The problem is that in many places the interest you will pay on a mortgage for the cheapest available home with only 3% down is higher than the cheapest available rental alternative. You can't buy small enough homes. People are living out of bedrooms in other people's houses and struggling to make rent even there. You can't buy one of those. I'm living in a tiny mobile home that I own outright... on rented land, a tiny parcel of rented land the like of which you can't buy anywhere. The mere interest on a mortgage on an empty normal-sized lot to park my tiny home on (if you could get mortgages on empty lots, or park mobile homes on them, neither of which you can) would exceed the rent I pay here. So I'm stuck renting until I can save up the hundreds of thousands of dollars to put enough down on a house that the interest alone on the consequent mortgage doesn't push the date I can finish paying it off even further past what should be retirement age but already won't.
You're ignoring the fact that the people receiving UBI (everybody) are the same people paying for it, so most of those taxes are cancelled out by the UBI they pay for. People in the middle neither pay nor receive much of all in net. The many people at the bottom get a lot as a percent of their income, while a few people at the very top pay a little as a percent of their income to fund it.
See for a numerical examples this post I just made in a different thread showing approximately the net cost/benefit to people with different incomes.
Well there's a catch-22 if I ever saw one. Poor people support "socialism"? They're just greedy entitled moochers who want free stuff. Rich people (who would actually be paying for it) support it? They're detached elites free to say what people should do since nothing can hurt them anyway.
FWIW I make almost exactly the mean personal income for the United States and I support an UBI, precisely because since I'm average it will barely affect me, if I should end up poor again it would help me, and if I ever ended up rich I would be able to easily afford to pay for it.
Nobody is talking about just adding X to everyone's income and calling it done. You add X to everyone's income and take Y% from everyone's income to pay for it. The money supply doesn't increase, so there isn't inflation; the money just shuffles around into more hands. The mean income remains the same, but everyone's individual income gets closer to it.
If you check my comment history you'll see that I am extremely pro-UBI and generally pro-social-programs and anti-capitalist, but that said...
The important difference between paying taxes and paying bills is that you can choose not to pay your bills if you're ok with not getting the services in return. It's a voluntary trade. You don't get to choose not to pay taxes. You don't even get to demand services in return for them. You pay what the state says you have to pay and you get what they say you get in return, or else.
That said, in turn, one of the major things states do is prevent other states from existing, which they tend to spontaneously do. So if you've got a state that at least asks your opinion, albeit indirectly, on what everyone should have to pay and what should be given to them, then that's a huge step up from the kind that just takes everything and gives nothing, which is what you usually get by default when states spring up out of a power vacuum. And since all states thus far have no idea how to survive except by taking what they need at gunpoint from people, you've basically got the choice between going along with the demands of the nicer state that at least asks your opinion even if they're still free to ignore it, or refusing to pay and, at best if enough people go along with you, creating a power vacuum that's immediately replaced by another state that's going to fuck you without lube.
If you're going to get fucked one way or another, but one of them asks you how you want it, the choice is pretty clear. It doesn't make it okay, but it makes it unquestionably the better of the available alternatives.
(And then, given that there's basically no available option of not getting taxed at all, but that taxes are still a bad thing being done to people, it follows that the more preferable form of taxation is the least harmful kind, which thanks to marginal utility means the kind that takes more from those better able to bear it, and funds things that help those most in need. In other words, as a logical consequence taxation being evil but unfortunately necessary, progressive taxes to fund social programs is the best possible option).
If you fund the UBI by a flat tax on all income of (UBI amount) / (mean income) it is automatically revenue-neutral and everyone below the mean income (currently about 75% of the population in America) sees a net benefit, with most of the remaining population who are only slightly above the mean income paying only a small amount. "The average working man" benefits from an UBI. The people with incomes literally off the actual charts are the ones who pay for it.
You have Bob who can't get a job and has nothing to do but sit around and come up with reasons why he deserves a boat like Tom anyway.
And how is that different from now, except that Bob doesn't die from it? And is that what you'd prefer instead, that he just die... so that he won't be able to jealous?
I know, yeah, you'd prefer he get a job and earn his own damn boat, but you just stipulated that he can't.
If anything the jealousy would drive him to go out and get a job to get that boat, if he possibly could. And maybe with the UBI he can afford to take risks necessary to pursue a career that might eventually earn him one, instead of scrambling desperately after some job, any job, at the cost of his health and education and the pursuit of any interests that might have lead him to something more productive than ubering someone's taskrabbit for a fiver or whatever desperate poor people do to scrape by today.
