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How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

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Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#181

Post by djrobstep »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #175
djrobstep wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “People are entitled to other people’s labor” is ideology as well. You make a powerful critique of capital income and inheritance law. > So you’re suggesting we deprive people of their income because of your ideology? You're the one advocating we systematically deprive people of income. I'm the one advocating everybody receive an income. > Negative, ownership creates property law. Libertarian ideology has broken yo…

> You make a powerful critique of capital income and inheritance law. You must have missed the part about entitlement to others’ labor, as inheritance is a transfer initiated by the owner of the property, and capital income is a voluntary exchange by all parties. > You're the one advocating we systematically deprive people of income. No, that was you who suggested that US GDP could be expropriated from its owners and…

> as inheritance is a transfer initiated by the owner of the property

Incorrect, dead people cannot own things. Inheritance is a government program that redistributes property to rich children based on what their parents wrote on a piece of paper.

> expropriated from its owners and redistributed to your favored recipients

You are very confused. People do not own what they are taxed. When a person is taxed and the money given to eg a social security recipient, that's not violating ownership, that's enforcing ownership. That money is literally the property of the SS recipient. The law is very clear on this.

> You’re advocating that some men with guns confiscate the income of the working class and give it to people whom you have deemed more deserving.

No, that's what you're advocating, by supporting enforcement of status quo capital income laws.

> Property is temporally and logically antecedent to property law.

It isn't. You can say the statue of liberty is your property - but until that's enforced by somebody (via initiation of force or threats thereof), it is meaningless. Property is the biggest government program there is.

> According to egalitarian principles, you have no such right.

Yes I do - I'm simply enforcing my view of property rights.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#182

Post by _y5hn »

esotericn wrote: post #135
Jochim wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to how your opinion has changed during the course of the lockdowns? I'm tired of it as well, but rather I feel the length of the lockdown is a result of the prevarication that took place in the beginning and a continuing series of poor choices intended to save political face afterwards. My opinion is that had we locked down hard and early, banning foreign arrivals until the pandemic passed globally, we…

Mostly, my mental condition has declined as I've started to realise that we have increasingly slid into considering perpetual lockdowns and cessation of democracy to be a normal state, rather than a state of emergency. Initially, at the start of the lockdown in March 2020, people voluntarily acted far in excess of legal requirements, or even guidelines. I think that this made sense, and I'm proud of our behaviour on…

UK half-assed the lockdown response since March. So when a country lose control, their hands get forced. This leads to even worse outcomes. Witness consequences in US too.

It's a leadership problem, and hard to fix for regular Joe.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#183

Post by _y5hn »

pdimitar wrote: post #160
esotericn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Next time", I and many others will simply refuse the lockdown strategy, and if it so happens that it's a virus that has high lethality across all age groups, loads of us are going to die before the evidence is clear and we start to voluntarily reduce interactions. "Just a few weeks to flatten the curve" was a once in a generational play. I did my bit, and so far I've been punished for it. I really hope for our sake…

You are spot on. People around here are at the brink of rioting. The limitations are becoming too much for everyone. You are absolutely correct that there might not be "next time" even if that means humanity's doom.

Get better leaders.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#184

Post by esotericn »

_y5hn wrote: post #182
esotericn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly, my mental condition has declined as I've started to realise that we have increasingly slid into considering perpetual lockdowns and cessation of democracy to be a normal state, rather than a state of emergency. Initially, at the start of the lockdown in March 2020, people voluntarily acted far in excess of legal requirements, or even guidelines. I think that this made sense, and I'm proud of our behaviour on…

UK half-assed the lockdown response since March. So when a country lose control, their hands get forced. This leads to even worse outcomes. Witness consequences in US too. It's a leadership problem, and hard to fix for regular Joe.

No-one was forced to enact laws against me visiting my family.

It leads me to my original post:

> They will throw you under the bus immediately and comprehensively as soon as there's even the slightest microscopic threat to their wellbeing.

> And they'll cast the blame on you. They'll say it's your failing. They'll say - never mind our responsibilities to you - you need to do your bit regardless.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#185

Post by _y5hn »

kevin__ wrote: post #141
devdas wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that exactly the meaning of conservative? They want to preserve the status quo of that time.

Sure, I guess in a dictionary sense of the word. But that obviously doesn't match their behavior in that case. They wouldn't be arguing for lower taxes or cuts to social security if they were only interested in preserving what existed in 1980. They wouldn't be attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade or gut the Civil Rights Act.

Think 200 years earlier, slavery and widespread poverty. The aim is bsckwards to good ol' times.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#186

Post by ehsankia »

zepto wrote: post #174
ehsankia wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't my point. Obviously there is now way to know for certain, but there's a possibility that if Trump's administration hadn't cut the pandemic team, this whole thing may not even have happened in the first place. It may be a bold statement, but don't forget that said team's job was exactly to have people on the ground in China and other places, looking for new viruses and ringing the alarm early. Spending bil…

> there's no way to know for sure how well preventative measures work This is true. It’s not a valid counterfactual to compare against an imagined ideal. It’s just as possible to consider that the pandemic response team had degenerated into ineffectiveness, and by disbanding them Trump made things better. This is why imagined counterfactuals aren’t helpful compared vs comparing with an actual benchmark.

