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I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to

I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.

whimsicalism 6y ago
Probably also a fallacy that it would take infinite amounts of money to alleviate poverty (:
- criticaljudge 6y ago
  Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario. Also scarcity - think of "a kingdom for a horse". If there are 1000 apples and 1001 people, and everybody who doesn't get an apple starves to death, the 1001th apple would be worth an infinite amount of money to the 1001th person at least, or to the person who wants to save them by all means.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario Unless my physics course misled me, no, it isn't.
    - criticaljudge 6y ago
      The value can be infinite. If you are about to die, you would give everything to prevent it - more than you have.
dv_dt 6y ago
I am confused by this. The comment is against taking care of lazy people directly, but also hits on government spending which would be the way to make direct personal care of lazy people indirect. As to the infinite money - we have more than enough productive capacity to supply basics of life to everyone without trying to somehow further weigh if their laziness needs to be punitively motivated for basic living support. Is this some fear that if we provide basic supports for everyone that "too many" people would not move beyond basics? That really seems unlikely.
- criticaljudge 6y ago
  I was replying to an absolute statement, "every lazy person deserves x". My point is that there are probably more aspects to consider in general. Your claims that we have "more than enough" are unproven, imo. Let's take housing. Is your claim that there is enough good housing around for everybody, or that it could be built quickly? How quickly - how many houses are needed, by your estimate? How many building workers are available, and how fast could they build? How many heavy machines (cranes, trucks, bulldozuers...) are available on short notice, to speed up the building? I don't think many such machines are sitting around idly, and the same goes for construction workers. That means housing is already being built at maximum capacity, and yet there still aren't enough affordable houses. Just because Apple can make billions of dollars of surplus, doesn't mean there is the equivalant of building machines sitting around idly, waiting to be hired with Apple's money (taking Apple as an example of a rich surplus company). In fact that money is just debt, literally IOUs - "I owe you". Apple selling an iPhone to people for 1000$ means they trust those people will someday repay them with something worth roughly 1000$. That something could be a building machine. But that machine does not have to exist yet - at the point of sale, all there is is Apple's trust in "the people" to at some point provide that building machine. Now if Apple were to say today "screw it, we are spending all our money on building houses for the poor", it would probably result in the equivalent of a bank run. Apple would try to rent or buy 10000 construction machines in a single go, but that many machines don't exist. So "the people" would have to go oopsie and say "actually, you can not get a bulldozer for your money".
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Its actually quite a good claim, for example if we examine UK: we have more empty houses than we have homeless people, and we have more food thrown away as waste than what would be needed to feed said homeless people. Furthermore, suppose you were to budget 3000 calories of basic food for every person in Uk, you'd find it's a tiny fraction of national budget.
    - criticaljudge 6y ago
      So the only reason those homeless people don't get their houses is that nobody wants to give them to them? I rather doubt that number. More likely those empty houses are in places where nobody wants to live, or that are unsuitable for homeless (because the environment to support them is missing in the location).
xxpor 6y ago
> Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend. They create the money so they literally do. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be deployed wisely of course.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  If you want to be pedantic, they have the ability to create infinite nominal dollars. They cannot create infinite wealth.
- EvilEy3 6y ago
  They "create" money out of your pocket.
- criticaljudge 6y ago
  If they print money, they devalue the money people already have, so in the end again it is the people, not "government", who pay.
xyzzyz 6y ago
When your friend Steve comes to you to "borrow" $100 (that he'll never return), because he's short on rent, and he blew last of his cash on hookers and booze, it seems pretty reasonable and perfectly morally justified to either refuse outright, or condition your help on requirement that Steve gets a job, and quits his hookers and booze habit. Certainly, nobody would ever suggest that you have any obligation to enable Steve to live his desired lifestyle of leisure, hookers and booze. However, when it's the government that comes and asks you to give them $100, so that they could in turn give it to Joe, an acquaintance of Steve living the same lifestyle that you have never even met, somehow now it is your moral obligation to pay up, as Joe clearly deserves your money. How does that work?
- RobertKerans 6y ago
  It works because that's not the calculation being made. You're not giving up money specifically to a "Steve" or "Joe". What you are doing is putting money into a pool. From that pool, the money is redistributed in such a way as to provide baseline income to people in need. Most of the people it is redistributed to are not "Steve" or "Joe", and the calculation is that it is cheaper to ignore free riders such as Steve/Joe as they are a small minority. The calculation is also that not providing this baseline is both economically bad (providing a baseline seems to be much more cost effective than dealing with effects of not doing that) and morally bad (most of the people in need of the baseline are in need of it not [directly] through fault of their own)
- mattbk1 6y ago
  To add to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307485, the government may be in a position to turn that $100 directly into food or housing for Steve.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    The $100 Steve asked me to borrow will also turn directly into housing. He said that he needs it to meet his rent, and he's not lying: he will use it to pay his rent. Nevertheless, that just enables him to continue his hookers and booze habit.
hellbannedguy 6y ago
I don’t think they are lazy. Many have emotional problems. Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs. It’s ironic you say the government doesn’t have infinite money to spend. We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter. There is not a person, well one, on my block in Marin County that has not benefited financially from the virus, but will be getting $1400 to blow. I am worried about inflation.
- criticaljudge 6y ago
  The OP was specifically a bout "lazy people", so your claim that they are not lazy does not make any sense at all. You can argue that there may be no actual lazy people, but that is another discussion. "We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter." Are you really not aware that the bill for that will simply come later (as it is a debt taken out on behalf of the population), and in the process of creating those two trillion, existing money has already been devalued?
- retrac 6y ago
  Most of the people I know who don't work who are sometimes dismissed as lazy have mental issues. In the family of ADHD, or anxiety. Unable to focus on pursuing a particular path long enough for it to pay off. Easily frustrated and prone to giving up when frustrated. And often a crippling doubt that they're capable of doing anything worth being paid for in the first place. I suspect clever lazy people without barriers to social or economic participation usually seek out, and often obtain, jobs where they're paid to do approximately nothing. Lazy people, assuming that category is even meaningful, aren't masochists who want to live in poverty. There's more going on there.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  Inflation of US currency is dead.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  > Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs. Without the job, they would have extra 8 hours (plus commute time) a day to meet their non-job friends.

