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Typical Pubbie posted:I don't think simplicity is a virtue if the money goes to people who don't need it. You are saying you'd rather the government hire people to do the busy work of means testing people instead of just giving everyone money and getting it back from the rich in taxes. You are an idiot. Means testing comes with MASSIVE bureaucracy in place to prevent abuse on both ends.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:02
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Nevvy Z posted:Obviously because he just doesn't want to do it. Some college student might drop out to make films instead of becoming a bank teller and providing great value to society. Alternatively: That college student might have to work 20+ hours a week where he will be forced to interact with people outside his air-tight social circle which in turn will foster a sense of community and provide him with real world experience which we could channel into his creative work.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:03
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Typical Pubbie posted:I don't think simplicity is a virtue if the money goes to people who don't need it. Aka the people you don't like. Gosh I wonder what they look like. I really wonder that.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:04
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Typical Pubbie posted:Alternatively: That college student might have to work 20+ hours a week where he will be forced to interact with people outside his air-tight social circle which in turn will foster a sense of community and provide him with real world experience which we could channel into his creative work. He's probably going to do that anyway because, get this, people like buying stuff. At least until he starts making money off his films.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:04
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Typical Pubbie posted:Alternatively: That college student might have to work 20+ hours a week where he will be forced to interact with people outside his air-tight social circle which in turn will foster a sense of community and provide him with real world experience which we could channel into his creative work. Hurry up and tell us how you've never paid for any form of art, genius. Hahaha I didnt even notice that your main problem in this nightmare scenario of "Student Attends College Full-Time" is he has too many friends.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:04
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Rob Filter posted:No resource barriers prevent us making sure everyone has access to medicine, food, and shelter. Medicine is almost completely free to make, 50% of food gets thrown out, and houses stand empty all the time. There is no reason for poverty to exist, except that it benefits the rich. Medicine is cheap to manufacture but necessarily cheap to "make" when you include design of the medicine from blue-sky chemistry research to practical applications development. Of course, this is not an argument for pharmaceutical company profiteering, it's just something you have to take into consideration. We'd still need people to know how to devise new medicines.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:08
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Typical Pubbie posted:If I missed it I apologize: Where is the study showing where the tax burden for a mincome would fall? And no, the wealth of the comfortably middle class generally does not originate from the unemployed. The tax burden of funding society falls wherever you want to put it, that's why you have progressive taxation. All human labour has equal value, because all human life is equally valuable and all labour is primarily an expenditure of life. You give your life, day by day, and get money in return. Now, you can disagree with that, but that's the premise I and probably a number of other people are working from. If we follow from this, your proposed "middle class" is "people who are already paid the value of their labour" or "people earning what they would earn if all the products of labour were divided equally between all people". If they are more wealthy than that, then their wealth by definition must come from the undervaluing of the labour of the poor. Just as the wealth of the extremely wealthy does. So, mincome as a system is designed to steadily oppose the unequal distribution of the products of labour, if you take money out of the system, taking more from the wealthy than the unwealthy on an individual basis, then give back equally to everyone, this will steadily redistribute wealth (which is the product of labour) equally among everyone. So, either your middle class is paid less than the value of their labour, in which case they will be net beneficiaries of this redistribution. They are paid exactly the value of their labour, in which case their situation would remain unchanged, monetarily, though I would argue the social changes may be beneficial to them. And if they earn more than the value of their labour then that inequality is being addressed, and it is entirely proper that they should repay that to society.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:09
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Typical Pubbie posted:I don't think simplicity is a virtue if the money goes to people who don't need it. It is a virtue if the waste from this is less than the waste from alternatives. Still waiting for that evidence that mass workforce dropouts would result. This also seems to rely on a very restrictive understanding of "need." Sure, people in well-paid professional jobs don't need the minimum to provide for their economic needs, but they are still subject to the pressures of employer demands and the job market, so a minimum income would benefit them.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:11
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Typical Pubbie posted:Alternatively: That college student might have to work 20+ hours a week where he will be forced to interact with people outside his air-tight social circle which in turn will foster a sense of community and provide him with real world experience which we could channel into his creative work. Goddamn millennials!!!!!
