101–110 of 119 posts
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Feudalism is joining the esteemed ranks of now-meaningless words like “violence”, “cancer”, “white supremacy”, and “patriarchy”.
> Feudalism is joining the esteemed ranks of now-meaningless words like “violence”, “cancer”, “white supremacy”, and “patriarchy”. All of those words have well-established and commonly understood meanings.
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I have a few questions: - Where does the money for UBI come from? - How do you propose to deal with the sudden spike in rent prices that's almost exactly the UBI amount? - What do you do when welfare faring becomes socially acceptable?
> Where does the money for UBI come from? Taxes. > How do you propose to deal with the sudden spike in rent prices that's almost exactly the UBI amount? Rent control. > What do you do when welfare faring becomes socially acceptable Celebrate the reduction in pointless stress and the associated social harms from no longer stigmatizing those with no other choice, while watching more of those who can do more actually do…
Rent control is terrible. Even if it would prevent rents from increasing for existing tenants, that doesn't help anyone who doesn't have a rent controlled apartment from before the rents went up. Nor anyone who is looking to buy a home if it causes housing prices to go up. Rent control also discourages home ownership in general because you don't buy if price controls are making it cheaper to rent.
The true answer is this. If people having more money would only cause all of it to go to landlords, that is a dysfunction in the housing market, not the UBI. In a functioning housing market, more demand should primarily result in more construction, not higher prices. If that isn't the case then it has nothing to do with a UBI -- it would also be true if people had more money due to rising wages, or a reduction in taxes or interest rates or healthcare costs.
"What if every time people get more money it all goes to landlords" is a housing problem, not a UBI problem.
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No what you really need is federal binding minimum standards for Annual leave (4 weeks ) and Sick pay and minimum wage. Repeal all the right to work laws and massively reduce the ability of employers to use non compeats (us CA as a model here I think)
How do you decide who qualifies for four weeks pay? that is a significant cost to many small businesses. Do you limit it based on how many employees they have? How many hours the employee averages per week? The last time Congress set limits they threw low wage earners under the bus; the now infamous ACA twenty nine hour rule. minimum wage should not be at the federal level, it is a state by state and city by city iss…
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No what you really need is federal binding minimum standards for Annual leave (4 weeks ) and Sick pay and minimum wage. Repeal all the right to work laws and massively reduce the ability of employers to use non compeats (us CA as a model here I think)
This is all true, but you also need to remove the ability for healthcare to be based on one employer. You should be able to get your own coverage and contribute to an HSA no matter what job you do. That mobility will make a huge difference
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> Where does the money for UBI come from? Taxes. > How do you propose to deal with the sudden spike in rent prices that's almost exactly the UBI amount? Rent control. > What do you do when welfare faring becomes socially acceptable Celebrate the reduction in pointless stress and the associated social harms from no longer stigmatizing those with no other choice, while watching more of those who can do more actually do…
> Rent control. Rent control is terrible. Even if it would prevent rents from increasing for existing tenants, that doesn't help anyone who doesn't have a rent controlled apartment from before the rents went up. Nor anyone who is looking to buy a home if it causes housing prices to go up. Rent control also discourages home ownership in general because you don't buy if price controls are making it cheaper to rent. The…
Rent control usually requires other interventions (that are usually not undertaken) to be net desirable, but those other interventions are not directly relevant to the problem posed.
> In a functioning housing market, more demand should primarily result in more construction, not higher prices.
Many housing markets are not “functioning”, and while many of the causes for that are policy related in many cases there are natural constraints as well. Any adoption of UBI in the real world is going to need mechanisms adopted that address this in affected markets (which may be more limited in scope than the whole subject area of UBI.).
> "What if every time people get more money it all goes to landlords" is a housing problem, not a UBI problem.
It's a housing problem that t frustrates the purpose of UBI wherever it exists, making it a UBI problem, as well.
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No what you really need is federal binding minimum standards for Annual leave (4 weeks ) and Sick pay and minimum wage. Repeal all the right to work laws and massively reduce the ability of employers to use non compeats (us CA as a model here I think)
Closer, and that would help but not change the fundamental problem of who controls the means of production. I think you'll lose in the end, as we see today. You could just remove the tension of the employer-employee imbalance altogether. I'd advocate for public funding of loans for worker owned co-ops. 1 employee/owner = 1 share = 1 vote. Vote on wages, vote on bosses, run it like a democracy. Once people have democr…
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>No other labour law required. Simple competition sorts it out. We have seen how no labor laws combined with competition works, we get: 80 hour work weeks with no over time, no benefits, dangerous work conditions, and even exploitative child labor. There is legitimate use of contractors in lieu of employees, but UBER and gig economy as a whole are very hiring what are clearly employees, under the law, as contractors…
Ok. Explain how you can have 80 hour weeks with no overtime when the statutory alternative job in the local area is 35 hours a week, $25 per hour, 9-5 steady work about half a mile away from their house with full health care, pension and sickness cover. How does the 80 hour week person get any labour?
