8 ms·

Your views exemplify selfish priorities and an uncaring worldview. If you care about others, let it be reflected in your behavior and people (like me) will stop

Your views exemplify selfish priorities and an uncaring worldview. If you care about others, let it be reflected in your behavior and people (like me) will stop doubting you. Is your issue with government in the abstract or your government? If the latter, the caring solution is to change the government through voting, vocalizing and organizing. Governments are instituted to maintain a level of civility in a society. Naturally, poverty erodes the means for civility so governments in civilized nations around the world successfully apply their government as an organization sufficient for this task. If that sufficiency falls below their approval, they repair it. If your issue concerns government in the abstract, then quite simply: you don’t care about people in poverty. If you can’t find the decency to be honest about that, then you’ve got even bigger problems. UBI prioritizes your economy, not your neighbors in poverty. Note Socialists do not support UBI and for anyone concerned that socialists simply want handouts, this should table that argument once and for all. Social programs prioritize caring for people by: - Decoupling access to basic commodity needs from the whims and woes of the market - Built-in protections from abuse. Uncaring folk like to criticize welfare cash recipients as dishonest and lazy. Social programs that avoid cash also avoid this potential altogether.

mathgladiator 8y ago
Are we going to play empathy Olympics? The problem is that you can't decouple commodity needs from the market because life is suffering.
- wilsonnb2 8y ago
  > you can't decouple commodity needs from the market Why not? Isn't that what agricultural subsidies are for?
- germinalphrase 8y ago
  I’m having trouble parsing this sentence. Is this a moral argument about the value of suffering? That suffering is inevitable so lack of access the market can/should be ignored?
sokoloff 8y ago
> you don’t care about people in poverty. If you can’t find the decency to be honest about that, then you’ve got even bigger problems. I have a positive, but finite, amount that I care about people in poverty. > UBI prioritizes your economy, not your neighbors in poverty Giving people in poverty a sustenance level of amount money per month seems it prioritizes neighbors in poverty more than today. To use your own words: If you can’t find the decency to be honest about that, then you’ve got even bigger problems.
- extralego 8y ago
  >I have a positive, but finite, amount that I care about people in poverty. It appears too low to effectively help them except in the case that the same effort might also help yourself. This is not caring. >Giving people in poverty a sustenance level of amount money per month seems it prioritizes neighbors in poverty more than today The contradictions and other problems really are too long to list here but it shouldn’t be necessary. For someone so concerned with wasting money, advocating UBI over direct commodity distribution is about as hypocritical as it gets. The only difference is an additional and purely self-serving dependency on market values, which are drastically unstable across time, geography and, social structures. So, while your claim is of course untested, your proposal only further establishes that once it is instatiated, the results will be ever-changing and your claim therefor unknowable. You might do best to just state why* you would prefer UBI over direct commodity distribution.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    > It appears too low to effectively help them except in the case that the same effort might also help yourself. UBI would absolutely not help me or my family in aggregate. We would be net donors to that program, likely by a factor of more than 20. I support it not because it's good for me, but because it seems the best way to ensure a minimalist safety net for all members of the society. > This is not caring. I understand your opinion. > You might do best to just state why you would prefer UBI over direct commodity distribution. I believe that individuals know better how to and will do a better job in allocating cash than any other agent, governmental or not, would know how to allocate commodities to them. I