When you get both the worst pandemic and worst hack in a century right 1-2 year after killing the very teams whose job it is to prevent said catastrophes, at what point do you stop blaming things on bad luck?

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#187

Post by _y5hn »

zepto wrote: post #174
ehsankia wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't my point. Obviously there is now way to know for certain, but there's a possibility that if Trump's administration hadn't cut the pandemic team, this whole thing may not even have happened in the first place. It may be a bold statement, but don't forget that said team's job was exactly to have people on the ground in China and other places, looking for new viruses and ringing the alarm early. Spending bil…

> there's no way to know for sure how well preventative measures work This is true. It’s not a valid counterfactual to compare against an imagined ideal. It’s just as possible to consider that the pandemic response team had degenerated into ineffectiveness, and by disbanding them Trump made things better. This is why imagined counterfactuals aren’t helpful compared vs comparing with an actual benchmark.

This is just as true then:

People die in hospitals.

Demolishing them will make things better.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#188

Post by chordalkeyboard »

djrobstep wrote: post #181
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You make a powerful critique of capital income and inheritance law. You must have missed the part about entitlement to others’ labor, as inheritance is a transfer initiated by the owner of the property, and capital income is a voluntary exchange by all parties. > You're the one advocating we systematically deprive people of income. No, that was you who suggested that US GDP could be expropriated from its owners and…

> as inheritance is a transfer initiated by the owner of the property Incorrect, dead people cannot own things. Inheritance is a government program that redistributes property to rich children based on what their parents wrote on a piece of paper. > expropriated from its owners and redistributed to your favored recipients You are very confused. People do not own what they are taxed. When a person is taxed and the mon…

> Incorrect, dead people cannot own things.

That is precisely why they initiate the transfer while they are alive by making a will.

> People do not own what they are taxed. When a person is taxed and the money given to eg a social security recipient, that's not violating ownership, that's enforcing ownership. That money is literally the property of the SS recipient. The law is very clear on this.

Then it sounds like the people aren’t entitled to the income that you want them to. What’s your justification for changing the law on property?

> No, that's what you're [...].

> It isn't [...].

This is tiresome. You’re just contradicting me by insisting on your framing of the circumstances without any justification or addressing my arguments. I get it, you (apparently) don’t like it when someone has more than someone else and you want people to run around continuously taking and giving so that no one ever has much more than anyone else. Hopefully one day you can see that this amounts to people enforcing their view of property on everyone else, which is quite the hierarchy and not the least bit egalitarian. I’m sure you’re ready with a devastating rebuttal (“no u”) but the part where people own what they own and obtain through voluntary exchange, and we prohibit taking people’s stuff and rearranging it without their consent, is the one with the egalitarian social ideals imbedded into the fabric of it. Because people have to agree to things, so essentially the poorest person has the same power as the wealthiest. And obviously you can see that in no way can we make the same egalitarian observations about a system that constantly looks at what you own and decides if its “too much” or not. So this is easy to demonstrate in any kind of good faith discussion but when people just contradict you it never gets beyond the part where I say something and you contradict it, so its usually a waste of time. But I appreciate you interacting with me up to this point and please feel free to engage with the substance of my remarks at any time.

> You can say the statue of liberty is your property - but until that's enforced by somebody (via initiation of force or threats thereof), it is meaningless.

Surely you can see this is not the case. Who would they be enforcing my claim of ownership against, unless someone else also claimed to own the Statue of Liberty? So we haven’t even enforced it yet, but we already have the idea of ownership. You see, there wouldn’t be anything to enforce unless we conceived of an idea of ownership. This is what it means for ownership to precede enforcement.

> I'm simply enforcing my view of property rights.

Good luck.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#189

Post by readflaggedcomm »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #178
djrobstep wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they haven’t done anything to create an income "People who don't work full time should starve" is ideology, not some law of physics. > There’s no income from which to deprive them There is plenty. US GDP is trillions a year. > How does that work? Property law creates property ownership. Ownership assigned to one person is deprived from others.

Then hand over the computer you're typing this on. It doesn't belong to you, and I've got some people who want to use it. That is, I'm pretty sure that on some level you operate as if private property is both normal and right, no matter what your theory says...

That is personal property, not private property.

Re: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

#190

Post by djrobstep »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #178
djrobstep wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they haven’t done anything to create an income "People who don't work full time should starve" is ideology, not some law of physics. > There’s no income from which to deprive them There is plenty. US GDP is trillions a year. > How does that work? Property law creates property ownership. Ownership assigned to one person is deprived from others.

Then hand over the computer you're typing this on. It doesn't belong to you, and I've got some people who want to use it. That is, I'm pretty sure that on some level you operate as if private property is both normal and right, no matter what your theory says...

Self ownership (control over your own body) is in fact the opposite of property ownership, because property enforcement requires violently restricting the bodies of others against for consent.
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