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Are Universal Basic Incomes 'A Tool For Our Further Enslavement'? (medium.com)
Douglas Rushkoff, long-time open source advocate (and currently a professor of Digital Economics at the City University of New York, Queens College), is calling Universal Basic Incomes "no gift to the masses, but a tool for our further enslavement."
Uber's business plan, like that of so many other digital unicorns, is based on extracting all the value from the markets it enters. This ultimately means squeezing employees, customers, and suppliers alike in the name of continued growth. When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating. When it's looked at the way a software developer would, it's clear that UBI is really little more than a patch to a program that's fundamentally flawed. The real purpose of digital capitalism is to extract value from the economy and deliver it to those at the top. If consumers find a way to retain some of that value for themselves, the thinking goes, you're doing something wrong or "leaving money on the table."
Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps. Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely.... Soon, consumers simply can't consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone's data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend. To the rescue comes UBI.
The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.... Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords... if Silicon Valley's UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future's Marina Gorbis... As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It's the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they've sexually harassed. It's hush money.
Rushkoff's conclusion? "Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need."
Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps. Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely.... Soon, consumers simply can't consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone's data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend. To the rescue comes UBI.
The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.... Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords... if Silicon Valley's UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future's Marina Gorbis... As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It's the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they've sexually harassed. It's hush money.
Rushkoff's conclusion? "Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need."
tool for enslavement: using emotionally loaded language.
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That is a complete nonsese. Let's say everyone will get $1000 UBI. Does this mean, that they will earn $1000 more of value? NO. It will inflate global prices about $1000 so prices will be (TODAY_PRICES + $1000), so they will gain no value at all. No one.
40+ years and trillions of dollars after Johnson declared war on poverty and here we are wondering how to enslave more generations in poverty with even more expensive schemes.
You are right, instead we should reward them for being liars (PR) or sociopaths (CEOs) or just plain old gun dealers.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Capitalism is theft, plain and simple. Profit is a tax on the labor of others. You should not reward people just because they can fog a mirror while being rich.
You are welcome on my lawn.
UBI is a safety net without the expensive part of qualifying people for different welfare programs. Nothing more or less. It's a more efficient form of welfare, where the costs of the UBI are recovered with higher income and/or sales taxes as incomes increase.
Also, people who don't feel as poor tend to be more mobile. If you're making $10/hr at Mickey Dee's at 40hr/week, you're too busy surviving to go back to school or look for vocational training to better yourself. Take away the immediate need for as much income, and people end up with more options -- this will end up making people MORE productive in the long run.
The world is better off as a whole eliminating the work done by the least productive members of society, even if it means subsidizing them through something like a UBI, which is probably the least terrible form of wealth redistribution, but that's an aside. It fails to consider that as the world becomes more productive, the cost of goods and services decreases, which actually means that it becomes cheaper and cheaper to subsidize someone to a basic level of living. You can even see homeless people with smartphones and internet access these days and that's because they both became incredibly inexpensive relative to what they previously were.
Some people like to complain that as this wealth is created that a disproportionate amount of it goes to the wealthiest people, but it misses the point. It doesn't matter if the wealthiest are getting a disproportionate amount of it as long as everyone is moving up, and if you look at the world, poverty has been declining globally at massive rates. Even in the U.S. which is already wealthy, people are moving up. You often see people complain about the shrinking middle class, but what they fail to mention is that it's because the upper middle class is growing.
If anything is a problem with UBI, it's that humans seem to need some purpose in order to function well and for a lot of people that's a job that they feel gives their lives meaning. Many proponents like to think that most UBI recipients will learn new skills, etc. but I think a large number either won't or there might be a few at the bottom who won't be able do any kind of productive labor that wouldn't be better done by a machine. Even though further industrialization will continue to drive productivity higher and make goods more affordable, people without purpose tend to fall victim to substance abuse or other forms of behavior with similar consequences and outcomes. I think that's going to be the harder problem to crack, because I'm not sure if technology can do anything about it.
Yeh... capitalism and politics that funnel money to the wealthy had nothing to do with that. That was sarcasm.... i figured i better say so because you're clearly too stupid to understand reality.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
UBI is the primary ingredient.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
wish i had mod points, and that you were not posting as AC.
Feel free to propose more value-neutral alternatives.
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to give working tax payers some gov money every year?
Want to support the poor and working poor?
Use a means test to find out who is not working, poor, working poor, in need of gov support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Offer that support until they are working the needed hours and earning a wage.
Use photo ID to prove citizenship when starting such payments and ensure the payment goes into a new bank account that has been set up with photo ID.
That ensures payments only go to approved citizens and not illegal migrants, the same person trying to set up more than one bank account.
Should a citizen not have a bank account and be without photo ID then gov workers and approved charities can work with that person to get the needed new photo ID and bank account.
Thats keeps a nations budget under control and the gov can then look after all its citizens for generations.
Once a person has started approved education then the payments can be adjusted.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
...is a sign of a systemic problem in society.
UBI could help some of the poor to change their situation for the better but it will not fix the root of the problems and as long as that persists we will have poor people no matter what "band aids" are used.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
This article proposes, instead of the UBI, something called "universal basic assets". Looking online, this seems to be a grab-bag of three things: 1) some form of income redistribution such as UBI, welfare, or progressive taxation, 2) government-provided services such as parks and libraries 3) nongovernment-provided services such as Wikipedia.
How exactly does UBA differ from UBI? Assets #2 and #3 already exist. #2 can be supplemented by adding new government services, #3 cannot be supplemented because it's what individuals choose to provide. As for #1, we all agree that income supplementation is or will become necessary, but in what form? If the income provided is by UBI, then UBA ends up being exactly the same as UBI. If the income is provided by some other means, what makes that means better than UBI?
In effect, the only difference between UBI and UBA is in the clarity of thinking. UBI identifies concrete problems (inequality is rising, some people are likely to end up without any marketable skills, government aid programs are inefficient) and proposes a concrete solution to all of them, with clear benefits and downsides that can be rationally debated. With UBA, in contrast, the thinking is a muddle and the only consistent idea is that capitalism is oppressive so we must look at the world in *some* way that is not capitalism. The 3 components have little in common, and seem lumped together only to provide the illusion that attempts (like UBI) to solve concrete problems are insufficient. As for the actual difficult problems that UBI tries to address, UBA doesn't bother to think about - it has no opinion on whether UBI or welfare or something else is best. Similarly, it does not provide any concrete suggestions for improving #2 or #3, the two other things it claims are
Bottom line: UBA and this article don't seriously attempt to solve any problems, all they do is try to divide the world into Marxist oppressors and oppressed, and sling insults like "slaveowners" at anyone who isn't sufficiently oppressed. This is not a recipe for anything positive in the world.
We can imagine an UBI that empower workers. If the level is high enough that you can tell employers you are not interested by their projects, the story becomes different. But that requires a huge amount of money.
Nothing impossible, but the scale is about socializing the whole labor market: Companies would pay an UBI fund to get the UBI paid workers abroad. The more a company pays, the more workers it can employ, but it still have to convince workers their project is worth it. Of course, this is a completely new idea and have never been tested anywhere, hence we do not know if enough workers would be interested by working at all.
That sounds like a desperate last-ditch effort to discredit UBI. According to his logic, employment is just another tool to funnel money to Uber and Walmart as well, so we should all quit our jobs right now to stop them.
OTOH, is we actually issue UBI, people won't need to work for Uber until they're too poor to work anymore. They can hold out for a real job that pays what their time and resources are worth.
There is nothing in the article that supports this. One thing is clear: the author wants a more radical patch to the "economic operating system". But why is UBI a bad patch to the current system?
Exactly: nothing stops you from working in this situation. People typically want to have a purpose in life. Most will continue to work, but maybe not two jobs at min wage -- they'll have more time to better themselves and their situation.
The premise is nonsense. UBI is a means of distributing wealth in a economy where the marginal cost of producing goods and services approaches zero. It's a means to offer a transition into post-scarcity economy and a means to keep the ones at the lowest position in the pyramid at bay, because any other option would be more expensive. Rather having people who's jobs have been taken by robots grab kalashnikovs and start taking what they want society will chose to give them UBI. Those societies that will not do so when time is due will fail. UBI raises the bottom to which one can sick to something resembling a frugal but dignified life.
Uber and other shared economy services is just a transition from "private owned cars" to "robot cars used as a commodity" by transition over something that resembles taxis but really is nothing other than people doing lowly work that will be replaced by robots within 10 years. The main part about Uber is nothing but a piece of software anyway. I expect something like Waymo cars becoming attached to the Uber API or something like that within the next 5 years.
The Uber drivers of today will then get UBI. Where they don't, they will cause trouble, understandably.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So UBI will basically be like a minimum-wage job today, except with ability to make more money by working more and not lose any benefits you may have. Or have more free time to better oneself and eventually end up doing something either (a) better-paying or (b) genuinely useful to society.
once all the money is collected by those at the top, is it game over, or will they find a way to get more? if at that point they "let" UBI start, where will that money come from?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As opposed to Capitalism, which in it's modern form mostly consists of idle rich skimming all the profit off of the labor of the masses,
Human beings are required to work and be productive at something. If an economic model doesn't provide that outlet then psychological problems tend to happen such as, depression and suicide.
That is why it is a curse to have lots of money.
Sure it is fine for the first year or so, but then you become bored or you indulge in self destructive behavior.
So to avoid that an economic model should include everyones participation. So far, the best model we have is free markets coupled with a Republic/Democracy.
Nobody has found a better solution yet at scale.
The code of ethics, the oldest which is Judao Christian/Western ethics embodies this idea when it says you are not to covet they neighbors goods.
It implies you can own things, from the fruits of your own labor and keep them safe so you can plan your existence in a predictable way.
Without that, predictability is not something you can plan for and you have no control over, such as in Communism.
The state plans everything for you.
People have all sorts of faults of course. The largest one is, being lazy. The other is lust for power.
The majority of us, do not wake up in the morning with the first thing on our minds is how to control my fellow human begins. Most of us wake up and look forward to the work day and what sorts of things we can contribute or work for.
But obviously, those who seek power awake with the first goal on their minds to start their day, and this is a problem no matter what political or economic system you pick.
But Universal Basic Income basically makes the human soul rot. With a bribe everyday from governments, corporations or individuals who want to control you.
So you do not act, and restore your own destiny so they can live on their private little islands, or enjoy their "you can't fire me" government jobs.
While you and your kids live with no future.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers.
That's all we are now - consumers. And having to work two jobs and STILL not be able to afford health insurance is a flaw in free market capitalism. Or the fact that housing is affordable to many people. To afford to just have an apartment in my area of Metro-Atlanta, Family Promise says that a person needs to make $18.62 an hour and that's assuming he's getting scheduled 40 hours a week. My sub division is being scooped up by private equity firms. Every time a house goes on sale, they come in and buy it. They then rent it.
Prices are no longer restricted by people's income. It's controlled by capital. And the bridge? Debt. Making us all serfs.
My point is that the negatives they are harping on have already happened without UBI.