like this cheese, or that bread. I don’t like crunchy peanut butter. I’d rather live on the East side of the city. I’d rather live with roommates and have more free cash; someone else might want to spend more to live alone. Lots of choices to be made to optimize for limited resources. I don't want a new governmental agency (likely with the usability of the DMV) deciding where poor people live, what they are given to eat, and what clothes they are given to wear. Money is trivially easy to distribute without creating any parallel logistics operations to buy, store, inventory, move, and distribute physical goods. We already have market-based distribution mechanisms for all of those things. Give them cash and let them use their agency to decide how to spend it. They'll do a much better job of it than we would on their behalf.
TheBeardKing 8y ago
What you call the "whims and woes of the market" others would call market efficiency. Being a government employee myself, and dealing with multiple state and federal government programs in my personal life including my mortgage, I am fully on board with allowing the market to better serve the needs of people making their own decisions with cash in hand funded collectively by every citizen of this country. Which, by the way, if not called socialism then I don't know what is. Also, UBI by its very acronymm is Universal, meaning everyone gets the same amount. That's the only fair way to do it, and would negate criticism of cash recipients being "dishonest and lazy." Yes some pay more than others, but that's simply a re-implementation of our current progressive tax system. I think it all basically comes down to your view on government - can they do the right and best thing, or can the individual make better decisions for themselves. By disempowering the invididual, you may even the outcomes, but you disadvantage those who would most benefit from achieving more in life - which in turn, benefits society.
- extralego 8y ago
  >I have a positive, but finite, amount that I care about people in poverty. UBI is another attempt to save an economic system which works for you but incentivizes maintaining a class of desperate and powerless citizens. Each of these ill-fated attempts punishes another slew of innocent generations of poverty-ridden lives, in the name of ignoring the root issue of misaligned incentives. How many chances do you believe the ruling class to deserve? The issue may not be the amount that you care but that your caring evidently depends on what you get out of it. That’s not caring. Try again. >Giving people in poverty a sustenance level of amount money per month seems it prioritizes neighbors in poverty more than today. The contradictions and other problems really are too long to list here but it shouldn’t be necessary. For someone so concerned with wasting money, advocating UBI over direct commodity distribution is about as hypocritical as it gets. The only difference is an additional and purely self-serving dependency on market values, which are drastically unstable across time, geography and, social structures. So, while your claim is of course untested, your proposal only further establishes that, once implemented, the results will be ever-changing and therefor unknowable. You might do best to just state why you would prefer UBI over direct commodity distribution.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
I won't speak for sokoloff. But for myself, my issue with government is that I see, in concrete specifics, exactly what sokoloff said: Waste and inefficiency. And if you claim to care about poverty, maybe you should care about the efficiency of the programs that are supposed to be helping poverty. Maybe you ought to care whether they really do some good, or whether they just employ a lot of middle-class bureaucrats. Note that it's not the middle-class bureaucrats that we're really trying to help. So for all your ripping sokoloff for his/her alleged lack of compassion, you seem to have your head in the sand. You act like government programs actually do what they say on the label - as if passing a program to help people actually helps them. Some of those program probably do some good. But they could do more. If you actually care about the poor (instead of just claiming you do), you have to care about the efficiency of programs that are supposed to help them.

