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> 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-sequitu

> 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/
      - autokad 10y ago
        so your idea of a productive conversation is having someone repeat your own opinions at you. I'm sorry you don't believe your success is in your own hands. successful people create their own luck, you are pretty old to have not realized that by now.
        quadrangle 10y ago
        I LOVE learning new things by engaging with people I disagree with (and sometimes change my mind!) The way to succeed at that process is to avoid asserting nonsensical extremes. Of course there's a correlation between hard-work and success, but it's not a strict one. There are lots of cases where two people worked equally hard and intelligently and one succeeds where the other fails. That luck factor is separate from all the systematic things that put people at all sorts of different privileges already. From everything I understand about the world (from personal experience and from reading and learning from others), there's a strong correlation between success and unearned privileged that is at least arguably a stronger correlation than the one about hard work. So, the most success comes from all three factors: luck, privilege, and hard work — put together. It seems like you think even acknowledging luck and privilege is tantamount to denying the significance of hard work.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > SO when an employer is forced to pay all employees a basic income BI is not paid by employers to employees. You seem to be confusing Basic Income with some kind of minimum wage. > this means taking pay raises / income / benefits from the other employees. Or it means reducing returns to capital; this is fairly expressly the case in UBI funded by increases in taxation of capital income.
    - pitay 10y ago
      > BI is not paid by employers to employees. You seem to be confusing Basic Income with some kind of minimum wage. Although, raising the minimum wage would be a good thing. Here is an article that shows how the lowest paying companies are effectively ripping off the rest of the economy: http://prospect.org/article/confronting-parasite-economy http://prospect.org/article/confronting-parasite-economy (Confronting the Parasite Economy) The articles is written by Nick Hanauer who is co-chair board of Pacific Coast Feather Company, his families business. Here is a excerpt from the article which explained what happened when minimum wage was raised to $15 an hour in Seattle. In 2014, Seattle took its high-wage model one step further, passing the first $15 minimum wage in the nation. Restaurateurs and right-wing think tanks warned of ruin. Businesses would close. Workers would lose their jobs. The invisible hand would punch us in the mouth. But it never happened. As the Puget Sound Business Journal recently reported in a front page story titled “Apocalypse Not: $15 and the cuts that never came,” six months after the first wage increase went into effect, Seattle’s restaurant industry is growing faster than ever. Even celebrity chef Tom Douglas, who had warned that Seattle could lose a quarter of its downtown restaurants, has continued to add restaurants to his local empire. “Douglas has now changed his mind about the law,” the PSBJ reports, “saying he was ‘naïve’ to think that restaurants would raise pay on their own.” That he was. And then on February 15, 2016, The Seattle Times reported that ADP’s national survey of economic vitality ranked Washington state number one in the country for both wage and job growth. And you thought higher wages killed jobs. Not hardly.
      - autokad 10y ago
        basic income and minimum wage is about the same thing, its just a matter of how it gets taken out of our paychecks. seatle is successful because of a tech boom and subsequent real estate boom, not because of minimum wage, that started just over a year ago.

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/
    - autokad 10y ago
      so your idea of a productive conversation is having someone repeat your own opinions at you. I'm sorry you don't believe your success is in your own hands. successful people create their own luck, you are pretty old to have not realized that by now.
      - quadrangle 10y ago
        I LOVE learning new things by engaging with people I disagree with (and sometimes change my mind!) The way to succeed at that process is to avoid asserting nonsensical extremes. Of course there's a correlation between hard-work and success, but it's not a strict one. There are lots of cases where two people worked equally hard and intelligently and one succeeds where the other fails. That luck factor is separate from all the systematic things that put people at all sorts of different privileges already. From everything I understand about the world (from personal experience and from reading and learning from others), there's a strong correlation between success and unearned privileged that is at least arguably a stronger correlation than the one about hard work. So, the most success comes from all three factors: luck, privilege, and hard work — put together. It seems like you think even acknowledging luck and privilege is tantamount to denying the significance of hard work.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > SO when an employer is forced to pay all employees a basic income BI is not paid by employers to employees. You seem to be confusing Basic Income with some kind of minimum wage. > this means taking pay raises / income / benefits from the other employees. Or it means reducing returns to capital; this is fairly expressly the case in UBI funded by increases in taxation of capital income.
  - pitay 10y ago
    > BI is not paid by employers to employees. You seem to be confusing Basic Income with some kind of minimum wage. Although, raising the minimum wage would be a good thing. Here is an article that shows how the lowest paying companies are effectively ripping off the rest of the economy: http://prospect.org/article/confronting-parasite-economy http://prospect.org/article/confronting-parasite-economy (Confronting the Parasite Economy) The articles is written by Nick Hanauer who is co-chair board of Pacific Coast Feather Company, his families business. Here is a excerpt from the article which explained what happened when minimum wage was raised to $15 an hour in Seattle. In 2014, Seattle took its high-wage model one step further, passing the first $15 minimum wage in the nation. Restaurateurs and right-wing think tanks warned of ruin. Businesses would close. Workers would lose their jobs. The invisible hand would punch us in the mouth. But it never happened. As the Puget Sound Business Journal recently reported in a front page story titled “Apocalypse Not: $15 and the cuts that never came,” six months after the first wage increase went into effect, Seattle’s restaurant industry is growing faster than ever. Even celebrity chef Tom Douglas, who had warned that Seattle could lose a quarter of its downtown restaurants, has continued to add restaurants to his local empire. “Douglas has now changed his mind about the law,” the PSBJ reports, “saying he was ‘naïve’ to think that restaurants would raise pay on their own.” That he was. And then on February 15, 2016, The Seattle Times reported that ADP’s national survey of economic vitality ranked Washington state number one in the country for both wage and job growth. And you thought higher wages killed jobs. Not hardly.
    - autokad 10y ago
      basic income and minimum wage is about the same thing, its just a matter of how it gets taken out of our paychecks. seatle is successful because of a tech boom and subsequent real estate boom, not because of minimum wage, that started just over a year ago.