Healthcare is the most regulated industry, it is filled with exceedingly complex regulations and prices exploded when the Government really stepped in. Far from being a "free market capitalism" issue, it's essentially the result of Government trying to manage an industry whilst simultaneously being greased (via contributions) by the industry it's seeking to manage. Obamacare was a massive giveaway to insurance companies (guaranteed consumers, restitution payments, guaranteed sales of services not needed - like men paying for OB/GYN and childless adults paying for pediatric), and only made the situation worse.
If you want to talk housing, house prices in some areas are exploding (SF, NYC, etc) mainly because Government restricts supply. San Francisco's housing shortage has it's own Wikipedia page where we find:
San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area have enacted strict zoning regulations.[6] Among other restrictions, San Francisco does not allow buildings over 40 feet tall in most of the city, and has passed laws making it easier for neighbors to block developments.[7] Partly as a result of these codes, from 2007 to 2014, the Bay Area issued building permits for only half the number of needed houses, based on the area's population growth.
Fill the area with new-found wealth from tech and you have massive bidding wars forcing prices so high only those with 7 figure budgets can even think of living there. Strict regulation has, once again, turned out to be the source of pain for most.
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To what problem?
This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market. They exchange one thing of value (in the case of Uber, transportation services) for another thing of value (money). Or with their drivers, they trade money for use of the contractor's time and car wear and tear.
Both their customers and their contractors are better off after their interaction with Uber because they all exchange something they value less for something they'd rather have. The customer would rather have the ride, the contractor would rather have the cash and Uber would rather have their cut of the money than keep their app and system of organizing rides to themselves.
If Uber isn't efficient enough in their part of the transaction, then Lyft (Or Ula, or whoever) will come in and take their market share. So Uber can't profit any more than they can make the whole process more efficient.
The problem with the Walmart example is that the "Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want" never happens. You can still go into any Walmart and pay less for things than any of the "small" shops which may have been around before. They have to compete with places like Amazon, etc... anyway. It also ignores that their employees were on welfare and food stamps _before_ walmart hired them. It's not like they took a lower paying job at Walmart in order to get food stamps.
Really, this guy sounds like he's one conspiracy theory away from climbing into a clocktower somewhere.
The groups which "extract" resources from the economy, rather than help create new ones, are bureaucrats and politicians via taxes. They skim off the top and never return more than they take overall (i.e. the "multiplier" is less than 1), not even including the economic drag of their endless micromanaging rules for everyone to follow.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
No, it doesn't, at least not if set up sensibly. We have a big enough per capita GDP to have everyone above the poverty line, and the human labor being wasted in the complex administration of these programs can be utilized in a more productive way.
Yes, it will be paid out to a wider base, but the average citizen will paying in roughly what they get out, so it's a wash. And we'll get oodles of extra productivity and reduced costs from people being able to afford to take care of themselves, as well as the ability to buy quality goods instead of cheap shit that needs to be replaced all the time.
And UBI opponents always leave off the best part of UBI: It leaves workers in the position to tell their boss to go fuck themselves.
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No, itâ(TM)s not theft. Look at the comparison to Walmart, which is wise. Walmart created a way of doing things which was so much more efficient (mostly with economies of scale and long supply chain) that it undercut all the local actors, and the fact the locals were getting premiums paid for useless busywork was revealed. UBI is betting on the same thing: It claims thereâ(TM)s a way of doing things so efficient that youâ(TM)re either inside it, (one of the few AI machine engineers) or youâ(TM)re doing massive amounts of useless busywork to achieve the things the machines do instantly and near zero cost, but youâ(TM)re charging a premium. It is the realization of capitalism, which bestows power on those organize society in a way people reward with money, to whom it will reward great organizational power if they can take care of the people.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
Reference.
When most right-leaning people say "Capitalism," what they actually end up meaning after all of the qualifications is Distributism.
One of the many ways Distributism would work better is that its solution to healthcare would be large scale state and federal subsidies of non-profit hospitals and facilitating the establishment of new ones. A distributist state would also give priority to those hospitals that operate as charities and would regularly threaten to withhold funds from hospitals, universities, etc. that are found to be prioritizing administrative jobs over "worker jobs."
Why is it not evil to take someones money if the government does it? Because you voted for it? Why can't people just rob the banks? They have insurance for that, no one is a victim right? It's just money!
You are evil, just like the liars and sociopaths you are complaining about... you just happen to be on the opposite end of the spectrum. The desire to take something that was not yours be it through direct violence at your own hand or through indirect violence by voting that another take it for you is envy and is evil!
If you want to stop the these evil people stop giving them the power to do it and convince your fellow citizens of the same and stand up to them in a different way. If you become evil to stop evil... what have you achieved?
No, a UBI removes control from the handouts. UBI is just welfare without the administrative costs. If you want to control people via handouts, you pull the Republican shit where you have to be not doing drugs, go to Church on Sunday, be working at least 60 hours a week, and never, ever, buy lobster.
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It's the same argument as the one made against GNU software. It was initially mostly written by people whose main goal was either self-promotion or by those much of whose income came from grants rather than from being stake holders in the value they created. The extracted value flowed to the top. It's why MS is all too happy to embrace open source now. They realized that there is even more value to be extracted from the process if both majority of creators are paid by someone else while their customers still pay them as the organizers of this fare. Because that's what this is. It's not a cathedral or a bazaar. It's a fare. The customers pay the organizers. Most participants pay the organizers. A few participants a paid by the organizers to create an illusion of a good deal for the starting participants. But most of the value settles in the hands of the organizers.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Look, Uber can die in a fire for all I care. But unless, for some bizarre reason, UBI recipients are required to give some percentage of their income specifically to Uber, dropping that company into this discussion is so disconnected from the topic at hand that it doesn’t even deserve to be called a straw man.
#DeleteChrome
The social contract only worked for a set working and productive population. A number of well educated and productive tax paying workers entering the work force every year. Then working and paying tax for decades.
A number of people who had paid tax for decades needing a gov pension in old age.
With set numbers of people and very well educated population every year that would be within a nations budget.
Have too many working age people not paying tax as they don't work, not educated to any standard to get work and then having to pay an old age pension?
Add in the cost of decades of complex health care, gov supported housing and the budget has to push the pension age further out.
Working people in jobs needed to pay tax. Not many more people who should be working getting generations of gov support.
The UBI is just another cost to further add to a budget.
At what point will workers not be able to cover their own rent, house, food, health care, transport and fall into a new type of working poverty. A small UBI every month will not replace the huge UBI tax rate on workers.
A much longer wait for less gov specialist medical care. The UBI won't cover the full cost of private medical care.
Everything sold will have to be taxed more and more to pay for a UBI.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I don't know if he's concern trolling or if he has a point. I'm too lazy to find out, so I'm going to use this an excuse to mention another idea Modern Monetary Theory. Planet Money did a recent episode on it as a good primer. It may not amount to much but MMT sounds better than UBI. Of course they both point to a post scarcity society that we are heading to which in David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs it is an undercurrent of his thesis.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
> This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market.
Except that's exactly what they do: It's called "Profit." Profit is the extracted value in excess of the materials and labor the thing they sold cost. The fact that you are willing to pay in excess of what something is materially worth because its convenient doesn't mean it's not extracting value from you. Just the opposite, in fact.
Note this is not necessarily a bad thing; That profit can be applied to other things, and so the extracted value ultimately recycled back into the economy. It's when people take that extracted value and remove it from the economy that we have a problem...
=Smidge=
The "U" is short for "universal". As in all people.
Or take a real job for six months, and take off for six months. Or just have a 20 hour work week. Or lots of other options.
UBI is "no job means you can get by." Maybe you are getting by with no job while you work on a startup and become a billionaire. Maybe you do it for a lifetime. Who knows!
Your ad here. Ask me how!
This is similar to what happened at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution: Instead of 10 farmers being minimally productive and all eking out a living, one farmer could become highly productive, obtain dollars for the things of value he's producing, and the other farmers go out of business. This has continued till the present day, where we have mega-farms and agribusiness, and few smaller (though still large) farms.
Automation and centralized purchasing centers (web sites) are similarly consolidating value. As a company is able to replace more and more workers with machinery, it does not require assistance in the creation of things that people value. The company - the management - is able to keep it all for itself. Instead of a store requiring 100 people to generate 20 million a year in value, it now only requires 10.
It's the "Consolidation of the Production of Value."
Initially, there's tremendous dislocation. People gotta eat and have shelter and clothes everyday. But it can take decades for new sectors to form which can make use of the displaced workers.
I too started feeling pitchforky when I read the summary. There is, in fact, a tremendous amount of psychopathic malfeasance at the top levels of the economy and government. But, we need to understand what's going on, in order to fairly and justly address it, in order to provide the greatest standard of living for the most people.
At least cab companies are local, pay local taxes and their revenues go back into the community instead of all the profit being shoved off to some douche's new San Francisco campus.
You're ignoring that both sides in the transaction gain from a voluntary exchange. I gain value from paying someone to do something for me because I value my time, or whatever is involved more than I value what I'm paying them to do it. Look up consumer surplus, for example.
The amount of profit for both sides is minimized by the amount of competition for what they are providing.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
No one is taking your money, your paying taxes to have an environment where you can work and earn money. Don't like paying taxes, well it is easy to stop working and paying them. You can also move to a country without taxes such as Somalia or a country with low taxes such as Saudi Arabia and enjoy the freedom that not paying taxes brings.
Do you complain about the grocery store demanding money to allow you to walk out with groceries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Capitalist economic models (US, the EU, Scandinavia, etc) seem to work really well, even long-term. Socialist (USSR, China, Venezuela, Cuba) and related dictatorial (North Korea, China to a large extent, Vietnam, most of Africa) economic models don't seem to do nearly as well. The more power the Government has to tell you how much you can earn, and what you can do with your money, the more incentive there is for those running the Government to clamp down harder on you. A capitalist economic model breaks that kind of yoke.
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because they're recently made homeless and are still sane enough to use a smart phone. If anything it's scarier to see somebody like that. It means people who traditionally didn't end up homeless are. There's an entire new class of people who are homeless in short spurts. 6-8 months, then they land a job and hold an apartment until something blows up in their face, then it's back to being homeless...
.1% with half of everything.
As for the AEI, they're a right wing think tank. Take anything they said with a block of salt suitable for cows. Yes, the upper middle class is growing, but not because of upward mobility. It's because in the current economy it's winner take all. Depending on how you run the numbers 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (depends on if you run it as "no money", "$400 bucks to their name" or "under $1000 to their name"). Wealth is concentrating at the top. So you've got 20% of the population with basically everything, 1% with almost everything and
This will end in one of a few ways. Either a new dark age of conservativism where the ruling class clamp down on change to maintain the status quo or another round of nasty wars when the desperate get organized by a dictator into an angry mob. That's just how these things go. Basic income and other forms of socialism are pretty much the only way out of that (well, outside of mass extinction, which thanks to climate change is on the table...).
