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rudatron posted:drat dude, tough break, hope the rest of your life is better going forward. Of course it's tied into both status and masculinity. But we're never going to get rid of status. It's completely reasonable for people to be attracted to others who demonstrate talent or success and those words are really just variations on 'status'. But note that we already have a large variety of ways that people display their talent/status. Academic success (your example) is attractive, good social skills are attractive, artistic expression is attractive, success in sports or other competition is attractive and all of these are true independent of money. Job status is one thing among these it's just that job status right now is the single largest. And I tend to think that in times in the past with church, unions and other social institutions there were actually more parallel paths. So your example brings up just how deeply rooted work and its association to status is to society (dating). So it's possible that people will transition into perusing the other areas above, but at the least it's a difficult transition. Rob Filter posted:The reason those factories are "efficient" is because their labor force is underpaid, overworked, and kept in line with violence; exploited. Otherwise, the transport costs (which are only so low because fuel is also stolen through force) would prevent massively centralized clothing manufacture from being viable. So you don't understand how the defining features of the last 2 centuries or so of human history work (industrialization, automation or specialization) then. I'd remedy this or keep it to yourself.
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Dec 31, 2015 17:03
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Paradoxish posted:The point is that mincome is a way to put the brakes on this process and transition into a state where working for a living may not be a realistic possibility for many people. The alternative is a continued slow erosion of wages, loss of quality jobs, and increase in wealth and income inequality. Doing nothing means more people who could be doing productive work or learning new skills will instead be underemployed or simply move out of the labor pool altogether. It's absurd to think it's going to mean the end of work, unless you honestly believe people making a decent middle class income are going to decide to lie around doing nothing all day because they get the equivalent of a minimum wage check from the government. If the pay is sub subsistence level, sure, minimum income won't end work. But if you implement minimum income properly, some people will stop working. People who's parents are sick will leave work to look after them, bored people will quit and start writing, prostituted women will say gently caress you to the johns. That said, I agree, not everyone would quit work. But minimum income would have massive, market changing effects on employment, especially on employers employing people at the bottom of the job market, or in lovely degrading jobs. Rob Filter fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Jan 2, 2016 |
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Jan 2, 2016 03:41
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Rob Filter posted:If the pay is sub subsistence level, sure, minimum income won't end work. But if you implement minimum income properly, some people will stop working. all of that is good though.
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Jan 2, 2016 05:21
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Mans posted:all of that is good though. Agreed. I mean, we probably WOULD have a huge amount of people leaving work right when BI was implemented... at which point employers would poo poo themselves and raise wages/benefits/etc. to draw people back so their businesses didn't fall. Various casual jobs and creative work that doesn't fit well with the need to constantly have money coming in at a regular pace would also become much more viable for many people, as would volunteer work.
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Jan 2, 2016 09:36
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I think minimum income is good idea, UNITED STATES have so many different departments who all will give benefits only narrowly, so many people to manage, and they treat the poors like childs, "this is only for food" ,"this is only for house". Just give them the money, allow them to decide what it is used for. People will be respected and will be greatly appreciative of such a gesture and so many government slaves allowed to go free.
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Jan 2, 2016 10:08
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Cicero posted:You'd have to be completely delusional to actually believe this. Yes, egregious labor conditions make manufactured clothing cheaper than it would otherwise be, but we're never going to go back to...what, exactly? Everyone making their own clothes? Note my wording: Massively centralized manufacture. Were going back to clothing being manufactured near where its sold, rather than clothes being exported over literal seas, creating pollution and consuming fossil fuels. The only important competitive advantage a clothing manufacturer has over another is being able to pay your workers less, and have them work in less safe conditions. The clothes we buy from overseas are made with sewing machines, same as clothes manufactured here.
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Jan 3, 2016 05:52
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Rob Filter posted:Note my wording: Massively centralized manufacture. "Firing the poorest people on the planet is good for them"
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Jan 3, 2016 15:24
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asdf32 posted:"Firing the poorest people on the planet is good for them" It's not like Zimbabwe is getting money from the West at the moment
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Jan 3, 2016 15:32
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Chocolate Teapot posted:It's not like Zimbabwe is getting money from the West at the moment Great in that case we can stop it before it happens.
