Why are reddit and 4chan actually talking politics and economics according to random WTDWTF users
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Look at Zimbabwe.
Are you genuinely claiming that the US is fairly comparable to a country whose rule of law, in particular as it pertains to the rights of real estate holders, has been completely undermined by a kleptocratic dictator-for-life and his cronies?
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Are you genuinely claiming that the US is fairly comparable to a country whose rule of law, in particular as they pertain to the rights of real estate holders, has been completely undermined by a kleptocratic dictator-for-life and his cronies?
No, I am saying that cranking the printing press up to ludicrous speed will cause you to need a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. Inflation. You cannot just print money without consequences.
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If you flip burgers for a living, your compensation is absolutely less than the same landed cost of automation that would do your job.
And if you're a CEO, your compensation is absolutely whatever your golfing buddies decide you can get away with asking for.
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We're a little behind, but we're working on it!
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And if you're a CEO, your compensation is absolutely whatever your golfing buddies decide you can get away with asking for.
You just hate that anyone can prosper don't you? How about we pass a law where it is illegal for any person to make more than X multiple of the average household income?
If we are going to level the playing field, we may as well nuke it while we are at it.
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And I'm saying that your assertion that the required speed would necessarily be ludicrous - indeed, that any increase in the money supply at all would necessarily be required - is unsupported by anything but handwaving.
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You just hate that anyone can prosper don't you?
You can repeat that assertion as many times as you want, as well; that doesn't make it true.
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Are you genuinely claiming that the US is fairly comparable to a country whose rule of law, in particular as they pertain to the rights of real estate holders, has been completely undermined by a kleptocratic dictator-for-life and his cronies?
Not yet, but they're working on it.
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any increase in the money supply at all would necessarily be required - is unsupported by anything but handwaving.
No, you fucking retard, it is supported by math.
You have an equation that says: X=XY where Y != 1 and you are saying that you can solve for X. You can't. Tax all wealthy people down to $50K/year and you still would not come up with enough money to make this program work. You are trying to use magic, and we are calling you on your bullshit.
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You can repeat that assertion as many times as you want, as well; that doesn't make it true.
Your words would certainly lead a person to believe so.
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I specified how I would pay for it back when I first proposed the scenario. Hint: it wasn't taxing the rich.
It's entirely possible that the numbers don't add up, but at least engage with the actual proposal I laid out, instead of your fantasy-world shoulder alien idea.
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Or better put, I believe the right of people to express unpopular opinions trumps the "right" to not be offended.
QFT! The "right" to not be offended stops at the door of the First Amendment! (And anyone who believes otherwise can try taking it up with the Supreme Court of the United States ;) )
Besides -- if you have an issue with what someone's saying, come up with a better counter-argument. Censorship isn't the solution to speech you don't like, more speech is!
Actually it's less than that. I am personally acquainted with three people who, having been moved off the Australian Government's unemployment benefit onto its "work for the dole" program, ended up spending more in transport to and from the workplace, and childcare made necessary by mandatory attendance at that workplace, than they were paid for their work there.
In all cases they were eventually able to switch back to the straight-up unemployment benefit after a few weeks, but the fact remains that for the weeks they were in work, they went backwards financially as a direct consequence of being in that work. To me, that absolutely counts as a negative wage.
ICK! How does a system get that broken?Also...yeah, sadly, poverty traps are a thing -- and those sorts of structural inequities have a tendency to bite back when you start to attack them, too. That doesn't change this point, though:
Educate people better. Teach them about money. Teach them that if you piss all of your money away on the latest cell phones, TVs and cars that are well beyond your means that society should have absolutely no sympathy for the fact that you cannot afford proper food. If you want to educate people, I am all for it. If you want to piss money away, rational people are going to think you are a loon.
Some people just don't understand how money works -- for all my deficiencies in executive reasoning, I manage to live more frugally than they do in some ways!My understanding is that he was getting killed by employee turnover and raised wages to deal with that. No doubt there were other reasons, and I can see why Ford would want to make everyone think he was doing it for the employees, but the bottom line is that employment exists to make profits for the owners, not the other way around.
At the same time, you can't make profits without customers to buy your stuff. Why do businesses keep forgetting this? (Both by treating their employees like crap and by treating their customers like crap, mind you.)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.
