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Unnecessariat

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191–200 of 256 posts

Re: Unnecessariat

#191
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why the 40 hour work week and dog-eat-dog economy seem to really suit those representatives just fine. No one has time or energy to make full use of representative democracy, unfortunately, except for some of the well off with resources to spare.

You're working a lot more than 40 hours per week if you don't have an hour a day to spend on advocacy.

The problem being that if you're in a job with standard hours, the hour a day you have to spend on advocacy happens during the time your representatives and their staffers are not available.

Re: Unnecessariat

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you get to call an intern in their office who will put a tally mark in a spreadsheet. The congressman may use this "how many people called about X" data to make decisions on what to vote for, or they may not.

Yes. But you can do this weekly. And spend tons of time getting others to do this weekly. Dozens of calls about X have more than dozens as many timed as much impact as ome call about X. If you get a bunch of people with the same concern to form an ”organization“, and then you spend weeks making repeated requests for your congressman to meet with your group, they'll eventually do it. You can write a op-eds and publish…

"The problem with the way you advocate is that you don't act like professional lobbyists"

I wonder why it is, that normal citizens with jobs and kids and mortgages, aren't able to effectively lobby the way full time paid lobbyists (with expense accounts!) are?

Re: Unnecessariat

#193
post #4

This is a pretty great personal account, and it helps me tremendously in my goal of understanding this group of people who feel left out and overlooked by their government. However, it's also a good demonstration of how people find ways to rationalize acting against their own self-interest. One example: The author observes that the unnecessariat is having lots of economic value extracted from them, e.g. from required…

So why didn't they all vote for Obamacare and for the public option, subsidized by higher taxes? Because there was nobody to vote for who offered that. McCain's proposal was to deny that the problem existed. Obama's proposal was Obamacare without an individual mandate. Clinton's proposal was Obamacare with an individual mandate. Those were the only entrees on the proverbial menu. No candidate ran on a public option,…

There was one primary candidate who offered better than that: [Dennis Kucinich campaigned on a single payer platorm][0]. However, for various reasons, he never topped fourth place in primary polling.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kucinich_presidential_c...

Re: Unnecessariat

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should. And replace it with universal basic income. Also: GP makes an excellent point, which I should have thought of myself.

Replacing minimum wage with UBI shifts employment subsidies to the same firms which are now pressing their workers to apply for welfare benefits whilst pocketing massive profits, including the wealthiest family in the US, the Waltons, of WalMart. Another model is UBI and government as employer of last resort (or a equivalent strong labour movement). If there is an employer who can absorb all applicants at a minimum w…

> Another model is UBI and government as employer of last resort (or a equivalent strong labour movement).

Exactly. It's amazing to me that people claim there just isn't enough work. There is more than enough work -- there's always some way to make the world a better place. And in the USA there are fairly obvious things, from social services (in the broadest sense) to mundane upkeep to large infrastructure improvements.

The problem is that there isn't enough work that's motivated by profit motive in the near-term.

Re: Unnecessariat

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99 out of 100 Senators voted on the issue. The abstained vote would not have changed the outcome. Is that rammed through?

It was not a midnight vote (or at least, not what the term implies), but yes, it was definitely rammed through. I've never seen such an absolutely-will-not-take-no-for-an-answer ramming job ever on anything.

Sure, the Democratic House, Senate and President acted in a somewhat hasty manner to utilize the power that they possessed, but all the complaints about not respecting the process or whatever are dumb.

The press statements made about the Supreme Court confirmation needed right now are a nice illustration of how stupid the process complaints are. Pretty much every person that has made a public statement about what respecting the process means had previously made a public statement taking the opposite of the position that they have taken now.

Re: Unnecessariat

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, capital income does come from work; it's just that the moment of income is divorced from the moment of work. That could be by a year, a decade, or a century, and it could accrue to the individual who personally did the work, or to someone to whom they traded, gifted, or willed the capital. I believe that an individual should be allowed to save the results of their work and consume the benefits later. I believe t…

In any case, they don't come from your kids' work. So you have to go back to arguing for voluntarism (step two of the carousel) rather than desert in order to justify your children enjoying something they didn't work for. And the problem with that is that it really relies on a "facts on the ground" view on property entitlements. If our laws about property are man-made and supported with force, why shouldn't we change…

My beliefs include that I'm able to share or gift my surplus capital as I see fit (and said so explicitly above).

You can disagree, you can certainly fight it, but you can't really morally condemn me for sharing my earnings with my family.

Re: Unnecessariat

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: Poor person produces something useful, rather than simply consuming. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Everyone is homeless? Could you fill in step 2 for me? I'm not following your logic.