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Jan 3, 2016 15:41
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asdf32 posted:"Firing the poorest people on the planet is good for them" Not keeping the poorest people on the planet in a continued state of poverty so you can continue to exploit them for cheap labour they will never see the benefit of may be good for them.
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Jan 3, 2016 19:35
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Rob Filter posted:If the pay is sub subsistence level, sure, minimum income won't end work. But if you implement minimum income properly, some people will stop working. I didn't say that people wouldn't stop working, I just said that it wouldn't be the end of work. Labor participation in the US among prime age workers has been falling since the mid-90s, so losing a few percent more isn't going to drastically change our cultural landscape. It'd also be a lot more viable for people to work part time jobs or focus on unpaid charity or community work, which in turn might create more overall employment opportunities. In any case, all I was really pointing out is that you're not going to get some huge group of people saying "nah, gently caress this $60k/year job, I'm going to radically alter my lifestyle so I can be paid $18k/year to sit around all day." People probably would ditch their lovely, minimum wage jobs in droves, but that's entirely reasonable and says more about the giant imbalance in bargaining power between employees and employers than anything else.
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Jan 3, 2016 19:39
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OwlFancier posted:Not keeping the poorest people on the planet in a continued state of poverty so you can continue to exploit them for cheap labour they will never see the benefit of may be good for them. Drop the Marxism and you'll understand how that happens.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:00
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asdf32 posted:Drop the Marxism and you'll understand how that happens. The introduction of capitalism to the region you all are talking about was an absolute disaster for the laborers. Wages dropped by more than 50%. Textile technology was stolen and then centralized into English power looms, and the products re-exported to the unemployed inventors of the textile technology (while British warships prevented exports and rival imports). There were a series of deliberate famines, caused by the transition to capitalism and commodity crops, that claimed tens of millions of lives inside and outside of their worse-than-Auschwitz concentration camps. Current wages in Bangladesh are today less than half what American wages were at the time of the revolutionary war. This is the system you're defending. For almost 200 years, it's been, and will continue to be, a human tragedy for everybody except the property owners (who, strangely enough, never seem to volunteer for shifts in their own factories). These people should be freed of work, Americans should be freed of work, because work is miserable at best and deadly at worst. Mincome isn't enough to free everybody, but it's a start. VVVVVVV "but other semi-capitalist systems have killed millions, too!" is some pretty genocide-apologist poo poo dude. What's next, excusing the American genocide because smallpox? oh wait Mofabio fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 22:58
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Communists are certainly familiar with deliberate policy decisions creating famines killing tens of millions of people. edit: Ah yes I forgot the standard communist defense, the no true scotsman fallacy. crabcakes66 fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 23:30
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.png) quote:The particular supine S-shaped growth incidence curve (Figure 1) does not allow us to immediately tell whether global inequality might have gone up or down because the gains around the median (which tend to reduce inequality) may be offset by the gains of the global top 1% (which tend to increase inequality). On balance, however, it turns out that the first element dominates, and that global inequality – as measured by most conventional indicators – went down. The global Gini coefficient fell by almost 2 Gini points (from 72.2 to 70.5) during the past 20 years of globalisation. http://www.voxeu.org/article/global-income-distribution-1988
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Jan 4, 2016 01:27
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Ironically I think a mincome can only work in a society that guilts the poo poo out of people for not working. To the point that a mincome should be tied to some sort of federal jobs guarantee where you absolutely have to work if you aren't disabled, even if the job is burying bottles filled with mincome checks which you then turn around and dig up. Why are leftists ok with sucking the labor of the working class as long as it's done through taxes and not stock dividends? Typical Pubbie fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 01:50
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Because that surplus goes to people who actually need it most, and that money is going to do more work in the economy due to marginal propensity to consume, and it provides a sense of security to workers that they will have a backstop that is superior to the piecemeal and incomplete social safety net that currently exists
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Jan 4, 2016 01:58
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agreed, communism has been a great success in china.
