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The real problem, if you look at it from first principles, is the lack of US government protections/services for all workers. If our government provided health

The real problem, if you look at it from first principles, is the lack of US government protections/services for all workers. If our government provided healthcare, eduction, a real pension program, non-terrible unemployment programs, etc. (as it works in most other developed countries) it would not matter if you are a gig worker or full-time employee. There would be no way to exploit you and gain a competitive advantage by hiring you as a contract worker. Companies and workers would be free to arrange employment simply around money and time. Benefits would not matter, and thus, the employment market would become more efficient. The fact that US companies are wholly responsible for the quality of life of their employees is totally hilarious in a modern world where you don't work for the same company for your entire career. You can go from a 1st-world standard of living to a 3rd-world one simply by changing employers in the US. It's absurd.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> If our government provided healthcare, eduction, a real pension program, non-terrible unemployment programs, etc. (as it works in most other developed countries) it would not matter if you are a gig worker or full-time employee. The issue with most of these things is that governments, especially the US government, are generally worse at providing things than competitive businesses. For people who actually have health insurance, outcomes in the US system are better than in most other countries, the US higher education system is generally considered one of the best in the world, etc. The key is not to nationalize services, it's to provide a baseline of support. Pay everyone a UBI. Then if you need healthcare, you have money, go buy healthcare. If you want to go to school, go to school. You don't actually need the government to operate the school, and you especially don't need it telling people what to spend the money on. (See also student loans and home loan interest subsidies and the effect on education and housing costs.)
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  UBI is cargo cult finance. It's a broken mental model that will kill the system. Money doesn't have inherent exchange value per se. It's primary value is in reducing friction in trade. Injecting more money into a system without tying it to injecting more goods and services into the system is a known means to fuel inflation.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    A UBI doesn't create money, it transfers it. It's a generic safety net that provides a floor for how low income can go, so that nobody involuntarily goes without food or medicine but you also don't need the government providing services itself or ordering people to spend the money in a particular way. > Injecting more money into a system without tying it to injecting more goods and services into the system is a known means to fuel inflation. Right now people are paying for things on credit. If you give them the money instead of requiring them to borrow it, the only difference is that they don't have to pay interest. But it could cause inflation in specific assets if the stuff the net recipients buy is different than the stuff the net payers would have bought -- which would be amazing. We're currently having a huge problem with central banks not being able to hit their inflation targets even at historically low interest rates. If we had something that could bring inflation up to traditional levels it would be a boon, since it would allow nominal wages to rise which is badly needed since everyone is currently saddled with unprecedented levels of mortgage, student loan and credit card debt and anything that could devalue the debt would be a major benefit.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      If you give them the money instead of requiring them to borrow it You are probably talking about the government borrowing it instead of individuals. This tends to not end well. The money has to come from somewhere. If it isn't tied to creating new goods and services, then either you are basically printing more or taxing someone for it. Wealth transfer schemes are inevitably unpopular and tend to not work well. Schemes to "soak the rich" tend to get push back from the rich, who generally are in a better than average position to resist being victimized by the system.
      - SantalBlush 8y ago
