351–360 of 761 posts
I just spent a year living in South Western France which is the most socialist part of France. (I'm a US citizen based here most of the time and I'm a CEO). If you want to see the result of wealth redistribution, go check it out yourself. You'll meet young men and women in the prime of their lives who spend their entire day in a coffee shop and later a bar, sipping a beverage discussing art, culture, poetry, how busi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you are not, but society is an organism with more than you in it, and if he's thrown into the bin because he's can't make it in it the guy may think it's fair to take it from you... I already had a similar discussion on Slashdot recently. Taking other people's money by force is, IMHO, theft. My question then isn't why it would be OK for the guy, but why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that ste…
The only reason that you can make the money you do is because you're standing on the shoulders of giants. Aristotle, Newton, Watt, Tesla, Von Nuemann, et cetera. Left to your own devices (and assuming that the other 7 billion people are in the same boat) you'd be starving as a subsistence farmer making the equivalent of about $1 a day. If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to…
That's an unreasonable assumption. There are differences in productivity even among farmers. Some people are much better at farming than others.
> If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to society.
So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%, nothing more? Also, you're arguing that I owe part of my success to the drug addict who gets high all the time, and to the drunk who starts drinking early in the morning, and to the mugger who robs people at gunpoint? Even to people who play World of Warcraft all day?
Society is a mix of people that make wildly different contributions, and in some cases hugely negative impacts. I am immensely grateful to people like Leibniz, Newton, Shakespeare and others, but not so much to people who just coast through life. I also wish Stalin, Hitler and many others would have never existed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm opposed to rewarding those who sit around and do nothing period, including the current system. Yes, starting a business is hard. So? All I'm hearing is excuses. I'm not saying do things that put you in indentured servitude. Debt is a tool that can be used to great effect but used unwisely it can make life harder. Unless it makes sense financially people are better not incurring college loans and educating themsel…
> I'm opposed to rewarding those who sit around and do nothing period, including the current system. So what's wrong with a system that still rewards laziness (because it can't be stopped no matter what system is in place) but benefits the country a lot more? > All I'm hearing is excuses. Excuses from someone who's started a number of companies (successful and failed), been through acquisitions, all without going to…
I'm not arguing that it isn't hard. You don't need to work 16 hours a day to provide for themselves. But you do need to work more than 8 hours a day if you don't have resources and want to get ahead. Once you start having some resources it gets easier and easier.
That's nice that you would have liked a free lunch. I would really appreciate not paying so many taxes; it would make it much easier for me to get ahead.
I agree with you that people can incur debt in the form of student loans that becomes extremely difficult to get out from. It's a conscious choice to incur that debt. Nobody is forcing them into that situation. If they weren't brainwashed by society they would see that the debt/equity ratio of modern college degrees is, for the most part, a bad investment.
I personally have lived with a song-writer who has had his work reach the #1 most popular music video on youtube for a short time period. We were also dirt poor and living in a warehouse with rooms that we built from scratch ourselves with hammers and nails because we couldn't afford anything more. I had to pay for the drywall, lumber, nails, and tools with my credit card because I had no money. I studied framing because it was too expensive for me to hire a contractor (and we weren't exactly following city codes).
When I was working at a modeling agency in LA I knew more than a dozen actresses and models that have made more than $10K a month consistently. They pursued their careers full time not part-time.
People on HN will generally know more people who are creatively engaged. That's not the majority of society though.
Pushing the boundaries in art? Well, if people aren't interested in it then that's their own fault for being stupid. That fact that other people won't buy their work is not a problem of other people. It's their problem. If you aren't going to provide value that someone else wants then why should you be compensated for it. I certainly won't compensate someone for something I don't value.