Referring to To Kill A Mockingbird -- that basic assumption is that all poor people are like the Ewells, pissing away their money on transient pleasures (for the Ewells, drinking; in the modern thinking, consumerist things like fancy cars, the latest cell phones, and other such discretionary costs). This ignores the presence of folks like the Cunninghams -- honest, hard workers who simply don't have talents the economy favors. It doesn't matter if you're passionate about repairing cars if there are no cars to repair where you're at!Some of them are inferior in terms of being able to compete in the market. Some of that is simply them (especially people with disabilities), some is based on other causes. I think we should figure out ways to help them be successful.
Aye -- the atrocious state of the US mental health system hurts hard here. There's also the problem of people who have skills and talents that have been near-categorically rendered useless by economic changes (tailors don't have it easy these days I bet, given our mass-produced, throwaway economy).What percentage of poor people are intentionally choosing not to work, not because they're discouraged and have failed to find a job, but because they simply CBA? Without that key information, we can't craft a reasonable solution.
Good question! Sadly, it's a hard one to answer...There are certainly cases where people are better off financially on benefits than they would be on a minimum wage job, so simply don't get a job for that reason.
Yeah, that's an icky problem -- when you can't afford to commute by the cheapest means feasible (and sadly, walking or cycling can very well be infeasible in modern, automobile-centric cities) to the minimum wage jobs available to you, what are you supposed to do?It would be hard to construct a more effective incentive to avoid seeking work than the knowledge that doing so would reduce your already pitifully low income.
Again, ick -- you don't get the behaviour you want out of someone by beating them with a stick whenever they try it! Does someone need a hard lesson in Pavlovian conditioning?!I've said before that people who can't or won't acquire valuable skills are a real problem for our increasingly skilled society. I'm not sure what the solution is.
There are also skills that, while economically productive, at least some employers refuse to value at their full worth. (Tech support/customer service WTFs are full of these -- the drive to reduce costs drives out the economically valuable and productive skill of actually, you know, providing customer service.)
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Without a reply-to, it is virtually impossible to tell who you are addressing.
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Your words would certainly lead a person to believe so.
They might lead somebody so blinkered as to conceive of a national economy as a strictly zero-sum game to believe so.
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Both of you are doing it. Flabdablet is defending a suggestion I never made, and you're attacking it.
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you're attacking it
Meh, I never thought you made the assertion, so I did not think I was attacking your idea anyway. ;)
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somebody so blinkered as to conceive of a national economy as a strictly zero-sum game
THAT'S YOU!! You are the one who always wants to penalize those nasty rich people!
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This magic money has to come from somewhere, and where it comes from will want it back.
^ In that post you started attacking the UBI idea I was discussing with Boomzilla...
You simply cannot tax the rich enough to pay for this program
and here in your next post you start attacking taxing the rich.
So I got confused and assumed you were conflating the two. If not, my bad.
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How does a system get that broken?
Australians are gullible enough that we periodically elect populist conservatives, all of whom take great pride in their ability to invent ways to make our welfare system even more painful for the average recipient to deal with than it was before they came to power; after all, it's well known that everybody who receives an unemployment benefit is actually just a dole bludger.
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In that post you started attacking the UBI idea I was discussing with Boomzilla...
@boomzilla and I have had this exact discussion with @flabdablet before. Admittedly, I did not read all of the replies before I started firing from the hip. Nothing was specifically directed towards you.
If you would be so kind as to tell me how you would fund such a program, I would be happy to hear.
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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.
Of course, my idea was not intended to be rock-solid practical advice. I constructed it as a thought experiment to talk about why "socialism" and the free market are not automatically opposites. It was designed as a win-win compromise: nobody starves in the streets, and the free market becomes self-regulating.
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Of course, my idea was not intended to be rock-solid practical advice. I constructed it as a thought experiment to talk about why "socialism" and the free market are not automatically opposites. It was designed as a win-win compromise: nobody starves in the streets, and the free market becomes self-regulating.
Fair enough, but even I as an anarcho-capitalist thinks that shutting down things like OSHA would be a bad idea.
But I am sure that I could come up with my own list of agencies that would make the world a better place if all of their employees were in an unemployment line. ;)
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always wants to penalize those nasty rich people
Making it harder for rich people to get ludicrously richer does not, in my view, amount to penalizing anybody. The fact that I believe this does not imply that I also believe that any UBI must be fully funded via direct taxation on the ultra-rich.