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So UBI will basically be like a minimum-wage job today
No, that's not what I am saying. The people on UBI will still have minimum wage jobs, and be basically "farmed humans" by all kinds of entities, government and private. They will literally be human cattle where money is harvested instead of milk.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's modern form??? When has this not been the case?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I'd argue that it's probably less expensive to just let them be sponges
Even after you correctly call some category of people sponges you don't follow through the analogy of what sponges do best - absorb things.
There's an old saying that "idle hands are the devils playground" and if you start to give a bunch of people just enough money to subsist on, you will quickly find they are consuming VASTLY more resources than the poor are today.- in terms of health care, and costs to society at large from greatly increased crime rates all over any city near any UBI communities (and you know there will be UBI communities, AKA projects).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And how does this portrayal differ from humans in today's consumer economy?
A UBI could be used to do some of that, if it was high enough that people could put some aside and save up. However once a person sells assets to do these things, they are without a safety net.
This would be good for people who worked for highly profitable companies, or lived near them, but not so good for anyone else. Also, workers having a stake could become less relevant with rising automation. And, as above, if this allowed people to sell their shares to do the things in the previous paragraph, they would then be without a saftey net.
So what you're saying is that other than the solutions offered that made you jam your fingers in your ears and scream la la la, they offer nothing? What do you have other than LA LA LA?
This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market. They exchange one thing of value (in the case of Uber, transportation services) for another thing of value (money).
The point your ignoring, which the article summary touches on is the concept of externalities. Wal-Mart is heavily subsidized by the government, since a great many of its employees couldn't exist without government assistance. UBI is just government assistance in a different form. It may work out or not. It has the bonus of allowing the end user to control how it is spent and I suppose the negative of allowing the end user to control how it is spent. The actual outcome depends on the end user.
Either way externalities exist in businesses. The most successful are liable to be those that shift the cost to future generations or to others. Want uber to be "fair"? Just make sure the total amount of regulation they face is the same as an ordinary cab driver faces. Do also remember that regulation tends to come about as a result of bad behaviour, so quite often removing regulations has consequences that are significant.
So to answer the question of the article. No, not really. UBI is not slavery. If anything it is the opposite. A person could do what they love, even if it takes awhile to find, cause their basics are met. Of course, whether UBI is feasible is another matter...
Who eats protein powder unless they're a gym bunny or an infant who eats formula? Most of us eat real food, not melamine-laced Frankensupplements.
Or has medium become one giant "huh uh!!!" Like a warehouse full of two year olds.
I don't see solutions there.
Just hollering "that doesn't/won't work" and a whole bunch of scolding.
4 way stops are where the beginning of the end will come. UBI is simply replacing certain government assistance programs with one that gives every citizen an equal benefit. What that person does with the money, or if they work hard to make more, is up to them.
Have affordable basic health insurance, give everyone UBI. Let the people figure out the rest.
Quick anecdote. I sprained my knee recently. My doctor gave me a brace to wear any time I'm active. I just got the bill, $495. He also gave me the company name and the model and told me when this one wears out and I need to get a new one, they are $185 on Amazon and are the same thing.
Current healthcare is a pyramid scheme.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
That's... beyond untrue. Lot's of government programs produce values that are many times the amount spent on them.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Yeah...except what Wally World does is bleed the people making the products they sell dry until they have to be made in sweatshops to produce a product at the price Wally World wants...Huffy ring any bells?
We've seen this style of capitalism a bunch in our past, someone even wrote a song about it back in the day...how did that go again? Oh yeah
"You load sixteen tons and what do you get Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store"
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The Nordic model (that "Scandinavia" for you) is a mixed economy, and yes it's doing better than the US. THEY haven't crashed the worlds economy in quite along time... unlike one of those on your list. Most of the EU is also more towards the socialist side compared to the capitalist sociopaths here in the US. But then, that's the point.... THAT is what most people in the US on the left are looking towards, not the straw man bullshit you fucks always bring up with Venezuela and whatever other country is failing AT THIS MOMENT. I get it though, most conservatives are pretty stupid, and can't seem to learn that basic fact no matter how many times it's explained to them.
However, suggesting socialism requires a dictatorship simply means you're a fucking idiot that's never actually had an understanding of what socialism is. That's another trait of conservatives.... parroting the lies they've been told because they're too stupid to figure out it's lies. Again, i get it. You've been lied to for so long by shitstain conservative politicians that want your vote purely so they can have power, and you're too fucking lazy to use your brain and learn anything. Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.
Your "capitalism" is nothing more than you sucking the dick of the rich people while hoping they allow you to live, you're just too stupid to understand that.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I was with you till you veered into the "guvmint evil" screed. Yeah, what have the Romans ever done for us? Other than roads. And clean water. And and and...
You're ignoring that both sides in the transaction gain from a voluntary exchange.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that they are gaining equally from that transaction. Indeed, chances are pretty good that the corporate entity is gaining a whole lot more from the transaction than the consumer is.
Unfortunately, for many transactions the consumer has little choice. We don't get to choose to simply not eat, for example (and most working people don't really have the option of spending half their day fishing).
What the article writer seems to miss in my mind is that UBI needs to go hand-in-hand with a reasonable minimum wage. UBI shouldn't be a way for government to simply provide cheaper labour for corporate entities -- that's simply corporate welfare. UBI needs to be balanced with a reasonable minimum wage to prevent these sorts of abuses.
Yaz
The value provided by Walmart was not the store/labor, but the fact that Walmart was very good at outsourcing to low cost countries. This let Walmart put goods on its shelf for significantly less than its competition. Walmart dictates prices to its suppliers - if the suppliers can't meet their price, Walmart finds one who will. This is the race to the bottom in terms of price thats decimated the middle class in the USA - consumers only care about the sort term cost (at the retail lane) not the long term cost.
> This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market.
Except that's exactly what they do: It's called "Profit." Profit is the extracted value in excess of the materials and labor the thing they sold cost. The fact that you are willing to pay in excess of what something is materially worth because its convenient doesn't mean it's not extracting value from you. Just the opposite, in fact.
Note this is not necessarily a bad thing; That profit can be applied to other things, and so the extracted value ultimately recycled back into the economy. It's when people take that extracted value and remove it from the economy that we have a problem...
=Smidge=
I'd wager the objection stems from "extract" almost always being used in a negative way. While you correct in your analysis, some people tend to use "extract" in much the same way that others would say that "profit is theft"
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
Maybe. In some places (usually fancy suburbs) you have to get a permit to put in a garden.
it would change society drastically. You could live where ever. Right now people go where the jobs are. I'm in a major city and I hate it. I'd much rather live in something about 1/3 the size where I am now. I don't care for night life, don't like traveling and hate traffic. But I'm stuck here because this is where the jobs are and I need money.
Also, lots of folks don't _want_ the poor to have options. I worked for a fast food joint in the 90s and the owner had figured out one of her managers' husband was using the insurance for life saving meds. This was before Obamacare did away with pre-existing condition denials so she was completely trapped at that job. Literally a death sentence for her husband if she ever left. As soon as the owner found out she jacked the manager's hours up to 60+/week (salaried of course). This went on until her husband eventually succumbed to his illness and she quit soon after.
The ruling class are well aware of the value of desperation and happy to exploit it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So, infrastructure is theft too? Or maybe thins are not so "plain" and "simple"?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
it's got nothing to do with laziness. Most folks just aren't that capable. That was fine when we had farm jobs and later factory jobs. We've done away with most of those, and we're starting to see the effect.
That said, folks can and will amuse themselves. And given birth control they won't even breed out of control. Heck, give the birth control for free and start sex ed early and you'll have trouble getting them to have enough people to sustain a population. People breeded a lot because they needed farm hands. Take that need away and they'll control themselves.
You're spouting puritanical nonsense that got jammed in your skull when you were too young to have mental defenses against it. Look around the world at how people behave when they're under constant pressure. Poor people make consistently worse decisions and mistakes. Pressure doesn't make diamonds, it makes garbage more compact.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Does the government really make you work at a job that pays enough to tax? Seems that working is like going to the grocery store, a voluntary transaction. Used to be stories of people getting dropped off the Alaska highway and going to live in the bush to avoid both. That's a bit extreme but there is no reason that you couldn't cut down on working to the point where you don't pay taxes if you chose, do it right and you can have a high standard of living and never pay taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The Nordic model is built upon, and requires, free market capitalism. It is only due to the high level of economic activity (supported by a free market approach) that the rest of the Nordic model works.
As far as socialism requiring a dictator - can you point to a socialist economy that was not run by a dictator (or a small group of dictators, such as in China)?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In a word.
YES!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The cost for most items, including most of what you purchase regularly is not dictated by what you can afford to pay, but is a function of the cost to produce it plus a small profit. You can see this at the grocery store. If your theory were true, most items would have gone up in cost as people earned more. The price of a loaf of bread would be 10x larger in the bay area than in Montana. Bread or cereal is more expensive in NYC and SF, but by a relatively small amount to make up for rent and transportation costs, not by the actual income ratio of residents. Grocery store prices usually rise and fall as the cost of production rises or falls, not the income available to these purchasing. If you were worried that 1k/month in each pocket would tempt manufacturers to raise prices, remember that they have competition to pressure them to lower prices. They set that price to make a profit and keep competitors at bay.
Giving everyone more money will not raise prices for the vast majority of goods. In fact, some will go down in cost due to increased sales. I would predict that costs would largely remain flat. Wages would stagnate on the low end, unemployment would go way down, profits and sales will go up. UBI saves a lot of money in the long-term: law enforcement as crime rates go down, healthcare costs as people have less stress and more opportunity reduce hours or take a day off to see the doctor, greater productivity as people can go back to school and pursue high demand occupations rather than struggle to pay the bills. It allows workers to take lower paying jobs, so you'll see a higher quality of worker everywhere you go.
To my knowledge, the main costs that go up with relative income are education and real estate. I have no clue what would happen with education costs, but I am not even sure real estate costs will go up too much. One thing that drives up costs in urban areas like mine is people who have to move to a big city because the jobs farther out are less likely to pay a living wage. If people can thrive on lower incomes, they can live in more remote areas. It may relieve urban congestion. Also, the housing bubble was caused heavily by the 1% and even 5% buying multiple homes, not anyone who would notice an extra 12k/year in their pocket. Increasing taxes on the wealthy will probably lower real estate prices by a small amount because you won't have the ultra rich buying up as many properties for investment.
You are ignoring the market inefficiencies that result from upper management influencing govt. regulations and policy to "get something for nothing" from their shareholders, and to "bribe" politicians to get tax breaks and subsidies. Packing the board of directors with cronies so that no one will question a very large pay package is job one for most CEO's. If DE laws weren't so lax, boards would better represent the wishes of stockholders. Returns or dividends would be higher and pay wouldn't be so out of whack with other employees.
The end is already here. Four way stops are being replaced by roundabouts that are too small to function properly, and only the strongest can survive the trip through. It's Thunderdome, man, THUNDERDOME.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
"You load sixteen tons and what do you get Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store"
Presentism; noun. An uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.
