791–800 of 1001 posts
All these things are terrible for capitalism, because it would increase expenses...
Capitalism 2.0 is just shedding any pretense toward any common good coming out of it, and accepting being ruled by concentrated capital protected by the state, with little to no social mobility.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> some governments give poor people vouchers for rent ... targeted by slumlords who find a way to give you as little as possible for them This seems to be a problem because the vouchers are only redeemable by government-granted monopolies, and thus neither tenant nor landlord are participating an open market. If the tenant could go anywhere else with their money a la UBI nobody would choose those terrible living quar…
An open market will always favour the landlord, so you'd end up with more homelessness, or more slum housing and ten-people-to-a-room at the very best. We've been trying these approaches for centuries now, and they always end the same way. There has never been a "free" market which hasn't vastly increased inequality of opportunity across the population as a whole. Why is it so hard for proponents of "free" markets to…
Why don't you try being a landlord if it so easy? Not only do you have to capitalize to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars (or get leveraged to that level), between costs and taxes, your profit rate is going to be pretty tepid. It's not easy money, trust me.
>We've been trying these approaches for centuries now, and they always end the same way. There has never been a "free" market which hasn't vastly increased inequality of opportunity across the population as a whole. Why is it so hard for proponents of "free" markets to accept this fact?
Because that's not true. The free market has been the primary and pretty much the only driver of prosperity. And you cannot legislate prosperity. There is no magic combination of minimum wage, rent control and welfare that will increase jobs, income and wealth of the individuals.
> limits to advertising that promotes selfish greed and consumption, regulation of the press to eliminate the deliberate dissemination of obvious fake news, good public healthcare, higher taxation for giant monopolies and their owners, improved regulation to end the financialisation of everything, much improved public infrastructure, stronger unionisation and other forms of collaborative politics, and easier and cheaper access to capital for small business of all kinds.
Every communist nation thought it could 'educate away' human nature and brainwash to population into good communist automatons, and every time they tried it led to a humanitarian crisis. It's seems to be a core property of communist thought that human nature is completely flexible and can be shaped in anyway to make communism actually possible.
Everybody gets equal UBI in the game Monopoly, and that never works out well.
I am busy in the field of fractal arithmetic and quantum logic. Thanks to an incompetent advisor I was dis-advised to follow an academic schooling and missed the boat. With UBI I would have finished the basics of these two fields long ago and published them for the good of science releasing a trove of new techniques, insights, algorithms and hardware designs. Now I have to scavenge for work and waste my time.
Can you elaborate on what grounds did your advisor disadvise you to follow academic schooling?
The elephants in the room are the extremely cheap labor that already undermines the legit goods and services: - extremely cheap prison labor - undocumented laborers who have (almost) no legal rights and who take difficult jobs - ex-cons who have to pay a portion of their wages to employers who are willing to hire them - jobs where wages must be subsidized by government programs (eg. WalMart encourages their lowest pa…
UBI would obviate the need for SNAP.
> Even the most hardcore anti-capitalists have to give respect to how the combination of capitalism and technology has worked to lift most of the world out poverty and provided us with the security and comfort only kings enjoyed just a few century’s ago. No, they wouldn't. Any more that they would have to "respect" that the combination of Stalinism and technology lifted Russia out of poverty and post-war destruction.…
South Korea's prosperity is almost entirely attributable to its economic liberalization.
I like the simple argument made here about UBI enabling efficient consumption. I worry about three things with UBI though and they're more social than economic. 1. Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. We can see this a little bit with the coronavirus relief packages. 2. Predator…
> 3. Charity - let's say we actually give every person enough money for food, housing, and utilities. Some people will mess up. They could spend it all on an addiction or just make a bad investment. Even with UBI they could still end up hungry or homeless. Will we help them? Or will we say "you had your UBI, the rest is on you". This changes the morals of how we treat people in the worst times. I think it should be p…
Those probably don't exist with UBI, because one point of UBI is to take all the money going into those support and give it directly to the people and let them take care of themself.
In german there is a significant number of people and families who are only somewhat functional because of those external support. Without this support, they will probably end on even lower levels than now.
I like the simple argument made here about UBI enabling efficient consumption. I worry about three things with UBI though and they're more social than economic. 1. Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. We can see this a little bit with the coronavirus relief packages. 2. Predator…