7 ms·

This is evident in America where you'll find some people take a position against free or subsidised healthcare and other social support, because some undeservin

This is evident in America where you'll find some people take a position against free or subsidised healthcare and other social support, because some undeserving person (who is not in their group) might get it.

martin_a 4y ago
I don't think this is limited to America or healthcare. We're seeing these effects in corporate life, too: A charging station for EVs has been put up for the company and client EVs. I'm the first employee to have received "free access" to the charger as a benefit instead of more money. (to be fair: I'm the only one with a pure EV until now, too). Now people are voting against putting up more chargers and enabling employees to charge for a smaller fee than normal, because "there's no normal gas pump being installed". Nobody will lose anything with two more charging stations. But before somebody with another car gets "something nice", people prefer getting nothing at all now.
- bombcar 4y ago
  But this isn't so much a foot shoot. The gas-guzzling employees are voting (why is there voting anyway?) for "I get nothing, you get nothing" over "I get nothing, you get something" - perhaps arguing that the cost of the something has to come from somewhere. The described action would be more like "remove all parking lots instead of letting martin_a charge his car in a space" - which would harm the guzzlers to own the EVs.
  - tomstokes 4y ago
    > perhaps arguing that the cost of the something has to come from somewhere. This is exactly what’s going on. People know that these expenditures ultimately come out of the company’s operating budget, which diminishes the funds available for other things. Installing EV chargers is a great environmental move in my personal opinion, but we can’t pretend it’s unrelated to discussions come raise/bonus time when people are told that their raises are smaller than expected because budgets are stretched this year. The EV chargers may be a tiny contributor, but they’re still an unbalanced distribution of the company’s funds based on something completely unrelated to performance. People are keenly aware of these things.
    - martin_a 4y ago
      You've brought up good points here. Our "corporate climate" often isn't the best, that's probably why this leads to lots of upset people.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Amusingly if it were proposed to put the EV charging stations in the worst part of the parking lot, people would probably be happier; as it is they're often right next to the handicap stalls and so you have the double whammy of someone getting the best parking space AND free "gas".
  - FpUser 4y ago
    >"The gas-guzzling employees" Contrary to EV driving nature saving unicorns? Ever heard that many simply can not afford EV. Or healthy food. Or many other things.
  - martin_a 4y ago
    > (why is there voting anyway?) Meh, it's not the best word, I'm no native speaker. There are some very vocal people pushing against this initiative which are "inciting" (DeepL) others to stand up against this. > But this isn't so much a foot shoot. Not sure about it. We've got some money left from a good business year, so the CEOs wanted to make some "small projects" for the production site, with some kind of "longer impact" than one-time payments. With payments, taxes will eat most it and the holding corporation would probably step in and mess it up, as other companies from the group are struggling a little bit. So they've built a barbecue area for example. A handful of people wanted that (it hasn't been used more than two times up till now) and some people have said that they'd like their next car to be an EV/hybrid and that it would be great if there were more charging stations. So they thought it would be a good idea to invest some of the money in chargers. As there's this "inciting" now, it seems like that plan will be cancelled and the money will find its way into the holding group and be lost to the employees right here. Not sure if that isn't a foot shoot in the end after all.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah, that's an inter-family squabble about what to do with a "windfall" - the leaders should have collected various ideas and "combined" them in some way, a barbecue area that includes EV parking and (I have no idea what office workers see as perks, tbh).
      - martin_a 4y ago
        > the leaders should have collected various ideas Oh, that happened, but only a quarter of people took part in it because of "meh"... Now they are complaining... We also got bicycle leasing now and some other stuff, not all is bad...
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  It's not limited to the US or healthcare, but it is extremely evident there. Look at how many politicians get elected solely on the platform of "We won't help a certain group," regardless of who that hurts.
- jcampbell1 4y ago
  When you account for opportunity costs, i.e. no such thing as a free lunch, then your opponents' position is rational. People see installing chargers as depleting the pool of funds for employee benefits for which they receive no benefit. > Nobody will lose anything with two more charging stations Money doesn't grow on trees.
brodouevencode 4y ago
Or we see the problems in other countries that have such systems and think we can provide better solutions. That's not to say the current system is the best, but that's not what many want either.
- Sharlin 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure most Americans don't "see" anything outside the US. Even on Hacker News you see the phenomenon where people tend to dismiss solutions popular and proven to work everywhere else as somehow hypothetical and untested, or at least immediately confabulate some random knee-jerk reason why "it could never work in the US". American exceptionalism is truly a force to be reckoned with.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Nah, in my experience many Americans do, especially those that have the privilege to leave home (study abroad, move to a new place far away, etc.).
    - Sharlin 4y ago
      But those aren't most.
      - tomrod 4y ago
        Not sure about that. A _lot_ of city folks didn't start there.
  - ss108 4y ago
    I would say that those of us in the US who are more or less "coastal elite" types are probably just kind of sophomoric about how things work in Europe. I think a lot of us have a simplified and rosy picture of how European systems work, but if we were pressed on the details, would have to concede our ignorance lol
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
You can have good socialistic healthcare, and welfare country. You can also have open borders. You can't have both. It's basic stability condition. People will flow to the socialistic welfare or against it, and it's not going to stop until forces equalize, a.k.a it's just as good staying in the worst country as it is moving to the better welfare one. Since people moving tends to harm the other country the immigration is from, it should bring both down. Only one side has a stable condition. It's a matter of common sense at this point. If one side advocated for closed borders with subsidized healthcare, that's fair enough and maybe even better choice. P.S. socialized healthcare works well in Israel for example.
- jameshart 4y ago