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Jan 4, 2016 02:23
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Neoliberalism, with Chinese characteristics to be more precise
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Jan 4, 2016 02:30
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crabcakes66 posted:edit: Ah yes I forgot the standard communist defense, the no true scotsman fallacy. Do you also believe that North Korea is a democratic people's republic? Authoritarian regimes often adopt working class rhetoric and symbols. Why do you think the Nazi flag was red? Typical Pubbie posted:To the point that a mincome should be tied to some sort of federal jobs guarantee where you absolutely have to work if you aren't disabled, even if the job is burying bottles filled with mincome checks which you then turn around and dig up. Yeah, the [wage]work ethic is incredibly powerful  . But if we ever want real mincome, we need to attack the work ethic itself. I wouldn't settle for just having more dumbass jobs for the sake of jobs. "Bureaucratic efficiency" is weaksauce response to a work ethic-oriented person who's like, "but what if people play videogames all day?"If millions of people can afford to play videogames all day, that's actually a sign of an awesome economic system that has met basic human needs. If people aren't working lovely, degrading, dangerous jobs anymore, because they have the freedom to choose not to, then gently caress yeah! Mofabio fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 02:34
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So do all semi-capitalists countries get a free pass too since there has never really been an ideologically pure capitalist country? And ideological purity is what matters(by your logic).
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Jan 4, 2016 03:00
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Minimum income needs to start low, absolutely no question. But in the long run as society advances it is something that could be adjusted to our needs, up to and including fully automated post scarcity communism.
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Jan 4, 2016 03:09
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crabcakes66 posted:So do all semi-capitalists countries get a free pass too since there has never really been an ideologically pure capitalist country? And ideological purity is what matters(by your logic). Nobody gets a genocide pass, no. Watching your kids starve is a parent's nightmare whether it's because the Soviets requisitioned your crop, or because the British forced you to plant cotton instead of food.
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Jan 4, 2016 03:19
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Typical Pubbie posted:Ironically I think a mincome can only work in a society that guilts the poo poo out of people for not working. To the point that a mincome should be tied to some sort of federal jobs guarantee where you absolutely have to work if you aren't disabled, even if the job is burying bottles filled with mincome checks which you then turn around and dig up. Taxation is essential for maintaining an even money supply and for establishing the value of money in the first place.
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Jan 4, 2016 03:32
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Typical Pubbie posted:Ironically I think a mincome can only work in a society that guilts the poo poo out of people for not working. To the point that a mincome should be tied to some sort of federal jobs guarantee where you absolutely have to work if you aren't disabled, even if the job is burying bottles filled with mincome checks which you then turn around and dig up. Would you mind elaborating on why you feel this is the case, and why you think it makes sense to employ any portion of a population in work that's not socially useful? There's a very real social opportunity cost to the "dig a ditch and then fill it back in" approach to welfare. Those are people who spend their days "working" a job that does nothing for society while still occupying some portion of their time and energy that could be devoted to community work, family care, learning new skills, etc. Make work programs are dangerous because they can very easily turn into poverty traps, when the entire point of a mincome should be to provide a safety net and increase the value of labor.
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Jan 4, 2016 04:21
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asdf32 posted:Drop the Marxism and you'll understand how that happens. Not sure I can think of a better solution off the top of my head than "kill the rich and take their stuff" Or like, tax the rich and take their stuff. Either way generally getting the stuff away from the rich and back into the hands of everyone else is pretty good. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 06:00
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OwlFancier posted:Or like, tax the rich and take their stuff. Either way generally getting the stuff away from the rich and back into the hands of everyone else is pretty good.
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Jan 4, 2016 06:20
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asdf32 posted:"Firing the poorest people on the planet is good for them" I've not claimed that the death of centralized clothing manufacturing will be good, or bad, merely that it must happen, and that it was only economically viable in the first place due to the exploitation of its workers. That said, seeing your post, I'm reminded of a conversation I had about the ethics of paying for sex. them: "Paying for sex is fine; I mean, if you didn't pay for sex, then the women you paid would not have any money. She's consenting, and the act of paying for sex has gotten her money, bettering her life. The transaction is mutually beneficial!" me: "That's not the only option though. A john could directly give that money to the woman, without requiring her to gently caress to get it. Coercing a woman into sex isn't a necessary prerequisite for giving her money." Do you see how that applies to all forms of exploitation, not just prostitution?