Guess what? What you complain about has nothing to do with capitalism. Poverty is the DEFAULT state for humanity, with the average person working 12-16 hour days 6 days a week just to survive. Capitalism in those days merely inherited what existed before it. Technology was primitive, productivity was low and therefore wages were low. It was through their hard work and sacrifice that we have what we have today and via ours that the people of the future have what they have.
Yes working in a coal mine sucked big time in those days. It also sucked working as a feudal serf 200 years before that and it sucked pretty much all the way back to the beginning of human history. People worked 12 hour days in a coal mine and factory because it was better working conditions and better pay than 14-16 hour days on a farm. You will find NOBODY protesting poverty in 1700 for the same reason you won't find people protesting old age today. What's the point in protesting something that there is no solution to?
If you can't even understand the past you have no hope in forming useful thoughts about the future.
"They have insurance for that, no one is a victim right?"
What a dumb analogy. If everyone robs from banks then insurance companies can't afford to insure them and the banks fail.
No one likes taxation, it's just most people have the common sense to know that government is better than anarchy where anyone who can pull enough people together can do whatever the hell they want to you. On top of that, people generally like the services they get in return. Roads, schools, protection, etc.
You on the other hand just seem to want to roll over and be a victim.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
"Not a republican.
I am more of a centrist"
No, you're either a hypocrite or are "evil". If it is "evil to take someones money if the government does it" (your words here) then as a centrist you are evil or a hypocrite because you pretty much have to believe in government taxation to be a centrist. Your only way to justify your dumb questioning of taxation in such an absolutist manner is to be an anarchist and good luck with that.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Just like Uber drivers.
Because everyone wants to be free. Free from work, from money, from food, from shelter...
No, it doesn't, at least not if set up sensibly.
The average SS check is $1400, and many millions get more than that, up to $2500/month ... because they paid in much more over their working lifetime.
There is no plausible proposal for UBI that pays out that much. Most proposals are for about $500/month. So millions of people, retired and with no other income, will be worse off.
the human labor being wasted in the complex administration of these programs
Administration of SS and other entitlements is a minuscule portion of the costs of these programs. Far less than 1%.
Yeah...except what Wally World does is bleed the people making the products they sell dry until they have to be made in sweatshops to produce a product at the price Wally World wants...Huffy ring any bells?
I hear this line of BS from anti walmart and anti-corp. crowed all the time. But what we never hear from you is the follow through or the alternatives. The popular version is that of a 8 year old child putting together a $100 sneakers for a few dollars a day. What you never mention is the alternatives for that child. Instead you sit there on your high horse passing out judgement from on high.
Here are the options for that child putting together those sneakers Lets see they can go in to the sex trade, where a add deal of them wind up. Getting used dozens of times a day for nothing more than scraps. Then again they could just simply starve on the streets, or any number options, most of them not better than the sex trade.
Most of them are glad to have that job for a few dollars a day. The options for them are far worse.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
WTF Poor != Lazy
Don't worry if the point flew over your head, you'll catch on eventually.
Om, nomnomnom...
Indeed, chances are pretty good that the corporate entity is gaining a whole lot more from the transaction than the consumer is.
Nonsense. If I buy a pair of socks from amazon, I gain a hell of a lot of value; I save the many hours of labour which would be required for me to go out and sheer a sheep, turn the wool into yarn or thread, and then weave the yarn into a pair of socks. Whereas Amazon gains maybe a dollar.
That fact that amazon might sell 10 million pairs of socks and get 10 million dollars of "value" as a result doesn't change the fact that in each individual transaction the consumer benefits far more than the seller. This is the very foundation of trade. The whole point of buying stuff is that you get more value from buying it than from producing it yourself. If the seller ends up richer than you it's not because he's getting more value from your transaction; it's because he's conducting a hell of a lot more transactions.
You will find NOBODY protesting poverty in 1700 for the same reason you won't find people protesting old age today. What's the point in protesting something that there is no solution to?
I find SENS Research Foundation attempting to find solutions.
You went from arguing that taxation is evil because it's theft, to arguing that anyone who makes more than an arbitrary amount of money should be jailed.
This kind of cognitive dissonance is the sign of an unwell mind. You either haven't actually spent much time thinking about the things you're saying, or you are just downright nuts.
Perhaps the better option is for these 8-year-olds not to exist in the first place because the parents had access to condoms, IUDs, hormone treatment, or other means of birth control.
The "default" state of humanity is living a relatively easy hunter gatherer lifestyle which requires at most a couple of hours of work a day on average, and dying by 30.
The default state is not 6+ days a week at 12+ hours a day.
If you think of Capitalism as a sandglass, where the capitalists are on the bottom and the plebes are on the top, then UBI is like a tube with a motor that shoots sand back into the top of the glass. See, the sand DOES 'trickle down', they just lied about who was at the bottom.
Have to agree that 'universal basic assets' is a better foundation, though, otherwise too many people will blow their money and still be in defacto poverty. OTOH, giving money to someone responsible is more likely to lead to resources being spent on what that person needs, than if you try to give them what you suppose they need. So the ideal solution is probably to give people healthcare, food stamps + housing, and some spending money for entertainment etc.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
You already jumped to the wrong conclusion. Of course amazon and the consumer get something of percieved value. But amazons workers don't. Walmarts workers don't. Ubers workers don't. The value is still getting exploited out of somebody.
Prof. Rushkoff's ignorance of basic economic concepts such as subjective value, marginal utility, along with the nature of wealth creation itself, has resulted in a very bizarre, anti-individual conclusion. First, voluntary trade is not a one-way street (no pun intended); both parties expect to be in a better position than they were prior to the transaction, or else the transaction would not have taken place. And this "better position" is the expected subjective value both parties, respectively, should derive. Marginal utility means that, based on a person's subjective value at any particular point in time, subjective value being changing infinitely, a person will decide that they are better off, or not, to take any particular course of action or inaction; ordinal ranking obviously figuring into the basic premise. And wealth is ipso facto not "money," just as wealth was not gold, silver, or diamonds in the past. It is instead what one wishes to acquire and may acquire given their available resources, desires, and needs. This means that anytime a person benefits from a voluntary transaction, they are wealthier, either in immediately consumable services (e.g. Uber), or all the way to, yes, diamonds; it is totally dependent on what "wealth" means to the individual.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Who eats protein powder unless they're a gym bunny or an infant who eats formula?
My father-in-law, who has a heart condition. My mother, who has cancer.
You did ask...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Life is better for the average person than ever before, and this continues, and now continues in places like China and India, becaus of economic freedom
All other politics are liars, on oth sides, seeking power to twist laws to their own advantage.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
People become "too poor" only because there are expenses that continue rising (and protected by competition by the Government), namely housing, health care and education.
It's when people take that extracted value and remove it from the economy that we have a problem...
You mean like when they save??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Mod points are intended to highlight worthy posts. If anything, you should use them to promote worthy AC posts since they start at 0 rather than 1.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Ironic. California indian's are reported to have spent 4 hours a day meeting their needs, and in a virtual paradise.
Logic fail. You've offered evidence that regulations can have unforeseen consequences, not that they're intrinsically evil.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
except of course the efficiency is a myth as you can't get rid of all the other programs unless you think you will be paying enough to cover the sick, those with disabilities, the special needs, the veterans, the special cases. So what you end up with is just yet another system of top of the existing ones.
The author paints a picture of capitalist Walmart "exploiting" its workers and customers. Actually, Walmart is exploiting Chinese slave labor, to the benefit of its American customers, with the approval of the Chinese Communist Party rulers. However, even then, the Chinese are living better under China's quasi-capitalist system than when they were living under Mao's pure Marxist system. When pure Marxist/Communism/Socialism is applied to a population duped or forced into accepting it the grocery stores eventually empty out and the people start losing weight as they begin eating their pets, the local rodents and birds, strip the jungles of nearby primates and empty the rivers empty fish. Then, still starving because the shelves are empty, they sneak across the border into neighboring states that were not foolish enough to fall for the promise of free handouts and guaranteed incomes in exchange for their votes. Yes, I'm referring to Venezuela and other Marxist states that have already collapsed.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
If somebody else is getting rich while they are not if they actually *have* enough to live on that they don't genuinely need more of an income anyways?
If a UBI gives me the equivalent of a decent salary that is enough to afford a place to live and eat and still be able to afford nice things every so often if I'm willing to put aside money for it for a few months, then what reason other than petty jealousy, would I have to care that some other person happens to be making 5 to 10 times as much?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't quite follow the argument here. Is the argument that UBI is actively harmful and wage slavery is better? Or is the argument that UBI is not good enough and only a full blown revolution can set us free?
Because I strongly disagree with the former (and don't see any arguments to support it), and while I can understand the second position, I'd rather prevent a violent revolution.
Socialism means a lot of different things. The "State Socialism" practiced by the USSR and its followers is hardly the definition of socialism. Many socialists strongly disagree with it, and even disagree that it is socialist at all. It's mostly a useful straw man for people who want to prevent the US from implementing some sensible policies that help poor people.
This has been true for the last 50,000 years in human society.
If you render yourself logistically irrelevant... your political agency will wither to a similar irrelevance.
I strongly encourage those attracted to the idea of something for nothing to appreciate that a society that doesn't need you... won't miss you.
And whilst the current society for a lot of reasons won't push that line... probably not throughout all your life times... it may well in your children's or grand children's life times.
The agency we have now is a result of past generations logistical utility to the society. Go through the periods of time and find periods where people had more or less agency and you'll find that people had more personal logistical utility to the society.
The two variables correlate very strongly.
If you render yourself a net drain on society... then society will not prioritize your concerns. And if a situation comes up where the society can solve a problem by giving you less... it will... because there's no negative consequence to giving you less.
if you were doing something then giving you less would have a negative effect on whatever you were providing. But if you provide nothing... then there's no downside to shaving that to the bone.
I say all this as a father loves his children... as brother cares for his brothers... etc etc... Don't fall into this, people. It is a death pact.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I suspect Guaranteed Minimum Income would have about the same benefits, for a much lower cost. I don't hear it mentioned very often though.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Typical answer that I would expect from you people. You always are the first to pass blame but never one to actually suggest something useful.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Sure, all that is true in a competitive market. The thing, is the first you learn at Business School is that competitive markets are for suckers. What you really want is a monopoly, and there's plenty of ways to achieve one. Patents, network effects, regulation, brand recognition, high cost of entry to the market - there are lots of ways to achieve a monopoly, or at least a near monopoly.
There are plenty of companies that are value extractors. Healthcare, telecommunications, pharmaceutical and finance are rife with value extractors - companies that find a niche where they can extract far more value than they actually create. That High Frequency traders on the stock exchange - able to profit by being a little bit faster than everyone else, or being able to flood the exchange with bogus trades. The apologists will say that they "create liquidity" but in reality they have just found a way to extract value that someone else would have otherwise enjoyed.
"many hours of labour which would be required for me to go out and sheer a sheep, turn the wool into yarn or thread, and then weave the yarn into a pair of socks. Whereas Amazon gains maybe a dollar."