Your error is in picturing a class of "UBI people" apart from "everyone else". The point of an UBI is it is UNIVERSAL. Everyone gets it. Everyone pays to fund it out of any income they make on top of it. All it does in the end is adjust everyone's incomes to be closer to the mean income.
A flat tax plus a basic income becomes a progressive tax in net, so progressive that it becomes negative below a certain income, approaching negative infinity and zero income, while approaching but never exceeding the fixed percent as income tends toward infinity. Gross income plus a fixed amount minus a fixed percent moves all net incomes closer to the same number by some percent, meaning those further above and below that number get pushed toward it harder, and those close to it get pushed toward it less. E.g.:
384,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 384,000) = 300,000, an effective tax rate of 21.875%
192,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 192,000) = 156,000, an effective tax rate of 18.75%
96,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 96,000) = 84,000, an effective tax rate of 12.5%
48,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 48,000) = 48,000, an effective tax rate of 0%
24,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 24,000) = 30,000, an effective tax rate of negative 25%
12,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 12,000) = 21,000, an effective tax rate of negative 75%
6,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 6,000) = 16,500, an effective tax rate of negative 175%
If you set the tax percent to the credit amount divided by the mean income (or better, conversely, fix the credit amount to the same percent of the mean income, so it goes up automatically over time), the math automatically works it out to be revenue neutral. In this example I've assumed a mean income of $48,000/year (which is a little lower than in reality but makes the math easier to show) and a basic income of $1000/mo or $12,000/year or 25% of that mean income.
No, you can (and should) collect the funds to pay the basic income from an income tax, just like you do to fund all social programs. Printing or borrowing money to fund it is a ridiculous straw man.
This is why I think the real, long-term solution to the conflict that split classical liberalism into (on the one hand) socialism and (on the other hand) libertarianism, is a kind of modified libertarianism that takes a good hard look at what kind of contracts are acceptable. Initially it was only contracts of rent and interest that I sought to invalidate, but then I started thinking maybe it's contracts more generally; a respect for property rights, the core of libertarianism, doesn't say anything about any power of people to create new rights or duties to bind each other. I used to phrase this idea as "libertarianism without contracts, only trades", but then realizing that it becomes really difficult to frame some basic services in terms of trades, which is to say exchanges of ownership -- if I pay you to rub my shoulders, what property has changes hands besides my money to you? -- had lead me to this more interesting current line of thought:
In philosophical and legal analysis, rights are divided up along two axes: active vs passive, and first-order vs second-order. A first-order active right is a liberty, which is just a right to do or not do something, with no corresponding duty or prohibition on anyone else. A first-order passive right is a claim, which is a right to have someone else do or not do something; this doesn't just mean positive rights, your right not to be punched in the nose is a claim against being punched in the nose, it prohibits others from doing so.
Meanwhile a second-order passive right is a claim against having your first-order rights changed, and is called an immunity; if you have an immunity, then you have some claims or liberties that cannot be changed. A second-order active right on the other hand is a liberty to modify first-order rights, and is called a power. Immunities limit powers and vice-versa, and likewise claims limit liberties and vice versa.
The general libertarian stance is, broadly speaking, one of maximal liberties except as limited by the claim to property (and your body is your own property, of course), and maximal immunities except as limited by the power to contract. Which is to say that you can do anything, except transgress upon someone else's property, unless you exercise your power to contract to change that, and enter into an exchange of new obligations with someone.
Except, on that first-order line, we have to make an exception to that exception or else we get anarcho-pacifism: if we are to allow for defense, then we have to have the liberty to act upon the property (their person is their property remember) of someone who would transgress against our property, otherwise someone assaulting you could claim that, in fighting back, you were committing ever bit as much a crime as them. So maximal liberty, except the claim to property, but with an exception to that exception restoring some further liberty again, limiting an attacker's claims.
So what then is the missing analogue for the second-order rights? Maximal immunities, except the power to contract, but with some exception to that exception restoring some further immunity again? I say the exception to the exception is for reflexive contracts: we do not have the power to prohibit ourselves from entering other contracts or requiring that we do so. That, in effect, limits all contracts to straight-up trades of goods and services, and does away with all kinds of problematic contracts such as exclusivity deals, non-competes, and rent and interest, among others I probably haven't thought of.