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Jan 7, 2016 17:12
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Typical Pubbie posted:That's a hobby. Why is it a hobby? Because it's unpaid? I do freelance consulting in a technical field. I do well enough off of a few contracts per year that I'm also able to somewhat regularly do unpaid work for non-profits. Is this a "hobby" even though the work is identical to (and often more difficult than) the work that I'm paid for? You seem to be defining hobby as "thing you do that you aren't paid for," but that is very obviously ridiculous.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:13
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GunnerJ posted:Medicine is cheap to manufacture but necessarily cheap to "make" when you include design of the medicine from blue-sky chemistry research to practical applications development. Of course, this is not an argument for pharmaceutical company profiteering, it's just something you have to take into consideration. We'd still need people to know how to devise new medicines. It's also not cheap to manufacture given the high QC requirements.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:13
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Typical Pubbie posted:Alternatively: That college student might have to work 20+ hours a week where he will be forced to interact with people outside his air-tight social circle which in turn will foster a sense of community and provide him with real world experience which we could channel into his creative work. Assumptions not actually in evidence here (not an exhaustive list, just what I can identify in under a minute): -That "having to work" 20+ hours per week would not negatively impact a student's ability to focus on scholarship (i.e., the whole point of being "a student"). -That all students have "air-tight social circles." -That having an "air-tight social circle" is necessarily a bad thing and necessarily incompatible with having a "sense of community." -That students won't engage in any other non-work activity that might "foster a sense of community." -That work is the only way to have inspiring "real world experience," or that work even provides this at all. The reason you are getting so many derisive responses is because you seem to argue entirely from stereotypes, vague moral abstractions, and a ton of problematic unexamined assumptions. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 17:18
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OwlFancier posted:The tax burden of funding society falls wherever you want to put it, that's why you have progressive taxation. People can be claim to be working from that premise but they are lying if they do. You don't pay people for expending their life on you nor do you bill them for life expended in return. You pay people for providing goods and services, some which you value highly, some which you don't. You can make up lovely-sounding definitions based on expenditure of life-hours and I'm sure lots of people will agree with the philosophy, but they're still going to spend $10 for a Starbucks and gently caress-all for hearing the heartwarming stories of a twinkly-eyed old man in the que.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:19
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Paradoxish posted:Why is it a hobby? Because it's unpaid? A hobby is something that you like and choose to do, and many people have jobs that they love and choose to do. Obviously this means their job should be qualified as a hobby and they should stop getting paid for doing it.They should find a job they hate to do to get paid like the rest of us, the lazy bastards.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:21
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Fargo Fukes posted:People can be claim to be working from that premise but they are lying if they do. You don't pay people for expending their life on you nor do you bill them for life expended in return. You pay people for providing goods and services, some which you value highly, some which you don't. You can make up lovely-sounding definitions based on expenditure of life-hours and I'm sure lots of people will agree with the philosophy, but they're still going to spend $10 for a Starbucks and gently caress-all for hearing the heartwarming stories of a twinkly-eyed old man in the que. Which highlights helpfully the rather poor job that money and markets do of emphasizing the true (if any such thing can be said to exist) value of things. Personally I would much rather pay tax so that the old man can be paid to continue living and haranguing random people with his stories about what happened during the war. I'd also like to extend that to everyone else too.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:22
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GunnerJ posted:Medicine is cheap to manufacture but necessarily cheap to "make" when you include design of the medicine from blue-sky chemistry research to practical applications development. Of course, this is not an argument for pharmaceutical company profiteering, it's just something you have to take into consideration. We'd still need people to know how to devise new medicines. Fargo Fukes posted:It's also not cheap to manufacture given the high QC requirements. I agree. That said, manufacturing costs are still virtually free, and restricting access to manufactured medicine because the sick can't afford to pay the design costs is madness. I suspect you'd both agree with that though!
