311–320 of 628 posts
Let's pose the opposite: Is it possible to enforce that 8 billion people be and have exactly the same? Seems pretty obviously absurd.
Is it not worth trying to get as close to that as possible, though?
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And you can't think of any reasons outside of ethical arguments why it might be a good idea to make sure everyone has their basic needs met? Really? Have you spent very long trying to come up with one? Here's one to get you started: When a very small number of people have everything and a great many people have nothing, not even what they need to survive, those hungry desperate masses will have nothing to lose and ev…
It always comes down to violence and that argument makes me less sympathetic not more. I'm not interested in paying off what amounts to a rabid unproductive population for some hope of safety. Also, I'm not particularly scared of people that can't manage to find some success in the modern US either. So if you argument is that we should increase taxes so another Mao doesn't exist, I'd rather just kill Mao.
You're probably right to not be afraid, but things can kick off when the circumstances are right for it. And we haven't arrived at this historical moment by being nice.
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> I waited for a point in their model where people actually produced wealth and consumed it, made something or ate it, in addition to redistributing it. Not part of the model. That’s because the people making the models don’t create wealth and don’t really understand where it comes from. It’s like the way you see Marxists saying “seize the means of production” but never “build the means of production”.
Not so sure you understand what means of production are. You cannot build more means of production without having access to means of production in the first place, hence the 'seizing' part.
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but social security is funded via taxation, so it's somebody else's savings that's being forcibly taken away. Counting it as savings would give the wrong picture.
Not really. It's your savings that are forcibly being taken away, at the time you earn the money. Your benefits are (within limits) proportional to your contributions to the system.
This is why some people call social security a pyramid scheme - built into the system is an assumption that the number of workers will always increase or that interest rates will make that moot.
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> when people have access to same things but compete for different things, for example status, choice of partners, etc. People are already complaining about inequality of status and partners. Why is inequality of wealth less just than those other things? > Inequality does not mean we need to have people who can't satisfy their most basic things I honestly don't understand why and moral arguments are not convincing.
> I honestly don't understand why When people are inhibited from meeting their basic needs legally by structural impediments to their progress like severe inequality, they sometimes try to meet their needs via methods that are destructive to society, like crime, whether petty or violent. That behavior is usually damaging to people, property, or the fabric of society. This is a reason why such crime is strongly correl…
> We should provide them the tools and resources to do so in a prosocial way.
The reason why you default to this instead of simply defaulting to suggesting crushing any dissent (probably what was the default since the dawn of the modern era, and is the default in countries such as China) is because of moral values you have had instilled in you from your surroundings since birth.
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Not so sure you understand what means of production are. You cannot build more means of production without having access to means of production in the first place, hence the 'seizing' part.
How did the first means of production appear?
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Sure, but you have to consider that the often-touted Nordic countries have a very different demographic composition than the US. Easy example: Estimates place the illegal immigrant population of the US somewhere in the 25 million range (as a conservative estimate). Assuming half of them are of working age, that is, in rough terms, over 10% of the portion of the US population that is working (about 108 million). The v…
Illegal immigration and what happens in other countries are at best a red herring here because illegal immigrants aren't typically eligible for benefits and are typically working off the books. The US government has responsibility for its citizens, not those of Mexico or Latin America. Also keep in mind many of the proposed redistribution efforts fall squarely in the "equality of opportunity" column which you claim t…
Eligibility for benefits happens via children and partners. The group of people thus receives benefits that are then shared.
Via this mechanism, families containing non-citizens consume more benefits than families composed purely of citizens.
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Not so sure you understand what means of production are. You cannot build more means of production without having access to means of production in the first place, hence the 'seizing' part.
Yet all of the modern means of production stemmed from no means of production... hmmm. People create all of the time with extremely limited resources. Especially ones that haven’t been seized.
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You're not answering the "How?" Who is providing the services? How are they trained? How do new people enter the field? What incentive do they have to provide a good job? What do you do if they do a shitty job? Throwing money at problems usually means that the people providing the solutions make more money. It does not necessarily mean that the problems get fixed. In many cases, it means that those people now have mo…
Everybody chips in or the ones that are wealthiest provide support for the weakest. That's how. How is this so difficult to understand? In many cultures this is standard. For example, families taking care of their less fortunate family members (as long as they don't do something really stupid). Or another example, in many cultures, historically, the status came from being able to support weaker members of society. Es…
The thing about lazyness & cynicism is that it's viral. When everybody sees everyone else around them pitching in to the best of their ability, they're inclined to pitch in as well. When one person starts enjoying the benefits of this without contributing, contributors start getting angry. When multiple people start doing this but there's no way to either punish or evict them from the group, contributors get depressed, and often switch their worldview. Why bother working hard for other people when the other people are not working hard in return?
Empirically, this seems to happen at a few thousand people, well below the size of a modern nation-state. The cultures you cite all have internal subdivisions (villages, tribes, clans) of around this size. Beyond it, the complexity of society grows to the point where freeriding cannot be detected & punished other than by institutional means (money, contracts, lawsuits), and so there's an incentive for everyone to freeride.
It doesn't even require malicious intent. Take the health care example, and imagine you're a physician's assistant. 99% of the patients who come to you just have a cough that they could've taken care of with bedrest & fluids. After seeing 99 patients, most of whom come from the more well-to-do if neurotic segments of society and none of them needing actual medical treatment, you start thinking "Man, all these folks don't have any actual problems, but they keep coming for medical care because it's free. What's the point in doing anything other than sending them home for rest & fluids?" The 100th person has aggressive lung cancer, but you send them home for bedrest and fluids, where they die. The PA's malpractice insurance covers the inevitable lawsuit, so they don't face any consequences for their cursory examination. They do, however, end up even more bitter about patients who are not only lazy but litigious too. The family of the deceased tells all their friends that the healthcare system is irretrievably broken, but there's nothing they can do about it - since it's a government institution, it's not like there's anywhere else they could go. Instead, it trickles down into how they do their own jobs: they get just a little bit more cynical about how much everyone else is pitching in to the common good, and decide they're going to pitch in a little bit less to keep the score even.
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It always comes down to violence and that argument makes me less sympathetic not more. I'm not interested in paying off what amounts to a rabid unproductive population for some hope of safety. Also, I'm not particularly scared of people that can't manage to find some success in the modern US either. So if you argument is that we should increase taxes so another Mao doesn't exist, I'd rather just kill Mao.
Power is always expressed through violence. Someone wants to use the land you're currently using. They leave it alone, even if their situation is miserable. Why? You can call in the cops who will subject them to violence and make their lives worse. What if they can take the cops? Well, wherever you happen to be, it used to be part of someone else's domain; it was taken away by violence. Violence shapes society, it sh…