The elimination of rent and interest in particular then demolishes capitalism per se -- the system whereby wealth concentrates in the hands of the already-wealthy -- without requiring state intervention, in fact by requiring less of it because certain contracts are now unenforceable. This achieves socialism, but in a free market, resolving the contradiction that destroyed the progress of classical liberalism and stranded us in the quagmire we've been in for a century now.
Inflation is caused by an increase in money supply, not a redistribution of it.
Or would you say that if, by some miracle of the free market, people somehow ended up with more equal incomes naturally, that that would cause inflation and take away all the benefits of that? Because if so, the logical consequence of that would be that one person holding all the world's wealth would cause deflation sufficient to more than make up for the loss of income to everyone else. Sure everyone's poor but now everything's cheap so it makes up for it, right? It's the exact same mechanism just ratcheted the other direction so why not?
Here's a hint: in that extreme scenario, everything's only "cheap" for the one guy who owns everything. To everyone else, relative to their nonexistent incomes, it's expensive as hell. Ratchet it back the other way again, think about why that's happening, and you'll see why inflation won't eat all the benefits of greater income equality... except for the people at the top benefitting from the current inequality.
If it were a basic income instead, not only would that problem be more than solved, but there would be no point in differentiating between "contractors" and "employees" anyway. Everyone gets the same benefits either way.
It would already be much simpler to solve this problem with a basic income that everyone gets.
The biggest problem that I see with this proposal is, as others have pointed out, where do you draw the line between someone "doing gigs" and a sole proprietor of a business with a variety of clients? Or between either of those and an independent contractor working full time over years for one big client? Say the latter were entitled to benefits because he's close enough to a regular employee; if he then shifts to working, still full time altogether, for two different clients, each of them for years at a stretch, does he lose those benefits? If not then, then how many clients does he have to have before he stops being "basically an employee" and becomes "basically the owner of his own company with a lot of customers"? And then, between that sole proprietor and the "gig worker", what, does it depend on how many hours he's in business, or how much money he brings in, or how regular his customers are? Even if you decide where to draw those lines, how much overhead cost is there going to be just determining on which side of each line every single person in the workforce falls, before you even start talking about the money paid in actual benefits, and then the overhead to run all the separate benefits programs, etc?
Much, much simpler to just give everyone a simple cash payment (call it a tax credit, make tax payments due and refunds distributed monthly instead of annual, and you need no additional administration overhead), funded by a flat tax (of that credit amount over the mean income, so the math automatically balances out and it is revenue-neutral). Everyone gets a safety net with which to obtain the services provided by the otherwise free market, everyone still has incentive to work because everyone always wants more and there's no downside to making more money because you still get the same benefits, and everyone pays the same percentage of the additional money they earn to fund it, which has the overall effect of everyone making below the mean income (currently about 75% of the population) seeing some net benefit, people near the mean income seeing almost no effect whatsoever, and only the people at the extremely rarefied top of the income scale actually paying much of anything in net. It puts a centerward pressure on all incomes, driving them closer to the mean with a force proportional to their distance from the mean, meaning that as income inequality gets worse it pushes harder, but as it gets better it automatically pushes less. And it lets you let the entire rest of the market operate freely, cutting all kinds of expensive specialized benefits programs and things like minimum wage, resulting in an overall freer market, but with none of the usual downsides thereof.
This taking a while to play out is the best hope I eventually settled on after writing the above. It occurred to me that even were Pence implicated with Trump somehow and the both of them taken down, the presidency would then fall to Paul Ryan or else Orrin Hatch (and then on to Rex Tillerson and the rest of the Trump cabinet), which doesn't really accomplish much policy-wise. However if the Democrats can take back Congress next year, and then Trump/Pence are removed from office, then a Democrat would be next in line. Having a huge Trump scandal ongoing would, as you point out and hadn't previously occurred to me, increase the odds of Republicans losing Congress next year, which makes it even better to delay everything.
Which puts a kind of strange set of perverse incentives in place. If it begins to look like Trump and Pence are both going down sooner or later, it becomes in the Republican party's interest to make it happen sooner, and the Democratic party's interests to make it happen later. So, if impeachment proceedings begin, and if Pence is caught up in them too, then you end up with the perverse incentives for Democrats to try to delay them as long as possible until after next year's election, and perverse incentives for Republicans to crush their own executives right now before the Dems have a chance to retake Congress.
