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What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

theguardian.com

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Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#231

Post by badminton1 »

Academic journal publishers force academics to constantly go through paywalls, putting massive restrictions to scientific research.

Walmart and other companies pays employees the bare minimum, forcing them to go on welfare and boycott their right to form unions and defend themselves.

Pharmaceutical companies do fake studies as well as tricks to extend patents and prevent people from benefiting from affordable drugs.

Healthcare disproportionally overcharges people. 500 dollars for a bag of water with salt.

Food industry adds sugar to all foods knowing sugar poses health risks, because sugar is addictive and keeps people coming back to their products. They also lobby to prevent proper labeling of sugar in food.

Companies sell garbage food to kids in schools like pizzas and hotdogs, knowing it's ruining generations of people.

You get the idea...

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#232

Post by gozur88 »

HillRat wrote: post #226
tamana wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made a huge leap from "running a trailer park" to "being a slumlord", and you also implied but haven't answered the question of who is to pay for mold remediation etc when the tenants can't afford to make it profitable. Surely landlords can't be compelled into their own poverty , forced to rent units below cost. Such a price has to be paid by society/government overall, or not at all.

No one is forcing these property owners to "rent units below cost;" they set the rents on their houses and apartments. The issue is that many of these people buy properties that are out of code with no intent to improve them, and then rent them anyway. Yes, it's not economically-rational to rebuild them. No, it's not the government's fault that the slumlord's business model depends on flouting code and safety violati…

>The simple answer is that if I can't afford to maintain a minimal level of environmental and residential standards, I'm not allowed to rent out my property.

That's all well and good, but what happens to the people who are renting there, and what happens to the people who can't afford a place with "minimal level of environmental and residential standards"? Will those people be better off sleeping rough?

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#233

Post by mentando »

pink_dinner wrote: post #223
dublinben wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However, that didn't work out too well. When was communism actually implemented, that it didn't "work out too well" in your opinion?

sigh do we really need to have this discussion and dou you actually think communism would ever work? The problem is that pesky human nature gets in the way.

Yeah, in theory it is awesome, but it just does not work in real life...

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#234

Post by jeffdavis »

I expected the article to detail a list of profiteers, but the examples cited just don't seem very compelling.

And the story isn't really complete unless it somehow connects to powerful people pulling the strings to keep the money rolling. A small time landlord is probably not friends with senator.

So who exactly is the villain here?

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#235

Post by danbolt »

petra wrote: post #170
CydeWeys wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people in the linked article are frequently moving between housing, though. If they had thirty solid years of employment lined up they wouldn't be in their situation to begin with. What you're proposing is rent-to-own, which the vast majority of people would never make any headway on.

What about adding something like transferable shares mechanism - so so you could use your ownership stake in another house if you want you need to move?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how that helps if there's little to no equity in the first place.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#236

Post by ubernostrum »

Fjolsvith wrote: post #227
ubernostrum wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing to realize here is that the number of humans who need to do work building/operating/maintaining the machinery that keeps everyone taken care of decreases over time. It's perfectly reasonable to expect a point in the future where most of the time, zero direct human work is required in order to provide for all humans. The issue is getting over the mental hurdle of enabling such a society. The technology is ac…

Frankly, I don't see that this is perfectly reasonable to expect. TANSTAAFL. Food still has to be produced. Energy still has to be produced. All that stuff has to be paid for somehow or the producers stop producing for the freeloaders. What you think of as a mental hurdle I see as a way of discerning what is mine from what is yours. Show me a developed nation where a person actually doesn't have any personal property…

Food still has to be produced. Energy still has to be produced. All that stuff has to be paid for somehow or the producers stop producing for the freeloaders.

The question is: what happens when most or all of the food and energy is being produced not by human labor, but by fully-automated processes? Why would, say, a farming robot care whether someone is "freeloading" off its labor?

What you think of as a mental hurdle I see as a way of discerning what is mine from what is yours. Show me a developed nation where a person actually doesn't have any personal property.