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> But the arguments used to justify the power of capital owners over the operations (and profit distribution) in the company are in principle the same as those used to defend feudal lordship. It's a neat metaphor in a storybook sort of way, which is why it seems like you are making a political point and not a economic argument. > The freedom of mobility is not relevant if your only choice is just another feudal lord.…
"which is why it seems like you are making a political point and not a economic argument" I am making an argument that the principal justification for power of these individuals is the same. It's neither strictly political nor strictly economic argument. "There are ~30 million small businesses in the US, anyone can start one, and many people do. Anyone cannot decide to become a feudal lord; it is a position taken thr…
You're drawing an analogy in the roughest possible terms. "A person can choose to become X", where X is a company or a lord, does not logically imply anything about the two things other than they are both choices. (Everything at some level is arguably a choice, so in fact this says nothing).
Similarly, "Doing thing X is risky" where X is starting a company or starting a gang, is not a logical argument for anything other than two random things are both "risky" (but perhaps in markedly different ways).
> Also, while there are small businesses in capitalism, yes, the core of it in practice are large businesses.
Roughly half of all employment, and the majority of employment gains, comes from small business. Roughly half of GDP comes from small business.
> And just like the lords, the owners of the large businesses are those who can either outsmart the other small owners, or just win the game of taking the risk.
In any competitive environment (be it sports, or selling widgets, or war) there are winners and losers depending on the preparation, skill, and execution of the players. "Football is war" is a metaphor, not a rigorous argument for why the Geneva Convention should apply to football.
> The fact that there is no direct violence in economic competition between companies doesn't invalidate the comparison I am making.
The fact that two things are meaningfully different in almost every sense does though. The only comparisons you've made are only in the most general metaphorical sense.
> The question why should somebody keep unlimited and indefinite control over something (be it company or state) just by virtue of organizing people around creation of that something still stands.
Besides the obvious point that no one has unlimited or indefinite control over anything, the tenants of private property are a well argued philosophical stomping ground. Why anyone should be able to own anything that they pay for... If they ever truly own it, if it is being taxed annually, or merely rented it from the State... If they should be able to keep it, or how much of it their family should be able to keep after they die... Whether a person can fully transfer title in something they create even if they are paid for it...
The fundamental reason that we let people own the things that they create or that they pay for is because that becomes the incentive for people to work hard to create great things, and because it's a way to give meaning to life. The fundamental reason that we don't take everything away from people the moment they die, but merely take just a large share of it, when it's over a certain amount, is roughly similar.
Other countries have tried to do it different ways, and IMO they have all turned out orders of magnitude worse for the wear.
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> Where does the money for UBI come from? Taxes. > How do you propose to deal with the sudden spike in rent prices that's almost exactly the UBI amount? Rent control. > What do you do when welfare faring becomes socially acceptable Celebrate the reduction in pointless stress and the associated social harms from no longer stigmatizing those with no other choice, while watching more of those who can do more actually do…
> Rent control. Rent control is terrible. Even if it would prevent rents from increasing for existing tenants, that doesn't help anyone who doesn't have a rent controlled apartment from before the rents went up. Nor anyone who is looking to buy a home if it causes housing prices to go up. Rent control also discourages home ownership in general because you don't buy if price controls are making it cheaper to rent. The…
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It's still got nothing to do with actual feudalism... Yes it has. Feudalism was that exactly: all society, from bottom to top was based on individual asymetrical pacts between two parts, the vassal and the lord. This kind of relation existed between peasants and lords and between lesser and greater lords.
All employment contracts are asymmetrical. Almost all contracts are asymmetrical. The defining features that make feudalism different from any other master/servant or employer/employee relationship are completely different from the gig economy and the gig economy oppresses people in completely different ways. For example a gig economy employee can withdraw their labour at any time; can choose how much or how little t…
The feudalism term clearly seems to be introduced because of that, not because something's good or bad or whatever, but because it's atomizing labour relations.