Poor person accepts job paying 1$/hour to compete with indian wages.

See my other comment - if you want to transfer wealth to the poor you can do this with EITC or other programs that don't discourage work. A job guarantee is my preferred policy.

(And keep the borders closed - poor brown people don't even count for 3/5.)

Also, you seem to be imagining that if landlords of poor people would rather get $0/month in rent (with houses going vacant) than reduce rents. When did landlords become so non-greedy?

Re: Unnecessariat

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Taxation is theft" is true regardless of whether robots are employed or not. The fundamental issue is, simply, that it involves the use of force (or threat of use of force). As long as men with guns will come and arrest you if you don't "pay your taxes" then it is theft. No rhetorical flourishes or byzantine logic can alter that.

Matt Bruenig (yes, the guy who was recently hounded out of his job for calling a powerful Hillary supporter a scumbag) had an interesting description of this argument, or rather this series of arguments. First, he says, libertarians defend inequality through desert: * People should keep their money, they worked hard for it! Then Bruenig points out that there is capital income, which does not come from work. Capital w…

This whole thing is just a few chained together straw men.

Libertarians do not say "people should keep their money because they worked hard for it." They say that "people should keep their money." No qualifier.

Libertarians are not "against force and for voluntarism." Libertarians are fully in favor of force, particularly when it comes to the defense of personal property. Some libertarians are in favor of voluntarYism (the y matters) but that's a totally different thing than whatever Bruenig trying to reference here.

It's partisan screed that oversimplifies concepts and twists words to appeal to people who don't actually know enough about libertarians to spot the bullshit.

Re: Unnecessariat

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your definition of "theft" is "taking something by (threat of) force", That is not my definition of theft. Theft by force (or threat of force) is a subset of theft in the more general sense. For point (1), there is clearly a historical baseline in which no land was owned by anybody, and all land was equally accessible to all. Then people started to make claims that some part of land was theirs, and that they had t…

Theft by force (or threat of force) is a subset of theft in the more general sense. Fair enough, but how do you reconcile that with my point (3)? Police returning an item as in the given example means the police are thieves according to your definition. If not, how do you propose mitigating this conflict? In the same way as it is done today. Note that I'm not the one who is saying that land ownership is theft - you a…

Note that I'm not the one who is saying that land ownership is theft - you are, because you are trying so say "taking by (threat of) force is theft".

I'm not saying that land ownership is theft. I don't advocate taking someone else's land by force, but I do claim that (at least in "proto-world") taking unclaimed land is acceptable exactly because it is unclaimed.

That whole discussion does lead to some other interesting points though... for example, if I abandon the home and garden I build on unclaimed land in proto-world, and move 8,000 miles away, does that land remain "mine" or does it return to its unclaimed state? It turns out that in the modern world, "we" decided that once you own a piece of land, it is yours forever, unless you sell it, trade it way, etc. I'm not actually convinced that is right. On this, I may be closer to the position of some left-anarchist types who hold that land ownership is temporary and only based in actual use/occupancy. I'm not entirely convinced one way or the other on this point though.

Inheritance is another interesting issue, although you can kinda sorta hand-wave around that by saying that "if you can transfer something to a new owner, then doing so a split second before you die is effectively the same thing as allowing inheritance".

In reality, what is and isn't theft is defined by social convention. So land ownership, police returning items, and tax aren't theft, even though they all involve (the threat of) force.

Sure, the social convention is what it is. What I'm arguing is that the social convention is wrong and needs to be updated. It's not like these things are chiseled into stone tablets and made immutable for all time.

I'll also point out that I'm far from alone on the "taxation is theft" thing. It may be a minority viewpoint, but it's hardly some fringe idea held by just two or three crackpots. There's at least five or six of us. :-)

Re: Unnecessariat

#200
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sometimes mentioned a public option, but it was never central to either Obama's or Hillary's pitch. See here for an evaluation of Obama on the issue: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/dec/... It was included in his platform, but as an "also, too" kind of thing. And if you took your evaluation of his position from what he said on the stump, you'd never have known it was in his platform at al…

My recollection is that it was included, but then traded to the relevant industries for their acceptance of the plan we have now. Whether it was always intended as a chip or was a serious part of the plan is open for debate I suppose, but the best chips are ones that are serious, so I'm not sure there's much difference in practice.

Kind of, in that opponents of any bill were joined by some Senators that were closely tied to the insurance industry to threaten to filibuster the bill (which passed the House with a public option) if a public option was included, looking several attempts (both passing the form the House did and putting forward different public mechanisms) to include a public option in the Senate version, and dropping the public option was the only way to secure Senate passage.
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