In my own case, I quit my day job because I decided it would be more fun to travel the world and photograph beautiful women. I tried to make a business out of it but I was never really successful at it financially despite being published in several major magazines. I racked up over $30K in credit card debt. Did I expect a handout from others so I could continue doing it? Absolutely not. It was my own choice and one that did not pay off financially. I took responsibility for my situation. I switched back to programming, paid off all my debt, and am now still pursuing my interests part time as a hobby. My pay wasn't that great in the beginning but through personal study and experience I have greatly increased my salary.
People don't always get to do what they want. But if they make the right decisions they can definitely prosper.
Just because someone can't support themselves doing whatever they find the most interesting or the easiest path doesn't mean others should be forced to provide them that opportunity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in that case you would be justified in telling the irresponsible person tough luck and maybe they would spend it more wisely the next time around. If they die of starvation that's their problem. I have a hard time believing that would be a wide spread problem though.
Exactly, and it isn't like this is the ONLY form of income. This is meant to subsidize those who are living below the poverty line. If you are living below the poverty line and go out and buy yourself a car you can't afford, guess what, you'll have to sell the car, and you'll have learned your lesson that next year, you can't go waste your BI.
Now that's just silly. If it were meant to subsidize people living below the poverty line it would target people living below the poverty line, not households making over 50k a year who would likely sock away the money or spend it on a bathroom renovation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Where did you get the idea that disposable income increases for everyone? How could that be even possible? The government could be printing money to make that possible, as well, instead of financing it through taxes only.
Printing money causes inflation, which is effectively a wealth tax.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems like it would create a perverse incentive to breed unnecessarily.
Government workers in Sweden get 13 months paid maternity leave. That's a pretty good incentive. But they rank 187th in the world by birth rate, according to the CIA World Factbook.
A recurring cash payment meeting or exceeding the costs of raising the kid on the other hand...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The correct answer here is that you are not valuing your opportunity costs highly enough. If you are working 8-10 hours a day, you should be making an incredible surplus. People in ancient societies worked less, and managed to survive just fine. With the technology available today, you could be making millions of dollars of surplus value, if given the opportunity. All you would need is the time to experiment with you…
Actually, I was arguing against the idea that society is punishing people who can't find a job. Personally, I'd love to get BI. That would free me to work only on what I like, or not work at all when I don't want to.
I think if you could see close-up how these systems work now, you'd be convinced that it's completely not worth the cost in practice to try and figure out who "deserves" each of the many, many special benefits/allowances/exemptions available (plus it's incredibly difficult for potential recipients to figure out what they're eligible for, plus it imposes those costs on the people who aren't eligible, but end up having…
...it's become increasingly clear to all of us that the implementation of well-meaning policies intended to separate the deserving from the undeserving ends up adding an incredible amount of complexity and overhead,... Unless the overhead is truly massive (read: 5x more than the actual benefits), it doesn't matter. It's still vastly cheaper to pay only a small set of deserving people than to pay everyone. Consider a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> wage slavery Having a wage, is by definition, not being treated like a slave. Plus, in most countries you get a wage AND you are free to look for jobs everywhere around you, and to get them. Unless you mean that the concept of having to do something to earn a living is actually akin to slavery, but I'd rather say it's common sense. Even from a personal standpoint, most people would not really feel good to be paid t…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery > in most countries you get a wage AND you are free to look for jobs everywhere around you, and to get them At some point, there will not be enough jobs to keep everyone gainfully employed doing meaningful work (in even the loosest sense of the word). With a basic income, rather than having immense swaths of poverty, each person would have the freedom of any pursuit they desi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced that Basic income would necessarily deal with edge cases all that much better. A simple basic income implies that you provide everybody with the same minimum income and they cut back on public services etc to the minimum since in theory people can now buy what they want. But there are problems in that not everyone can live off the same amount of money. This is especially true with disabled or very i…
> A simple basic income implies that you provide everybody with the same minimum income and they cut back on public services etc to the minimum since in theory people can now buy what they want. I haven't seen the reduction in services implied anywhere. It may, however, be a reality when implemented, but the intention isn't simply to change how government funds are spent on the poor. Generally, the aim is to redistri…