Problem: it's not actually possible for you, as a dispossessed urban worker, to actually do that you just said. Should you attempt to do so, you will be coercively prevented by armed agents of the state, on the basis of private pooperty.
That is, unless you are a member of the vanishingly small group of self-sufficient farmers who post on Slashdot.
while the price increase may be (TODAY_PRICES + $1000) in average , the reality is that for some stuff the increase would be larger, while for other it would be lower. To give you an example, it may make house even more out of reach with such an injection of money, but it would NOT make a sudden 300% inflation of food or rent. So anybody spending before that less than 1000$ on food and rent, would still win. Also you have to consider that not everything can have such an inflation, all non essential would be immediately shunned, e.g. if you got a bag of candy corn for 5$ they will not be able to justify suddenly jumping to 10$. The increase would be over years, i expect the inflation would be no more than 5%, so it would taker about 14 years to double price. There are some stuff where this could be the case like software , where price is market related rather than inflation related, but for most product this would not be the case. That if you provide people with 1000$ more will make all price match that is non sense. On the short term some stuff may be sold more, and on the medium term inflation will rise, but this is NOT a barter economy where price are set depending on demand, and your pack of chips would not suddenly get twice the price. So your inflation totalprice+1000$ is utter non sense.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
No. The issue at stake is that it is often far from voluntary for one participant.
In Lagos, you can haggle with the taxi driver. Try that with London black cabs or Uber.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
"Poverty is the DEFAULT state for humanity, with the average person working 12-16 hour days 6 days a week just to survive."
Oh my brother, you are woefully misinformed about history.
The horrific living conditions you describe are typical of the urban proletariat in the mid-19th century. 19th century capitalism can be seen as one of the all-time nadirs of human civilization. Such conditions were not at all typical of previous eras in European history. Peasants, serfs, and even most literal slaves in antiquity did not work nearly so much nor in such bad conditions.
The brutal living conditions of this new urban proletariat - a social grouping that had not existed a hundred years prior - appalled men of all classes. It directly inspired movements of anti-capitalist resistance such as communism, socialism, and the corporatist forbearers of fascism.
You might enjoy reading _The Great Transformation_ by Karl Polanyi for a detailed history of the development of capitalism and it's attendant poverty, squalor, & misery. Note that Polanyi would probably be described as "rightist" in contemporary American politics, illustrating again the bogusness of the left/right dichotomy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
"What you never mention is the alternatives"
Redistribution of land & productive capital. =)
"do it right and you can have a high standard of living and never pay taxes."
What are you smoking, and why aren't you sharing it with the rest of us?
It's when people take that extracted value and remove it from the economy that we have a problem...
Yeah, like in the form of savings accounts. It sucks when people behave in a fiscally responsible fashion..
And yes, savings accounts remove money from the economy in the exact same way that some fat cat billionaire removes the money from the economy by putting it in his bank account.
A million people saving a thousand dollars is no different than a billionaire adding another billion to his bank balance.
Except in the former example, people become much more financially secure and upwardly mobile. If you have a nice cushion built up you can risk leaving one job for another.
The people with no savings whatsoever are the most vulnerable. They'll put up with damn near anything to keep a job. Unfortunately our entire system, right now, is built on the majority of the people spending everything from every paycheck. A bunch of people who suddenly start saving will throw a wrench in the entire economy.
Except Amazon didn't shear the sheep either. It bought the socks, took your order and paid someone to deliver them to you. And you paid them more than it cost them to do that. That is called profit.
Doesn't matter. He didn't have to source the socks, negotiate a sale price for a quantity of 1 (pk), arrange delivery, etc.
Amazon handles all of this, for billions of transactions. Each person served pays a tiny bit of "markup" to save themselves time. It would take each person far more time to visit individual retailers for individual products than the value of the extra money they give to Amazon to do this for them.
Conversly, Amazon can only remain in business, by collecting this tiny markup, from millions of transactions. It specializes, in a sense.. It serves as a central distribution point. Same as any other general retailer.
There's a reason Farmer's Markets exist. It would be a huge pain in the ass to drive to Farm A for eggs, Farm B for bacon, and Farm C for milk. A central location is much preferred. Items A,B, & C can all be purchased within a few feet of each other. Reducing time and effort, on the part of the consumer, to obtain these items.
In exchange for access to a much larger target market, the farmers pay the distributor a percentage of their profit.
I guarantee you that the amount the farmer's pay is far less than the cost for them to distribute the products themselves. If it wasn't, they'd distribute the products themselves.. Nobody pays for anything that they think is worth less than the money they are handing over. Who, in their right mind, would do that?
Should you attempt to do so, you will be coercively prevented by armed agents of the state, on the basis of private pooperty.
That is, unless you are a member of the vanishingly small group of self-sufficient farmers who post on Slashdot.
The fallacy of "because someone doesn't do something, they can't do something"
This person is perfectly able to purchase land in the country and raise sheep. They choose not to. Perhaps it's because their current employment is far more profitable than being a sheep farmer who raises sheep to produce wool for one pair of socks.
Once again, we are back to the economics of scale. It is wholly unprofitable to produce the wool to create socks for a single person. It's far more efficient if 1 guy produces the wool for ten thousand socks. Cost per unit drops through the floor when compared to the cost per unit in the former scenario.
Humans have been specializing for the last ten thousand years (at least). A fisherman fishes... He doesn't farm, he doesn't raise sheep. He fishes for the whole village.. Conversely, the wheat farmer grows wheat.. For everyone.. And so on and so forth.
The fisherman trades (or sells) a tiny bit of his catch to one person to obtain wheat.. Wheat that would cost him far more to grow on his own. He'd have to take time away from fishing to grow the wheat..
Just another example where people trade money or goods to obtain other money or goods in a transaction that is worth way more to them than to the other party.. The other party has to rely on the economics of scale to be profitable... Sell wheat to a whole lot of people.. Sell fish to a whole lot of people..
You are right, instead we should reward them for being liars (PR) or sociopaths (CEOs) or just plain old gun dealers.
Your bias is blatant. Most businesses are small businesses. Most CEOs are not sociopaths. They're small business owners..
What the fuck do gun dealers have to do with anything? Are you using it as a negative?
I do not agree with government imposed welfare, but I am totally on board with government establishing a maximum total income.
You are a hypocrite.
You'd prevent any business from getting too large, if it was owned by one person, yes? So I'll be forced to spend more of my money on the goods I buy because I don't get to benefit from the economics of scale.
There would be no point in growing any business beyond a certain size because all profits, in excess of what you deem acceptable, would be subject to seizure.
Thus, no mega companies providing products at pennies over cost and profiting from billions of transactions to compensate for the tiny profit. Instead lots of small companies with far smaller volumes who have to charge larger markups to smaller customer groups.
The cost of goods in my neighborhood market are far higher than in the mega retailers. If I had to purchase everything from these tiny stores I'd have far less money left over after each paycheck.. There'd be far less to put in the savings account.
The neighborhood market exists only because, sometimes, people are willing to trade a bit more money for a small transaction than the cost in time and fuel to travel all the way to the big box store for a small amount of items to purchase.
But if we had to purchase everything from these low volume and (relatively) high markup establishments, we'd all be a lot fucking poorer.
No thanks. I like being able to source goods I need at the lowest possible price. I get to put more money in savings and thus give myself a fiscal safety net for lean times.
I fully understand human nature. But that won't be the problem of UBI. Society will have to deal with human nature one way or the other, regardless of UBI. We are close to this already. That's why we have people looking pittyful at my Moto G5 plus while holding an iPhone, even though I can do more with my Moto than they will ever be able to do with their iPhone. That's also why people rant about all kinds of things while their biggest problems are overweight, bad habits and drug abuse.
Given, UBi won't change this directly, but that's not what it's supposed to. UBI will replace income by jobs now done by robots. Plain and simple.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
as a dispossessed urban worker
Being a dispossessed urban worker has nothing to do with it. The quality and variance of the products we consume make it impossible to sustain this kind of living even if I had 100% of my time to dedicate to doing something myself. The time and effort to create 1 thing doesn't scale 1:1 with more things.
This is also true 100s of years ago if not from the last millennium. Individuals live a struggled and incredibly basic life. Communities on the other hand thrive as they can benefit from each other's services.
the point of UBI was to increase the ability to take risks and drive the economu that way.
people on UBI could take a change on building their own business, without fear that if it fails they end up on the streets because the safety net is there.
if you want to keep working for a big corp, that is fine too, but not the main idea.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
The word you're looking for is screed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why is this showing as "funny" when it apparently has more insightful mods? Something to do with the lack of a "stupid" mod category?
Regarding the content, the author apparently needs to learn that the past is not the present. However I'll continue looking for some comment that is actually funny or insightful.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
They're in a difficult and stressful business, with low pay and high risks for the bulk of the people working in it.
This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market. They exchange one thing of value (in the case of Uber, transportation services) for another thing of value (money). Or with their drivers, they trade money for use of the contractor's time and car wear and tear.
Both their customers and their contractors are better off after their interaction with Uber because they all exchange something they value less for something they'd rather have.
Wrong. Companies certainly can and do extract value. In Uber's example, they extract it from their contractors because their contractos are fallible humans and not borg-like beings with perfect knowledge of the market. They make human errors like math errors or incomplete consideration the the facts that lead them to believe that Uber pays at least enough to cover the operation of their car when it doesn't.
An Uber contractor is not really doing labor for profit, they're doing labor to extract some value from their vehicle and give a piece of it to Uber. It's sort of like a reverse mortgage on a car that you have to work for.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Basically that's the answer I was searching for in this tedious discussion. I can't tell if there is no sense to be found here, the moderation system is just that badly broken, or I'm just too dense to figure out the right key words to search for.
The problem in high productivity societies is that most people have too much excess time available unless they are somehow paid for their recreational time. The problem is spreading fairly rapidly.
Ekronomics 101. Think about the time, not the money. Then you realize you can't tell them to drop dead. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Yeah. This author has missed, well, everything.
UBI isn't the cause of people being unable to create marketable value... It's the result of that occuring and those people not being left entirely for dead. Let's say it's all one rich guy and everyone else on UBI. Where is the money for the UBI coming from? From the people on UBI exclusively? It just doesn't hold up.
UBI does not somehow magically turn people into valueless non-creators. This is classic tin-foil-hat "wake up sheeple" nonsense that doesn't hold up to five seconds of scrutiny.
Amazon's role in this adds value right through the chain though.
The shepherd in New Zealand doesn't know me and isn't going to be able to sell me his wool.
The child in Bangladesh operating the machinery in the factory lacks the international contacts needed to sell the products she creates.
The transport overheads of a single sock (or even a pair of socks) would cost more than the dollar I pay for it.
Amazon enable all of this to happen in bulk, offering economies of scale, adding sufficient value to every participant involved that they can all benefit and profit.
An entire farm's worth of wool makes a container full of socks, the shipping of which has merely marginal cost per sock, and Amazon allows me to search and choose from among the multiple sock options available.