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Jan 7, 2016 17:24
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Paradoxish posted:Why is it a hobby? Because it's unpaid? There is also nothing inherently wrong with more people having more free time to devote to hobbies even from the standpoint of "social value" rather than mere personal value. Humans are social animals and in the age of the internet and social media, even enthusiasts the more solitary hobbies can and will connect with each other in "communities" (such that they could be said to "have a sense of community") and often will collaborate on things the make the human experience better for everyone, even if this is not the intended goal of their activity.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:25
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OwlFancier posted:Which highlights helpfully the rather poor job that money and markets do of emphasizing the true (if any such thing can be said to exist) value of things. Oh they gently caress up all the time, but they're the best system we've come up with yet. I'm much more in favour of improving the system by tweaking it to better reflect economic reality (e.g. carbon tax to represent the environmental damage that is otherwise offloaded on to someone else) than overhauling it to include life-hours and good feelings.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:28
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Fargo Fukes posted:People can be claim to be working from that premise but they are lying if they do. Alternately, they do not define "value" in terms of marketable economic output.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:28
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Fargo Fukes posted:Oh they gently caress up all the time, but they're the best system we've come up with yet. I'm much more in favour of improving the system by tweaking it to better reflect economic reality (e.g. carbon tax to represent the environmental damage that is otherwise offloaded on to someone else) than overhauling it to include life-hours and good feelings. I don't think you can say that the current system is inherently better than, say, the Iroquois distributive system. It's not like there's much basis for a comparison.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:30
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Fargo Fukes posted:Oh they gently caress up all the time, but they're the best system we've come up with yet. I'm much more in favour of improving the system by tweaking it to better reflect economic reality (e.g. carbon tax to represent the environmental damage that is otherwise offloaded on to someone else) than overhauling it to include life-hours and good feelings. I'd be in favour of just taxing the rich a lot and giving money back to everyone equally. That would be fine. One of the nice things about human life being, for the sake of argument, unquantifiably valuable, is that we don't have to bother quantifying things. You're alive, you get a share. Simple.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:31
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Rob Filter posted:I agree. Yes, that is why I said "this is not an argument for pharmaceutical company profiteering." It's still worth considering the cost of researching and developing medicine because if you want to do that in a way that is not beholden to the profit motive, and we should, you need to figure out how to make R&D happen otherwise. The most obvious way is just publicly funded research (much of the basic conceptual research is already funded in this way iirc) but this is a cost to consider in designing and funding the overall social welfare system of which basic income would be a part.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:32
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Rob Filter posted:I agree. "Virtually free" is where you lose me. I live in a country with socialised medicine and the sick are still restricted access to medicine because the system as a whole can't afford to pay the design costs. And this is a feature, not a bug. This may come across as unnecessarily pernickety and bean-counterish, but acting like the costs don't matter and there's plenty for everyone if we only share immediately raises alarms, because the costs do matter and even sharing needs a system, and management.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:36
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Rob Filter posted:Again: Money is an abstraction layer over real resources, capital and labor. Sovereign governments can't run out of money. But they can certainly gently caress up their economies by expanding their money supply to finance a budget deficit. You can tell a Venezuelan pensioner that money is just an abstraction over real resources but this will not allow him to obtain toilet paper.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:36
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Fargo Fukes posted:Oh they gently caress up all the time, but they're the best system we've come up with yet. I'm much more in favour of improving the system by tweaking it to better reflect economic reality (e.g. carbon tax to represent the environmental damage that is otherwise offloaded on to someone else) than overhauling it to include life-hours and good feelings. Or you could... stay out of socialist conversations if you aren't willing to shift yourself to learn what socialist concepts mean. Your "life hours and good feelings" is basically the equivalent to going into a biology thread and saying "Heh I dunno about you folks but my grandaddy ain't no monkey."