Oh yeah, the war-hawk, tough-on-crime, legislating-so-called-morality party is definitely the "less authoritarian", sure thing.
Which is not to say the Democrats are anything close to libertarian themselves, but they're certainly less vocal proponents of the worst kinds of authoritarianism than the Republicans are.
And I reply "what about?" so I can decide if it's important.
Too many people insist that their matter is important without having any idea what else I may be doing and how important that might be in comparison, so I can't just take anyone's word that it's important. In fact, people just saying something they won't tell me what it's about is important screams "not important!" the same way that someone saying "trust me" screams "untrustworthy!"
You know, in a way, the right's "zomg homophobic!" faux-reaction to this joke is kind of the same sort of thing. The people who are usually the last to call anyone out on homophobia, because they're often homophobic themselves, are calling out someone (Colbert) who's part of the group of people who do actually care about homophobia as homophobic because it's an insult they think will stick, because it employs the same rhetoric as the people it's attacking, turning their own ideas against them.
I feel like I see things like this pretty frequently in the modern discourse. The next example that pops to my mind is calling right-wingers "snowflakes", which is originally their rhetoric against left-wingers and so makes a good insult against them when it can be applied, because that's something they claim to care about.
And on the topic of the fine line between doing that and starting to actually incorporate your opponent's ideology into your own through your use of their rhetoric against them, that also seems like something I've seen more and more in recent years. Like how the right, though constantly attacking the idea of identity politics, have simultaneously adopted a straight-white-cis-male identity politics of their own. Particularly disturbing to me, on the left myself, is a faction of the left on the internet who frequently engage with the right-wing filth of places like 4chan and then increasingly seem more and more like that filth themselves.
I guess it's really just the old "gaze long into an abyss..." / "he who fights monsters..." thing rearing its head again.
And I find it degrading to be expected to drop everything else I'm juggling and give my undivided attention to a task I don't yet know warrants that treatment. So please go ahead and send a text or email, or leave a short voicemail, saying what it is you want to talk about -- you don't have to talk at length to the machine, just give me an informative subject line basically -- and I will try to find the time to give you that undivided attention at the appropriate level priority. But I can't afford to let just everyone force their conversation to the top of my never-empty queue of things I'm always having to spend my time on. It's my precious limited time and I'll decide how much to spend on what and when... and mystery conversations about I-know-not-what-yet can stay perpetually at the bottom of that list.
Completely the opposite. Eisenhower was further to the left of any politician in recent memory. Reagan and Nixon were further to the left than most Democrats today. The whole spectrum has moved to the right in absolute terms -- but both left and right have moved further from their common center, so from a parochial point of view ignorant of history and the wider world, it looks like the left has moved left, relative to the current center, which is far right of where it used to be.
VoiceMail is useless anyways. If someone really needs to get hold of you, they will call again.
While probably true, it's also true that if someone really needs to get hold of you, they will leave a voicemail. This makes ignoring all calls and only checking voicemail a good way to screen out pointless time-wasting calls. If it's important there will be a voicemail, if there's no voicemail it obviously wasn't that important (or they messages you another way instead).
There are already a plethora of websites where users can document obnoxious phone calls (and other users can look up numbers to see who is this unknown caller calling you, and read those complaints about it). Seriously just search the web for any random unknown caller's number and you'll find tons of them.
Unless these prerecorded ringless voicemails don't have a callback number associated with them somehow, those existing sites would serve that function just fine.
like how all the tiny hands jokes aren't parvamanuphobic or actually suggesting that there's anything unusual about Trump's hands even, it's just a know sore spot with him, a hangup about being thought to have small hands, which makes it a good insult against him whether or not he really does and whether or not there'd be anything the matter if he did.
That's not how science works. You don't get to make an unsupported assertion of a positive result and then challenge others to prove you wrong.
Actually, that's very much how science works. Nothing is ever proven so, it's only ever proven not. That doesn't mean anyone else has to believe every assertion anyone makes if it doesn't seem likely to them, and the burden is on the person making the assertion to change others' minds. But conversely, the burden of proof is on you if you want them (the person making the assertion) to change their mind. The default state of affairs is "who knows? anyone might be as right as anyone else", and all you can do from there is show that some of those possible opinions are wrong. So if you think someone's opinion is wrong, show that it is, else accept that it might not be. That's how science works.
