Society says even the poorest people prepared to put in a day's work should be able to afford shelter, food, etc.
Sadly, "society" says no such thing. And even if they did, trying to address it only on the wage side is a losing proposition; you will never decrease the cost of something by giving someone more currency units to pay for it; in fact, you will only increase its price in that case (look at US medical costs, college tuition, housing, and even equities and commodities in general).
The only way to decrease the cost of something with constant or increasing demand is to increase supply faster than demand (through competition or productivity or legal fiat), and generally this is the part "society" forgets when it tries to improve standard of living through minimum wage increases.
I can't stand online shopping for most goods for one reason: I can't inspect items before purchasing them. (Incidentally, retailers are starting to learn there are massive costs associated with online store returns for this reason.)
Now, if I'm buying something like a video or book or perhaps a particular piece of electronics, where there is no ambiguity in the product, online shopping is great. But if it's a tool, or a piece of clothing, or a piece of furniture, I really really want to be able to look at the items before purchasing.
Things like build quality, fit and finish, etc. are not things that are put in a spec sheet in an online store.
Generally speaking, that's correct. But when most people think of capitalism they forget that just essentially means private ownership of capital, not "profit is more important than anything else." The issues we have with "capitalism" is that it's not just merely about private ownership of capital - it's about the other restrictions we place on capital which tend to concentrate capital in the hands of a few. Capitalism itself doesn't have to do this; in fact, it can only do this if the market has inefficiencies.
Consider there are two types of profit from any investment: The first is what I would call "true" productivity, which is "I use this tool (capital) to make it easier to farm, meaning I get more output per unit work and unit land." This is inherent profit, which will drive costs and prices down. This type of profit is what made the 20th century United States the "capitalism poster child." Because it drops prices of goods, everyone benefits.
The other type of profit, though, is only possible in inefficient markets: someone produces something and gets paid more than it costs to make it, because competition can't come in fast enough to keep the prices low. "Buy low sell high" types of profits fit into this category: they do not change the amount of real wealth (goods or services) in the economy, but simply allocate more wealth to a particular group or individual. This type of profit is notable in that it is not associated with a reduction in prices, so overall society tends not to benefit.
In an environment where the second type of profit dominates, those that are getting a larger share of real wealth can then purchase truly productive assets, essentially meaning that all benefits of capital go to a smaller and smaller group.
One approach to address this, though it would likely never be implemented, would be no taxes on production of wealth (agriculture, manufacturing, etc.) and taxes only on trade. This means that unless you were the original producer of a good selling that good, you are taxed on it. This would avoid penalizing producers, and encourage traders to stop trading and produce instead.
Another approach would be to tax income in proportion to total wealth. That is, instead of having income tax and property tax, you would instead have tax only on income but the tax rate, instead of being based on income, would be based on amount of owned property*. So if you have no accumulated wealth and a meager job, your taxes are zero, but if you have a large amount of wealth but no income (e.g., retired) you would also have no tax. This would naturally counter wealth accumulation; eventually a property owner who had tons of wealth would have every bit of his income taxed, making it not worthwhile to accumulate more wealth. Meanwhile, someone who has very little wealth but suddenly has a large income, would have little of that income taxed and so would be able to accumulate capital.
*In practice this is a little tricky, since defining what is "income" and what is "owned property" would have be done carefully to avoid loopholes.
Those wind turbines have to be put somewhere, that land has to be leased, the power has to be moved, and someone had to build and support those huge turbines.
Right, but that is my point: any power system requires land costs. And electrical machines and distribution, etc. are basically the same no matter what the prime mover is.
So my question for wind is - why is a tower and some blades and some brakes and what should be a trivially simple control system so expensive compared to a combustion machine?
For solar there are a bit more pieces, but inverters and such aren't "rocket science" and you would think they should be dime-a-dozen by now, and you don't even have moving pieces. But solar PV is still relatively expensive, and solar thermal is kind of the worst of all worlds (I understand why that is expensive, you need lots of land plus a thermal plant).
I guess it's just wind that baffles me - why people pay so much for turbine machinery especially.
But maybe my question is bigger than just "power" - why is construction so darn expensive in general, when labor costs are essentially flat and we have increased automation? I'm guessing it all boils down to regulatory capture, because the barriers to market entry are so high.
