Why are reddit and 4chan actually talking politics and economics according to random WTDWTF users
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@Polygeekery said:
I am not Jewish, Hispanic, Black, gay or female either. That does not mean I am going to stand by silently while some idiot tries to vilify those groups due to their misinformed ideals.
Are you truly attempting to suggest that the ultra-rich warrant inclusion in a collection of historically oppressed groups? That equivalence was ridiculous when Clive Palmer assumed it, and it's no less ridiculous when you do.
This reminds me of the joke:
A: Would you sleep with me for 1,000,000$?
B: ...YES!
A: How about 1$?
B: What do you think what a person I am?
A: We have established what you are, madam. We are now merely haggling over the price.
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I'm saying I disagree on their worth because I can see the economic benefits those skills can bring.
You weren't, but I'm happy to accept your amended statement.
Yet, all-too-often, we see a mentality based on "time to complete call" and other such woefully misleading metrics that land customers shuffled off to Buffalo with their problems still unsolved.
Actually I tend to agree, but then, we don't know what would be the price of getting the quality customer service service. Bad incentives everywhere!
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You would ideally place these "hotels" apart from each other, so you can spread the poverty around.
I see no advantage of what you're proposing over the kind of shared house I lived in during the part of my life where I was experimenting with learning how to live comfortably on as little as possible. It was a large rental house, with ten to twelve of us living in it at any time, it provided everything you've talked about with no state involvement whatsoever, and I lived there for three years on about half the income generally talked about as appropriate for a UBI.
If you were to standardize these things and put them out for tender, I'm quite sure each one would end up costing the taxpayer far more than simply giving what they cost to operate to the tenants and letting them run it themselves.
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Main difference between you and me, then, is that I have the whole idea of taxation filed firmly inside your "etc."
As I see it, taxation is the mechanism by which we fund public goods like infrastructure and enforcement of property rights, and I have no problem at all with the idea of considering the elimination of poverty traps to be at least as worthy a public good as property rights.
Yes, taxation is how you pay for that stuff. And it's definitely an interference, but we should be mindful of the tradeoffs (I mentioned that above, and I don't really harbor any fantasy about you correcting your opinion of my opinion of taxation).
As for "forcefully": to my way of thinking, the democratic State is essentially a mutual corporation (one member, one vote) to which we have collectively agreed to give a monopoly on the kinds of violence ultimately required to enforce the rules required to enable a healthy economy to operate.
Well, what if you don't mutually agree? Then guys with guns will show up. You could ask Eric Garner how this works, but he's dead because he wasn't paying taxes.
To my way of thinking, that means that the "force" in this instance has a legitimacy missing from force exerted by other actors, and cannot be fairly equated with that.
Legitimate or not, don't confuse yourself. It's still force. PJ O'Rourke had a great quote:
…remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody’s head.
Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot.
Thus I:
- in my role as citizen and voter
- am going to shoot you
- in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck
- if you don’t pay your fair share of the national tab.
Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, “Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?”
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Legitimate or not, don't confuse yourself. It's still force.
Of course it is. Which is why the question of its legitimacy is important, and why simply treating it as morally equivalent to theft amounts to intellectual laziness.
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I maintain the root problem is the inability to opt-out, which leads to exploitation of employees and leaves very little time or energy for self-improvement.
That's exactly it. You have to work 50+ hours a week to pay the rent. By the end of it, you're physically drained. Only the most motivated even have the energy to do even marginally effective studying after that. There are diminishing returns on labor, and employers want the best parts of your labor. And they will fire you if they don't get it.
About a year ago, I made a decision people probably think is crazy. I chose to be homeless, so that I could spend my time working for myself. I've spent the last year basically couch surfing, still working 50+ hours a week, and generating a dollar of value for each minute I work. I own all of that, unlike the previous situation where I generated three times that much for a company, but only earned a 15 cents a minute. I am now significantly better off, even though society is worse off because of lower productivity.
Obviously, I lived as thriftily as possible, and incurred very low marginal costs on my network. And paid them out of pocket.
Now, of course, I am lucky that I had an effective social support network that believed in my work ethic and found my plan to be acceptable. Not everybody has access to such a network. Especially if you're poor and you're surrounded by poor people.
And even if everybody had the social network, not everybody could do this. A 66% reduction in productivity across a large segment of the economy can easily ruin a nation. I saw an opportunity to improve my life and took it before somebody else could.
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No more so than including people posting in this forum in a group of people dead centuries ago.
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@boomzilla said:
Legitimate or not, don't confuse yourself. It's still force.
Of course it is. Which is why the question of its legitimacy is important, and why simply treating it as morally equivalent to theft amounts to intellectual laziness.
