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> If those workers were capable of earning enough money to no longer be eligible for public benefits, they would choose to take those jobs instead. It seems we
by dxdm 6y ago
> If those workers were capable of earning enough money to no longer be eligible for public benefits, they would choose to take those jobs instead.
It seems weird to me to accept it quasi as a law of nature that large parts of the population get paid below subsistence level for their work, often doing physically or emotionally hard labor, while others earn big in bullshit-rich environments.
I get that we need some sort of market for effective allocation of resources. But seeing how rich western societies are as a whole, while still giving many of their members trouble with feeding themselves, housing and (in some countries) getting adequate medical care, makes me wonder how far we've really come with finding a good way to distribute wealth adequately.
Saying that "the market forces" don't allow people to make enough money to get by seems like such a cop-out to me. Yes, public benefits are a way of redistributing wealth for a better outcome, but let's not forget that the market is a human creation and we can influence how it operates in multiple ways.
If public benefits subsidize cheap labor in exchange for cheaper consumer prices, that is (as has been pointed out) a way of shifting some of the price off the product to be paid via taxes, externalizing some of the cost to the general public, incurring a human cost on the people who provide the labor, while allowing private investors to take a share of the transfer as their profit. I don't know if that's the most effective way of distributing resources here, but let's not forget that we might not only want to optimize for money making potential here, but also for harder to price things like the pursuit of happiness.
- philwelch 6y ago> It seems weird to me to accept it quasi as a law of nature that large parts of the population get paid below subsistence level for their work, often doing physically or emotionally hard labor, while others earn big in bullshit-rich environments. Earning “below subsistence level” for physically and emotionally hard work is how over 99% of human lives have gone throughout history. It’s somewhat miraculous how many people in developed countries don’t live that way anymore.
- arcticbull 6y agoYeah most of human existence was crap and crap out of necessity. The necessity doesn’t exist anymore so it’s a specious argument. Accepting any less than a basic reasonable existence now that it’s possible is selling yourself short and your countrymen short.
- dxdm 6y ago> It’s somewhat miraculous how many people in developed countries don’t live that way anymore. Instead of invoking the supernatural, I'd prefer to call it quite fortunate that human ingenuity has allowed us to exploit vast energy sources in order to raise the general level of well-being among a portion of humanity, while also finding ways to share wealth and power in (unfortunately not exclusively) more peaceful ways. The cop-out I was talking about is precisely this kind of hiding behind proclaimed laws of nature and miracles, when there's clearly choice and agency involved. Comparing the situation of laborers, but also the stratification of western societies, in the Victorian era with today I think shows that we can not only increase the size of the pie, but also influence how to distribute it more fairly. I think that seeing how much "miracle" there is to go around, it's worthwhile considering how to enable more people to take part in it, by finding ways to spread the miracle whip around a tad more evenly.
- philwelch 6y agoWhich is exactly the reason we have these public assistance programs, so I don’t see the problem.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]