Sure, they make a profit. But I get a sock for a dollar.
If only there were other ways to treat 8 year olds.
Lets see, how do other countries do it? Education? Welfare to assure they're not hungry? Assured housing?
Why not offer those same opportunities and benefits instead of making them work in a shitty abusive factory.
You are nowhere as intelligent as you've been telling yourself; neither are the nodding mouthbreathers who've been modding you up.
> And yes, savings accounts remove money from the economy in the exact same way that some fat cat billionaire removes the money from the economy by putting it in his bank account.
Not nearly to the same degree. There are individuals whose "savings" accumulate to more than the combined savings of over half the planet.
And chances are if you're a working schlub with a modest savings account, that account is with a local bank which means there's are least some benefit to the local economy as the bank lends that money to others. Even if that benefit isn't as effective, it still exists.
So unless and until someone can explain to me how having a few hundred million dollars in a tax haven island account benefits the US economy, this argument can be safely ignored.
=Smidge=
First of all, I have to say that the summary here makes him sound completely delusional, while the article itself sounds a little more intelligent, yet still not well thought out and full of internal contradictions.
But I wanted to mention something else. We're all thinking about jobs as they used to be, but we're much more a world of content creation and consumption than in the past. We spend our time posting and browsing on Facebook or Instagram. My kids watch their favourite youtubers more than they watch TV. They watch games being played more than they play them. And that's not to comment on how they waste their time, but how many people are creating lots of content in their free time. When companies sell phones, they sell the cameras in them, because we're a world of content creators.
And UBI plays into this. If we don't need to waste our time doing menial jobs, we can create things we want to create. And sure, a lot of people won't do that, but they'd consume the content, and that's just as important.
Really, a lot of jobs people do are utterly pointless, and not all that fulfilling. Even the fulfilling ones are often stressful and leave us with little free time to enjoy with ourselves or with our kids. Eliminating them will be a good thing.
if Silicon Valley's UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets
The problem to solve is not an economic problem, but a political one. The wealthy are continuing to purchase laws that siphon more and more of the country's wealth in their direction. If anything, it is that transfer of wealth that will create the tool for the further enslavement of which the author of TFA speaks.
To read the original post carefully, he is saying that the progress of capitalism has left us slaves to a small number of corporate overlords. I have to say, that's true.
We let this happen because we enjoy having Amazon figure out what we want to buy, and make it easy for us to pull the trigger. Same with Uber. It's not really that bad, and also not that different from what is historically normal.
Now, enslaving overlords aren't what they used to be. They have learned a lot of lessons from historical episodes like the French Revolution, the mass unemployment in Britain of the 1920s, the early Great Depression in the US, and many others. The lesson is captured in what someone upthread referred to as "pitchforkiness," and others refer to as the frog-in-hot-water syndrome: Don't let the slaves get too uncomfortable.
It's incredibly good to be in the quiet ruling class of a prosperous, hopeful world. It really sucks to be the unquestioned despot of masses of people who feel that life is going the wrong way for them. Talk to billionaires and centi-millionaires (which I do), and you'll realize they totally get this.
What is happening now is that the lessons of noblesse oblige are steadily being unlearned by the newest class of oligarchs, who like most people 35 and younger, are astonishingly ignorant of history. I actually date this movement to the Enron blowup, and the less-celebrated concomitant event, the destruction of its auditor Arthur Andersen & Co. I remember boardroom conversations at that time about the significance of this episode: that the relatively few people with true power have lost any ethical sense, and we all had better start getting it back.
Guess what? We haven't, and it's gotten much worse since then.
In terms of basic economics, this is showing up as deflation. Not in the textbook monetary sense, but in the fact (mentioned by many posters here) that it's getting noticeably harder for ordinary middle-class people to afford many economic goods that were easily within reach in more prosperous times. This is a really big and separate topic (it intersects with the disastrous aftermath of the 2008 GFC). But for present purposes it represents the lever by which the truly powerful are exerting their control.
The extreme example of this is the situation in Silicon Valley. You'd think the C programmers making $240K/year and the data scientists literally making up to a million, have it made in the shade. So why are they constantly obsessing over real estate? They have plenty of money, but there's not enough for them to buy with it. That's a new kind of deflation (which many people mistake for inflation), and something like it is happening across all sectors of the economy, and in nearly every country. That's what we have to be worried about, because our economic overlords aren't doing anything about it.
Among many other more important things, this led to the rise of Donald Trump, who achieved nothing more (or less) than recognizing it and giving it a name. We're rather lucky that he's a feckless idiot. A more capable individual, more plugged into the true economic power structure of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Tencent, Alibaba, etc., could wreak tremendous harm.
and that women with enough food have healthier, smarter babies. Sex Ed and birth control are also part of it anywhere that Evangelicals don't stop it. The projects were doing quite well until the funding for the jobs programs got pulled by Reagan. Homelessness was temporary thing in decline until he shut down the mental hospitals. Nixon's war on drugs didn't help either.
See, what we have here is the result of putting people who don't believe in government (the GOP) in charge of government. It's like a vegan running a barbecue. It's not gonna end well for anybody.
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FYI people didn't work 12-16 hours on a farm on a regular basis, the industrial revolution made people work longer hours than before.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ma...
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog...
It's not a fantasy. Just trade. And if you founded a new, independent colony on some new planet, trade would absolutely be in the interest of the colony's survival. Try opening your own business. You will be strongly incentivized to do the things that are most profitable for you. And that's good for the overall economy, though it puts pressure on your competitors, but keeps you (and them) in check.
Ignoratio elenchi. I never claimed regulations were good or evil, you are the one assigning morality.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You've got to be kidding. There are often many alternatives to a given kind of transportation: walk, run, own bike, rent bike, horse, hitchhike, motorcycle, moped, bus, subway, *move to closer location*, decide that the trip wasn't worth whatever they're charging, etc., etc. You're not going meta enough in your options. In the West, except in rare cases (that IMHO should be reduced to the absolute minimum necessary for the bare survival of the government and citizens), you can say "no" to anyone's offer. That's what freedom is and ought to be. There should in effect be no "offer you can't refuse". If there seems to be, either someone is coercing you, or you already had agreed to it as an implication of another agreement that you voluntarily signed/agreed to, e.g., the fine print. Unfortunately, under the guise of the so-called public good, etc., we're passing laws that limit our freedom in various ways. For example, in NYC I can't just put a taxi sign on my car and start looking for clients. All kinds of regulations, medallions, etc. Maybe it would not be wise for some random New Yorker to get into my random car for a cheap ride (e.g., I could be a criminal, etc.), but I could work to convince the person it would be fine by developing a reputation (brand), etc. Totally without government interference. As I understand it, the development of taxi regulations was basically a gift to the established cabbies to limit competition, with the "benefit" of less congestion and less rifraff, thus a bloody guild! Finally, you have no right to a taxi or Uber: they are not literally your slaves nor you theirs.
...and their revenues go back into the community instead of all the profit being shoved off to some douche's new San Francisco campus.
So, the fares they pay drivers doesn't go back into the local community? And taxi companies don't have douche's collecting the profit to buy houses in the Hamptons?
I don't see a difference.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of writing this exact post. I've got one addition:
It also ignores that their employees were on welfare and food stamps _before_ walmart hired them.
More important, we neglect the benefit the customers get. Are we really better off paying higher prices at Bob's Hardware versus getting it at barely over wholesale at Walmart/Target/Home Depot/Costco/Amazon? I don't think so and nether to a few hundred million other people.
Now run along and die, scumbag.
We have no hope of escaping the basics of our economics anytime soon and you must pay for civilization by taxing economic activity. Property taxes too which are the exception. When labor is gone a primary tax source disappears; so either you shift to property taxes or you change your method of economic tax. More regressive sales taxes OR you greatly increase corporate taxes! duh. Increase corporate taxes to cover ALL the lost income taxes. If you just think about it, this has always been payed by the corporation indirectly because it came out of labor's pocket. It won't harm them at all even though they'll try to fool slow people as their profits increase by eliminating their labor force.
Yes, this could be sold as a robot/software tax. Which is not a crazy idea; because it eases the transition into robots replacing human labor... robots still be cheaper than labor but still retaining the taxed portion of the salaries that are eliminated.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Either way externalities exist in businesses. The most successful are liable to be those that shift the cost to future generations or to others.
Any proof that? How about: greater profit by figuring out how to get greater productivity? It currently takes much less resources and human effort to produce a nice apple than it ever did in history. Figure out even small improvements in any costly industry, and you could do well if you play your cards right.
Want uber to be "fair"? Just make sure the total amount of regulation they face is the same as an ordinary cab driver faces.
Those taxi rules, especially medallions in NYC, have always been unfair to all the potential cabbies who might have made a little extra money for themselves. The idea that someone has a government protected lock on an industry is positively medieval, yet it exists. Let's get rid of guild-like laws, like licencing in various industries. If customers demand a seal of approval before paying for a ride or stay, then you can make a business around reviews, etc., wait, that's what Uber and Airbnb do. Why can't free people make deals just engage consensually? Nobody should be guaranteed a trade for life: it necessarily disadvantages all those who might like to enter that trade.
We would like to see numbers supporting your claims. It does not bode well that your exposition starts with "My guess..."
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Quite so, but modern capitalists love to use the 19th Century 'dark satanic mills' as the bar to measure everything to prove no matter how badly you are being treated now, you should be grateful to the "job creators".
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
How is "nip poor overpopulation in the bud by increasing poor people's access to birth control" not "actually suggest[ing] something useful" over the course of a generation?
Certain parts of the "religious right" voting bloc oppose all forms of birth control. In some cases, this extends beyond a "pro-life" stance beyond abortion even to anticonceptive methods that prevent pregnancy in the first place, such as hormones and condoms. Many Republicans publicly oppose state support for birth control in order to attract their votes.
The article is probably a propaganda piece... or it's unintentionally acting along those lines.
Same points can be made about a great many things. The academic world provides nearly all the innovation but gets little in return plus a fair amount of abuse which slow people pile onto because they can't see beyond 1 step removed.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The amount of value you derive can vary, though. If you buy a burger for $5 when starving and you don't die it has a lot of value. If it's what tips you over into a cornonary not so much. That's an extreme, but the definition of value has perplexed economists for over 250 years.
Even then, except for those at the top, life was still very much hard work, as just about everything was created by hand, and whilst specialisation helps a bit, it only helps a cerrain amount. I'd argue that what led the mass of people to significantly better their lives as the exploitation of energy and mineral sources, combined with mechanisation and automation, along with a relative shortage of labour to fully exploit that automation, combined with improvements in governance.
The problem with the Walmart example is that the "Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want" never happens.
And as long as you don't actually go looking for any evidence, you can go right along believing this.
Ok here's the thing.
In the near future, the automated, AI guided economy will not need us, to help produce stuff that people need.
We will just get in the way and get injured in gory robot-factory accidents.
People without a job, through no fault of their own except being average humans, will still be able to vote.
So in all likelihood, democratically elected governments will tax automated production profits and will distribute wealth.