I do believe that making the taxation burden fall most heavily on those best able to afford it is completely appropriate in a wealthy economy. Again, I do not see this as "penalizing those nasty rich people"; I see it as minimizing poverty.
I also find myself frequently amused by the efforts of those who are not ludicrously rich to defend the interests of those who are. There never seems to be a shortage of chickens willing to speak up for Colonel Sanders.
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We're a little behind, but we're working on it
What's this... step 1, elect a black dude?
Don't make me go all SJW on your ass.
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This post is deleted!
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At the same time, you can't make profits without customers to buy your stuff.
Yes. I never said anything to contradict that.
There are also skills that, while economically productive, at least some employers refuse to value at their full worth.
You mean you disagree on their worth. You might be right, too, but I don't think this is a fair characterization.
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I constructed it as a thought experiment to talk about why "socialism" and the free market are not automatically opposites
The heart of socialism (I assert) is the government controlling enterprise. Making decisions. This is often by it actually owning things and other times by fiat or coercion or something else. I do not equate socialism with welfare. But I do say that socialism and a free market are pretty decent opposites.
Nevertheless, to impose government welfare is for the government to interfere with the free market, such as it is. This involves a trade off that should be evaluated in each case.
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Fair enough, but even I as an anarcho-capitalist thinks that shutting down things like OSHA would be a bad idea.
Dude...if you think there should be OSHA, you're not an anarcho-capitalist.
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But I do say that socialism and a free market are pretty decent opposites.
Yeah, I was taking the piss a little bit out of us politics which equates any form of helping the poor with "socialism".
to impose government welfare is for the government to interfere with the free market,
Under our current welfare models, absolutely. But my hypothesis was that freeing people from the necessity to work in order to survive makes the market truly free.
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Don't make me go all SJW on your ass.
thankyousirmayihaveanother
What's this... step 1, elect a black dude?
To borrow a phrase, you have the memory of a goldfish. Alternately, TIL that Woodrow Wilson (notorious racist) was black.
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Dude...if you think there should be OSHA, you're not an anarcho-capitalist.
I used to work in one of the most fatal industries in the USA. I file them under necessary evil.
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to impose government welfare is for the government to interfere with the free market
Meh. You say "interfere with", I say "establish the context for". Tomayto, tomahto.
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Making it harder for rich people to get ludicrously richer does not, in my view, amount to penalizing anybody.
Unless you believe that economies are zero-sum games, why would it fucking matter how rich someone else is? Why not just worry about yourself? Why do you think we have to be Robin Hood in order to help the poor?
The fact that I believe this does not imply that I also believe that any UBI must be fully funded via direct taxation on the ultra-rich.
To me it does, because you imply that we have to do so in order to make things more fair.
I do believe that making the taxation burden fall most heavily on those best able to afford it is completely appropriate in a wealthy economy.
And here in the US, that is largely what happens. Hell, we already have a form of UBI in the form of "Earned Income Tax Credits" (I have never seen a more ludicrous misnomer that I can recall). If you boil down EITC, they take taxes from the more well off and give those taxes to poorer people who are not even paying Federal income taxes.
Again, I do not see this as "penalizing those nasty rich people"; I see it as minimizing poverty.
But...it doesn't minimize poverty. Only education and advancement can do that. Handouts do not decrease poverty.
I also find myself frequently amused by the efforts of those who are not ludicrously rich to defend the interests of those who are. There never seems to be a shortage of chickens willing to speak up for Colonel Sanders.
You claim you do not hate rich people, and then make statements like this? Do you even have cheeks, because you tend to talk out of all sides of your mouth.
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.
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You say "interfere with", I say "establish the context for". Tomayto, tomahto.
Dictatorship is fine, as long as you are the one that is the dictator, right?
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But my hypothesis was that freeing people from the necessity to work in order to survive makes the market truly free.
While I agree on some of your points, particularly this, I don't like the idea of a UBI. I don't think a UBI would accomplish what you want it to accomplish.There's plenty of evidence that when you give people income they can use for discretionary spending, much of it goes to waste. For example, some people that win the lottery don't improve their position and are pretty much back where they started after running out of their earnings. You can also see that some people with low income go for conspicuous spending. And then there are the many vices that people of all walks of life throw their money at; drinking, smoking, drugs, gambling, etc.