Good thing I didn't do that, then.
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If you can convince enough people that the State monopoly on legitimate violence ought to be overturned, the fact that you live in a democracy means that it will be.
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Could we at least make sure people understand the gravity and consequences of the things they're asking for?
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History suggests No, unfortunately.
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If you can convince enough people that the State monopoly on legitimate violence ought to be overturned, the fact that you live in a democracy means that it will be.
If I can convince enough people, then it will be, democracy or not. Or do you think a few thousand people in Washington can physically control 300 million?
But that's beside the point. You've admitted that this was decided centuries before any of us were born, so the defense rests.
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If I can convince enough people, then it will be, democracy or not. Or do you think a few thousand people in Washington can physically control 300 million?
But that's beside the point. You've admitted that this was decided centuries before any of us were born, so the defense rests.
And you've admitted that 300 million people don't object to it enough to alter it, so the prosecution? rests as well.
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Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner.
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Just as well for the lamb that at least one of the wolves is a SJW, then.
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And you've admitted that 300 million people don't object to it enough to alter it,
You could use this argument to justify any political system.
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That's true, soon enough the other wolf will probably kill him. If we're lucky, though, the SJWW will severely injure the other one and we'll have a chance.
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@flabdablet said:
And you've admitted that 300 million people don't object to it enough to alter it,
You could use this argument to justify any political system.
Maybe he just really likes omelettes.
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You could use this argument to justify any political system.
If the few thousand in power are capable of remaining in power over the objections of the bulk of the populace (see e.g. Syria), the argument is inapplicable.
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I see no advantage of what you're proposing over the kind of shared house I lived in during the part of my life where I was experimenting with learning how to live comfortably on as little as possible.
I shared a similar arrangement for an year I spent living abroad, which is probably why I thought of it. The issue is, other people with the same income I used to share a room would not make the same choice.
You are under the impression that giving people the same fixed amount would result in a similar standard of living. This is simply not so. Different parts of a city, and different parts of a nation, will have different amounts that are required for purchasing the same goods. So from the get go, you can't even standardize how much money that should be. You'll either have people gravitate to the parts of the nation where the number is higher (because of course they will not take the cost of living into account), or away from the more expensive areas due to an arbitrary decision. So you are now not just deciding how they should live, you are deciding where they will live even though you don't want to.
By removing the money from the equation, people get to live where they feel is best for them. So more freedom for the poor, which is the whole point.
Also, if you give them money to people to spend freely, you'll have some making bad choices. Like sacrificing the quality of the food for beer. Even if most people would make the right choices, those that make bad choices will live worse than those that make good choices.
If the goal is to provide a minimum, just provide that minimum. Don't provide them the means to get that minimum, and let them fail to get it, because now you have people living below the minimum you set out to establish. And if you instead give them money but demand that they spend it in a specific manner, what's the difference with just providing that?
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soon enough the other wolf will probably kill him
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those that make bad choices will live worse than those that make good choices
which is exactly as it should be.
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Not when you are trying to establish a belgium MINIMUM STANDARD OF LIVING.
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@Kian said:
those that make bad choices will live worse than those that make good choices
which is exactly as it should be.
We're just disagreeing on which bad choices we want to protect them from.
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If the goal is to provide a minimum
The goal is to remove structural poverty traps, not to compensate for genuine individual irresponsibility.
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The goal is to remove structural poverty traps, not to compensate for genuine individual irresponsibility.
Part of the structural traps are that poor education leads to irresponsibility.
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Fuck it. Just throw money at them.
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Those who make good choices should still live better than those who make bad choices. but those who make bad choices shouldn't be locked out of the game entirely. We do want to incentivize certain choices, but with things less dire, like cable tv instead of a roof over your head.
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Which is why I said anyone should be allowed to live in these hypothetical "hotels", and that they should be allowed to get improvements without necessarily moving out. So if you consistently make every wrong choice, you get the minimum. A roof and food, and spaces to improve yourself (eg: a library).
As you make more good choices, you can improve your quality of life in increments, until you make enough that you decide you'd rather have a house of your own instead of sharing with everyone else.
Good choices improve your life, bad choices don't turn you into a slave.
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By removing the money from the equation, people get to live where they feel is best for them.
You have a lot more faith in the tolerance of aspirationals for welcoming the poor into their midst than I do.
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but those who make bad choices shouldn't be locked out of the game entirely.
So the opposite of a Darwin Award? The quixotic ideas thread is
.
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What does harassment and police overreaction have to do with this conversation?
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Sean Toon and his associates are emblematic of the pushback I see as likely to be suffered by poor people, especially poor black people, who would end up occupying your hypothetical hostels if those were built in "nice" neighborhoods.
