One of the biggest views I see in my parents and grandparents: work provides purpose and dignity, and without work, you have no purpose, and therefore, you are a failure. This is really hard to respond to, especially with people who have spent 50 years working with this mindset, because they feel "invalidated" or "worthless" if their life's worth isn't measured by their work output. I don't think that's necessarily a…
> If you have no choice but to work or be discarded, then, when the value you can provide via work is less than that required to maintain your life, you have no choice but to attempt to indenture yourself. And failing that, you're truly, completely fucked. Work or be discarded? Really? Most people have, you know, other people in their lives. Hell, 20% of the country at any given time is children, and they don't work…
A nation of slaves
171–180 of 258 posts
Re: A nation of slaves
#172An unconditional basic income[1] would speed up a paradigm shift from the current "work or starve" society. Maybe our grandchildren will look back to this time and make funny jokes about digging and filling holes... [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
How would that work from a free market standpoint? What I mean is, when everyone has a baseline amount of money, the relative scarcity is diminished and the market prices will inflate as the value of money(real & perceived) decreases. I cannot recall the historical character at the moment, but I recall reading of a benevolent king(central or south american?) who give all his subjects generous amounts of gold to the e…
It doesn't work in supply restricted things like real estate thought, so other solutions might be needed for that market.
Re: A nation of slaves
#173An unconditional basic income[1] would speed up a paradigm shift from the current "work or starve" society. Maybe our grandchildren will look back to this time and make funny jokes about digging and filling holes... [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Basic income mean huge changes: For example, salary may still be partially driven by necessary education / experience, but physical, tiresome or stressfull works would requireask for way higher salaries (because you get up at 4AM to collect garbage when you have no other choice, or when you think it really is worth it, and those jobs would still be necessary) The same way, some companies will have huge problems filli…
But i agree with many people who replied to your thread - this would be a very small problem.
Re: A nation of slaves
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens if people decide to stop paying Mr. Myne to use his machines? Someone else invents it? The fallacy is the same one that most people in favor of "intellectual property" operate under: that Mr Myne is somehow so special that he's the only person who could have ever invented the machine. As history has repeatedly shown, even the very special are hardly ever truly unique. Most inventions and discoveries occu…
Why would someone else invent it? If people decide to stop paying for the machines, or at least stop paying enough for him to suitably benefit from making/obtaining & maintaining the machines, why would anyone else fill in the gap if they're not going to benefit either? Such technologies are common: per-unit and per-use cost may be low, but price of reaching that cost level may be extremely high. Integrated circuits…
But unless Mr. Myne is the only one with the capital to create the machines, I can't see how someone else wouldn't come along and make the machines for what the market will bear. As the saying goes, "demand creates its own supply."
Re: A nation of slaves
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Basic income mean huge changes" I have to admit this alone is enough to give me pause. The logic goes something like: "Our current social system has produced astonishing wealth. We can therefore take this to change our current social system and distribute the wealth more widely. Hooray, we fixed things!" But this amounts to a rewriting of the social system. We have no guarantees that the next social system will prod…
BI requires lots of experimentation, cant go from 0 to BI nationwide in one day. The "wealth creation" argument is flimsy, but recognizing that the consequences of BI are unknown is not. Also, i found this phrase really upsetting: "A society that is paying more for its basic needs is a poorer society" It would have been a perfectly applicable argument against abolishing slavery. I can assure you that all low-end jobs…
It would have been wrong, though; slavery is an abuse of power to force people who could otherwise be very productive members of society to do relatively low-value tasks. I'm pretty sure most historians agree that slavery was either not a net economic win, or on its way to not being an economic win, by the time it was abolished.
You then sort of prove my point, by describing an economy in which apparently nobody runs any restaurants at all, and apparently you're going to do your own cooking, cleaning, etc. Yes, that's a gloriously hippie paradise... it's also a poorer economy. You've just celebrated that basic income will produce a poorer economy. And that's not my problem. That's your choice. We all have different values. The question is, where is the wealth for basic income going to come from if the economy just got poorer than it is today?