If you don't like this, I would like you to explain your position more fully. And denial of near-future automation unemployment is not a tenable position. That's just ostrich-head-in-the-sand wishful thinking.
So is your position that those who cannot productively work without phony make-work projects (say, 50% of those who want to work, in the near future), should just be weeded out and die? Leaving only a few uber-machiavellian entrepreneurs and some ultra-nerd super-intelligent techies in the human population, along with a number of massage therapists, say.
Or what is your alternative to that?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You've got to be kidding. There are often many alternatives to a given kind of transportation: walk, run, own bike, rent bike, horse, hitchhike, motorcycle, moped, bus, subway, *move to closer location*, decide that the trip wasn't worth whatever they're charging, etc
Because your alternatives are so practical for most people after decades of fucking up our cities due to zoning.
"Hmm...I can't afford an Uber....I know! I'll buy a horse!! Or dig my own subway!!"
she'd just be replaced. As long as we let a small number of people oppress us like that they'll always be plenty of them to do the oppressing. It's not that people are so awful that what she did is the norm. But since it's such a small number of people being allowed to wield so much power you don't need very many bad actors to screw the whole thing up.
Also, don't use violence. The right wing is much, much better at it since they emphasize authoritarianism in their philosophy which leads to better foot soldiers. You'll never win on violence. At best you'll get your ass kicked and at worst you'll just flip and become what you hate, with only the rhetoric left from your left wing days but none of the actions or systems. Like the Soviets and the Chinese and the North Koreans did.
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and everything to do with a small number of scientists being allowed to be scientists. Life is better because we've increased food production and the stability of the food supply and logistics chain. That's not economic freedom that did that, it's science.
Now's the time to decide if we want to keep progressing though. There's a growing movement who sees a world without struggle and starvation as a threat. That's because if nobody's poor then nobody's rich. If you can't control people's access to food, shelter & healthcare then you lose a massive amount of power. Nobody's going to break their backs building pyramids or force their neighbors to at gunpoint for a slightly nicer car. Well, not in the numbers you need to build pyramids (or the 2018 equivalent that seems to be space travel).
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Sure, value can often be subjective and situation dependant. So can morality. That doesn't mean that we can't make some general statements about how they operate in the majority of situations.
Oh go fuck yourself. At least I'm actually doing something. How many kids do you sponsor? I"m willing to bet its 0. You sit around behind your computer screen passing out judgement on everyone else. How about getting off your ass and doing something instead of bitching about what every else is doing?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
...because the only way UBI works is if the top earners are taxed enough to get the money back, so no the money wouldn't just accumulate at the top.
That's the whole point of why the more you earn the more you get taxed - Re-distribution of wealth.
And this is a GOOD thing - If this didn't happen, a handful of people would have all the money and everyone else wouldn't have any so they wouldn't be able to buy anything which would cause the economy to collapse unless the rich people bought stuff that the poor people made which would force them to give up some of that money and so it goes on.
Money is inherently worthless; It's the movement of money that keeps the keeps the system working!
Well, instead of saying BS like enslavement, come with a solution that's better. With the increase in automation due to better flexible robots and AI it won't be long before jobs are getting scarce, it's not about IF it's gonna happen, it's about WHEN it's gonna happen. Even IT-jobs are getting replaced with AI. And people still need money to pay for food, housing and living, so unless we make everything free (which is never gonna happen ofcourse as everyone would want a villa then) there will be a need for a solution like basic income. And in regard to 'enslavement', aren't our current jobs not already a form of 'enslavement' as I (and most people) don't work for fun, but for money to be able to buy food, housing and living.
Finally, someone with some actual cred who gets it. UBI is bullshit, a complete fantasy. Don't fall for it, lads.
As I get older I realise there is no utopia for any society made up of actual people. A significant minority will want to enslave the rest, another significant minority will want to do jack shit all day. Maybe 5% will actually do remarkable things but the rest of us are just passing time!
Certain parts of of the "religious right" along with a great many others are a bunch god damn idiots. Sorry I bit your head off earlier. I actually do understand what you are trying to say.
Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. In a ideal world it would be but we have to work with what we have. Societies and religious "right" don't change over night. So many people don't really understand how many problems are caused by dogma.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Yeah, not sure Amazon is actually allowing the child in Bangladesh to profit.
3 billion pennies would be worth more as scrap than their face value.
Present some researched facts relevant to the conversation, and some moron mods them down. Mod points are so scarce that most bad mods never get fixed.
And yet, the mod system never changes.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Really? You don't say? I know you really don't understand this but in many ways you are part of the problem. You probably are not even aware of it.
You say things things, education, welfare, and assured housing like they are an option. You base your answers on a western point of view. Where the ideal of being "poor" means you might have to live in government housing or eat from a soup kitchen. You really have no concept of poverty. Having nothing.
In these places there is no welfare, no hope of education, and most certainly no assured housing. There is simply no money for this. Survival means lasting to your next meal.
You can not offer the same opportunities and benefits where they do not exist. Sometimes these "shitty" factory jobs are all they have. The difference between a chance to make their lives better and starving to death.
You have to understand the way things are before you can start talking about the way they should be. The "shitty" factory jobs are not perfect solutions but in many cases that is all there is. An they do help. Many times once the factory gets established the area starts to go up as more money comes into the community. Then wages do in many cases start to go up. $2 a day doesn't sound like much to a westerner, but in many places that is a living wage.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Redistribution of land & productive capital. =)
Doesn't work. It has been tried many times in history. You only have to look at places in Africa to see the results. Communism never works. It looks good on paper and sounds good in theory but it has never worked on a large scale in real life.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
No. I say this because I know that subsistence survival has few exit points.
Education on the other hand will transform the society.
So prioritise giving children the basic care and standard of living needed to benefit from an education, give them that education and watch your entire country's poverty start to diminish.
What the article writer seems to miss in my mind is that UBI needs to go hand-in-hand with a reasonable minimum wage.
I actually see it the other way around: to be practicable UBI needs to go hand in hand with the abolition of minimum wage. After all, the only way of paying for UBI is taxation, and, since taxing those you're paying UBI to doesn't make any logical sense, the most likely source of that tax revenue is corporations. Now, because we don't want the corporations to simply raise their prices (in order to maintain their current level of profits) resulting in a vicious spiral of rising prices -> rising UBI to pay for those goods -> rising taxes to fund UBI -> rising prices, the only way for them to make or maintain their profits is to reduce their costs: and the only practicable way to do that is to reduce their wage bills, which means doing away with the minimum wage.
UBI shouldn't be a way for government to simply provide cheaper labour for corporate entities
Again, I see this differently. UBI covers the basic needs of your population: accommodation, food, and healthcare, with perhaps a trivial amount of discretionary spending thrown in. The government should not be in the business of supplying their population with luxuries, or funding an extravagant 'consumer' lifestyle. Companies, on the other hand, will continue to compete for top talent based on the wages they offer, and will pay as little as possible to fill their other job openings. It is worth pointing out though that, since everyone now has their basic needs met, the bottom end of the job market is no longer going to be filled by people desperate to get paid something, anything, in order to be able to afford their next meal. In other words companies will, by necessity, have to pay rather more that you might initially think in order to fill those positions too.
Now, I'm happy to admit that I 'might' be wrong in my analysis, it is after all a very complex political / economic web in which we live, but, in the broad strokes, I don't think so. I would be interested in hearing your, further, thoughts on the matter though...
A coffee farmer gets less than 1 cent for every cup of coffee you buy, clearly a lot of middle men are taking there cut.
It is not that they don't add value, of course they do. The question is are they taking a reasonable proportion of the money. Capitalism has no concept of fair, and left to its own the strong will take advantage of the weak (just like in nature) and the strong that don't will be outperformed by the strong that do. Laws like minimum wage allow society to set level of what is considered fair.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that they are gaining equally from that transaction.
Yup. The estimate I've seen is that consumers capture about 97% of the value of tech companies, the companies about 3%. It's quite unequal. Since people keep starting companies, capturing just 3% is must be enough.
Taxes are not voluntary, they are compulsory, meaning people with guns come for you when you do not pay them.
So? People with guns will come for you (at least in theory) if you steal anything. Hell, you're probably American, so in your country, people with guns might come for you if you just copy something without the proper permission.
The Government gets paid before I do as well. The only thing I see is how munch the government TOOK out of my paycheck before it gets deposited in my bank account.
Now, I don't know about your job, but I filled out a form telling my employer to send a percentage of my pay check to the government so that I wouldn't have to worry about saving enough to pay the entire bill at tax time. So if your job is anything like mine, the government's not taking it before you get it, your employer is giving a percentage of your pay to the government, based on a form that you filled out when you started your job. Your employer is doing it because it's easier for everyone if they help you pay your taxes in installments over the year instead of simply letting you trying to manage the entire bill at tax time, and they are doing so because you authorized them to do so.
Shopping at the grocery store is not compulsory. For now until total socialism takes total control I can still at least grow my own food.
I sincerely doubt that you could, you seem generally incompetent and poorly informed.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
You on the other hand just seem to want to roll over and be a victim.
Nah, he doesn't even want to roll over. He just wants to claim he's the victim and it's the system is keeping him down. Just another temporarily-embarrassed millionaire with delusions of adequacy.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Most CEOs are not sociopaths.
This is actually true, only about 15-20% of CEOs are sociopaths. It's one of the highest job rates, but it's by no means a majority. I've worked for at least 2 sociopaths, though.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Profit is the undue gain , profit represent s how much more then fair you charged them. If in Equitable trade you break even..
True, it saves you many hours of labor but those hours amazon did not provide, it didn't raise the sheep, it didn't spin the yarn it did wealth the yarn, it didn't ship the product.
Of course not; that's not their business model. The guy who owns and cares for the sheep got some value by selling the wool. If he hired someone else to shear them, that person got some value in the form of a salary. The person who bought the wool got plenty of value by not having to raise and shear sheep. He then turned around and made it into yarn, which he sold to a sock maker, extracting value for himself in the form of profit. The sock maker got value by not having to raise or shear sheep, or make yarn. He then used the yarn to make the socks. He sold the socks in bulk to amazon, and again got value out of the transaction in the form of profit. Amazon got value out of the transaction by not having to raise or shear sheep, make yarn, or turn it into socks. They then listed them for sale on their website and sold them to thousands of customers, thereby getting value in the form of profit. The customers received value by not having to raise or shear sheep, make yarn, knit socks, or waste time trying to find a sock maker.
At each step of the chain value is created and both parties benefit. As a result we all profit. But opinionated nincumpoops who once read Carl Marx just want to focus on Amazon and accuse them of "extracting excess value" or whatever the currently hip terminology is.
It's stupid.
All it did is spend a few milliseconds of computer time.
It did a fuck of a lot more than that. If you honestly believe what you just wrote the you obviously don't know the first thing about what's involved in running a retail business, let alone the largest marketplace on the planet.
But it takes a disproportionate large proportion of the profit.