mathgladiator 8y ago

Are we going to play empathy Olympics? The problem is that you can't decouple commodity needs from the market because life is suffering.

wilsonnb2 8y ago
> you can't decouple commodity needs from the market Why not? Isn't that what agricultural subsidies are for?
germinalphrase 8y ago
I’m having trouble parsing this sentence. Is this a moral argument about the value of suffering? That suffering is inevitable so lack of access the market can/should be ignored?

sokoloff 8y ago

> you don’t care about people in poverty. If you can’t find the decency to be honest about that, then you’ve got even bigger problems. I have a positive, but finite, amount that I care about people in poverty. > UBI prioritizes your economy, not your neighbors in poverty Giving people in poverty a sustenance level of amount money per month seems it prioritizes neighbors in poverty more than today. To use your own words: If you can’t find the decency to be honest about that, then you’ve got even bigger problems.

extralego 8y ago
>I have a positive, but finite, amount that I care about people in poverty. It appears too low to effectively help them except in the case that the same effort might also help yourself. This is not caring. >Giving people in poverty a sustenance level of amount money per month seems it prioritizes neighbors in poverty more than today The contradictions and other problems really are too long to list here but it shouldn’t be necessary. For someone so concerned with wasting money, advocating UBI over direct commodity distribution is about as hypocritical as it gets. The only difference is an additional and purely self-serving dependency on market values, which are drastically unstable across time, geography and, social structures. So, while your claim is of course untested, your proposal only further establishes that once it is instatiated, the results will be ever-changing and your claim therefor unknowable. You might do best to just state why* you would prefer UBI over direct commodity distribution.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  > It appears too low to effectively help them except in the case that the same effort might also help yourself. UBI would absolutely not help me or my family in aggregate. We would be net donors to that program, likely by a factor of more than 20. I support it not because it's good for me, but because it seems the best way to ensure a minimalist safety net for all members of the society. > This is not caring. I understand your opinion. > You might do best to just state why you would prefer UBI over direct commodity distribution. I believe that individuals know better how to and will do a better job in allocating cash than any other agent, governmental or not, would know how to allocate commodities to them. I like this cheese, or that bread. I don’t like crunchy peanut butter. I’d rather live on the East side of the city. I’d rather live with roommates and have more free cash; someone else might want to spend more to live alone. Lots of choices to be made to optimize for limited resources. I don't want a new governmental agency (likely with the usability of the DMV) deciding where poor people live, what they are given to eat, and what clothes they are given to wear. Money is trivially easy to distribute without creating any parallel logistics operations to buy, store, inventory, move, and distribute physical goods. We already have market-based distribution mechanisms for all of those things. Give them cash and let them use their agency to decide how to spend it. They'll do a much better job of it than we would on their behalf.

TheBeardKing 8y ago

What you call the "whims and woes of the market" others would call market efficiency. Being a government employee myself, and dealing with multiple state and federal government programs in my personal life including my mortgage, I am fully on board with allowing the market to better serve the needs of people making their own decisions with cash in hand funded collectively by every citizen of this country. Which, by the way, if not called socialism then I don't know what is. Also, UBI by its very acronymm is Universal, meaning everyone gets the same amount. That's the only fair way to do it, and would negate criticism of cash recipients being "dishonest and lazy." Yes some pay more than others, but that's simply a re-implementation of our current progressive tax system. I think it all basically comes down to your view on government - can they do the right and best thing, or can the individual make better decisions for themselves. By disempowering the invididual, you may even the outcomes, but you disadvantage those who would most benefit from achieving more in life - which in turn, benefits society.

extralego 8y ago
>I have a positive, but finite, amount that I care about people in poverty. UBI is another attempt to save an economic system which works for you but incentivizes maintaining a class of desperate and powerless citizens. Each of these ill-fated attempts punishes another slew of innocent generations of poverty-ridden lives, in the name of ignoring the root issue of misaligned incentives. How many chances do you believe the ruling class to deserve? The issue may not be the amount that you care but that your caring evidently depends on what you get out of it. That’s not caring. Try again. >Giving people in poverty a sustenance level of amount money per month seems it prioritizes neighbors in poverty more than today. The contradictions and other problems really are too long to list here but it shouldn’t be necessary. For someone so concerned with wasting money, advocating UBI over direct commodity distribution is about as hypocritical as it gets. The only difference is an additional and purely self-serving dependency on market values, which are drastically unstable across time, geography and, social structures. So, while your claim is of course untested, your proposal only further establishes that, once implemented, the results will be ever-changing and therefor unknowable. You might do best to just state why you would prefer UBI over direct commodity distribution.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

I won't speak for sokoloff. But for myself, my issue with government is that I see, in concrete specifics, exactly what sokoloff said: Waste and inefficiency. And if you claim to care about poverty, maybe you should care about the efficiency of the programs that are supposed to be helping poverty. Maybe you ought to care whether they really do some good, or whether they just employ a lot of middle-class bureaucrats. Note that it's not the middle-class bureaucrats that we're really trying to help. So for all your ripping sokoloff for his/her alleged lack of compassion, you seem to have your head in the sand. You act like government programs actually do what they say on the label - as if passing a program to help people actually helps them. Some of those program probably do some good. But they could do more. If you actually care about the poor (instead of just claiming you do), you have to care about the efficiency of programs that are supposed to help them.