        >Wealth transfer schemes are inevitably unpopular and tend to not work well. Transfer payments are used as an economic stabilizer along with taxation. They also pool risk. You'll need to back up your assertion since most economists see some benefit to transfer payments, and most developed economies use them.
- danmaz74 8y ago
  The US health care system is the least efficient of all the developed world, in terms of results vs expense. In many sectors, a competitive market gives the best results. In health care, that's just not the case. The free market isn't the be all, end all solution that free market advocates want people to think it is.
  - trentnix 8y ago
    First, US health care is hardly a free market. Second, the free market certainly isn’t a be all, end all solution. Most advocates of free market economics would agree with you. It’s just simply better than any of the other solutions man has dreamed up so far, that’s all.
    - danmaz74 8y ago
      Is the free market the best solution to have an army? Or a judiciary system? It's not. So, it's not better than any other solutions for all problems.
      - ernst_klim 8y ago
        >Is the free market the best solution to have an army? It definitely is. As in "I'm not going to pay for bombing other countries, thanks."
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > The US health care system is the least efficient of all the developed world, in terms of results vs expense. In many sectors, a competitive market gives the best results. In health care, that's just not the case. Interestingly, your example undermines your case, because the US system is also less cost efficient than systems that are more market-oriented than it is. The US healthcare system is uniquely problematic. It's not a markets vs. socialism problem, it's a unique damage that arises from trying to do things at such a scale. Everywhere else in the world it's things the size of individual US states doing healthcare regulation, e.g. a median US state like Oregon has a GDP larger than Portugal or Greece. In the US it happens at the level of the entire union, which screws things up something terrible because it's well past the point that economies of scale give diminishing returns but it grows the public and private bureaucracies so large that they have their own inertia and gravity. If the only thing the US did was repeal all federal healthcare laws and hand the whole thing over to the individual states, it would probably cut costs significantly. And then California could have single payer and New Jersey could require employer-provided coverage and Wyoming could let the market handle it entirely and probably all of them would do better than the feds are currently doing.
viscanti 8y ago
> The real problem, if you look at it from first principles, is the lack of US government protections/services for all workers. This is so true. If traditional jobs (not gig economy jobs) were better, no one would ever accept a gig economy job. Traditional full-time jobs are required to give healthcare and other expensive benefits (that governments everywhere else provide), so those businesses have cut down on the number of full-time jobs. The real comparison here is between big companies who refuse to offer full-time jobs and instead rely on limiting hours to keep most of their jobs as part-time. People who accept gig economy jobs do so because they can work more hours per week (not artificially held under 39 hours so their company can avoid paying benefits). Generally people are rational actors when it comes to accepting the best employment opportunity, so if we see lots of people accepting gig-economy jobs it means that their other alternatives are worse. That's not a defense of gig-economy jobs but instead points out that this is a problem for all workers and suggests moving to a system that the rest of the world uses to solve the same problem.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  And likely because the full-time jobs pay terribly so they do gig stuff to supplement / make ends meet. And it’s something they can do flexibly around their full-time work schedule.
andrei_says_ 8y ago
The reason that government supported healthcare is so difficult to sell in the us is that it drives down the cost of labor and the real constituency of politicians (campaign donors) prefer cheap labor.
jdjmail 8y ago
You nailed it.
jdjmail 8y ago
You nailed it. Overlapping boundaries, inconsistent definitions and application of community values encourages misuse.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