  This is what’s called a ‘false dichotomy’ ‘Open borders’ is a strawman, anyway. You can have policies which promote immigration, provide legal pathways for immigrants to provide labor to the economy (including unpaid labor like raising kids and domestic elder care), and can structure social benefits in such a way that you provide a social safety net, without having to just throw the border open to all or pay out unemployment benefits to anyone who shows up out of work. Illegal immigration is a market response to a failure of the government to provide a legal framework for sufficient legal migration. People are willing to come to (for example) the US and work illegally without legal access to any social safety net. But allowing people to live under those conditions is both a moral failing (we should not be comfortable relying on the labor of people who face destitution if they lose their job) and a societal risk (people with no safety net are more likely to end up engaged in criminal activity that harms society). So why not create a more structured arrangement? Create paths to legal immigration, with access to defined, limited, temporary benefits, and with a pathway that over time - as an immigrant’s stake in the country increases - converges towards the full security afforded to citizens.
  - 988747 4y ago
    >> Illegal immigration is a market response to a failure of the government to provide a legal framework for sufficient legal migration. No, it really is not. There's really no upper limit on how many people might WANT to immigrate to your country (other than the obvious 8B world population size), but there's an upper limit on how many immigrants your country can accommodate in the given time frame. Increasing limits for legal immigration won't stop illegal one, it might even encourage it (e.g. when one person gets an immigrant visa and some of their relatives don't but they still decide do go, illegally)
tomstokes 4y ago
> because some undeserving person (who is not in their group) might get it. Surely someone, somewhere feels like this, but it’s more often a strawman argument used to make opposing arguments more easily dismissible. The discussions I have with people offline aren’t interested in these types of dismissals. I know many people who genuinely want better healthcare, cheaper education, and stronger social safety nets but who disagree with the specifics of proposals. Like most things in politics, if an argument reduces the other side to an easily-dismissible evil, it’s probably not an accurate representation of the counterarguments. From real world anecdotes, the concern about things like student loan forgiveness (as the most recent example of an expensive social program being debated) are more about the extreme cost of the program contributing to an ever increasing list of expenditures. People are nervous about the amount of government spending and how it’s being distributed semi-randomly. This goes back to the rampant COVID loans to businesses, the stimulus programs that far overshot their target, and now proposals to give certain households with up to $250K income a free $10K. People understand that these things do matter in a society where we’re all bidding for a limited supply of homes and such. It’s nice to imagine someone having a reduced debt load, but people still think about where that money comes from and how the uneven distribution of that money gives some people (excluding those who paid their loans off early) a financial leg up in places like the competitive housing market. It’s all connected. The money must come from somewhere, and we’re all operating within the same markets. It’s disingenuous to pretend that there are no consequences for these programs, which IMO is where politicians fall far short of structuring them and pitching them to a wider audience.
- judge2020 4y ago
  But what are the consequences? People has similar revelation when the national debt was about to surpass GDP, and yet no economy-ending consequences rose from that. In reality nobody really knows how debt works on a global scale, and those that try to understand it seem to do a fair job at keeping the economy afloat when they join FRB or the multinational conglomerates that have a stake in the US remaining economically stable.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > the concern about things like student loan forgiveness [...] the extreme cost of the program contributing to an ever increasing list of expenditures. SLF is a one-off cost (of between $400Bi and 1Ti depending on which plan you subscribe to) though. It's not like, say, the DOD which is currently burning $800Bi a year and rising - I would venture that the people happy to shoot down SLF are equally happy to keep that budget going up. > People are nervous about the amount of government spending ...going to people they deem undeserving. They're perfectly happy with the amount spend on the DOD, DHS, etc.
oifjsidjf 4y ago
"Free healthcare" lmao. Who do you think pays for it? TAXPAYERS! It's not free! And usually in those kind of "free healthcare" systems the private clinics get looked down upon or are even restricted/blocked via laws in order to "preserve the 'free' healthcare system". Thus the people have even less choice. There are many countries with this kind of a "free healthcare" system. I'm living in one of them. Want to go to a specialist? Sorry bro, that's gonna be 6 months of waiting time... So anyone who is not piss poor will go into a private clinic.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I wanna go to a specialist in the United States and it’s still 6 mo waiting time…
  - brodouevencode 4y ago
    I have first hand evidence that this is not the case. Let's not over-generalize here.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      I’m responding to a generalization with my own specific experiences, so if anything this comment should be going to the original person I responded to
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      You have first hand evidence that GP does not have to wait 6 months to see a specialist? Was there a HIPAA violation involved? And hell, while we’re throwing around completely vague and unsubstantiated claims. I have first hand evidence that the top level parent is lying about having to wait as well.
  - dangerlibrary 4y ago
    Right? What world are people living in? On anything other than a 30% coinsurance PPO, you aren't getting anything done without insurance pre-approval. And that's an extra month or two wait on top of the three month wait to get in the door for a consult.
swfsql 4y ago
The same can be said from the opposite side of the argument. People will be on the side of free or subsidised healthcare and other social support regardless of their unpayable public debt rising even further and that it eventually may crush individuals from society that are perhaps not even born yet. The "opponent" in this case is the wrong person who has a different political view.
x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
Reagan's Welfare Queen is a prime example of how government support systems were not only dismantled, but met with disdain because of the feeling that they were helping undeserving people.
josephcsible 4y ago
This is a straw man. The actual viewpoint is "I don't want more of my hard-earned money to be taken from me via higher taxes and then wasted".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

