4 ms·

The last thing we need is another government program. Everyone thinks he has a great idea when he can use the force and coercion of the State to extort everyone

The last thing we need is another government program. Everyone thinks he has a great idea when he can use the force and coercion of the State to extort everyone else to support his megalomaniacal master plan. If this idea is so good, let's not use to the State to implement it. Let's start locally and work our way out. But that would be too difficult and too much work. It's much easier to get politicians to point guns at people. Instead of just handing people a BIG, maybe we need to look at what is fundamentally causing poverty. BIG is just an impersonal, "throw some money at it" non-solution. It will probably be used by the rich and powerful to keep people poor. Special interests will get involved; the State will pick winners and losers; people will be less free and more dependent on the State. Is this what we really want?

zanny 13y ago
I'm pretty heavy on voluntarism and libertarianism, but a counterargument here is that when people are given the choice, they allow poverty, because there has always been poverty. It doesn't help that one of the major ways to get wealthy is to be very apathetic to the suffering of others. A lot of the runaway profit centers that can get people really wealthy depend on what is already borderline extortion (landlords abusing tenants, healthcare costs, credit cards that predate on the poor). Also, the main argument about BI is that you don't pick winners or losers at all. From square one, you don't pick sides. You say "every citizen of adult age is authorized to get $2000 a month" the end. You eliminate all the other welfare, you could even possibly eliminate public healthcare, and just do a raw wealth redistribution. While it would be nicer if we could get a 99% econonmically literate society of people who can't be taken advantage of who are eternally vigilent to protect their economic interests and behave rationally in all interactions, we can't pull that off. And I think the last 30 years have well demonstrated what happens when people who live to make money off others focus entirely on making money off people who aren't focusing on fighting that battle - they win. By a landslide. And they can crush an entire middle class by way of a cultural apathy to it. And we can't easily fix it, at least not while people are destitute. If everyone was more prosperous, their heirarchy of needs was well taken care of, maybe over a hundred years you could transition to a culture of intellectualism and personal introspection so that you could dissolve violent theft of profits and let people interact as rational informed actors, but we don't have that right now, the problems are only getting much worse, and the worse they get the less likely you are to stand a chance to achieve a truly free society.
- pdonis 13y ago
  when people are given the choice, they allow poverty I'm not sure I understand this. What choices are you and I making that "allow" poverty? (Note that your next paragraph talks about ways in which some predatory people can cause poverty, by preying on others; but that doesn't seem to be what you're referring to when you say people in general "allow" poverty.)
  - zanny 13y ago
    This article argues that with a fraction of total GDP you could cycle back that productivity into BI. That means, even indirectly, most of us enable poverty by the way we spend our money and the way we engage with charity. If you buy a lot of stuff at wal-mart, you promote sub-living wage income in most places for the clerks, because wal-mart (and the market at large) doesn't value their labor at what it would cost to survive, they just go with the state mandated minimum they can't violate. It isn't something one person can change. Hence why it seems futile to try to moitivate individual behavior to cause a universal change that is inherently counter to the benefit of those with the resources to fix the problem - even if you don't forcibly take the money, if enough charity was going on to uplift the impoverished from poverty, there would be much lower than 15% poverty. Therefor, the market as is doesn't provide an uplifting effect, espeecially if poverty is getting worse (post recession).
    - pdonis 13y ago
      wal-mart (and the market at large) doesn't value their labor at what it would cost to survive You're assuming that wal-mart (and the market at large) values their labor incorrectly. What if that assumption is wrong? I.e., what if the actual value of their labor is lower than what it would cost to survive? I know that sounds harsh, but that doesn't mean it has to be wrong. I don't see any reason why every job must automatically be worth enough, in actual value added, to support the person doing it. (For one thing, many jobs at the low end of the wage scale are not intended for people who have to support themselves. When I worked jobs in high school and college, I was being supported by my parents and financial aid; the money I earned went towards luxuries and savings, not my support.) if enough charity was going on to uplift the impoverished from poverty, there would be much lower than 15% poverty Maybe for a short time. But here's what I expect would happen if widespread "charity" in the form of BI or something like it were instituted: within a year or two, there would be a significant percentage of people who were squandering their BI ($10K a year or whatever) on anything from junk food to lottery tickets to drugs, and who were therefore still in poverty, despite receiving BI. Then the news stories start on how you can't fix fundamental problems in society by just handing people money: you have to teach them how to handle it, what to do with it, etc., etc. Then the government gets pressured to offer "life coaching" and other services along with BI. Then we end up with all the same bloated government bureaucracy we have now, plus the extra expenditure of BI.
nbouscal 13y ago
> The last thing we need is another government program. So would you then be in favor of a plan that dismantled all other current government means-tested welfare programs (welfare, unemployment, food stamps, medicaid, etc), replacing all of them with a strict implementation of a basic income guarantee (everyone gets the exact same amount, no matter what, no exceptions)? That would decrease the number of government programs, vastly decrease administrative overhead, and some calculations have shown that it would actually decrease overall spending as well.
- ahallock 13y ago
  I'm not in favor of any of them, but I guess BIG would a step forward, so I see your point. The thing is, a lot of people are dependent on those programs, and not just the recipients, but everyone in the chain. So removing them is going to be a tough sell and the opposition will be fierce.