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Jan 7, 2016 17:38
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Fargo Fukes posted:"Virtually free" is where you lose me. I live in a country with socialised medicine and the sick are still restricted access to medicine because the system as a whole can't afford to pay the design costs. And this is a feature, not a bug. This may come across as unnecessarily pernickety and bean-counterish, but acting like the costs don't matter and there's plenty for everyone if we only share immediately raises alarms, because the costs do matter and even sharing needs a system, and management. It's probably more likely that your government doesn't like the socialized medicine so they're deliberately underfunding it.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:38
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JeffersonClay posted:But they can certainly gently caress up their economies by expanding their money supply to finance a budget deficit. You can tell a Venezuelan pensioner that money is just an abstraction over real resources but this will not allow him to obtain toilet paper. Okay, but I don't see what that has to do with what he said. Either you're being a prick and assuming everyone is ignorant and in need of your enlightenment, or you're implicitly arguing that there's insufficient capital and resources in the USA to enable a decent life for everyone in the USA. Which is it?
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Jan 7, 2016 17:41
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OwlFancier posted:I'd be in favour of just taxing the rich a lot and giving money back to everyone equally. That would be fine. One of the nice things about human life being, for the sake of argument, unquantifiably valuable, is that we don't have to bother quantifying things. You're alive, you get a share. Simple. "Not quantifying things" is, to me, not an advantage. Quantifying gives you information, and oversight, which allows you to improve, to do the same thing again with more efficiency, less resources, less labour, higher profit. Quantifying human labour (not to say the value of a person, but what that person is willing and able to do, for pay, on someone else's behalf) is a step towards human dignity and comfort, not away from it.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:46
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Fargo Fukes posted:"Not quantifying things" is, to me, not an advantage. Quantifying gives you information, and oversight, which allows you to improve, to do the same thing again with more efficiency, less resources, less labour, higher profit. Quantifying human labour (not to say the value of a person, but what that person is willing and able to do, for pay, on someone else's behalf) is a step towards human dignity and comfort, not away from it. Quantifying human labour as a method of deciding what degree of dignity and comfort they are to be permitted is effectively quantifying their personal value. So don't do it.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:53
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JeffersonClay posted:But they can certainly gently caress up their economies by expanding their money supply to finance a budget deficit. You can tell a Venezuelan pensioner that money is just an abstraction over real resources but this will not allow him to obtain toilet paper. Expanding money supply to finance a budget deficit is a management failure; you should have raised taxes instead of printing money, or if your economy is in deep crisis you should have briefly abandoned money and reverted to rationing. Well its that, or its that the government has collapsed, and thus government money now has no value, and people are only slowly realizing this, thus mass inflation. Nothing can cure that one though. Fargo Fukes posted:"Virtually free" is where you lose me. I live in a country with socialised medicine and the sick are still restricted access to medicine because the system as a whole can't afford to pay the design costs. And this is a feature, not a bug. This may come across as unnecessarily pernickety and bean-counterish, but acting like the costs don't matter and there's plenty for everyone if we only share immediately raises alarms, because the costs do matter and even sharing needs a system, and management. By virtually free, I mean "cents". It costs cents to manufacture drugs once they are researched. The sick are restricted access to medicine in your country because the government can't afford to pay overseas drug profiteers enough money such that every citizen has access to the drug, not because the system can't afford the design costs. Well that, or because the government has being slowly cutting healthcare. Or both! Think about it; the drug is already designed when it goes on market. It's up front cost are paid! There is no cost in designing that drug now, only in designing new drugs. There is no need to mark up by literal 10000x times the price on old drugs to pay for the manufacturing of new drugs, unless somehow marking up old drug prices was the only way to raise money for new drug funding. Which isn't the case; taxes exist, paying in one lump sum money to a private corporation for its work exists. Rolling new drug design costs into old drugs just serves to price out people who could afford the manufacturing cost, literally killing people for no reason who could have lived. Well, it also serves to profit the rich.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:55
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Rob Filter posted:Why is it ridiculous to pay each adult thirty thousand dollars a year, exactly? Money is an abstraction layer over real resources, capital, and labor. It's impossible for America to run out of money, only the goods and services money can be used to purchase. Money is only a barrier when politicians want it to be. The bold means that when we people speak in dollars they're really talking about the stuff dollars represent. Understand that "multiple 10's of thousands", say 30,000 is a major chunk of GDP for the US. It's not in the realm of political feasibility .