martin_a 4y ago

I don't think this is limited to America or healthcare. We're seeing these effects in corporate life, too: A charging station for EVs has been put up for the company and client EVs. I'm the first employee to have received "free access" to the charger as a benefit instead of more money. (to be fair: I'm the only one with a pure EV until now, too). Now people are voting against putting up more chargers and enabling employees to charge for a smaller fee than normal, because "there's no normal gas pump being installed". Nobody will lose anything with two more charging stations. But before somebody with another car gets "something nice", people prefer getting nothing at all now.

bombcar 4y ago
But this isn't so much a foot shoot. The gas-guzzling employees are voting (why is there voting anyway?) for "I get nothing, you get nothing" over "I get nothing, you get something" - perhaps arguing that the cost of the something has to come from somewhere. The described action would be more like "remove all parking lots instead of letting martin_a charge his car in a space" - which would harm the guzzlers to own the EVs.
- tomstokes 4y ago
  > perhaps arguing that the cost of the something has to come from somewhere. This is exactly what’s going on. People know that these expenditures ultimately come out of the company’s operating budget, which diminishes the funds available for other things. Installing EV chargers is a great environmental move in my personal opinion, but we can’t pretend it’s unrelated to discussions come raise/bonus time when people are told that their raises are smaller than expected because budgets are stretched this year. The EV chargers may be a tiny contributor, but they’re still an unbalanced distribution of the company’s funds based on something completely unrelated to performance. People are keenly aware of these things.
  - martin_a 4y ago
    You've brought up good points here. Our "corporate climate" often isn't the best, that's probably why this leads to lots of upset people.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Amusingly if it were proposed to put the EV charging stations in the worst part of the parking lot, people would probably be happier; as it is they're often right next to the handicap stalls and so you have the double whammy of someone getting the best parking space AND free "gas".
- FpUser 4y ago
  >"The gas-guzzling employees" Contrary to EV driving nature saving unicorns? Ever heard that many simply can not afford EV. Or healthy food. Or many other things.
- martin_a 4y ago
  > (why is there voting anyway?) Meh, it's not the best word, I'm no native speaker. There are some very vocal people pushing against this initiative which are "inciting" (DeepL) others to stand up against this. > But this isn't so much a foot shoot. Not sure about it. We've got some money left from a good business year, so the CEOs wanted to make some "small projects" for the production site, with some kind of "longer impact" than one-time payments. With payments, taxes will eat most it and the holding corporation would probably step in and mess it up, as other companies from the group are struggling a little bit. So they've built a barbecue area for example. A handful of people wanted that (it hasn't been used more than two times up till now) and some people have said that they'd like their next car to be an EV/hybrid and that it would be great if there were more charging stations. So they thought it would be a good idea to invest some of the money in chargers. As there's this "inciting" now, it seems like that plan will be cancelled and the money will find its way into the holding group and be lost to the employees right here. Not sure if that isn't a foot shoot in the end after all.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah, that's an inter-family squabble about what to do with a "windfall" - the leaders should have collected various ideas and "combined" them in some way, a barbecue area that includes EV parking and (I have no idea what office workers see as perks, tbh).
    - martin_a 4y ago
      > the leaders should have collected various ideas Oh, that happened, but only a quarter of people took part in it because of "meh"... Now they are complaining... We also got bicycle leasing now and some other stuff, not all is bad...
thesuitonym 4y ago
It's not limited to the US or healthcare, but it is extremely evident there. Look at how many politicians get elected solely on the platform of "We won't help a certain group," regardless of who that hurts.