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Jan 4, 2016 06:50
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Lyapunov Unstable posted:The minimum income people are so close to becoming Marxists or Marx-curious that it's frustrating to watch, like they literally just need to skim some Wikipedia articles to get that final leap in udnerstanding Minimum income isn't really a Marxist idea, though. A lot of the more mainstream proponents of it are people who are looking at it as a way to keep our current economic system in place in the face of the rapidly diminishing value of labor. Like, there's a legitimate argument to be made that a guaranteed income is a massive handout to businesses.
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Jan 4, 2016 07:02
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Paradoxish posted:Minimum income isn't really a Marxist idea, though. A lot of the more mainstream proponents of it are people who are looking at it as a way to keep our current economic system in place in the face of the rapidly diminishing value of labor. Like, there's a legitimate argument to be made that a guaranteed income is a massive handout to businesses. In the sense that it would seem to be necessary to keep society functioning in a recognisable way as labour becomes useless, yes. And in the sense that all money given to people is a handout to business because business exists to get money off people and giving them more money will eventually put it in the hands of business. But it comes with some pretty nice caveats of decoupling working and living, and generally relaxing the grip of capital on the lives of the workers a bit, as well as being a potentially good stepping stone for people to start wondering "why do we have private enterprise anyway?" when the world fails to self destruct when people stop going to work to do lovely jobs. It's a pragmatic idea, but a far less completely-capital-friendly one than business handouts usually are.
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Jan 4, 2016 07:16
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Rob Filter posted:I've not claimed that the death of centralized clothing manufacturing will be good, or bad, merely that it must happen, and that it was only economically viable in the first place due to the exploitation of its workers. This argument is nowhere near as clear cut as you are making it out to be. Also: Would you make the same argument for prostitutes that HAD a basic income, and were doing it to buy a fancier car rather than basic necessities of survival?
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Jan 4, 2016 12:59
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asdf32 posted:"Firing the poorest people on the planet is good for them" See, conservative politicians and talking heads actually believe this unironically and encourage it as a motivating force, rather than seeing it as a humiliating, depressing, hope-draining one.
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Jan 4, 2016 13:23
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OwlFancier posted:Not sure I can think of a better solution off the top of my head than "kill the rich and take their stuff" International capital redistribution [rich->poor] is what we need and is a thing already happening on a large scale due to global capitalism. Meanwhile national level socialism actually has nothing to do with international wealth redistribution and completely removes the incentives which are making it happen right now (which Marxists call exploitation regardless of whether its positive or not). International taxing and re-distributing requires a global socialist revolution which isn't happening and is barely worth talking about.
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Jan 4, 2016 13:27
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asdf32 posted:International capital redistribution [rich->poor] is what we need and is a thing already happening on a large scale due to global capitalism. Meanwhile national level socialism actually has nothing to do with international wealth redistribution and completely removes the incentives which are making it happen right now (which Marxists call exploitation regardless of whether its positive or not). International taxing and re-distributing requires a global socialist revolution which isn't happening and is barely worth talking about. Capital does not redistribute wealth to the majority. It may occasionally invest in its workforce but only if it can extract more out of it in future. By definition all its wealth must come from the work of others, so even when it does reinvest it's only returning a small fraction of what has been owed to the workers already, and then only temporarily.