I maintain that's an consequence of choosing to try and build "utility-scale" windmills (like the 500MW, 200m-long blade beast I recently read about) instead of much simpler, smaller "neighborhood-scale" supplies. If it costs 10x as much to make a giant windmill with 5% more efficiency than the equivalent collection of smaller, cheaper windmills, it's economically terrible to choose the giant one. It's not like heat-engine plants where paying for efficiency makes sense because you're reducing operating costs.
What puzzles me about the economics of solar and wind is how solar and wind can cost so much even though they have minimal running costs. That is, all the cost of solar and wind is fixed cost (plus maintenance); there is no recurring fuel cost.
Especially with wind, I don't understand why costs are so high, except for the fact that all the manufacturers have to do is price their product just slightly below conventional energy; it's the old "price what the market will bear" rather than "let's price it at what it costs, so people will get the benefits faster" tradeoff.
That said - I'd rather my tax dollars be invested in "clean" energy than in other things.
I read it as more like "quality of life isn't necessarily proportional to amount of hours worked, but rather it is exceedingly low below an amount which is essentially working all the time, and even then it may still not be great depending on the type of work performed."
There are many many reasons for this, including things like: Health insurance tied to "full time" employment. Mortgages having such long terms with fixed payments. The tax structure. Slow changes in wages / salaries compared to changes in prices of "everyday" goods like food and fuel. General population growth. The list goes on and on.
I don't count any of those things as AI, although they are components of AI since they are all pieces of (or combinations of) observing and interacting with the environment.
To me, "true AI" is something that can decide to do something other than that for which it was constructed. Can AlphaGo do anything other than play Go? If you tell it to play Go, can it decide, "No thanks, I'd rather cure cancer, it's a more rewarding problem"?
While AlphaGo and the like are very fantastic achievements, I don't think they are intelligence - they are "merely" very effective specialized problem-solving machines.
That's one thing I've always disliked about Windows updates. Why can't they put a description in Windows Update instead of making us look up KBxxxx? It takes forever to click on them and see what each one claims to do.
This is kind of always what bugs me - because global warming isn't actually "global". You even stated it - even if the global average goes up, large regions could indeed have lower average temperatures over an extended period of time.
My question has always been - is the global average an actual meaningful metric, or do we really need to look at something a little more fine-grained? The globe is a big place, so simply averaging over the entire thing is losing a lot of information.
I'm also curious as to the nature of the increase in average. For instance, I would wager that there are effects that are important that don't change the average: For instance, last summer where I live the average temp (simple [high+low]/2) was about the same as the year before, but the overnight temperatures were much hotter - that is, instead of being 60F night 95F day, they were 70F night 85F day.
So in a similar vein, I'd say the effects of climate going from say 60 low -> 90 high to 60 low -> 95 high would be different than 60 -> 90 to 62.5 -> 92.5, even though both are a 2.5 deg increase in average.
Have you ever considered what it takes to "make your own job" even at, say, a consistent minimum wage level? It's not just that you have to afford the risks associated with competing in a crowded market, but you have an increasingly uphill battle against regulation and having enough to stay alive. It's even worse if you already have fixed costs based on a job that has suddenly gone away - I think you may be severely underestimating the personal financial risk to most people.
The current state of the world economy is such that it is actually very difficult to make your own job and have it be a going concern. Part of it is that we live in such an advanced economy already (close to saturation on most things, unless you get lucky) and are also under a fairly heavy regulatory environment (tax law, ACA, business licenses, inspections, etc.).
You don't need a computer at all for garage doors. And technically you don't even need electricity either, although I do admit that automatic garage door openers do make life easier.
As an added bonus, if you have a manual garage door, you don't have weird failure modes or resetting the manual release if there is a power outage.
No, that's just a symptom. A competitor selling a product for prices lower than you are (due to better technology or malice or whatever) so you don't have any sales is only a problem if you need sales to survive. I would say the real problem is that we are stuck in a system where most people are required to trade goods or services in order to obtain their basic necessities. That is, even if you've obtained the basics, you can't usually keep them unless you trade with others.