That's just bullshit. Their profit margins are insanely slim. That's one of the things which makes them so competitive; they make less of a profit per item than other retailers, which allows them to keep prices relatively low.
It does this because it controls the market place, it makes sense to only have only 1 because you don't really want to shop at 10 online stores to get the cheapest.
And this is more nonsense. For some things I'll check Chinese websites before I go to amazon, exactly because I know I can probably get them cheaper. Or I'll check Walmart online. Or I might even go to a local shop if I want to browse the shelves. People haven't stopped shopping around, and amazon certainly doesn't control the market; they've just made it difficult for less efficient companies to compete.
A coffee farmer gets less than 1 cent for every cup of coffee you buy, clearly a lot of middle men are taking there cut.
Of course they are. There's the people who the farmer hired to pick the cherries. Theres the people who did the drying and sorting of the cheries. There's the people who transported the cherries to the silo and/or the mill. There's the mill owner. There's the people the mill owner hired to do the milling. There's the people who did the hulling. There's the people who did the cleaning and sorting. There's the people who did the grading. There's the people who did the packaging. There's the people who moved and loaded the packaging onto pallets and trucks/trains/planes. There's the people who drove those vehicles to get the beans to warehouses. There's the dock workers who unloaded the trucks. There's the sales department which negotiated the sale to stores, coffee shops, and other large buyers. There's the marketing department and all the downstream effects of that. There's the HR department which managed the personnel involved in all of the above. There's more warehouse workers and truckers who again loaded and moved the stock to the next location. There's mo
You're missing that different things are valued differently to different people at different times.
If I give you a lawn mower in exchange for a stove, we can both be better off than we were before, both making a "profit" on the deal, because what we traded was worth less to us than what we received. If not, we wouldn't have a reason to make the exchange.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Because your alternatives are so practical for most people after decades of fucking up our cities due to zoning.
"Hmm...I can't afford an Uber....I know! I'll buy a horse!! Or dig my own subway!!"
Funny, but I am no supporter of zoning (despite personally benefitting from it). Sure I like peace and quiet, but nobody granted me a perpetual right to no boarding houses, high density building development, retail stores, etc. in my neighborhood. I looked it up recently, and it turns out to have really started only in the 1920s, if memory serves. More getting rid of rifraff and probably some bits of racism too. Even there, communities where resident mutually agree to bind their properties to a covenant limiting the kinds of allowable development were present and totally possible without the government forcing people to do things with threat of prison, fine, etc. Invariably, some mob gets the idea of limiting individual rights for truly specious reasons, and we get all kinds of unintended consequences. Voluntary choice should be the dominant model; people seem to forget this.
The AC lists some ways, others include borrowing a lot of money, going bankrupt and getting a tax credit for years, I believe your current President uses that trick. Listing your businesses residences in strategic jurisdictions for tax purposes where profits happen while you lose money in jurisdictions where taxes are high and various other ways that expensive accountants and lawyers can come up with.
You're probably middle class, the ones that have the hardest time avoiding taxes, but it is still possible by incorporating, working as a contractor instead of an employee and doing various other sleight of hand tricks that a good accountant can explain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Are people forced to be Uber drivers? No, they are not. Can they stop being aiber drivers? Yes, they can. Therefore it isn't anything like slavery.
So whar if it is local, does that change anything? As to taxes, they are taken by force and should not be.
So no argument against what he said just proof you are a braindead pig ignorant NPC.
"Yes, but that doesn't mean that they are gaining equally from that transaction. " So what? Why would they need to gain equally? Each is choosing it because they determine that to be THEIR BEST POSSIBLE CHOICE. The judgement of some elitist ass like you isn't relevant. "Indeed, chances are pretty good that the corporate entity is gaining a whole lot more from the transaction than the consumer is." That isn't your call to make and even if it were it is none of your business. "Unfortunately, for many transactions the consumer has little choice." So what, others do not owe them options. "We don't get to choose to simply not eat, for example" Nobody is making you need to eat. That is purely your body making you need to eat, so why do you think others should have to make allowances for that? "(and most working people don't really have the option of spending half their day fishing)." Actually they do, they just understand that isn't as productive as going to work... "What the article writer seems to miss in my mind is that UBI needs to go hand-in-hand with a reasonable minimum wage." No it does not and given you have provided no evidence or arguments to support you claim then by Hitchens razor I dismiss it with none myself. "UBI shouldn't be a way for government to simply provide cheaper labour for corporate entities -- that's simply corporate welfare." UBI is immoral and unacceptable. "UBI needs to be balanced with a reasonable minimum wage to prevent these sorts of abuses." Nope it needs to not exist, like minimum wage.
This is blown out of the water with the fact that uber / lyft are cheaper and save money for customers so the customer can use that money other places in the community instead of blindly throwing it at government that all take their cut. They can also afford more trips which pays more people. They get to decide where their money goes, not government.
And chances are if you're a working schlub with a modest savings account, that account is with a local bank which means there's are least some benefit to the local economy as the bank lends that money to others. Even if that benefit isn't as effective, it still exists.
Well, it's not really a requirement for banks to have cash-on-hand to do loans.. Fractional reserve banking did away with that requirement a long time ago. I mean, technically, yeah they have to have _some_ cash, but seeing as they can loan out 9x what they have, even the smallest banks can write some pretty decent loans.. As long as they are fiscally sound, they can borrow cash from other banks and then loan out 9x that amount... It's all one giant ponzi scheme...
Seeing as how even the Swiss finally caved to US pressure and don't really have secret bank accounts any more, I suspect that at least some of the cash moved out of the US is done for fiscal safety.... i.e. Don't have all your eggs in one basket/economy.. I would guess there is at least some quid pro quo with rich Europeans having some of their cash in US banks..
If you choose to.
"still possible by incorporating, working as a contractor instead of an employee"
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
I take it you've never tried the measures you suggest... 'Cuz when the do that you pay a lot more tax, not less.
I would be interested in hearing your, further, thoughts on the matter though...
I'm hardly an expert in this area, but I appreciate your willingness to have an honest discussion about it.
You may very well be right -- if a job pays too little, you may simply find nobody is willing to work that job. But I suspect on the really low-end of employment this may not be the case. Companies are still going to prefer people with experience and with education, and while people with these attributes may see competition in pay under a UBI system, those who don't (but who still want more in life than the minimums that UBI affords) will still be sufficient -- and IMO they should be protected from being abused with an undignified level of pay.
Now all that said, it may be the a reasonable minimum wage can be much lower than what people expect today. Maybe under UBI a minimum wage of $5 an hour makes sense, as opposed to the $15 an hour many are pushing for today. I don't know. But I suspect that someone who wants to work and is trying to get ahead shouldn't be making 50 an hour just because they get a UBI.
Those are my thoughts.
Yaz
Each and every person has a concept of what they consider is fair and will not accept a transaction that isn't beneficial to them. As such everything you just argued is proven to be rubbish.
Except it doesn't, each of those people along the way traded in voluntary transaction for their benefit.
No it hasn't, we understand it is subjective.
Are you retarded or just playing such for comedic effect? You don't have to use the f**king taxi you f**king moron.
That's... beyond untrue. Lot's of government programs produce values that are many times the amount spent on them.
Saying so doesn't make it true. But I will grant you that there are a few, but they are a distinct minority.
Just another day in Paradise
You're both right and both wrong. There's a spectrum of good/evil in taxation. Clearly, we want government to provide certain services (deliver the mail for example), for which we must pay (postage in that case), Typically national defense, and infrastructure are what could likely be considered the bare minimum, and even with those, it's arguable as to how much is enough, with some people demanding virtually none. Toward the opposite end of the viewpoint spectrum, you have folks who want what some would call the "Nanny State". Obviously, the majority of folks are somewhere in the middle, and disagree on how much taxation and services should be, but in the big scheme of things, very few are ever going to be happy with the status quo...it just doesn't work that way. Fortunately for us Americans, we have ~50 laboratories in which we can experiment, and see results that work or don't.
Just another day in Paradise
Only if you want to be a hermit. You can't avoid taxes if you wish to do many things that people didn't have to just a century ago. You can't even (legally) leave the country without doing so...fees are also a tax.
Just another day in Paradise
The solution would be for everybody to become their own boss, with the risks and difficulties associated with that. Such a system would be called distributism (regarding the distribution of ownership resulting in the distribution of profits), but many prefer the status quo, and will never go for a system where they must develop their own marketing, accounts receivable/collection, and having to base their income on their own competence.
Of course, socialism and capitalism both fundamentally suffer from the same problems, large entities (corps owned by successful capitalists v large corps effectively owned by politicians) that separate people from a portion of their profit to be redistributed up the chain and to other individuals in the system. If all of the management folks had to be productive in producing actual output instead of overseeing the productivity of others, we'd have an even better economy, with a much flatter distribution of wealth since their would be far less concentration through the economies of scale driving profits to a few at the top. I think it would ultimately improve things, but will never happen, and I don't want socialism because the relationship between me and those who run the companies goes from voluntary to mandatory which definitely reduces my freedom long term.
Money loses value over time. I would like to see people get minimum shelter, food, education, clothing, healthcare (including some entertaining exercise) and communications and transportation. People can of course work to get higher-status resources and most will. Not talking communism. Look at the military. A sort of perfect socialist model if one considers it. UBI will not synchronize with basic needs over time. The intrinsic value of universal resources will remain stable, This might not have been possible in the age before deep learning automation. But it won't be long before robots can easily make this $#!+. And people will be paid simply to consume stuff.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
UBI would undoubtedly throw the pay rates for low/no skill labor into a period of wild fluctuation as people worked out what they're willing to work for. In the very short term I would expect pay to drop across the board by the same amount as the UBI. Then as people evaluate whether or not working 40+ hours a week is worth whatever extra then they may or may not quit. I would expect that people closer to the UBI in current earning would be more likely to stop working for their current employer. So we might actually see businesses that use those laborers increase the amount their willing to pay for labor, and given that an individuals survival doesn't ride on that job it is entirely possible that those wages could wind up higher than they are now.
It's still your choice, be a hermit or pay taxes and get benefits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Something I haven't read mentioned yet is that this summary states that "Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do[...]".
This is, of course, nonsense. UBI doesn't strip anyone of the ability to create anything.
I'd suggest looking at the work of the likes of Ricardo (labour theory of value - roughly the value of a good is the value of the labour embedded in it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) and others. There are several other theories of values that emerged and withered. Value really has perplexed economists.
Ah... the intrinsic or customary value arguments...
This is not subsistence survival. Living on the streets, picking through trash for your food is. The jobs these factories bring is a entry point. $2 a day may not sound like much by western standards but in many of these countries it is a living wage. That is what these people need, not more hand outs.
As more money comes into the community then while the parents work children can go to school. There will be enough money for this to happen. As more money comes in to the community then there will be more left over for government services. The schools and other social safety nets that we take for granted. With the schools will come the education that is needed and only then will poverty start to diminish.
You can't just wish these things in to existence. It takes a stable society for them to exist. An a stable society demands that people have enough money to meet basic survival needs. An for that to happen, you have jobs.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.