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Jan 4, 2016 13:33
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asdf32 posted:International capital redistribution [rich->poor] is what we need and is a thing already happening on a large scale due to global capitalism. Meanwhile national level socialism actually has nothing to do with international wealth redistribution and completely removes the incentives which are making it happen right now (which Marxists call exploitation regardless of whether its positive or not). International taxing and re-distributing requires a global socialist revolution which isn't happening and is barely worth talking about. No, wealth redistribution works in spite of capitalism, not because of it. Global capital involves extraction and exploitation of the cheapest and least restrictive labor pools/environmental regulations/etc and moves on to the next country once it is less profitable to stay in the former countries where wages have risen. This is why global businesses shift the way they do from, say, the United States to China and then from China to Vietnam/Cambodia and so on. Mincome would do a great deal good of liberating West Virginia from the whims of the coal industry, for example, to allow West Virginians to shift from low-paying environmentally damaging labor (not to mention personal health risks) to other alternative labor. Without a way of transitioning, people are stuck in a poverty trap as well as beholden to coal company interests. Teriyaki Koinku fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 13:41
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OwlFancier posted:Capital does not redistribute wealth to the majority. It may occasionally invest in its workforce but only if it can extract more out of it in future. By definition all its wealth must come from the work of others, so even when it does reinvest it's only returning a small fraction of what has been owed to the workers already, and then only temporarily. You're not getting it. If the U.S. trades $1 million in goods with China the goods are 'worth' $1 million to both the Chinese and the Americans. Now what I'm bringing up is "who needs the trade more" which I'll sometimes phrase in terms of value (not dollars though, actual worth to the end consumer which is not dollars). I'm saying the Chinese get more value because of marginal utility and because of the makeup of the goods. China will literally ship us party favors for medical equipment. When that's the goods makeup it should be clear that your accounting is lacking. More broadly one of many things Marxism helps shield you from understanding is that there is surplus each side of every transaction. If the imported goods weren't worth more than a $1 million to the Chinese they wouldn't engage in the transaction. Both sides profit, but poorer counties who disproportionately import goods like machinery and medical equipment stand to profit more in the long term. Which, if you were included to look, shows up in actual economic data.
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Jan 4, 2016 13:56
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asdf32 posted:You're not getting it. If the U.S. trades $1 million in goods with China the goods are 'worth' $1 million to both the Chinese and the Americans. Now what I'm bringing up is "who needs the trade more" which I'll sometimes phrase in terms of value (not dollars though, actual worth to the end consumer which is not dollars). I'm saying the Chinese get more value because of marginal utility and because of the makeup of the goods. China will literally ship us party favors for medical equipment. When that's the goods makeup it should be clear that your accounting is lacking. Yea, that million dollars isn't going to buy medical equipment for poor Chinese people, it's going to buy another million dollar house in Vancouver for the rich people they work for. The poor people are all still dying of smog cancer and making pennies per day because there's no incentive at all to pay them living wage.
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Jan 4, 2016 15:33
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Trent posted:Would you make the same argument for prostitutes that HAD a basic income, and were doing it to buy a fancier car rather than basic necessities of survival? At that point wouldn't the exploitation be removed and thus what is the problem with a prostitute being voluntary?
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Jan 4, 2016 17:38
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Powercrazy posted:At that point wouldn't the exploitation be removed and thus what is the problem with a prostitute being voluntary? You're still giving her a physical/monetary thing she wants in exchange for a behavioral/labor thing you want, so the question of exploitation is where the line is, exactly. There are also some who put sex work on a special pedestal that other potentially demeaning/degrading/dangerous work can't access, for various reasons. In other words, many would argue that prostitution is voluntary now, at least as much as any work for a wage. Others would argue that it could never be.
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Jan 4, 2016 17:48
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asdf32 posted:You're not getting it. If the U.S. trades $1 million in goods with China the goods are 'worth' $1 million to both the Chinese and the Americans. Now what I'm bringing up is "who needs the trade more" which I'll sometimes phrase in terms of value (not dollars though, actual worth to the end consumer which is not dollars). I'm saying the Chinese get more value because of marginal utility and because of the makeup of the goods. China will literally ship us party favors for medical equipment. When that's the goods makeup it should be clear that your accounting is lacking. Goods are not worth what they sell for, they're worth the value of human labour put into them. Profit is made by buying labour at less than its value and selling the goods it produces for more than the buying price of the labour, with the difference going to the wealthy. The point is, that consistent undervaluing of human labour is causing people to essentially waste their time working unhelpful jobs because someone else can make a profit off them doing so. If China wants medical equipment, they would be much better served making their own medical equipment, which they would be able to do better if the world were not arranged to make it difficult to challenge the established manufacturers of medical equipment who are quite happy making a profit off selling the labour of their workers below its value. You can't argue that we should call capital redistributative because it does occasionally transfer some value along with its trade, that's only redistributative in comparison to the entire problem of capital which is capital just hoarding all the wealth. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 17:51
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