6 ms·

The laws are like that, because someone feels that it's not in their interest that people actually get out of poverty. The logic behind that interest is simple.

by kebman 5y ago

The laws are like that, because someone feels that it's not in their interest that people actually get out of poverty. The logic behind that interest is simple. You can't make people dependent on you if you simultaneously give them the tools to achieve independence. And these guys love dependent people, because it gives them power. However this attitude is ruining most Western societies.

shoo 5y ago
do you have any hard data or research to back that up?
- monoideism 5y ago
  Hypothetically, if something like that were happening, do you think any of the politicians voting such legislation in, with such an intent, would admit to it in an open forum, for a study?
- kebman 5y ago
  Well, if you're willing to look for it, there does exist research within political science that shows that "the elites" are systematically favoured in representational democracies, as far as policy implementation goes. In short, these analysis show that policies that has the favour of the elites gets voted in far more often than policies that only has the favour of the regular population. Two great outliers here are of course the vote for Brexit, and the election of Trump. The elite hated both of those. An interesting paper would thus be to compare the contentedness of these "factions" with their political system between countries that have representative democracy, vs. countries that have a more direct style of democracy such as Switzerland. Speaking purely from logic, neither the political nor the monetary elite would rationally want regular people to get a possible advantage over them. Moreover, they want people that are dependent on them, because that makes them far easier to control. You do that by making sure they only ever get enough money for their daily bread, without getting so much as to cut into what keeps the elites rich, which is a combination of real estate, banking and industry ownership. This means both some right leaning, but also left leaning parties, might want to ensure that regular people are never given more than exactly enough for mere survival, but not a penny more. This also goes for education, btw. You don't want to over-educate these guys, lest they become a competitor to the job you're looking for. If you give them any less, you'll have riots on your hand. If you give them any more, you lose control over them.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > You don't want to over-educate these guys, lest they become a competitor to the job you're looking for. You see this a lot in immigration policy BTW. Why do we have so many uneducated and unskilled immigrants with no legal recognition whatsoever, and so little immigration of skilled workers and business-oriented people, much of it hobbled by restrictions on firm-level mobility (like those around the H1B visa)? Follow the money.
  - kebman 5y ago
    > You see this a lot in immigration policy. Why do we have so many uneducated and unskilled immigrants with no legal recognition whatsoever, and so little immigration of skilled workers, much of it hobbled by restrictions on labor mobility (like those around the H1B visa)? Follow the money. Well, in some sense you could also follow the labour organizations. Look, if you're a poor migrant who just got a hold of a job, would you love the idea of ten others standing in line for that same job, ensuring that you can't ever ask for a raise? No. If you were a rational human being, you'd start voting for the populist anti-migrant parties in your country of residence, like many immigrants are these days. This is proven by the wages in immigration heavy professions, that have been all but standing still for decades now. Some people even call this effect reverse colonialism. It's when you're not allowed to earn money off colonialism anymore, so you simply invite the impoverished people for similar jobs in your own country instead. What's worse is that many Labour Party equivalents across the West have even been welcoming this change, since they hoped it would make more people vote for them. But now most of them see that this stance has backfired badly for them. Hence many of them are now experiencing the lowest approval ratings in decades, as many now view them as the direct cause for many of the problems Western countries are now experiencing.
zozbot234 5y ago
Yup, people who actually lift their way out of poverty are not a reliable votebank. You see this happen a lot in the U.S. where minority groups have been trapped for decades by the Democrat party especially. First with sharecropping and segregation then with class warfare, either way they're kept down on the farm.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  The people who supported segregation mostly abandoned the Democratic Party decades ago because of the civil rights issue. It’s one of the prime reasons the south used to be solidly Democratic and is now solidly Republican. Neither party is the same as it was in the nineteenth century.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > The people who supported segregation mostly abandoned the Democratic Party decades ago because of the civil rights issue. Yup, that's what people like to tell themselves but much of it is wishful thinking. Look at how long people like Robert Byrd stayed around. Look at who actually supports, e.g. extreme NIMBY policies in urban areas to keep undesirable "demographics" out of the neighborhood, and "fights gentrification" to keep them boxed in with substandard amenities. How is that not modern segregation?
    - dd36 5y ago
      It’s historical fact.
    - enkid 5y ago
      Senators from West Virginia do not represent the mainstream Democrat views, so let's not cherry pick an example that ended over a decade ago. Instead, let's have a substantive conversation about policy. What specific policies are you referring to as NIMBY?
      - zozbot234 5y ago
mycologos 5y ago
There's a weird chicken-and-egg quality to these arguments where the pro-state party wants to expand benefits, the anti-state party wants to limit them, and we end up at this equilibrium where benefits are good enough for some people to cobble together lives based on them, but not good enough for most of those people to build better lives and get off them. I think it's overly simplistic to put all of the blame on one party (as a sibling comment about Democrats does).
- usrusr 5y ago
  I call that problem the how-much-vs-how: there's a permanent battle about the amount of transfer with exceptions and special cases pushed in from both sides at every opportunity, and result is continually worse incentives and complications like that effective tax rate problem at the thresholds of the receiver side.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  I think it's disingenuous to categorize the parties as "pro-" and "anti-" state, when the "anti-state" parties generally contain all the nationalists, supporters of the police state, and those who are willing to increase state military expenditures (and at least in the US's case, increasing government subsidies for their own constituents). It's pretty clear that "anti-state" in this context actually means opposition exclusively to policies that help the poor and hinder exploitation by the rich.
pjc50 5y ago
The drive from this comes out of the right, who believe that work is the only valid route out of poverty. Regardless of actual capacity to work.
- chii 5y ago
  > only valid route out of poverty well, what other routes are there?
  - Kliment 5y ago
    For the fuckers currently running the UK, primarily a combination of inheritance and corruption.
  - growse 5y ago
    If you can't think of any, do you think that means that those who can't work (disability, illness, dependents) deserve to be poor forever?
    - chii 5y ago
      i'm not saying the deserve to be poor, but they cannot be rich - and at best, society can keep them alive and provide the minimal, necessary sustenance for survival. While they wait for technological improvements to cure them of their illness (if such tech comes to pass). What would be a viable alternative? If this had happened in the jungle pre-historic times, they'd just be dead. So is it not an improvement?
      - mrow84 5y ago
        > at best, society can keep them alive and provide the minimal, necessary sustenance for survival There is no constraint on a society enforcing this level of support as an upper bound. A society can dedicate as much or as little of its resources as it chooses to supporting those unable to support themselves, each possible amount having a different set of consequences.
      - 5y ago