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The problem is that in many places the interest you will pay on a mortgage for the cheapest available home with only 3% down is higher than the cheapest available rental alternative. You can't buy small enough homes. People are living out of bedrooms in other people's houses and struggling to make rent even there. You can't buy one of those. I'm living in a tiny mobile home that I own outright... on rented land, a tiny parcel of rented land the like of which you can't buy anywhere. The mere interest on a mortgage on an empty normal-sized lot to park my tiny home on (if you could get mortgages on empty lots, or park mobile homes on them, neither of which you can) would exceed the rent I pay here. So I'm stuck renting until I can save up the hundreds of thousands of dollars to put enough down on a house that the interest alone on the consequent mortgage doesn't push the date I can finish paying it off even further past what should be retirement age but already won't.
You assume our parents own homes too.
You're ignoring the fact that the people receiving UBI (everybody) are the same people paying for it, so most of those taxes are cancelled out by the UBI they pay for. People in the middle neither pay nor receive much of all in net. The many people at the bottom get a lot as a percent of their income, while a few people at the very top pay a little as a percent of their income to fund it.
See for a numerical examples this post I just made in a different thread showing approximately the net cost/benefit to people with different incomes.
Well there's a catch-22 if I ever saw one. Poor people support "socialism"? They're just greedy entitled moochers who want free stuff. Rich people (who would actually be paying for it) support it? They're detached elites free to say what people should do since nothing can hurt them anyway.
FWIW I make almost exactly the mean personal income for the United States and I support an UBI, precisely because since I'm average it will barely affect me, if I should end up poor again it would help me, and if I ever ended up rich I would be able to easily afford to pay for it.
Nobody is talking about just adding X to everyone's income and calling it done. You add X to everyone's income and take Y% from everyone's income to pay for it. The money supply doesn't increase, so there isn't inflation; the money just shuffles around into more hands. The mean income remains the same, but everyone's individual income gets closer to it.
If you check my comment history you'll see that I am extremely pro-UBI and generally pro-social-programs and anti-capitalist, but that said...
The important difference between paying taxes and paying bills is that you can choose not to pay your bills if you're ok with not getting the services in return. It's a voluntary trade. You don't get to choose not to pay taxes. You don't even get to demand services in return for them. You pay what the state says you have to pay and you get what they say you get in return, or else.
That said, in turn, one of the major things states do is prevent other states from existing, which they tend to spontaneously do. So if you've got a state that at least asks your opinion, albeit indirectly, on what everyone should have to pay and what should be given to them, then that's a huge step up from the kind that just takes everything and gives nothing, which is what you usually get by default when states spring up out of a power vacuum. And since all states thus far have no idea how to survive except by taking what they need at gunpoint from people, you've basically got the choice between going along with the demands of the nicer state that at least asks your opinion even if they're still free to ignore it, or refusing to pay and, at best if enough people go along with you, creating a power vacuum that's immediately replaced by another state that's going to fuck you without lube.
If you're going to get fucked one way or another, but one of them asks you how you want it, the choice is pretty clear. It doesn't make it okay, but it makes it unquestionably the better of the available alternatives.
(And then, given that there's basically no available option of not getting taxed at all, but that taxes are still a bad thing being done to people, it follows that the more preferable form of taxation is the least harmful kind, which thanks to marginal utility means the kind that takes more from those better able to bear it, and funds things that help those most in need. In other words, as a logical consequence taxation being evil but unfortunately necessary, progressive taxes to fund social programs is the best possible option).
If you fund the UBI by a flat tax on all income of (UBI amount) / (mean income) it is automatically revenue-neutral and everyone below the mean income (currently about 75% of the population in America) sees a net benefit, with most of the remaining population who are only slightly above the mean income paying only a small amount. "The average working man" benefits from an UBI. The people with incomes literally off the actual charts are the ones who pay for it.
You have Bob who can't get a job and has nothing to do but sit around and come up with reasons why he deserves a boat like Tom anyway.
And how is that different from now, except that Bob doesn't die from it? And is that what you'd prefer instead, that he just die... so that he won't be able to jealous?
I know, yeah, you'd prefer he get a job and earn his own damn boat, but you just stipulated that he can't.
If anything the jealousy would drive him to go out and get a job to get that boat, if he possibly could. And maybe with the UBI he can afford to take risks necessary to pursue a career that might eventually earn him one, instead of scrambling desperately after some job, any job, at the cost of his health and education and the pursuit of any interests that might have lead him to something more productive than ubering someone's taskrabbit for a fiver or whatever desperate poor people do to scrape by today.