This means that, even outside "non-social" disruptions like a drought or something that reduces crop yields, you've got the extra burden of always having to trade to produce extra to pay taxes, etc.
This means that any disruption to your trade threatens survival - doesn't matter if it's due to globalism or the guy next door. Somehow we've got to make things more robust to changes in demand, so that standards of living can be maintained even if demand decreases.
I think it's worthwhile to distinguish between individual cases of harassment like that and general situations of "micro aggression" or "trigger words" or whatever it is that is going around these days.
The differences between "this seems to be a case of actual targeted harassment" versus "this type of gathering and speech is intentionally divisive (e.g., KKK meetings as an extreme example) versus "we don't want to let people talk about this, because someone might be offended" are huge, and trying to lump them together is problematic.
Really, how hard is it to act professional in a workplace and refrain from speech or actions that someone might find harassing
I think this is the crux of the matter - anyone is able to claim that anything makes them feel harassed, and the speaker is always instantly assumed to be in the wrong. Gone is the expectation of years past where you are taught that there is always going to be some level of bull in the world and you just ignore it and move on, because it really is just bull.
The ability to ignore things is a useful survival skill, and it seems we're losing it - and society really is going to suffer. People just need to raise the bar a little bit - unless something is a pattern, and is consistently directed at the same people, just ignore it and spend your energy on more productive things.
But systemic oppression? Yes please let's work on getting rid of it! But not through more oppression and trial-by-internet.
Well, yes that is a good question: which humans' values?
There is indeed no one set of values which "all" humans have, except perhaps "I wish people didn't do things I don' like," but I don't know if that really is a "value system."
But your examples illustrate an interesting point - why are the values "in Mein Kampf or like the ones in pretty much all religious books" better or worse than any other values? That is - by what value system would it be possible to evaluate those values? What (if anything) puts that value system in a privileged position to judge the other value systems?
So you either believe there is an "absolute" value system by which to judge value systems, or you don't - and you end up with Mein Kampf (or one of its influences, der Wille zur Macht).
This, this, so much this... it is so sad that people don't realize this. It's not even the fact that the Constitution is getting stomped on - it's the fact that people don't even know why that's a bad thing.
Well, Japan is suffering from population (and therefore overall demand) collapse; deflation makes sense there if production is consistently higher than demand.
And I don't care what the Fed or any other central bank is doing: Paying people to take your money (negative interest rates) is a completely irrational act, and betrays one of the core tenets of economics, that of rational actors. As the saying goes, "You may give someone an apple in exchange for two apples in the future, you might give someone an apple in exchange for an apple in the future, but you're a fool if you give someone two apples now in exchange for one apple in the future."
I understand that negative interest rates are seen as just another way to increase money supply (and not without limits; they are only an artificial result of the cost of holding cash). The problem is increased money supply can either go to increased consumption / production, or it can simply go into bank accounts and inflated asset prices. Based on the past 8 years, where do you think the existing money supply increases have gone? Why is there any rational belief that negative interest rates will change that?
Don't confuse price drops with deflation - in fact, if prices are dropping due to increases in productivity (and competition) that is progress, not deflation. Right now we have price drops in equities and oil, but just about everything else has its prices increasing. (And yes, I know that drops in commodities and equities can trigger layoffs and such, reducing demand and causing actual deflation).
But, deflation is usually only bad because of long-term debt or if you are a producer of durable goods; if we had a different debt repayment system, especially for consumer debt, deflation would not be as big a concern and would be fairly self-correcting. See my other posts in this thread that cover that - if you could change your debt payments as fast as demand changes, there would be far less impact.
Ok, perhaps it's not technically Moral Hazard; I might have gotten my phrases wrong. But the point should have been clear: you either take wealth by force (or threat of force) or you let your fellow man starve to death. Both of those are "moral" issues.
Secondly - VAT is terrible. It punishes consumption and doesn't really do anything to "naturally" reallocate wealth to society. And a 23% VAT is really quite high, especially if you are a lower-income person. If you spend 100% of your income on goods, you'd be paying at least 23% - far above the current levels for lower tax brackets. And if you say, well, there will be an exemption up to some level of income... then you are right back where our current taxes are, arbitrarily picking threshold values.
