51–60 of 268 posts
Whenever I hear the phrase "the dignity of work", I'm reminded of Jeffrey Bernard's quote: "As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work ... if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?" http://www.rense.com/general56/thevirtueofidleness.htm
Isn't gardening a popular hobby amongst the rich?
So we are saying that most of the people out there are of no use to the economy and thus, most probably, to society. Well, welcome to fascism 2.0, this vision is elitist, it creates a huge power lobby (the entity paying up the basic incomes...), and it sees people as sheep with no brains.
I think you made too big of a jump there. We are already being confronted with a situation where vast quantities of people are no use to the modern economy. The fact is technology is going to replace a lot of what we traditionally considered work. This does not mean that these people are worthless, they still hold social and cultural value to society (well, most people, there will always be people who are a drain on society, but we have that now and I don't think that will ever change).
>... it creates a huge power lobby...
We already have that. And to make matters worse, the current process of distributing welfare is highly political and manipulated by special interests. With a BI, the power stays in place, but at least the bureaucracy and special interests are removed from the process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would hav…
"Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever..." Unless they want more money, of course. Hands up everyone who might want more money than the minimum needed to survive.
F'rinstance I don't begrudge anyone a roof over their heads, but right now in the UK it is causing an enormous political storm trying to roll back "... with a spare bedroom or two, in the postcode of your choosing" getting tacked onto this basic right somewhere along the line.
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The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. That's untrue. Switzerland is having a national referendum on whether to offer one, and stipends from oil or casino money, while not enough to live on at this point, already exist in a few places. You may be correct that there's not enough money to give everyone enough to live on, but it's far from sci-fi. (There is plenty of money in the world, it's just tied up in things…
In switzerland it was voted down because it doesn't make economic sense. Look at the numbers, they don't work.
And yes, the numbers do work. You just need relatively high tax rates (>= 50%) to support the Basic Income -- but no higher than already exist in many European countries.
Since 1930 productivity in my home country Sweden has increased fivefold, mainly due to technical achievements. Does that mean that we work 20% of the time we did then? No it does not. Wealth has increased of course since the 1930s, and perhaps we want a higher material standard. But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? N…
Europeans are already working a lot less hours than american. It's ridiculous that many Americans can't even get 2 weeks of vacation. Things are even more brutal in developed Asian countries, and that's why their suicide rate is so high.
Greenland
Lithuania
South Korea
Guyana
Kazakhstan
China
Belarus
Slovenia
Hungary
Japan
Obvious caveats about national suicide stats apply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would hav…
> The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Sorry, but that last part is utterly dumb. There is enough of everything for everyone, money is just one of the abstractions we built for convenience's sake. Most of these abstractions for power have gone out of hand, but I assure you that there exists a theoretical parallel universe where basic income is implemented at a global scale.
You can actually see this in practice if you visit Cuba. In Havana there are 3 families living in one apartment with cardboard over the windows for normal people, and there are gorgeous ex-Colonial villas with landscaped gardens, where well-connected Party types live.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In switzerland it was voted down because it doesn't make economic sense. Look at the numbers, they don't work.
No, Basic Income hasn't been voted on yet in Switzerland. You're probably thinking of the 1:12 pay scale referendum. And yes, the numbers do work. You just need relatively high tax rates (>= 50%) to support the Basic Income -- but no higher than already exist in many European countries.
A family of 4 could live on £12000/year not luxuriously but with the basics, somewhere like Wales. A single person could not live on £3000/year in London.
I am not an unconditional advocate for Basic Income but I think that the idea is intriguing and could potentially be very efficient. I am not going to argue about what BI could or could not do but I would really like to see more experiments with it to have some tangible information. I would rather see that it fails than hope that it would work. Of course, I'll be delighted to see it work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org…
https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...
Back of the envelope calculations are also useful. I did one a while back, you can steal the source code and build your own to at least determine affordability. The basic gist is that an inefficient targeted program is vastly cheaper than an efficient untargeted one.
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...