Your error is in picturing a class of "UBI people" apart from "everyone else". The point of an UBI is it is UNIVERSAL. Everyone gets it. Everyone pays to fund it out of any income they make on top of it. All it does in the end is adjust everyone's incomes to be closer to the mean income.
A flat tax plus a basic income becomes a progressive tax in net, so progressive that it becomes negative below a certain income, approaching negative infinity and zero income, while approaching but never exceeding the fixed percent as income tends toward infinity. Gross income plus a fixed amount minus a fixed percent moves all net incomes closer to the same number by some percent, meaning those further above and below that number get pushed toward it harder, and those close to it get pushed toward it less. E.g.:
384,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 384,000) = 300,000, an effective tax rate of 21.875%
192,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 192,000) = 156,000, an effective tax rate of 18.75%
96,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 96,000) = 84,000, an effective tax rate of 12.5%
48,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 48,000) = 48,000, an effective tax rate of 0%
24,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 24,000) = 30,000, an effective tax rate of negative 25%
12,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 12,000) = 21,000, an effective tax rate of negative 75%
6,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 6,000) = 16,500, an effective tax rate of negative 175%
If you set the tax percent to the credit amount divided by the mean income (or better, conversely, fix the credit amount to the same percent of the mean income, so it goes up automatically over time), the math automatically works it out to be revenue neutral. In this example I've assumed a mean income of $48,000/year (which is a little lower than in reality but makes the math easier to show) and a basic income of $1000/mo or $12,000/year or 25% of that mean income.
No, you can (and should) collect the funds to pay the basic income from an income tax, just like you do to fund all social programs. Printing or borrowing money to fund it is a ridiculous straw man.
This is why I think the real, long-term solution to the conflict that split classical liberalism into (on the one hand) socialism and (on the other hand) libertarianism, is a kind of modified libertarianism that takes a good hard look at what kind of contracts are acceptable. Initially it was only contracts of rent and interest that I sought to invalidate, but then I started thinking maybe it's contracts more generally; a respect for property rights, the core of libertarianism, doesn't say anything about any power of people to create new rights or duties to bind each other. I used to phrase this idea as "libertarianism without contracts, only trades", but then realizing that it becomes really difficult to frame some basic services in terms of trades, which is to say exchanges of ownership -- if I pay you to rub my shoulders, what property has changes hands besides my money to you? -- had lead me to this more interesting current line of thought:
In philosophical and legal analysis, rights are divided up along two axes: active vs passive, and first-order vs second-order. A first-order active right is a liberty, which is just a right to do or not do something, with no corresponding duty or prohibition on anyone else. A first-order passive right is a claim, which is a right to have someone else do or not do something; this doesn't just mean positive rights, your right not to be punched in the nose is a claim against being punched in the nose, it prohibits others from doing so.
Meanwhile a second-order passive right is a claim against having your first-order rights changed, and is called an immunity; if you have an immunity, then you have some claims or liberties that cannot be changed. A second-order active right on the other hand is a liberty to modify first-order rights, and is called a power. Immunities limit powers and vice-versa, and likewise claims limit liberties and vice versa.
The general libertarian stance is, broadly speaking, one of maximal liberties except as limited by the claim to property (and your body is your own property, of course), and maximal immunities except as limited by the power to contract. Which is to say that you can do anything, except transgress upon someone else's property, unless you exercise your power to contract to change that, and enter into an exchange of new obligations with someone.
Except, on that first-order line, we have to make an exception to that exception or else we get anarcho-pacifism: if we are to allow for defense, then we have to have the liberty to act upon the property (their person is their property remember) of someone who would transgress against our property, otherwise someone assaulting you could claim that, in fighting back, you were committing ever bit as much a crime as them. So maximal liberty, except the claim to property, but with an exception to that exception restoring some further liberty again, limiting an attacker's claims.
So what then is the missing analogue for the second-order rights? Maximal immunities, except the power to contract, but with some exception to that exception restoring some further immunity again? I say the exception to the exception is for reflexive contracts: we do not have the power to prohibit ourselves from entering other contracts or requiring that we do so. That, in effect, limits all contracts to straight-up trades of goods and services, and does away with all kinds of problematic contracts such as exclusivity deals, non-competes, and rent and interest, among others I probably haven't thought of.