You've also said "UBI needs to be controlled so that it doesn't outgrow the productive surplus" - also terrible. Any time you have a system that isn't self-correcting, you've got an issue. A good system needs to be self-correcting without intervention, because if it requires intervention then it will be abused.
When it comes to UBI, my fundamental problem is still this: who decides what the "living wage" is? How do you prevent prices for those basic goods from rising? Partly this goes back to the "intervention" concept - if you have to do analyses to calculate a "cost of living" increase, you've already lost the war.
Now, I agree that it would be very nice to see power shift back toward the masses from the few, but I would do it by ensuring that labor always earns capital so that all laborers are automatically capital owners. I would not try to threaten the capital owners.
Perhaps something like if a corporation hires you, it must include shares as part of your wage in addition to cash (so no "stock only" compensation). Or perhaps, in the interest of UBI, a corporation must have a percentage of its shares (maybe 10%? something significant, but non-controlling) owned by the public.
You could do other things too, like limit mortgage terms to 10 or 15 years (long-term debt is dangerous), or mandate that wage reductions must occur before wholesale layoffs (10 jobs at 90% pay is arguably better for society than 9 jobs at 100% and 1 job at 0).
There are other radical things, like all prices could be done in % of your salary for a time period, rather than in a fixed nominal amount.
High employment at reduced hours (the supposed solution to pending 50% unemployment) can't work unless prices for things is allowed to drop, because basically nobody can afford their current basket of goods and services on 50% of their current income.
UBI can't work unless you do other corresponding crazy things like force the maximum term on a mortgage to 5 years, and don't flip out when housing costs drop dramatically...
Or perhaps if you force companies to keep employing people rather than lay them off when productivity increases.
Basically I'm looking for real solutions that don't involve use of force or government takeover (or mob rule) that make mathematical sense.
If you know of such a formula or plan... I'm really interested to hear it, because it's beyond my capacity to think of it.
Ah, ok, I think I understand from where you are coming now. But there's a caveat that "society as a whole" doesn't really produce anything - a large collection of individual producers produce things (regardless if you have private or public ownership of means of production).
So I agree that we do have sufficient current production to distribute that production to everyone, but when you get out of the aggregate and down to the individual producer, how do you avoid moral hazard - both from the standpoint of those taking the production from those who produce and from the standpoint of the producers, resisting giving to those with a need and no way to repay it?
These are real questions by the way, not rhetorical...
Right - but when I talk about wealth I talk about actual wealth, like food or a factory - not money.
Most "wealthy" people today don't actually control means of production, so they would be hard-pressed to actually survive. Especially because they probably don't have anything for which famers really would want to trade.
Also - most wealthy people do not force people to give them large chunks of their money - they get their money by large amounts of people giving them small amounts.
I'm not sure what you mean by people being forced to give the fruits of their labor to the rich - it's partly voluntary, as in, choosing to work for a company because it's easier to get a job for an existing company than trying to start your own. Now - I do say partly voluntary, because it is indeed very difficult to start a new company and have it be successful, but there is still some choice involved. If there truly is indeed no choice*, then we should address that issue. I'd much rather see that before forcibly taking people's wealth via taxes.
*Some examples here would be, zoning boards preventing you from growing your own food, deed restrictions, and other regulatory barriers to entry.
The problem with that experiment is that it wasn't done in an enclosed system - that population was able to import goods and services from outside its local geographic area.
Does that study include a trade balance change for the population, or a change in real wealth produced?
Without seeing that data, I would wager that population group became more of a resource sink.
Yes, I can definitely see benefits of lower work stress and the like, but did the population that was given "mincome" maintain its previous output, or did it reduce? I didn't see that in the Forget report.
In order for a UBI to make sense, you need A) Sufficient economic surplus that you can actually afford to pay one and B) Not be labor constrained.
Sort of - but who is the "you" that is affording to pay the UBI? Is it those people who control the means of production?
Who is going to make them keep producing things for which they don't get any benefit? If you are not forcing someone to produce, it boils down to what the owners of means of production see as a reasonable price (in terms of excess production) to pay instead of having to erect private defenses to fend off the mobs that want to take control over the means of production.
So you actually do end up with an "unfair" system (for some definitions of fairness) where people who are willing to work do indeed simply give the fruit of their labor to people who don't want to work.