by kebman 5y ago

shoo 5y ago

do you have any hard data or research to back that up?

monoideism 5y ago
Hypothetically, if something like that were happening, do you think any of the politicians voting such legislation in, with such an intent, would admit to it in an open forum, for a study?
kebman 5y ago
Well, if you're willing to look for it, there does exist research within political science that shows that "the elites" are systematically favoured in representational democracies, as far as policy implementation goes. In short, these analysis show that policies that has the favour of the elites gets voted in far more often than policies that only has the favour of the regular population. Two great outliers here are of course the vote for Brexit, and the election of Trump. The elite hated both of those. An interesting paper would thus be to compare the contentedness of these "factions" with their political system between countries that have representative democracy, vs. countries that have a more direct style of democracy such as Switzerland. Speaking purely from logic, neither the political nor the monetary elite would rationally want regular people to get a possible advantage over them. Moreover, they want people that are dependent on them, because that makes them far easier to control. You do that by making sure they only ever get enough money for their daily bread, without getting so much as to cut into what keeps the elites rich, which is a combination of real estate, banking and industry ownership. This means both some right leaning, but also left leaning parties, might want to ensure that regular people are never given more than exactly enough for mere survival, but not a penny more. This also goes for education, btw. You don't want to over-educate these guys, lest they become a competitor to the job you're looking for. If you give them any less, you'll have riots on your hand. If you give them any more, you lose control over them.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > You don't want to over-educate these guys, lest they become a competitor to the job you're looking for. You see this a lot in immigration policy BTW. Why do we have so many uneducated and unskilled immigrants with no legal recognition whatsoever, and so little immigration of skilled workers and business-oriented people, much of it hobbled by restrictions on firm-level mobility (like those around the H1B visa)? Follow the money.
- kebman 5y ago
  > You see this a lot in immigration policy. Why do we have so many uneducated and unskilled immigrants with no legal recognition whatsoever, and so little immigration of skilled workers, much of it hobbled by restrictions on labor mobility (like those around the H1B visa)? Follow the money. Well, in some sense you could also follow the labour organizations. Look, if you're a poor migrant who just got a hold of a job, would you love the idea of ten others standing in line for that same job, ensuring that you can't ever ask for a raise? No. If you were a rational human being, you'd start voting for the populist anti-migrant parties in your country of residence, like many immigrants are these days. This is proven by the wages in immigration heavy professions, that have been all but standing still for decades now. Some people even call this effect reverse colonialism. It's when you're not allowed to earn money off colonialism anymore, so you simply invite the impoverished people for similar jobs in your own country instead. What's worse is that many Labour Party equivalents across the West have even been welcoming this change, since they hoped it would make more people vote for them. But now most of them see that this stance has backfired badly for them. Hence many of them are now experiencing the lowest approval ratings in decades, as many now view them as the direct cause for many of the problems Western countries are now experiencing.