The elimination of rent and interest in particular then demolishes capitalism per se -- the system whereby wealth concentrates in the hands of the already-wealthy -- without requiring state intervention, in fact by requiring less of it because certain contracts are now unenforceable. This achieves socialism, but in a free market, resolving the contradiction that destroyed the progress of classical liberalism and stranded us in the quagmire we've been in for a century now.
Inflation is caused by an increase in money supply, not a redistribution of it.
Or would you say that if, by some miracle of the free market, people somehow ended up with more equal incomes naturally, that that would cause inflation and take away all the benefits of that? Because if so, the logical consequence of that would be that one person holding all the world's wealth would cause deflation sufficient to more than make up for the loss of income to everyone else. Sure everyone's poor but now everything's cheap so it makes up for it, right? It's the exact same mechanism just ratcheted the other direction so why not?
Here's a hint: in that extreme scenario, everything's only "cheap" for the one guy who owns everything. To everyone else, relative to their nonexistent incomes, it's expensive as hell. Ratchet it back the other way again, think about why that's happening, and you'll see why inflation won't eat all the benefits of greater income equality... except for the people at the top benefitting from the current inequality.
If it were a basic income instead, not only would that problem be more than solved, but there would be no point in differentiating between "contractors" and "employees" anyway. Everyone gets the same benefits either way.
It would already be much simpler to solve this problem with a basic income that everyone gets.
The biggest problem that I see with this proposal is, as others have pointed out, where do you draw the line between someone "doing gigs" and a sole proprietor of a business with a variety of clients? Or between either of those and an independent contractor working full time over years for one big client? Say the latter were entitled to benefits because he's close enough to a regular employee; if he then shifts to working, still full time altogether, for two different clients, each of them for years at a stretch, does he lose those benefits? If not then, then how many clients does he have to have before he stops being "basically an employee" and becomes "basically the owner of his own company with a lot of customers"? And then, between that sole proprietor and the "gig worker", what, does it depend on how many hours he's in business, or how much money he brings in, or how regular his customers are? Even if you decide where to draw those lines, how much overhead cost is there going to be just determining on which side of each line every single person in the workforce falls, before you even start talking about the money paid in actual benefits, and then the overhead to run all the separate benefits programs, etc?
Much, much simpler to just give everyone a simple cash payment (call it a tax credit, make tax payments due and refunds distributed monthly instead of annual, and you need no additional administration overhead), funded by a flat tax (of that credit amount over the mean income, so the math automatically balances out and it is revenue-neutral). Everyone gets a safety net with which to obtain the services provided by the otherwise free market, everyone still has incentive to work because everyone always wants more and there's no downside to making more money because you still get the same benefits, and everyone pays the same percentage of the additional money they earn to fund it, which has the overall effect of everyone making below the mean income (currently about 75% of the population) seeing some net benefit, people near the mean income seeing almost no effect whatsoever, and only the people at the extremely rarefied top of the income scale actually paying much of anything in net. It puts a centerward pressure on all incomes, driving them closer to the mean with a force proportional to their distance from the mean, meaning that as income inequality gets worse it pushes harder, but as it gets better it automatically pushes less. And it lets you let the entire rest of the market operate freely, cutting all kinds of expensive specialized benefits programs and things like minimum wage, resulting in an overall freer market, but with none of the usual downsides thereof.
This taking a while to play out is the best hope I eventually settled on after writing the above. It occurred to me that even were Pence implicated with Trump somehow and the both of them taken down, the presidency would then fall to Paul Ryan or else Orrin Hatch (and then on to Rex Tillerson and the rest of the Trump cabinet), which doesn't really accomplish much policy-wise. However if the Democrats can take back Congress next year, and then Trump/Pence are removed from office, then a Democrat would be next in line. Having a huge Trump scandal ongoing would, as you point out and hadn't previously occurred to me, increase the odds of Republicans losing Congress next year, which makes it even better to delay everything.
Which puts a kind of strange set of perverse incentives in place. If it begins to look like Trump and Pence are both going down sooner or later, it becomes in the Republican party's interest to make it happen sooner, and the Democratic party's interests to make it happen later. So, if impeachment proceedings begin, and if Pence is caught up in them too, then you end up with the perverse incentives for Democrats to try to delay them as long as possible until after next year's election, and perverse incentives for Republicans to crush their own executives right now before the Dems have a chance to retake Congress.