> If our government provided healthcare, eduction, a real pension program, non-terrible unemployment programs, etc. (as it works in most other developed countries) it would not matter if you are a gig worker or full-time employee. The issue with most of these things is that governments, especially the US government, are generally worse at providing things than competitive businesses. For people who actually have health insurance, outcomes in the US system are better than in most other countries, the US higher education system is generally considered one of the best in the world, etc. The key is not to nationalize services, it's to provide a baseline of support. Pay everyone a UBI. Then if you need healthcare, you have money, go buy healthcare. If you want to go to school, go to school. You don't actually need the government to operate the school, and you especially don't need it telling people what to spend the money on. (See also student loans and home loan interest subsidies and the effect on education and housing costs.)

DoreenMichele 8y ago
UBI is cargo cult finance. It's a broken mental model that will kill the system. Money doesn't have inherent exchange value per se. It's primary value is in reducing friction in trade. Injecting more money into a system without tying it to injecting more goods and services into the system is a known means to fuel inflation.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  A UBI doesn't create money, it transfers it. It's a generic safety net that provides a floor for how low income can go, so that nobody involuntarily goes without food or medicine but you also don't need the government providing services itself or ordering people to spend the money in a particular way. > Injecting more money into a system without tying it to injecting more goods and services into the system is a known means to fuel inflation. Right now people are paying for things on credit. If you give them the money instead of requiring them to borrow it, the only difference is that they don't have to pay interest. But it could cause inflation in specific assets if the stuff the net recipients buy is different than the stuff the net payers would have bought -- which would be amazing. We're currently having a huge problem with central banks not being able to hit their inflation targets even at historically low interest rates. If we had something that could bring inflation up to traditional levels it would be a boon, since it would allow nominal wages to rise which is badly needed since everyone is currently saddled with unprecedented levels of mortgage, student loan and credit card debt and anything that could devalue the debt would be a major benefit.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    If you give them the money instead of requiring them to borrow it You are probably talking about the government borrowing it instead of individuals. This tends to not end well. The money has to come from somewhere. If it isn't tied to creating new goods and services, then either you are basically printing more or taxing someone for it. Wealth transfer schemes are inevitably unpopular and tend to not work well. Schemes to "soak the rich" tend to get push back from the rich, who generally are in a better than average position to resist being victimized by the system.
    - SantalBlush 8y ago
      >Wealth transfer schemes are inevitably unpopular and tend to not work well. Transfer payments are used as an economic stabilizer along with taxation. They also pool risk. You'll need to back up your assertion since most economists see some benefit to transfer payments, and most developed economies use them.
danmaz74 8y ago
The US health care system is the least efficient of all the developed world, in terms of results vs expense. In many sectors, a competitive market gives the best results. In health care, that's just not the case. The free market isn't the be all, end all solution that free market advocates want people to think it is.
- trentnix 8y ago
  First, US health care is hardly a free market. Second, the free market certainly isn’t a be all, end all solution. Most advocates of free market economics would agree with you. It’s just simply better than any of the other solutions man has dreamed up so far, that’s all.
  - danmaz74 8y ago
    Is the free market the best solution to have an army? Or a judiciary system? It's not. So, it's not better than any other solutions for all problems.
    - ernst_klim 8y ago
      >Is the free market the best solution to have an army? It definitely is. As in "I'm not going to pay for bombing other countries, thanks."
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > The US health care system is the least efficient of all the developed world, in terms of results vs expense. In many sectors, a competitive market gives the best results. In health care, that's just not the case. Interestingly, your example undermines your case, because the US system is also less cost efficient than systems that are more market-oriented than it is. The US healthcare system is uniquely problematic. It's not a markets vs. socialism problem, it's a unique damage that arises from trying to do things at such a scale. Everywhere else in the world it's things the size of individual US states doing healthcare regulation, e.g. a median US state like Oregon has a GDP larger than Portugal or Greece. In the US it happens at the level of the entire union, which screws things up something terrible because it's well past the point that economies of scale give diminishing returns but it grows the public and private bureaucracies so large that they have their own inertia and gravity. If the only thing the US did was repeal all federal healthcare laws and hand the whole thing over to the individual states, it would probably cut costs significantly. And then California could have single payer and New Jersey could require employer-provided coverage and Wyoming could let the market handle it entirely and probably all of them would do better than the feds are currently doing.

viscanti 8y ago

> The real problem, if you look at it from first principles, is the lack of US government protections/services for all workers. This is so true. If traditional jobs (not gig economy jobs) were better, no one would ever accept a gig economy job. Traditional full-time jobs are required to give healthcare and other expensive benefits (that governments everywhere else provide), so those businesses have cut down on the number of full-time jobs. The real comparison here is between big companies who refuse to offer full-time jobs and instead rely on limiting hours to keep most of their jobs as part-time. People who accept gig economy jobs do so because they can work more hours per week (not artificially held under 39 hours so their company can avoid paying benefits). Generally people are rational actors when it comes to accepting the best employment opportunity, so if we see lots of people accepting gig-economy jobs it means that their other alternatives are worse. That's not a defense of gig-economy jobs but instead points out that this is a problem for all workers and suggests moving to a system that the rest of the world uses to solve the same problem.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
And likely because the full-time jobs pay terribly so they do gig stuff to supplement / make ends meet. And it’s something they can do flexibly around their full-time work schedule.

andrei_says_ 8y ago

The reason that government supported healthcare is so difficult to sell in the us is that it drives down the cost of labor and the real constituency of politicians (campaign donors) prefer cheap labor.

jdjmail 8y ago

You nailed it.

jdjmail 8y ago

You nailed it. Overlapping boundaries, inconsistent definitions and application of community values encourages misuse.