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Jan 7, 2016 18:08
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OwlFancier posted:I'd be in favour of just taxing the rich a lot and giving money back to everyone equally. That would be fine. One of the nice things about human life being, for the sake of argument, unquantifiably valuable, is that we don't have to bother quantifying things. You're alive, you get a share. Simple. If you actually care about material wealth and poverty then, yes, you must quantify economic output in order to manage, distribute and produce it.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:11
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asdf32 posted:If you actually care about material wealth and poverty then, yes, you must quantify economic output in order to manage, distribute and produce it. But not in terms of who gets how much. If you are having problems with not enough wealth to give to everyone, reduce the amount you're giving everyone, or increase the amount of wealth you tax.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:14
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asdf32 posted:If you actually care about material wealth and poverty then, yes, you must quantify economic output in order to manage, distribute and produce it. I'm sure that that was a screed against counting.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:14
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Effectronica posted:I'm sure that that was a screed against counting. Heh at the point in the economic discussion where people are yelling "but money is just an abstraction!" It's hard to tell.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:18
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asdf32 posted:Heh at the point in the economic discussion where people are yelling "but money is just an abstraction!" It's hard to tell. It isn't if you aren't a gigantic jackass.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:19
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Effectronica posted:Okay, but I don't see what that has to do with what he said. Either you're being a prick and assuming everyone is ignorant and in need of your enlightenment, or you're implicitly arguing that there's insufficient capital and resources in the USA to enable a decent life for everyone in the USA. Which is it? It's the former, but I only assume people who say things like Effectronica posted:Taxes don't actually pay for things, in any case. Money is both created and destroyed on the authority of the government. Are in need of enlightenment. If money is just an abstract representation of resources and capital, and taxes are paid in money, then taxes actually represent payment for things. You can't just hand wave away how social services are paid for because the financing mechanism has real and significant impacts on the economy. Rob Filter posted:Expanding money supply to finance a budget deficit is a management failure; you should have raised taxes instead of printing money. I agree, but there's an upper limit on the amount of taxes the government can collect. So perhaps when you say in bold that sovereign governments can't run out of money you should caveat that the process by which a government can generate infinite money can be economically disasterous.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:24
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JeffersonClay posted:It's the former, but I only assume people who say things like Money is an abstract unit of measure, which is created by government authority. Therefore, since inflationary spirals are rare rather than continuous, money must also be destroyed as well as created. So how is money removed and destroyed if not through taxation and government fees? Like, if money is solely physical then we can just say it wears out, but that's never been the case. Virtual money has always been a massive part of the economy.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:29
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asdf32 posted:The bold means that when we people speak in dollars they're really talking about the stuff dollars represent. I don't think this sentence parses? Could you rephrase? e: Maybe your sentence does parse, it just doesn't relate to my argument at all? My argument was: "We have excess medicine, food, and shelter. We just don't allocate it to the poor, thus poverty. Money can't be the barrier to these goods going to the poor, because money is an abstraction over real resources." How does "when speaking of dollars we mean the stuff dollars represent" disagree or disprove that sentence? asdf32 posted:Understand that "multiple 10's of thousands", say 30,000 is a major chunk of GDP for the US. It's not in the realm of political feasibility . I agree! Minimum income is not currently politically feasible. I think this is because the rich control politics and don't want minimum income. It is monetarily feasible though; you could have a major (greater than 50%) chunk of the US GDP distributed equally among its citizens. That's a potential way to run an economy. Rob Filter fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 18:57
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You are saying that every dollar the government spends creates money from nowhere, and every dollar it collects in taxes and fees is destroyed. How is that conceptualization functionally different from one where the government creates both real and virtual currency, and funds its budgets with taxes and fees, financing shortfalls with debt or seigniorage?
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Jan 7, 2016 19:05
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