Oh yeah, the war-hawk, tough-on-crime, legislating-so-called-morality party is definitely the "less authoritarian", sure thing.
Which is not to say the Democrats are anything close to libertarian themselves, but they're certainly less vocal proponents of the worst kinds of authoritarianism than the Republicans are.
And I reply "what about?" so I can decide if it's important.
Too many people insist that their matter is important without having any idea what else I may be doing and how important that might be in comparison, so I can't just take anyone's word that it's important. In fact, people just saying something they won't tell me what it's about is important screams "not important!" the same way that someone saying "trust me" screams "untrustworthy!"
You know, in a way, the right's "zomg homophobic!" faux-reaction to this joke is kind of the same sort of thing. The people who are usually the last to call anyone out on homophobia, because they're often homophobic themselves, are calling out someone (Colbert) who's part of the group of people who do actually care about homophobia as homophobic because it's an insult they think will stick, because it employs the same rhetoric as the people it's attacking, turning their own ideas against them.
I feel like I see things like this pretty frequently in the modern discourse. The next example that pops to my mind is calling right-wingers "snowflakes", which is originally their rhetoric against left-wingers and so makes a good insult against them when it can be applied, because that's something they claim to care about.
And on the topic of the fine line between doing that and starting to actually incorporate your opponent's ideology into your own through your use of their rhetoric against them, that also seems like something I've seen more and more in recent years. Like how the right, though constantly attacking the idea of identity politics, have simultaneously adopted a straight-white-cis-male identity politics of their own. Particularly disturbing to me, on the left myself, is a faction of the left on the internet who frequently engage with the right-wing filth of places like 4chan and then increasingly seem more and more like that filth themselves.
I guess it's really just the old "gaze long into an abyss..." / "he who fights monsters..." thing rearing its head again.
And I find it degrading to be expected to drop everything else I'm juggling and give my undivided attention to a task I don't yet know warrants that treatment. So please go ahead and send a text or email, or leave a short voicemail, saying what it is you want to talk about -- you don't have to talk at length to the machine, just give me an informative subject line basically -- and I will try to find the time to give you that undivided attention at the appropriate level priority. But I can't afford to let just everyone force their conversation to the top of my never-empty queue of things I'm always having to spend my time on. It's my precious limited time and I'll decide how much to spend on what and when... and mystery conversations about I-know-not-what-yet can stay perpetually at the bottom of that list.
Today's Democrats used to be called "Communists"
Completely the opposite. Eisenhower was further to the left of any politician in recent memory. Reagan and Nixon were further to the left than most Democrats today. The whole spectrum has moved to the right in absolute terms -- but both left and right have moved further from their common center, so from a parochial point of view ignorant of history and the wider world, it looks like the left has moved left, relative to the current center, which is far right of where it used to be.
See the many sourced answers here for more details:
https://www.quora.com/The-Left...
VoiceMail is useless anyways. If someone really needs to get hold of you, they will call again.
While probably true, it's also true that if someone really needs to get hold of you, they will leave a voicemail. This makes ignoring all calls and only checking voicemail a good way to screen out pointless time-wasting calls. If it's important there will be a voicemail, if there's no voicemail it obviously wasn't that important (or they messages you another way instead).
There are already a plethora of websites where users can document obnoxious phone calls (and other users can look up numbers to see who is this unknown caller calling you, and read those complaints about it). Seriously just search the web for any random unknown caller's number and you'll find tons of them.
Unless these prerecorded ringless voicemails don't have a callback number associated with them somehow, those existing sites would serve that function just fine.
like how all the tiny hands jokes aren't parvamanuphobic or actually suggesting that there's anything unusual about Trump's hands even, it's just a know sore spot with him, a hangup about being thought to have small hands, which makes it a good insult against him whether or not he really does and whether or not there'd be anything the matter if he did.
That's not how science works. You don't get to make an unsupported assertion of a positive result and then challenge others to prove you wrong.
Actually, that's very much how science works. Nothing is ever proven so, it's only ever proven not. That doesn't mean anyone else has to believe every assertion anyone makes if it doesn't seem likely to them, and the burden is on the person making the assertion to change others' minds. But conversely, the burden of proof is on you if you want them (the person making the assertion) to change their mind. The default state of affairs is "who knows? anyone might be as right as anyone else", and all you can do from there is show that some of those possible opinions are wrong. So if you think someone's opinion is wrong, show that it is, else accept that it might not be. That's how science works.