jcampbell1 4y ago
When you account for opportunity costs, i.e. no such thing as a free lunch, then your opponents' position is rational. People see installing chargers as depleting the pool of funds for employee benefits for which they receive no benefit. > Nobody will lose anything with two more charging stations Money doesn't grow on trees.

brodouevencode 4y ago

Or we see the problems in other countries that have such systems and think we can provide better solutions. That's not to say the current system is the best, but that's not what many want either.

Sharlin 4y ago
I'm pretty sure most Americans don't "see" anything outside the US. Even on Hacker News you see the phenomenon where people tend to dismiss solutions popular and proven to work everywhere else as somehow hypothetical and untested, or at least immediately confabulate some random knee-jerk reason why "it could never work in the US". American exceptionalism is truly a force to be reckoned with.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Nah, in my experience many Americans do, especially those that have the privilege to leave home (study abroad, move to a new place far away, etc.).
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    But those aren't most.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Not sure about that. A _lot_ of city folks didn't start there.
- ss108 4y ago
  I would say that those of us in the US who are more or less "coastal elite" types are probably just kind of sophomoric about how things work in Europe. I think a lot of us have a simplified and rosy picture of how European systems work, but if we were pressed on the details, would have to concede our ignorance lol
- hotpotamus 4y ago

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

You can have good socialistic healthcare, and welfare country. You can also have open borders. You can't have both. It's basic stability condition. People will flow to the socialistic welfare or against it, and it's not going to stop until forces equalize, a.k.a it's just as good staying in the worst country as it is moving to the better welfare one. Since people moving tends to harm the other country the immigration is from, it should bring both down. Only one side has a stable condition. It's a matter of common sense at this point. If one side advocated for closed borders with subsidized healthcare, that's fair enough and maybe even better choice. P.S. socialized healthcare works well in Israel for example.

jameshart 4y ago
This is what’s called a ‘false dichotomy’ ‘Open borders’ is a strawman, anyway. You can have policies which promote immigration, provide legal pathways for immigrants to provide labor to the economy (including unpaid labor like raising kids and domestic elder care), and can structure social benefits in such a way that you provide a social safety net, without having to just throw the border open to all or pay out unemployment benefits to anyone who shows up out of work. Illegal immigration is a market response to a failure of the government to provide a legal framework for sufficient legal migration. People are willing to come to (for example) the US and work illegally without legal access to any social safety net. But allowing people to live under those conditions is both a moral failing (we should not be comfortable relying on the labor of people who face destitution if they lose their job) and a societal risk (people with no safety net are more likely to end up engaged in criminal activity that harms society). So why not create a more structured arrangement? Create paths to legal immigration, with access to defined, limited, temporary benefits, and with a pathway that over time - as an immigrant’s stake in the country increases - converges towards the full security afforded to citizens.
- 988747 4y ago
  >> Illegal immigration is a market response to a failure of the government to provide a legal framework for sufficient legal migration. No, it really is not. There's really no upper limit on how many people might WANT to immigrate to your country (other than the obvious 8B world population size), but there's an upper limit on how many immigrants your country can accommodate in the given time frame. Increasing limits for legal immigration won't stop illegal one, it might even encourage it (e.g. when one person gets an immigrant visa and some of their relatives don't but they still decide do go, illegally)