But what is more "fair" (if fairness is your goal): forcing people to give the fruit of their labor to others, or simply letting physics and chemistry take its course and have people who are unwilling to produce anything die off due to lack of resources?
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Sadly, "society" says no such thing. And even if they did, trying to address it only on the wage side is a losing proposition; you will never decrease the cost of something by giving someone more currency units to pay for it; in fact, you will only increase its price in that case (look at US medical costs, college tuition, housing, and even equities and commodities in general).
The only way to decrease the cost of something with constant or increasing demand is to increase supply faster than demand (through competition or productivity or legal fiat), and generally this is the part "society" forgets when it tries to improve standard of living through minimum wage increases.
I can't stand online shopping for most goods for one reason: I can't inspect items before purchasing them. (Incidentally, retailers are starting to learn there are massive costs associated with online store returns for this reason.)
Now, if I'm buying something like a video or book or perhaps a particular piece of electronics, where there is no ambiguity in the product, online shopping is great. But if it's a tool, or a piece of clothing, or a piece of furniture, I really really want to be able to look at the items before purchasing.
Things like build quality, fit and finish, etc. are not things that are put in a spec sheet in an online store.
Generally speaking, that's correct. But when most people think of capitalism they forget that just essentially means private ownership of capital, not "profit is more important than anything else." The issues we have with "capitalism" is that it's not just merely about private ownership of capital - it's about the other restrictions we place on capital which tend to concentrate capital in the hands of a few. Capitalism itself doesn't have to do this; in fact, it can only do this if the market has inefficiencies.
Consider there are two types of profit from any investment: The first is what I would call "true" productivity, which is "I use this tool (capital) to make it easier to farm, meaning I get more output per unit work and unit land." This is inherent profit, which will drive costs and prices down. This type of profit is what made the 20th century United States the "capitalism poster child." Because it drops prices of goods, everyone benefits.
The other type of profit, though, is only possible in inefficient markets: someone produces something and gets paid more than it costs to make it, because competition can't come in fast enough to keep the prices low. "Buy low sell high" types of profits fit into this category: they do not change the amount of real wealth (goods or services) in the economy, but simply allocate more wealth to a particular group or individual. This type of profit is notable in that it is not associated with a reduction in prices, so overall society tends not to benefit.
In an environment where the second type of profit dominates, those that are getting a larger share of real wealth can then purchase truly productive assets, essentially meaning that all benefits of capital go to a smaller and smaller group.
One approach to address this, though it would likely never be implemented, would be no taxes on production of wealth (agriculture, manufacturing, etc.) and taxes only on trade. This means that unless you were the original producer of a good selling that good, you are taxed on it. This would avoid penalizing producers, and encourage traders to stop trading and produce instead.
Another approach would be to tax income in proportion to total wealth. That is, instead of having income tax and property tax, you would instead have tax only on income but the tax rate, instead of being based on income, would be based on amount of owned property*. So if you have no accumulated wealth and a meager job, your taxes are zero, but if you have a large amount of wealth but no income (e.g., retired) you would also have no tax. This would naturally counter wealth accumulation; eventually a property owner who had tons of wealth would have every bit of his income taxed, making it not worthwhile to accumulate more wealth. Meanwhile, someone who has very little wealth but suddenly has a large income, would have little of that income taxed and so would be able to accumulate capital.
*In practice this is a little tricky, since defining what is "income" and what is "owned property" would have be done carefully to avoid loopholes.
Right, but that is my point: any power system requires land costs. And electrical machines and distribution, etc. are basically the same no matter what the prime mover is.
So my question for wind is - why is a tower and some blades and some brakes and what should be a trivially simple control system so expensive compared to a combustion machine?
For solar there are a bit more pieces, but inverters and such aren't "rocket science" and you would think they should be dime-a-dozen by now, and you don't even have moving pieces. But solar PV is still relatively expensive, and solar thermal is kind of the worst of all worlds (I understand why that is expensive, you need lots of land plus a thermal plant).
I guess it's just wind that baffles me - why people pay so much for turbine machinery especially.
But maybe my question is bigger than just "power" - why is construction so darn expensive in general, when labor costs are essentially flat and we have increased automation? I'm guessing it all boils down to regulatory capture, because the barriers to market entry are so high.