I don't believe economic policy is the appropriate tool to correct all forms of social inequity.
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And what would happen if you just gave them money? They'd clump together in cheap neighborhoods instead? I thought you were against ghettos.
I'm not trying to correct all forms of social inequality. Just brainstorming the most efficient way to solve the most grave issues; homelessness, malnutrition, and poor education for the children of the homeless or poor. Giving people money doesn't solve those problems, because those problems lead to poor spending habits.
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I thought you were against ghettos.
I'm against underspecified, underserviced public housing built down to a price instead of up to an acceptable standard, which I'm pretty sure is what we would end up with pretty much exclusively if universal provision of public housing were made mandatory.
Distinguishing the deserving poor from the undeserving poor is a policy game that's been played for a very long time, historically yielding fairly awful results for the poor generally; virtually no attention has been paid to distinguishing the deserving rich from the undeserving rich, or the deserving middle class from the undeserving middle class.
Can we, for the sake of argument, agree that undeserving people are those who consistently make choices that lower the quality of their own lives and that of those close to them?
I have met enough people to convince me that such people form a roughly consistent and small proportion of every income percentile, and that there is simply nothing at all that can be done, beyond respecting their fundamental right to fuck up their own lives as they see fit, to make those lives better. It's not really about education, in my view; it's more about impulse control, and that's a matter of temperament and attitude.
It seems to me that the vast majority of those who live hand to mouth in poverty traps do so not because they are irresponsible wastrels by nature, but because all their options are bad. The assumption that people who are not living in poverty traps have something vital and essential to teach to those who do live in them - such as, for example, how to live nicely in a share house - strikes me as fundamentally disrespectful and patronizing.
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The labor market becomes truly free, because those consuming jobs have the right to not "buy", to sit at home and do nothing with their time if that's the best option.
And they will choose not to buy, lowering demand, so by the basic rules of economy that's going to lower the supply.
In result - shit ain't bein' done. Business owners either close their door, or raise prices to match up the necessarily increased wages. The first results in an economic collapse and Soviet bloc scenario - people have money, but they can't spend it because the supply doesn't match up. The other makes the money you gave away worthless, because the prices adapt, and we're back to square one.
Look, you can't just wave a magic wand and make everybody rich, or even living at a sustainable level, without taking away from somewhere. Even if not everybody gets lazy - even if a single person gets lazy and decides "meh, I can fuck around, I'm getting enough money" - that means that person's contribution is now gone, and overall economy needs to adapt.
That will certainly be their initial response, but once it becomes apparent that there's now a substantial gap between what it costs to provide rental housing and the expected return on that investment, the market will react by providing more rental housing.
Even assuming you have a magic money printer (which you don't, by the way) - the rental market will adjust, but then the greengrocer will notice the increase in expendable income and raise his prices. Which some people, again, won't be able to afford.
Is it really so hard to imagine someone wanting to do a low-class job?
If they have sustainable income anyway? Not many will. And you need to define "sustainable income" anyway - you give people enough money to rent a two-bedroom apartment, they'll rent a studio and spend the rest on Magic cards.
You'll find some people, sure, but you'll end up with an inflated ratio of white collars to overall population. Unless you do as you say and raise the low-end job wages artificially, but then you'll find the companies shutting down because there's still the same amount of money in the economy, but now they have to pay people more.
And if you incentivize by flattening the wages, then you'll find people running away either to unemployment (since they can live comfortably anyway) or low-skill, low-responsibility jobs (since they don't get properly compensated). So you'll inflate the blue-collar to population ratio, which sucks about just as much.
I exaggerated, sure, but I see that kind of rhetoric a lot: poor people are poor because they lack the ethics/willpower/intelligence to not be poor. It pisses me right off because it's reductive, unproductive, and short-sighted.
And your solution is to reduce the need for ethics, willpower and intelligence to not be poor. So even if it isn't true now, it will be over time.
Look, even if you don't assume that people are lazy, they'll still want to develop themselves on their own accord and under their own rules. Why get a stressful, responsible job as a programmer if you can learn coding on the evenings, drinking beer and coding up whatever you want, not what people need?
If you start from a place where the poor deserve to be poor because they're inferior beings, you arrive at no real solutions.
The only prerequisite you need is the ability to get proper schooling and proper start in life. Which I'm all for. But if you're skillful enough and in a good enough situation that you can spend a couple of years studying, what's the excuse then?
There are some people who just got shitty cards dealt from the start, sure - but the solution is not to shovel money at them for the rest of their lives. Just enough to kickstart them, so that they can be productive and pay the state's expenses back.