tomstokes 4y ago

> because some undeserving person (who is not in their group) might get it. Surely someone, somewhere feels like this, but it’s more often a strawman argument used to make opposing arguments more easily dismissible. The discussions I have with people offline aren’t interested in these types of dismissals. I know many people who genuinely want better healthcare, cheaper education, and stronger social safety nets but who disagree with the specifics of proposals. Like most things in politics, if an argument reduces the other side to an easily-dismissible evil, it’s probably not an accurate representation of the counterarguments. From real world anecdotes, the concern about things like student loan forgiveness (as the most recent example of an expensive social program being debated) are more about the extreme cost of the program contributing to an ever increasing list of expenditures. People are nervous about the amount of government spending and how it’s being distributed semi-randomly. This goes back to the rampant COVID loans to businesses, the stimulus programs that far overshot their target, and now proposals to give certain households with up to $250K income a free $10K. People understand that these things do matter in a society where we’re all bidding for a limited supply of homes and such. It’s nice to imagine someone having a reduced debt load, but people still think about where that money comes from and how the uneven distribution of that money gives some people (excluding those who paid their loans off early) a financial leg up in places like the competitive housing market. It’s all connected. The money must come from somewhere, and we’re all operating within the same markets. It’s disingenuous to pretend that there are no consequences for these programs, which IMO is where politicians fall far short of structuring them and pitching them to a wider audience.

judge2020 4y ago
But what are the consequences? People has similar revelation when the national debt was about to surpass GDP, and yet no economy-ending consequences rose from that. In reality nobody really knows how debt works on a global scale, and those that try to understand it seem to do a fair job at keeping the economy afloat when they join FRB or the multinational conglomerates that have a stake in the US remaining economically stable.
zimpenfish 4y ago
> the concern about things like student loan forgiveness [...] the extreme cost of the program contributing to an ever increasing list of expenditures. SLF is a one-off cost (of between $400Bi and 1Ti depending on which plan you subscribe to) though. It's not like, say, the DOD which is currently burning $800Bi a year and rising - I would venture that the people happy to shoot down SLF are equally happy to keep that budget going up. > People are nervous about the amount of government spending ...going to people they deem undeserving. They're perfectly happy with the amount spend on the DOD, DHS, etc.

oifjsidjf 4y ago

"Free healthcare" lmao. Who do you think pays for it? TAXPAYERS! It's not free! And usually in those kind of "free healthcare" systems the private clinics get looked down upon or are even restricted/blocked via laws in order to "preserve the 'free' healthcare system". Thus the people have even less choice. There are many countries with this kind of a "free healthcare" system. I'm living in one of them. Want to go to a specialist? Sorry bro, that's gonna be 6 months of waiting time... So anyone who is not piss poor will go into a private clinic.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I wanna go to a specialist in the United States and it’s still 6 mo waiting time…
- brodouevencode 4y ago
  I have first hand evidence that this is not the case. Let's not over-generalize here.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    I’m responding to a generalization with my own specific experiences, so if anything this comment should be going to the original person I responded to
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    You have first hand evidence that GP does not have to wait 6 months to see a specialist? Was there a HIPAA violation involved? And hell, while we’re throwing around completely vague and unsubstantiated claims. I have first hand evidence that the top level parent is lying about having to wait as well.
- dangerlibrary 4y ago
  Right? What world are people living in? On anything other than a 30% coinsurance PPO, you aren't getting anything done without insurance pre-approval. And that's an extra month or two wait on top of the three month wait to get in the door for a consult.

swfsql 4y ago

The same can be said from the opposite side of the argument. People will be on the side of free or subsidised healthcare and other social support regardless of their unpayable public debt rising even further and that it eventually may crush individuals from society that are perhaps not even born yet. The "opponent" in this case is the wrong person who has a different political view.

x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago

Reagan's Welfare Queen is a prime example of how government support systems were not only dismantled, but met with disdain because of the feeling that they were helping undeserving people.

josephcsible 4y ago

This is a straw man. The actual viewpoint is "I don't want more of my hard-earned money to be taken from me via higher taxes and then wasted".

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]