I maintain that's an consequence of choosing to try and build "utility-scale" windmills (like the 500MW, 200m-long blade beast I recently read about) instead of much simpler, smaller "neighborhood-scale" supplies. If it costs 10x as much to make a giant windmill with 5% more efficiency than the equivalent collection of smaller, cheaper windmills, it's economically terrible to choose the giant one. It's not like heat-engine plants where paying for efficiency makes sense because you're reducing operating costs.
What puzzles me about the economics of solar and wind is how solar and wind can cost so much even though they have minimal running costs. That is, all the cost of solar and wind is fixed cost (plus maintenance); there is no recurring fuel cost.
Especially with wind, I don't understand why costs are so high, except for the fact that all the manufacturers have to do is price their product just slightly below conventional energy; it's the old "price what the market will bear" rather than "let's price it at what it costs, so people will get the benefits faster" tradeoff.
That said - I'd rather my tax dollars be invested in "clean" energy than in other things.
I read it as more like "quality of life isn't necessarily proportional to amount of hours worked, but rather it is exceedingly low below an amount which is essentially working all the time, and even then it may still not be great depending on the type of work performed."
There are many many reasons for this, including things like: Health insurance tied to "full time" employment. Mortgages having such long terms with fixed payments. The tax structure. Slow changes in wages / salaries compared to changes in prices of "everyday" goods like food and fuel. General population growth. The list goes on and on.
I don't count any of those things as AI, although they are components of AI since they are all pieces of (or combinations of) observing and interacting with the environment.
To me, "true AI" is something that can decide to do something other than that for which it was constructed. Can AlphaGo do anything other than play Go? If you tell it to play Go, can it decide, "No thanks, I'd rather cure cancer, it's a more rewarding problem"?
While AlphaGo and the like are very fantastic achievements, I don't think they are intelligence - they are "merely" very effective specialized problem-solving machines.
That's one thing I've always disliked about Windows updates. Why can't they put a description in Windows Update instead of making us look up KBxxxx? It takes forever to click on them and see what each one claims to do.
This is kind of always what bugs me - because global warming isn't actually "global". You even stated it - even if the global average goes up, large regions could indeed have lower average temperatures over an extended period of time.
My question has always been - is the global average an actual meaningful metric, or do we really need to look at something a little more fine-grained? The globe is a big place, so simply averaging over the entire thing is losing a lot of information.
I'm also curious as to the nature of the increase in average. For instance, I would wager that there are effects that are important that don't change the average: For instance, last summer where I live the average temp (simple [high+low]/2) was about the same as the year before, but the overnight temperatures were much hotter - that is, instead of being 60F night 95F day, they were 70F night 85F day.
So in a similar vein, I'd say the effects of climate going from say 60 low -> 90 high to 60 low -> 95 high would be different than 60 -> 90 to 62.5 -> 92.5, even though both are a 2.5 deg increase in average.
Have you ever considered what it takes to "make your own job" even at, say, a consistent minimum wage level? It's not just that you have to afford the risks associated with competing in a crowded market, but you have an increasingly uphill battle against regulation and having enough to stay alive. It's even worse if you already have fixed costs based on a job that has suddenly gone away - I think you may be severely underestimating the personal financial risk to most people.
The current state of the world economy is such that it is actually very difficult to make your own job and have it be a going concern. Part of it is that we live in such an advanced economy already (close to saturation on most things, unless you get lucky) and are also under a fairly heavy regulatory environment (tax law, ACA, business licenses, inspections, etc.).
You don't need a computer at all for garage doors. And technically you don't even need electricity either, although I do admit that automatic garage door openers do make life easier.
As an added bonus, if you have a manual garage door, you don't have weird failure modes or resetting the manual release if there is a power outage.
No, that's just a symptom. A competitor selling a product for prices lower than you are (due to better technology or malice or whatever) so you don't have any sales is only a problem if you need sales to survive. I would say the real problem is that we are stuck in a system where most people are required to trade goods or services in order to obtain their basic necessities. That is, even if you've obtained the basics, you can't usually keep them unless you trade with others.