zozbot234 5y ago

Yup, people who actually lift their way out of poverty are not a reliable votebank. You see this happen a lot in the U.S. where minority groups have been trapped for decades by the Democrat party especially. First with sharecropping and segregation then with class warfare, either way they're kept down on the farm.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
The people who supported segregation mostly abandoned the Democratic Party decades ago because of the civil rights issue. It’s one of the prime reasons the south used to be solidly Democratic and is now solidly Republican. Neither party is the same as it was in the nineteenth century.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > The people who supported segregation mostly abandoned the Democratic Party decades ago because of the civil rights issue. Yup, that's what people like to tell themselves but much of it is wishful thinking. Look at how long people like Robert Byrd stayed around. Look at who actually supports, e.g. extreme NIMBY policies in urban areas to keep undesirable "demographics" out of the neighborhood, and "fights gentrification" to keep them boxed in with substandard amenities. How is that not modern segregation?
  - dd36 5y ago
    It’s historical fact.
  - enkid 5y ago
    Senators from West Virginia do not represent the mainstream Democrat views, so let's not cherry pick an example that ended over a decade ago. Instead, let's have a substantive conversation about policy. What specific policies are you referring to as NIMBY?
    - zozbot234 5y ago

mycologos 5y ago

There's a weird chicken-and-egg quality to these arguments where the pro-state party wants to expand benefits, the anti-state party wants to limit them, and we end up at this equilibrium where benefits are good enough for some people to cobble together lives based on them, but not good enough for most of those people to build better lives and get off them. I think it's overly simplistic to put all of the blame on one party (as a sibling comment about Democrats does).

usrusr 5y ago
I call that problem the how-much-vs-how: there's a permanent battle about the amount of transfer with exceptions and special cases pushed in from both sides at every opportunity, and result is continually worse incentives and complications like that effective tax rate problem at the thresholds of the receiver side.
LordDragonfang 5y ago
I think it's disingenuous to categorize the parties as "pro-" and "anti-" state, when the "anti-state" parties generally contain all the nationalists, supporters of the police state, and those who are willing to increase state military expenditures (and at least in the US's case, increasing government subsidies for their own constituents). It's pretty clear that "anti-state" in this context actually means opposition exclusively to policies that help the poor and hinder exploitation by the rich.

pjc50 5y ago

The drive from this comes out of the right, who believe that work is the only valid route out of poverty. Regardless of actual capacity to work.

chii 5y ago
> only valid route out of poverty well, what other routes are there?
- Kliment 5y ago
  For the fuckers currently running the UK, primarily a combination of inheritance and corruption.
- growse 5y ago
  If you can't think of any, do you think that means that those who can't work (disability, illness, dependents) deserve to be poor forever?
  - chii 5y ago
    i'm not saying the deserve to be poor, but they cannot be rich - and at best, society can keep them alive and provide the minimal, necessary sustenance for survival. While they wait for technological improvements to cure them of their illness (if such tech comes to pass). What would be a viable alternative? If this had happened in the jungle pre-historic times, they'd just be dead. So is it not an improvement?
    - mrow84 5y ago
      > at best, society can keep them alive and provide the minimal, necessary sustenance for survival There is no constraint on a society enforcing this level of support as an upper bound. A society can dedicate as much or as little of its resources as it chooses to supporting those unable to support themselves, each possible amount having a different set of consequences.
    - 5y ago