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non-sequitur. The whole topic here is about a Universal Basic Income. You're the only one who said all that nonsense about "force employers to treat everyone li

non-sequitur. The whole topic here is about a Universal Basic Income. You're the only one who said all that nonsense about "force employers to treat everyone like stellar employees" etc. If you want to never learn anything, these sorts of straw-man statements are a good approach. Alternatively, you could actually engage fairly with what people are actually saying.

marknutter 10y ago
> It feels like Employers have all the power in America, and therefore all the Employees are basically slaves, and are treated as such. How is it a non-sequitur when it was in direct response to this quote?
- ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
  Because the implication was that the solution was allowing employees to more easily say no to employers (due to UBI), thus tilting slightly the balance in the direction of workers. A balance that has shifted in favor of employers for the past ~40 odd years or so. No UBI proposal has ever said anything about "treating everyone like stellar employees" - it's an irrelevant point.
  - autokad 10y ago
    UBI is not 'tilting slightly the balance in the direction of workers'. its ripping the balance strait the f off the scale. 'treating everyone like stellar employees' is not irrelevant. we are not in the utopian world where technology has made resources so abundant that everyone can have what they want without working extra hard for it. maybe in 35+ years, but this PRECONDITION is necessary to even begin to think UBI would work. SO when an employer is forced to pay all employees a basic income, they have to start paying uneducated / unskilled / low performing employees more. when revenue has not increased, this means taking pay raises / income / benefits from the other employees. #2 if all of your needs are GUARANTEED you might be surprised to find nobody would be willing to do many jobs.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      > SO when an employer is forced to pay all employees a basic income Wait, I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Employers don't pay a basic income, the government does (so by extension we all do, through taxes). I'm not sure how it will shake out, but there are pressures to both reduce and increase pay in a BI system. Everyone is getting a base level of income, so wages across the board will drop (but companies will be paying more in taxes, so it's offset somewhat). On the other hand, there will be less applicants for crap jobs, so the wages for those will likely go up. Then again, maybe a crap job isn't so bad if you don't have to do it 40 hours a week, and since people won't need the work as much as want it for increased spending power, maybe you can fill what was a single position with 2-3 part-time positions, and people will accept less pay because they aren't doing it all week long. The biggest problem with moving to BI is that there are so many variables that are affected it's impossible to say with any confidence how it would settle. Experiments like this help with that, but even they can only go so far when the people are interspersed with others that are not on a BI system.
    - autokad 10y ago
      let me get this strait kbenson, you are saying: take money from (tax) people who are skilled / educated / work harder to better themselves and give it to those who don't. they will have increased spending power now and purchase things that the skilled/educated workers where buying so the skilled people will face a double whammy of both loss of wages and loss of buying power.
      - quadrangle 10y ago
        no (though I'm not kbenson), because your entire premise that wealth today is strictly correlate with "skilled / educated / work harder" is bullshit. Yeah, I know some people think that we live in a meritocracy where if you have wealth, you deserve it, and there's no luck or dishonesty or cheating or inherent unfair inequalities — but it's obvious you don't come to that view by looking at the evidence, you come to that by something along the lines of reading Ayn Rand and just believing that nonsense or something similar. In reality, lots of wealth is captured by those whose action provide no positive value to the world. Lots of success involves luck. And lots of people working shitty not-so-productive jobs have the potential to be far more effective and UBI would assist that in ways other approaches do not. Anyway, even if we disagree about tons of things, you could have productive discussions with people if you didn't insist on bullshit implications like the idea that all the people in high-paid jobs are hard-working, deserving, productive folks while all low-paid people are the opposite. http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

marknutter 10y ago

> It feels like Employers have all the power in America, and therefore all the Employees are basically slaves, and are treated as such. How is it a non-sequitur when it was in direct response to this quote?

ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
Because the implication was that the solution was allowing employees to more easily say no to employers (due to UBI), thus tilting slightly the balance in the direction of workers. A balance that has shifted in favor of employers for the past ~40 odd years or so. No UBI proposal has ever said anything about "treating everyone like stellar employees" - it's an irrelevant point.
- autokad 10y ago
  UBI is not 'tilting slightly the balance in the direction of workers'. its ripping the balance strait the f off the scale. 'treating everyone like stellar employees' is not irrelevant. we are not in the utopian world where technology has made resources so abundant that everyone can have what they want without working extra hard for it. maybe in 35+ years, but this PRECONDITION is necessary to even begin to think UBI would work. SO when an employer is forced to pay all employees a basic income, they have to start paying uneducated / unskilled / low performing employees more. when revenue has not increased, this means taking pay raises / income / benefits from the other employees. #2 if all of your needs are GUARANTEED you might be surprised to find nobody would be willing to do many jobs.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > SO when an employer is forced to pay all employees a basic income Wait, I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Employers don't pay a basic income, the government does (so by extension we all do, through taxes). I'm not sure how it will shake out, but there are pressures to both reduce and increase pay in a BI system. Everyone is getting a base level of income, so wages across the board will drop (but companies will be paying more in taxes, so it's offset somewhat). On the other hand, there will be less applicants for crap jobs, so the wages for those will likely go up. Then again, maybe a crap job isn't so bad if you don't have to do it 40 hours a week, and since people won't need the work as much as want it for increased spending power, maybe you can fill what was a single position with 2-3 part-time positions, and people will accept less pay because they aren't doing it all week long. The biggest problem with moving to BI is that there are so many variables that are affected it's impossible to say with any confidence how it would settle. Experiments like this help with that, but even they can only go so far when the people are interspersed with others that are not on a BI system.
  - autokad 10y ago
    let me get this strait kbenson, you are saying: take money from (tax) people who are skilled / educated / work harder to better themselves and give it to those who don't. they will have increased spending power now and purchase things that the skilled/educated workers where buying so the skilled people will face a double whammy of both loss of wages and loss of buying power.
    - quadrangle 10y ago
      no (though I'm not kbenson), because your entire premise that wealth today is strictly correlate with "skilled / educated / work harder" is bullshit. Yeah, I know some people think that we live in a meritocracy where if you have wealth, you deserve it, and there's no luck or dishonesty or cheating or inherent unfair inequalities — but it's obvious you don't come to that view by looking at the evidence, you come to that by something along the lines of reading Ayn Rand and just believing that nonsense or something similar. In reality, lots of wealth is captured by those whose action provide no positive value to the world. Lots of success involves luck. And lots of people working shitty not-so-productive jobs have the potential to be far more effective and UBI would assist that in ways other approaches do not. Anyway, even if we disagree about tons of things, you could have productive discussions with people if you didn't insist on bullshit implications like the idea that all the people in high-paid jobs are hard-working, deserving, productive folks while all low-paid people are the opposite. http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/