A UBI would allow them the time, energy, and means to learn new skills. If they CBA, as you say, they won't succeed, they'll merely "get by". If they're willing but unable to improve their lives, suddenly, they'll be in a much better position to do so.
And that's when you can turn the faucet off. Once you get them where they can improve their lives. But you want to provide for them anyway, and then the inertia kicks in - they had a decent living with enough time to better themselves, so why give it up?
that funding them to stay out of the way of the rest of us in the job market would end up costing less than trying to weed them out of the welfare system,
So instead of paying them welfare, you want to pay them welfare. WTF?
If enough menial tasks are automated that there aren't enough skilled jobs to go around (which is pretty much what I read @flabdablet's "post industrial society" to mean), then you have two choices: create shitjobs to artificially increase supply, or make sure people can live comfortably without having to work.
Or, you know, upping the requirements to get a job at all. If you're not able to read, it's pretty much impossible to get a job today - it wasn't the case just a few centuries, if not decades ago. People adapted. It's called "progress".
Otherwise we'd all still be plowing our fields.
My idea was by shutting down major swaths of the government that are currently devoted to regulating the market, freeing up resources currently devoted to things like OSHA.
Yep, you've just saved a bunch of money. That's nice. Now you can either use it to actually improve the country by providing for roads, public utilities, etc., or you can do a giveaway.
Thing is, with the giveaway, you stopped pumping money into one place of the economy and pumped it into another place of the economy. And nothing of value was done.
but those who make bad choices shouldn't be locked out of the game entirely.
At that point you're not giving the poor the fishpole, you're not even giving them the fish, you're basically forcing the fish into their mouths as they stubbornly decide not to eat. Why?
Everybody should be able to go to hell on their own accord. You can't protect everyone from results of bad decisions, and even if you could, that would only mean more people would make bad decisions that hurt everyone.
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There's a lot in that post about people being 'undeserving'. You seem to have redefined it as people who act and think in a way you dislike, and that there are other, better people. What do you think that makes you?
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virtually no attention has been paid to distinguishing the deserving rich from the undeserving rich, or the deserving middle class from the undeserving middle class.
If some had been paid, what would it mean?
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Giving people money doesn't solve those problems, because those problems lead to poor spending habits.
Again, the available data do not support that conclusion. Handouts work just fine for most people whose immediate problem is a lack of personal funds.
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then the greengrocer will notice the increase in expendable income and raise his prices
which only becomes a serious issue if all the local greengrocers end up doing the same thing, which is a clear indication that the market is undersupplied with greengrocers, and that starting up a new greengrocery that undercuts the gougers is now a viable business model. And now the people relying solely on UBI have a place to shop again, while the high-priced greengrocery segment continues to make about as much money as the new guy via higher margins on fewer customers. Free markets FTW.
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Why get a stressful, responsible job as a programmer if you can learn coding on the evenings, drinking beer and coding up whatever you want, not what people need?
Ummmm... because it pays out the wazoo? That's why people do it now.
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So instead of paying them welfare, you want to pay them welfare. WTF?
No, instead of paying people to hound and police all welfare recipients, which is bad for both hounds and recipients, I would just prefer to accept that a small proportion of total welfare spending will end up in the hands of people whose attitude I dislike.
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But the grocers also have the increased housing expense to deal with. Not to mention paying for the UBI.
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If some had been paid, what would it mean?
Some are paid. My point is that the deserving vs. undeserving distinction is consistently agonized over in discussion of public policy only as applied to the poor. The pointy-haired bosses we all love to COMPLAIN about here never even figure; we just seem to accept that the annoying incompetent fuck who makes our lives a misery is as much entitled to his fat managerial paycheck as any other manager.
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My point is that the deserving vs. undeserving distinction is consistently agonized over in discussion of public policy only as applied to the poor.
For what should be obvious reasons. You brought up trying to figure out who were the "deserving" middle / upper class. I'm trying to figure out what that means.
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It means I don't consider the question of who is or is not deserving to be the one to which most attention is paid when formulating economic distribution policy.
Be that as it may, I deserve at least a couple hours of sleep now. That's all from me for tonight.
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Ummmm... because it pays out the wazoo? That's why people do it now.
That's because they're properly compensated. Which under the scenario discussed in that paragraph is not the case, if @Yamikuronue wants to flatten wages.
No, instead of paying people to hound and police all welfare recipients, which is bad for both hounds and recipients, I would just prefer to accept that a small proportion of total welfare spending will end up in the hands of people whose attitude I dislike.
At that point, you're undermining the whole point of welfare, which is to provide for those in need. I agree you shouldn't call it welfare then, but it doesn't make it any less silly. You're pissing money away, and you don't equalize anything, since by definition those obscene rich fucks you hate so much
end up getting as much as anyone else