There's no free lunch. A great deal of the "wage slave" jobs are also where a lot of the basic value of the economy is coming from. Indeed, isn't this half the point of the people on this page, complaining that the "real" value creators aren't getting properly compensated for it? If we tear into those, where is the stuff going to come from that we're supposed to be giving out to people as part of their basic income? It does no good to hand people a "living wage" if there's no longer anything to purchase with it. I'm not sure basic income advocates have deeply internalized the idea that for any economic transaction, there has to be two sides, and there's no Infinite Magical Grocery Store that will always be there, regardless of what we do to the economy. Replacing all the scut work with musicians and painters is a very sweet sounding goal, but where does their poop go?
It would be supreme (and probably very, very deadly) irony if we institute a "basic income" because we're "so rich", only to destroy the very wealth we thought we had in the process. This may not be what happens, but I'd like to see a lot more careful analysis based on real psychology and a few very careful trial runs (yes, I know about the tiny ones that have been done) before I'd even remotely support it. The risks are gigantic, and there's probably easier and less risky ways to mitigate the problems than this.
Re: A nation of slaves
#176Our economies also have this tendency to siphon off surplus and spend it on expensive military projects such as wars. There is the general year in year out expenditure on new military toys, keeping the nuclear 'deterrent' up to date and keeping those boys polishing their boots. We don't get a proper tax breakdown on this expenditure so I would only be guessing as to how much is really spent. On top of this regular ex…
Most of the US tax expenditure goes towards social security and medicare. But your talking about a governmental system that can print it's own currency and is the reserve currency of the world, so even that is a bit wonky to think about.
If the USA fixed it's regulatory health care mess, broke the artificial supply constraints on doctors, made medical devices not have %1000+ profit margins and socialized their healthcare, they would save more GDP than liquidating the US military. Shrinking the financial sector back to its 1950's % of GDP would also pay for the military. Our relatively small software industry is under %2 in 2007.[4]
1. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_Stat...
4. http://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-GDP-is-the-US-softwa...
Re: A nation of slaves
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there's little to no positive connection between who does the hard work and who gets rewarded for it. Nobody in China nor other country is working their ass off to make cheap stuff for developed countries. They're working their asses off to feed themselves and their families. The effort: very high. The value: not so much for them. I get what you're saying, but covering the effort in valor and moral superiority as…
The value: not so much for them. How is a "dramatic reduction in poverty" not of much value? http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/stats-on-human-rights/sta...
Value relative to effort. Compare your level of effort to your level of PPP received in return. Would you consider 1.25 USD@2005 a day to be an achievement for them in comparison to you, or an abysmal failure of society to justly allocate its rewards to the people who put in the effort?
In other words: is a just reward for doing the work that supports the lifestyle of the developed world a 'reduction' in the worst sort of abject poverty?
Re: A nation of slaves
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
The value: not so much for them. How is a "dramatic reduction in poverty" not of much value? http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/stats-on-human-rights/sta...
I think pessimizer was saying that the relative return to the labour at the bottom end is low. It is like (to be hyperbolic) living a life of luxury, but on giving the starving man who labours for you a bit of food, suggesting that that is ample reward for his efforts, because of how much value that bit of food has for him. Then, you can top that off by saying that it doesn't matter how much food he produces for you,…
At which end of the economic ladder do you think improvements occur for there to be a dramatic reduction in poverty within a whole society?
Re: A nation of slaves
#179funny i was talking about something similar with a friend last night. think about this: in a lot of professions it's common to study about up to 10 years before you start working. that's after 12-13 years of school(unless you're a professional athlete) you study for a quarter century. think about it. a quarter of a century. that's the height of your youth. then you're allowed to work for 40 years so you can "enjoy" y…
Re: A nation of slaves
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your history is just as flawed as your understanding of work, value and progress (in other words, you've been brainwashed). "Hard work" has always been a domain reserved exclusively for the slaves. The "virtue" of hard work is just a shallow manipulation tactic devised by those in power. None of this has changed today. What IS changing, however, is that as knowledge becomes more readily available, fewer and fewer peo…
The "virtue" of hard work is just a shallow manipulation tactic devised by those in power. How is this an argument against what ekianjo wrote? Yes, there has (almost?) always been a privileged upper class that had much more leisure than the masses. Still, the fact remains that living standards would have been lower had a majority of the population not worked their asses off. Should the distribution of work be adjuste…