AShamefulDisplay posted:

Couldn't help it, touched the poo

Me. As a society the US requires us to work in order to meet our basic needs for food and shelter. If we can't expect those needs to be fulfilled by either employment or government, how can we expect them to be met?


2. The simplest answer is a dead simple government program. Like a negative income tax. Then we can use the market to meet our needs without relying on governments or corporations for benefits.

Xerzes posted:

So a libertarian is trying to describe a UBI but is too broken to figure it out properly?

Xerzes posted:

So a libertarian is trying to describe a UBI but is too broken to figure it out properly?

OwlFancier posted:

And... where does the government get that money from?

OwlFancier posted:

And... where does the government get that money from?

Minrad posted:

I like to imagine im hearing a few more notes from in the hall of the mountain king every time a new bitcoin news headline appears

Goon Danton posted:

Do you mean the one that's currently being accidentally ddosed by a collectible cat picture minigame, or the one that has goddamned futures contracts on it?

dumbass1 posted:

I tend to think of rights and responsibilities in terms of if we were living on a desert island; I suppose this is similar to what Locke or Hobbes would have called a "state of nature".
If we live on a deserted island, it's up to us to survive by hunting, gathering, possibly some kind of farming or aquaculture, etc.
Put more people on the island, and we might choose to trade with each other and specialize, but no one magically becomes responsible for anyone else's welfare. If someone does work for someone else and doesn't like it, he can always go back to horticulture.
We live on a planet with seven billion people and an elaborate economy, but where's the magic line that says I can't be responsible for meeting my own needs anymore? That I need someone else to make sure I have food out of the goodness of their hearts?

dumbass 2 posted:

Because it is no longer possible to go back to those things (minus a couple of protected groups like indigenous people). There is no land to farm on or to hunt on, without money. Besides 7 billion people is far beyond what our planet can sustain with such systems. We need the complex economy (for example the power of markets) to have any hope for sustaining that many people with the limited resources of our planet.

It comes down to the fact that the society we have is coercive, you must work to eat, live etc. there isn't an alternative. Welfare is the current answer to that, and it's a terrible one. Without a solution to that problem, we can't have free labor markets. Free markets are not an ideal, they are a phenomena that requires certain conditions (that have all been well studied), one of those crucial conditions is voluntary exchange.

The fact is society as organized coerces people to participate in the labor market (even with welfare), until we remove the coercion, the labor market is not a free market, regardless of the price setting behaviors of things like the minimum wage, or differences between employees and contractors, coercion is the deepest problem.

Without the freedom to not work, labor and employment will continue to require regulations.

White Coke posted:

Please continue.

Xerzes posted:

So a libertarian is trying to describe a UBI but is too broken to figure it out properly?

quote:

I tend to think of rights and responsibilities in terms of if we were living on a desert island; I suppose this is similar to what Locke or Hobbes would have called a "state of nature".

GunnerJ posted:

It's telling how common it is for libertarians to derive their theories of how a society ought to work from a rare situation in which people are cut off from any society. I guess at least this example presumes other people around. I've heard them start from "Well, if you were alone in a jungle..."

Goon Danton posted:

"...You'd die?"

DACK FAYDEN posted:

Literally just mouse over this and read the URL, you don't even have to click, but if you do you'll enjoy the read.

(before linking this I didn't know that the team claims to have about a year's worth of content updates in the pipeline, I appreciate how much work they're putting into their batshit crazy useless crypto thingy, they really deserve the money they are getting idiots to part with)

Keeshhound posted:

That was my original read, too. But I think they might actually mean "the government pays you for making money." As in, "you are taxed -10% of your earned income."

Mr Interweb posted:

One of the most obvious problems with the "if we stop helping poor people, they'll finally stop being lazy and get jobs" is...not having many job openings to begin with? There's not an infinite number of jobs waiting around. Especially if you're in a hard hit city or going through a recession.

Doc Hawkins posted:

I highly recommend this twitter thread, even if you usually hate them.

https://twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/941053887678681089

If you're hesitating: he's trying to get the safe-space diapermen to buy diapers for charity

Curvature of Earth posted:

Curvature of Earth posted:

Mr Interweb posted:

Okay, giving this even an iota of legitimacy, how is such a thing even supposed to work?

Mr Interweb posted:

Okay, giving this even an iota of legitimacy, how is such a thing even supposed to work?

OwlFancier posted:

You're also not, as far as I know, going "I'm sure people have a right to exist but I wouldn't feel comfortable suggesting anyone in particular has to pay for it." like the oiks in the quoted exchange.

GlyphGryph posted:

Doesnt come across as very libertarian so I am guessing he isnt?

DACK FAYDEN posted:

When I was 15 I thought the word for my politics was "libertarian" because I was in favor of gay marriage (let people do what they want), free college (let people study what they want), and a UBI (let people do what they want without having to earn a living)

maybe he just read a philosophy book but didn't look around at "real" libertarians like lil' me

Goon Danton posted:

David Graeber is an anarchist a libertarian socialist, and Debt: the First 5,000 Years opens with "hey, Smith and Locke made up all that poo poo about barter and the origins of money, here's what really went down" iirc. If you send him a Graeber youtube clip, maybe make sure it's not one where he's dressed in a roman centurion halloween costume or anything first.