This means that, even outside "non-social" disruptions like a drought or something that reduces crop yields, you've got the extra burden of always having to trade to produce extra to pay taxes, etc.
This means that any disruption to your trade threatens survival - doesn't matter if it's due to globalism or the guy next door. Somehow we've got to make things more robust to changes in demand, so that standards of living can be maintained even if demand decreases.
I think it's worthwhile to distinguish between individual cases of harassment like that and general situations of "micro aggression" or "trigger words" or whatever it is that is going around these days.
The differences between "this seems to be a case of actual targeted harassment" versus "this type of gathering and speech is intentionally divisive (e.g., KKK meetings as an extreme example) versus "we don't want to let people talk about this, because someone might be offended" are huge, and trying to lump them together is problematic.
I think this is the crux of the matter - anyone is able to claim that anything makes them feel harassed, and the speaker is always instantly assumed to be in the wrong. Gone is the expectation of years past where you are taught that there is always going to be some level of bull in the world and you just ignore it and move on, because it really is just bull.
The ability to ignore things is a useful survival skill, and it seems we're losing it - and society really is going to suffer. People just need to raise the bar a little bit - unless something is a pattern, and is consistently directed at the same people, just ignore it and spend your energy on more productive things.
But systemic oppression? Yes please let's work on getting rid of it! But not through more oppression and trial-by-internet.
Well, yes that is a good question: which humans' values?
There is indeed no one set of values which "all" humans have, except perhaps "I wish people didn't do things I don' like," but I don't know if that really is a "value system."
But your examples illustrate an interesting point - why are the values "in Mein Kampf or like the ones in pretty much all religious books" better or worse than any other values? That is - by what value system would it be possible to evaluate those values? What (if anything) puts that value system in a privileged position to judge the other value systems?
So you either believe there is an "absolute" value system by which to judge value systems, or you don't - and you end up with Mein Kampf (or one of its influences, der Wille zur Macht).
This, this, so much this... it is so sad that people don't realize this. It's not even the fact that the Constitution is getting stomped on - it's the fact that people don't even know why that's a bad thing.
Well, Japan is suffering from population (and therefore overall demand) collapse; deflation makes sense there if production is consistently higher than demand.
And I don't care what the Fed or any other central bank is doing: Paying people to take your money (negative interest rates) is a completely irrational act, and betrays one of the core tenets of economics, that of rational actors. As the saying goes, "You may give someone an apple in exchange for two apples in the future, you might give someone an apple in exchange for an apple in the future, but you're a fool if you give someone two apples now in exchange for one apple in the future."
I understand that negative interest rates are seen as just another way to increase money supply (and not without limits; they are only an artificial result of the cost of holding cash). The problem is increased money supply can either go to increased consumption / production, or it can simply go into bank accounts and inflated asset prices. Based on the past 8 years, where do you think the existing money supply increases have gone? Why is there any rational belief that negative interest rates will change that?
Don't confuse price drops with deflation - in fact, if prices are dropping due to increases in productivity (and competition) that is progress, not deflation. Right now we have price drops in equities and oil, but just about everything else has its prices increasing. (And yes, I know that drops in commodities and equities can trigger layoffs and such, reducing demand and causing actual deflation).
But, deflation is usually only bad because of long-term debt or if you are a producer of durable goods; if we had a different debt repayment system, especially for consumer debt, deflation would not be as big a concern and would be fairly self-correcting. See my other posts in this thread that cover that - if you could change your debt payments as fast as demand changes, there would be far less impact.
Ok, perhaps it's not technically Moral Hazard; I might have gotten my phrases wrong. But the point should have been clear: you either take wealth by force (or threat of force) or you let your fellow man starve to death. Both of those are "moral" issues.
Secondly - VAT is terrible. It punishes consumption and doesn't really do anything to "naturally" reallocate wealth to society. And a 23% VAT is really quite high, especially if you are a lower-income person. If you spend 100% of your income on goods, you'd be paying at least 23% - far above the current levels for lower tax brackets. And if you say, well, there will be an exemption up to some level of income... then you are right back where our current taxes are, arbitrarily picking threshold values.
You've also said "UBI needs to be controlled so that it doesn't outgrow the productive surplus" - also terrible. Any time you have a system that isn't self-correcting, you've got an issue. A good system needs to be self-correcting without intervention, because if it requires intervention then it will be abused.