whimsicalism 6y ago

Probably also a fallacy that it would take infinite amounts of money to alleviate poverty (:

criticaljudge 6y ago
Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario. Also scarcity - think of "a kingdom for a horse". If there are 1000 apples and 1001 people, and everybody who doesn't get an apple starves to death, the 1001th apple would be worth an infinite amount of money to the 1001th person at least, or to the person who wants to save them by all means.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario Unless my physics course misled me, no, it isn't.
  - criticaljudge 6y ago
    The value can be infinite. If you are about to die, you would give everything to prevent it - more than you have.

dv_dt 6y ago

I am confused by this. The comment is against taking care of lazy people directly, but also hits on government spending which would be the way to make direct personal care of lazy people indirect. As to the infinite money - we have more than enough productive capacity to supply basics of life to everyone without trying to somehow further weigh if their laziness needs to be punitively motivated for basic living support. Is this some fear that if we provide basic supports for everyone that "too many" people would not move beyond basics? That really seems unlikely.

criticaljudge 6y ago
I was replying to an absolute statement, "every lazy person deserves x". My point is that there are probably more aspects to consider in general. Your claims that we have "more than enough" are unproven, imo. Let's take housing. Is your claim that there is enough good housing around for everybody, or that it could be built quickly? How quickly - how many houses are needed, by your estimate? How many building workers are available, and how fast could they build? How many heavy machines (cranes, trucks, bulldozuers...) are available on short notice, to speed up the building? I don't think many such machines are sitting around idly, and the same goes for construction workers. That means housing is already being built at maximum capacity, and yet there still aren't enough affordable houses. Just because Apple can make billions of dollars of surplus, doesn't mean there is the equivalant of building machines sitting around idly, waiting to be hired with Apple's money (taking Apple as an example of a rich surplus company). In fact that money is just debt, literally IOUs - "I owe you". Apple selling an iPhone to people for 1000$ means they trust those people will someday repay them with something worth roughly 1000$. That something could be a building machine. But that machine does not have to exist yet - at the point of sale, all there is is Apple's trust in "the people" to at some point provide that building machine. Now if Apple were to say today "screw it, we are spending all our money on building houses for the poor", it would probably result in the equivalent of a bank run. Apple would try to rent or buy 10000 construction machines in a single go, but that many machines don't exist. So "the people" would have to go oopsie and say "actually, you can not get a bulldozer for your money".
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Its actually quite a good claim, for example if we examine UK: we have more empty houses than we have homeless people, and we have more food thrown away as waste than what would be needed to feed said homeless people. Furthermore, suppose you were to budget 3000 calories of basic food for every person in Uk, you'd find it's a tiny fraction of national budget.
  - criticaljudge 6y ago
    So the only reason those homeless people don't get their houses is that nobody wants to give them to them? I rather doubt that number. More likely those empty houses are in places where nobody wants to live, or that are unsuitable for homeless (because the environment to support them is missing in the location).