There's also the fact that properly managing your income requires skills that are simply not taught in school (this is a problem all over the world, I believe). I don't think there are many high schools that explain how credit cards work, or what the best strategy for coping with a sudden increase in expenses is -- I read an account of a person who struggled financially that observed that he would incur overage fees for trying to pay all his bills, which led to more fees and fees for missing the fees from the bank, which led into a spiral of debt that he could have avoided by letting a service go for a month, for example. For math oriented people, personal finances are easy. For non-math oriented people, it is less so.
Finally, a UBI is inefficient for the purpose of guaranteeing a minimum standard of living. You can more cheaply provide housing and food in an apartment block with a communal kitchen than by letting everyone choose their own home and buy their own food. And when you tell them to buy their own food, you have to rely on them knowing what food is healthy when they enter the supermarket.
So, if I was going to attempt to provide a minimum standard of living, I'd go for basically state financed housing. You provide a small room with the bare essentials, a common kitchen serving three decent meals a day, common heating, access to shared facilities for other things that are deemed appropriate (books, restricted internet access, etc). Let the housing be open to anyone that wants to live there, and allow some services to be individually purchased to improve quality of life issues (so if they want to have their own fridge, they can buy one and pay for the electricity, or get private internet in their rooms, etc).
Instead of having the state run them, I'd have the state supervise them and an open (hmm, not sure the word in english. Contest? When you make a call for private contractors to provide quotes for a service, and choose the best one. Kind of like a reverse auction) to select the provider. Both for building the "public hotels" and for running them.
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Is it really so hard to imagine someone wanting to do a low-class job?
There's this episode of Deep Space 9 where they go to Earth and it turns out Sisko's dad runs a creole restaurant in their money-less society.
That's fine; I can definitely see someone wanting to run a restaurant even if they had a guaranteed income.
However, his restaurant took pride in preparing foods the "old fashioned" way without machines or replicators or what-not. Which means: someone has to peel the potatoes. They even show a scene of Sisko peeling potatoes, talked into it by his dad.
Why would anybody on Star Trek Earth want to peel potatoes?
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Why would anybody on Star Trek Earth want to peel potatoes?
It's a required condition for making "old fashioned" food. If you value "old fashioned" food, you have to convince someone of peeling potatoes. There are many ways this could be arranged. Maybe you agree with your "customers" that they only get to be served if they promise to render some similar service in the future, sort of like a coop restaurant.
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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.
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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.
Not at all, and you are still a mouth rapist. But, me not being a part of a group does not mean I have no right to speak up when idiots vilify them.
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vilify
Stating the obvious truth that the ultra-rich would suffer less than anybody else from an increase in taxation scarcely amounts to vilification. Nor does making an analogy between their position wrt those they exploit to gain it, and that of Colonel Sanders wrt chickens. And none of the above amounts to hating rich people. So I really don't know what you're on about.
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@boomzilla said:
Dude...if you think there should be OSHA, you're not an anarcho-capitalist.
I used to work in one of the most fatal industries in the USA. I file them under necessary evil.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't exist, just that an anarcho-capitalist would.
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You provide a small room with the bare essentials, a common kitchen serving three decent meals a day, common heating, access to shared facilities for other things that are deemed appropriate (books, restricted internet access, etc).
So you're proposing to cluster these small rooms together, deliberately creating concentrations of poverty? That's not gone well, historically speaking.
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@boomzilla said:
to impose government welfare is for the government to interfere with the free market
Meh. You say "interfere with", I say "establish the context for". Tomayto, tomahto.
"Establish the context" means to me public goods like infrastructure and enforcement of property rights, etc. Forcefully taking from one person and using the funds to pay another is another thing altogether.
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You mean you disagree on their worth. You might be right, too, but I don't think this is a fair characterization.
I'm saying I disagree on their worth because I can see the economic benefits those skills can bring.
Returning to my customer service example -- good customer service is a benefit to the company, not only first order (not having a customer who's having an issue with your product become further disgruntled, to the point where they might stop buying your products, tell their friends about how much Brand X customer service stinks, etal), but higher order (not getting bad press based on repeated bad service/support experiences, not getting lambasted in product reviews because of poor support, and gaining customers based on recommendations by existing customers) as well. 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.
