshell, there are limits to what governments can do with their economies.

But there isn't. The money has always had to come from somewhere, and it's always had consequences. It's just that the consequences can't be swept under the rug anymore, and soon even the most fervent propaganda will fail to convince the masses that everything is alright and the economy is recovering (when in reality it's not, and it's not).

How many people have any clue as to where tax revenues come from?

How many understand that other people have to earn that money first?

How many understand that if the people who earn money are burdened with much higher taxes to pay for someone else's BI, a lot of them them will just stop working because fuck that? How would that affect the burden on the remaining earners?

Please just think about it for a while.

Well, as far as I can tell, lots of Linux people are hipstery special little snowflakes and fork things because some small thing isn't exactly as they want it, and that's where most of the fragmentation comes from.

Assuming that's largely accurate, why would it not be a problem?

What if we had, say, three major Linux distros instead of dozens of half-assed ones? How many tinkerer-distros does the world need? -As many as it takes to prevent Linux from ever conquering the desktop, it seems.

But seriously.. Please stop.