The idea of a post-scarcity society is not incompatible with the idea of personal property. It is incompatible with continuing to believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, water, medicine, and possibly other things should be apportioned on a "did you earn it" basis, because that notion dates to a time when it truly was necessary for each person to put in continual effort to ensure enough of those things were produced. These things are no longer super-scarce and no longer require anywhere near the effort to produce that they used to; society should adjust in response to that change.

There is no logical reason, if the capability exists to automatically produce sufficient basic necessities for every human being, why every human being should still have to do a make-work job in order to prove they "deserve" those things. And you could still have all the capitalism you like for anything that isn't a basic necessity; the basic life doesn't have to be one of luxury, just one free from worry about things like food and shelter; the currency of such a society would need to be tied to something other than control of basic-necessity resources, but finding alternative bases for currency is something people already do for fun.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#237

Post by vectorjohn »

chillwaves wrote: post #186
Axsuul wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ending state lotteries is just another form of prohibition. It's part of human nature and population will still end up participating in alternative get rich quick schemes.

Then make them more fair with better payouts. They don't need to be completely exploitative.

A non exploitative lottery is also called a bank.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#238

Post by tomcam »

I believe they're looking in the wrong place for villains. The poverty industrial complex that starts right in the walls of the federal government is a great place to start. Why not just cut checks to the needy? The government burns up at least half of it in bureaucracy.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#239

Post by jpetso »

ultramancool wrote: post #74
stegosaurus wrote: post #67

The headline here is a bit odd - it seems self-evident. If we define the poor as a group which relies on regular labour to survive, and the wealthy as a group who does not, then many income sources of the wealthy dry up if the poor cease to exist. One fairly obvious example is renting. The existence of a rental market is not undesirable. People will always want to live in a place temporarily, as a trial, as a holiday…

Wealth inequality is good for all in a lot of ways, so I hate it when people talk about it like it's an inherently bad thing. If someone does something amazing and unique, they should be able to profit from it. Think about a world with perfect wealth equality and you'd have the opposite sort of problems - like it or not, capitalism and yes, wealth inequality have brought more people out of poverty than any other syst…

I think the question we should ask ourselves is not how to eliminate inequality, but what baseline level of services and opportunities we want to give people at any stage in their life, regardless of their competitiveness and productivity, including when they're otherwise poor and a net drain on society.

In other words, is stable housing a basic right or is it a luxury? If it's a basic right (and/or a net positive if it gives people the chance to bootstrap themselves into higher earnings), then we should strive to increase the reach and quality of tax-funded government housing programs - together with other baseline programs, such as public education, social services, etc. Or if you're a small-government person, substitute "tax-funded" with "charitable" and make it dependent on individuals' goodwills.

If it's a luxury then the status quo seems acceptable - markets need to be able to pick their customers, and baseline services are losing products unless the "exploitative" pricing makes up for it.

Abolishing inequality isn't desirable at all, but the range of inequality doesn't have to go from 0 to billionaire. We can provide a baseline that still leaves enough incentive for people to work their way up but is decent enough to live with dignity, greater than 0. Soviety provides some of that today. Discuss where to draw that line and who, taxpayer or otherwise, can provide it. A functioning society is never completely equal or completely without minimum support, always somewhere in between.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#240

Post by [deleted] »

gear54rus wrote: post #211
herbetdangerbri wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they feel no remorse for taking advantage of someone else I don't understand what it means 'to take advantage of someone else' in the context of this thread. Is Starbucks taking advantage of me when I want a coffee by selling me a coffee? Is Elton John taking advantage of my desire to see him play live at my party and the fact that there is only one of him by charging me a million dollars to appear? Are the bus com…

Well that's pretty easy. The most obvious form comes from the good old (bs) saying that 'the real price is what the buyer is ready to pay' (feel free to correct me here as to actual form of that). Hiking up price to a drug (the shkreli story) would be an exploitation and not a 'normal economic transaction'. So would be buying time of some poor workers in China for a dime. And then selling what they make on a 10x marg…

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