zanny 13y ago

I'm pretty heavy on voluntarism and libertarianism, but a counterargument here is that when people are given the choice, they allow poverty, because there has always been poverty. It doesn't help that one of the major ways to get wealthy is to be very apathetic to the suffering of others. A lot of the runaway profit centers that can get people really wealthy depend on what is already borderline extortion (landlords abusing tenants, healthcare costs, credit cards that predate on the poor). Also, the main argument about BI is that you don't pick winners or losers at all. From square one, you don't pick sides. You say "every citizen of adult age is authorized to get $2000 a month" the end. You eliminate all the other welfare, you could even possibly eliminate public healthcare, and just do a raw wealth redistribution. While it would be nicer if we could get a 99% econonmically literate society of people who can't be taken advantage of who are eternally vigilent to protect their economic interests and behave rationally in all interactions, we can't pull that off. And I think the last 30 years have well demonstrated what happens when people who live to make money off others focus entirely on making money off people who aren't focusing on fighting that battle - they win. By a landslide. And they can crush an entire middle class by way of a cultural apathy to it. And we can't easily fix it, at least not while people are destitute. If everyone was more prosperous, their heirarchy of needs was well taken care of, maybe over a hundred years you could transition to a culture of intellectualism and personal introspection so that you could dissolve violent theft of profits and let people interact as rational informed actors, but we don't have that right now, the problems are only getting much worse, and the worse they get the less likely you are to stand a chance to achieve a truly free society.

pdonis 13y ago
when people are given the choice, they allow poverty I'm not sure I understand this. What choices are you and I making that "allow" poverty? (Note that your next paragraph talks about ways in which some predatory people can cause poverty, by preying on others; but that doesn't seem to be what you're referring to when you say people in general "allow" poverty.)
- zanny 13y ago
  This article argues that with a fraction of total GDP you could cycle back that productivity into BI. That means, even indirectly, most of us enable poverty by the way we spend our money and the way we engage with charity. If you buy a lot of stuff at wal-mart, you promote sub-living wage income in most places for the clerks, because wal-mart (and the market at large) doesn't value their labor at what it would cost to survive, they just go with the state mandated minimum they can't violate. It isn't something one person can change. Hence why it seems futile to try to moitivate individual behavior to cause a universal change that is inherently counter to the benefit of those with the resources to fix the problem - even if you don't forcibly take the money, if enough charity was going on to uplift the impoverished from poverty, there would be much lower than 15% poverty. Therefor, the market as is doesn't provide an uplifting effect, espeecially if poverty is getting worse (post recession).
  - pdonis 13y ago
    wal-mart (and the market at large) doesn't value their labor at what it would cost to survive You're assuming that wal-mart (and the market at large) values their labor incorrectly. What if that assumption is wrong? I.e., what if the actual value of their labor is lower than what it would cost to survive? I know that sounds harsh, but that doesn't mean it has to be wrong. I don't see any reason why every job must automatically be worth enough, in actual value added, to support the person doing it. (For one thing, many jobs at the low end of the wage scale are not intended for people who have to support themselves. When I worked jobs in high school and college, I was being supported by my parents and financial aid; the money I earned went towards luxuries and savings, not my support.) if enough charity was going on to uplift the impoverished from poverty, there would be much lower than 15% poverty Maybe for a short time. But here's what I expect would happen if widespread "charity" in the form of BI or something like it were instituted: within a year or two, there would be a significant percentage of people who were squandering their BI ($10K a year or whatever) on anything from junk food to lottery tickets to drugs, and who were therefore still in poverty, despite receiving BI. Then the news stories start on how you can't fix fundamental problems in society by just handing people money: you have to teach them how to handle it, what to do with it, etc., etc. Then the government gets pressured to offer "life coaching" and other services along with BI. Then we end up with all the same bloated government bureaucracy we have now, plus the extra expenditure of BI.

nbouscal 13y ago

> The last thing we need is another government program. So would you then be in favor of a plan that dismantled all other current government means-tested welfare programs (welfare, unemployment, food stamps, medicaid, etc), replacing all of them with a strict implementation of a basic income guarantee (everyone gets the exact same amount, no matter what, no exceptions)? That would decrease the number of government programs, vastly decrease administrative overhead, and some calculations have shown that it would actually decrease overall spending as well.

ahallock 13y ago
I'm not in favor of any of them, but I guess BIG would a step forward, so I see your point. The thing is, a lot of people are dependent on those programs, and not just the recipients, but everyone in the chain. So removing them is going to be a tough sell and the opposition will be fierce.