When it comes to UBI, my fundamental problem is still this: who decides what the "living wage" is? How do you prevent prices for those basic goods from rising? Partly this goes back to the "intervention" concept - if you have to do analyses to calculate a "cost of living" increase, you've already lost the war.
Now, I agree that it would be very nice to see power shift back toward the masses from the few, but I would do it by ensuring that labor always earns capital so that all laborers are automatically capital owners. I would not try to threaten the capital owners.
Perhaps something like if a corporation hires you, it must include shares as part of your wage in addition to cash (so no "stock only" compensation). Or perhaps, in the interest of UBI, a corporation must have a percentage of its shares (maybe 10%? something significant, but non-controlling) owned by the public.
You could do other things too, like limit mortgage terms to 10 or 15 years (long-term debt is dangerous), or mandate that wage reductions must occur before wholesale layoffs (10 jobs at 90% pay is arguably better for society than 9 jobs at 100% and 1 job at 0).
There are other radical things, like all prices could be done in % of your salary for a time period, rather than in a fixed nominal amount.
High employment at reduced hours (the supposed solution to pending 50% unemployment) can't work unless prices for things is allowed to drop, because basically nobody can afford their current basket of goods and services on 50% of their current income.
UBI can't work unless you do other corresponding crazy things like force the maximum term on a mortgage to 5 years, and don't flip out when housing costs drop dramatically...
Or perhaps if you force companies to keep employing people rather than lay them off when productivity increases.
Basically I'm looking for real solutions that don't involve use of force or government takeover (or mob rule) that make mathematical sense.
If you know of such a formula or plan... I'm really interested to hear it, because it's beyond my capacity to think of it.
Ah, ok, I think I understand from where you are coming now. But there's a caveat that "society as a whole" doesn't really produce anything - a large collection of individual producers produce things (regardless if you have private or public ownership of means of production).
So I agree that we do have sufficient current production to distribute that production to everyone, but when you get out of the aggregate and down to the individual producer, how do you avoid moral hazard - both from the standpoint of those taking the production from those who produce and from the standpoint of the producers, resisting giving to those with a need and no way to repay it?
These are real questions by the way, not rhetorical...
Right - but when I talk about wealth I talk about actual wealth, like food or a factory - not money.
Most "wealthy" people today don't actually control means of production, so they would be hard-pressed to actually survive. Especially because they probably don't have anything for which famers really would want to trade.
Also - most wealthy people do not force people to give them large chunks of their money - they get their money by large amounts of people giving them small amounts.
I'm not sure what you mean by people being forced to give the fruits of their labor to the rich - it's partly voluntary, as in, choosing to work for a company because it's easier to get a job for an existing company than trying to start your own. Now - I do say partly voluntary, because it is indeed very difficult to start a new company and have it be successful, but there is still some choice involved. If there truly is indeed no choice*, then we should address that issue. I'd much rather see that before forcibly taking people's wealth via taxes.
*Some examples here would be, zoning boards preventing you from growing your own food, deed restrictions, and other regulatory barriers to entry.
The problem with that experiment is that it wasn't done in an enclosed system - that population was able to import goods and services from outside its local geographic area.
Does that study include a trade balance change for the population, or a change in real wealth produced?
Without seeing that data, I would wager that population group became more of a resource sink.
Yes, I can definitely see benefits of lower work stress and the like, but did the population that was given "mincome" maintain its previous output, or did it reduce? I didn't see that in the Forget report.
Sort of - but who is the "you" that is affording to pay the UBI? Is it those people who control the means of production?
Who is going to make them keep producing things for which they don't get any benefit? If you are not forcing someone to produce, it boils down to what the owners of means of production see as a reasonable price (in terms of excess production) to pay instead of having to erect private defenses to fend off the mobs that want to take control over the means of production.
So you actually do end up with an "unfair" system (for some definitions of fairness) where people who are willing to work do indeed simply give the fruit of their labor to people who don't want to work.
But what is more "fair" (if fairness is your goal): forcing people to give the fruit of their labor to others, or simply letting physics and chemistry take its course and have people who are unwilling to produce anything die off due to lack of resources?