xxpor 6y ago

> Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend. They create the money so they literally do. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be deployed wisely of course.

dahfizz 6y ago
If you want to be pedantic, they have the ability to create infinite nominal dollars. They cannot create infinite wealth.
EvilEy3 6y ago
They "create" money out of your pocket.
criticaljudge 6y ago
If they print money, they devalue the money people already have, so in the end again it is the people, not "government", who pay.

xyzzyz 6y ago

When your friend Steve comes to you to "borrow" $100 (that he'll never return), because he's short on rent, and he blew last of his cash on hookers and booze, it seems pretty reasonable and perfectly morally justified to either refuse outright, or condition your help on requirement that Steve gets a job, and quits his hookers and booze habit. Certainly, nobody would ever suggest that you have any obligation to enable Steve to live his desired lifestyle of leisure, hookers and booze. However, when it's the government that comes and asks you to give them $100, so that they could in turn give it to Joe, an acquaintance of Steve living the same lifestyle that you have never even met, somehow now it is your moral obligation to pay up, as Joe clearly deserves your money. How does that work?

RobertKerans 6y ago
It works because that's not the calculation being made. You're not giving up money specifically to a "Steve" or "Joe". What you are doing is putting money into a pool. From that pool, the money is redistributed in such a way as to provide baseline income to people in need. Most of the people it is redistributed to are not "Steve" or "Joe", and the calculation is that it is cheaper to ignore free riders such as Steve/Joe as they are a small minority. The calculation is also that not providing this baseline is both economically bad (providing a baseline seems to be much more cost effective than dealing with effects of not doing that) and morally bad (most of the people in need of the baseline are in need of it not [directly] through fault of their own)
mattbk1 6y ago
To add to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307485, the government may be in a position to turn that $100 directly into food or housing for Steve.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  The $100 Steve asked me to borrow will also turn directly into housing. He said that he needs it to meet his rent, and he's not lying: he will use it to pay his rent. Nevertheless, that just enables him to continue his hookers and booze habit.

hellbannedguy 6y ago

I don’t think they are lazy. Many have emotional problems. Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs. It’s ironic you say the government doesn’t have infinite money to spend. We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter. There is not a person, well one, on my block in Marin County that has not benefited financially from the virus, but will be getting $1400 to blow. I am worried about inflation.

criticaljudge 6y ago
The OP was specifically a bout "lazy people", so your claim that they are not lazy does not make any sense at all. You can argue that there may be no actual lazy people, but that is another discussion. "We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter." Are you really not aware that the bill for that will simply come later (as it is a debt taken out on behalf of the population), and in the process of creating those two trillion, existing money has already been devalued?
retrac 6y ago
Most of the people I know who don't work who are sometimes dismissed as lazy have mental issues. In the family of ADHD, or anxiety. Unable to focus on pursuing a particular path long enough for it to pay off. Easily frustrated and prone to giving up when frustrated. And often a crippling doubt that they're capable of doing anything worth being paid for in the first place. I suspect clever lazy people without barriers to social or economic participation usually seek out, and often obtain, jobs where they're paid to do approximately nothing. Lazy people, assuming that category is even meaningful, aren't masochists who want to live in poverty. There's more going on there.
datavirtue 6y ago
Inflation of US currency is dead.
Viliam1234 6y ago
> Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs. Without the job, they would have extra 8 hours (plus commute time) a day to meet their non-job friends.