But my hypothesis was that freeing people from the necessity to work in order to survive makes the market truly free.
Which is quite interesting to posit, I think, as it raises the question that forced demand or supply can be a market distortion as well -- i.e. you must produce X units of Y or you will be forcibly shut down, even if the market itself cannot support you producing X units of Y. Same with the idea that you must purchase Z or you're breaking some law somewhere. (It becomes worse when someone holds monopoly power over Zs.)There's plenty of evidence that when you give people income they can use for discretionary spending, much of it goes to waste. For example, some people that win the lottery don't improve their position and are pretty much back where they started after running out of their earnings. You can also see that some people with low income go for conspicuous spending. And then there are the many vices that people of all walks of life throw their money at; drinking, smoking, drugs, gambling, etc.
Sadly, QFT -- it's the conspicuous spending that gets me most of all. I suspect it has to do with the general trend towards conspicuous consumption though...There's also the fact that properly managing your income requires skills that are simply not taught in school (this is a problem all over the world, I believe). I don't think there are many high schools that explain how credit cards work, or what the best strategy for coping with a sudden increase in expenses is -- I read an account of a person who struggled financially that observed that he would incur overage fees for trying to pay all his bills, which led to more fees and fees for missing the fees from the bank, which led into a spiral of debt that he could have avoided by letting a service go for a month, for example. For math oriented people, personal finances are easy. For non-math oriented people, it is less so.
Some of us math-oriented folks have issues with finances as well, but of a different sort. (I don't interact with them well, myself...)Finally, a UBI is inefficient for the purpose of guaranteeing a minimum standard of living. You can more cheaply provide housing and food in an apartment block with a communal kitchen than by letting everyone choose their own home and buy their own food. And when you tell them to buy their own food, you have to rely on them knowing what food is healthy when they enter the supermarket.
So, if I was going to attempt to provide a minimum standard of living, I'd go for basically state financed housing. You provide a small room with the bare essentials, a common kitchen serving three decent meals a day, common heating, access to shared facilities for other things that are deemed appropriate (books, restricted internet access, etc). Let the housing be open to anyone that wants to live there, and allow some services to be individually purchased to improve quality of life issues (so if they want to have their own fridge, they can buy one and pay for the electricity, or get private internet in their rooms, etc).
Very interesting..."Establish the context" means to me public goods like infrastructure and enforcement of property rights, etc. Forcefully taking from one person and using the funds to pay another is another thing altogether.
Right.
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So you're proposing to cluster these small rooms together, deliberately creating concentrations of poverty? That's not gone well, historically speaking.
You would ideally place these "hotels" apart from each other, so you can spread the poverty around.
Also, historically poverty has been concentrated to get the poor out of sight. The goal of this would be to make the poor not "poor" anymore, by providing a space for them and especially their children to avoid the most damaging effects of structural failures in the society.
Also, poverty is already concentrated in most cities I know of.
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But my hypothesis was that freeing people from the necessity to work in order to survive makes the market truly free.
I was thinking about this over lunch. I'll describe a couple of ways I see this going down (I'm assuming your defund the rest of the govt doesn't happen and I haven't run the numbers to see how that works out)...
Most people carry on with their lives as before. Prices rise in order to pay the tax that pays the UBI. Poor people aren't really any better off so UBI gets raised. This can't go on forever so it becomes means tested and eventually we're pretty much back where we started aside from the extra friction all the redistribution causes.
Many people stop working nearly so much because they don't need to in order to live comfortably. Supply goes down, but mainly in more luxury / recreation oriented industries. Eventually (and maybe not after very long) prices for staples rise due to mismatch in supply / demand. Combination of some people getting really wealthy off of this and others simply accepting a lower standard of living. The super wealthy may maintain their standard of living but not the vast majority of people. UBI helps people enjoy the suck while the more affluent grow more disenchanted with supporting a slacker class.
I'm sure at least two people in this topic believe that people will react differently, but those are good outlines of what I see happening.
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"Establish the context" means to me public goods like infrastructure and enforcement of property rights, etc. Forcefully taking from one person and using the funds to pay another is another thing altogether.
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.
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 that let a healthy market economy to operate. 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.
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Dude...if you think there should be OSHA, you're not an anarcho-capitalist.
I tried this with him before back when he was claiming to be a libertarian. Good luck; you'll need it.
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.
We did? When did this happen?
