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RE: Doug Casey and I Destroying Commies On Universal Income
There is no comparison and you are very uninformed. There is "no better" way to implement socialism or UBI.
There is no comparison and you are very uninformed. There is "no better" way to implement socialism or UBI.
Upvoted. The best source of income is a job. It is immoral to demand payment without first producing value.
And how are people going to find jobs, if robots are doing most of them?? You reject the idea of a UBI and say people should work for money, which is all fine and might work now, but in the future people are not going to be able to find jobs. If there is no UBI what are they going to do?
As long as human want is never satisfied, there will always be a job to do. And if that isn't right, in however many decades you are worried about, consider how much you complain while enjoying leisure, how you wish you were working - you probably don't. The point of using machines is to Decrease our labor and Increase production, making less work for ourselves. The more productive we can be while doing less work, our standard of living increases. We are made better off by increases in production, which makes goods better and cheaper, and not by work itself. So if we run out of work to do, we can all rejoice, stay home on steemit, or do other activities we find more valuable. But that won't happen.
People have been worried about this for generations but turn out to be wrong every time. Here is likely your response, already said by someone else:
"That may have been very well in the past, but today conditions are fundamentally different, and now we simply cannot afford any more labor-saving machines." - Eleanor Roosevelt 1945
Don't be this wrong. Embrace the freedom of movement and choice that are afforded to us by using machines in production.
I do think there will still be jobs around, but I don't think there will be enough. While in the past more jobs were created by automation there will come a time when most humans will be rendered obsolete in the work place. That is the logical progression. Human labour being minimised as much as possible to increase productivity and profits.
If there is no work for someone to do, how will they have enough money to survive? How will they afford the basics of living without income? This then leads to your point about leisure.
Too much leisure isn't a good thing. People need to work. It isn't always the end product that produces joy, it's the process of making/doing that does. Playing video games all day with no life goals isn't fun in the longterm. That's kind of what I do now, I have far too much free time and it isn't actually fun.
And If you can't work how can you have leisure time? You need money to provide the basics, if you don't have the basics sorted you can't really have leisure.
I also don't like the idea of having most of the control over machines in the hands of the rich. If the rich own the means of production over all goods, what power do we have? They control everything. The disparity between rich and poor will be immense.
Yes people were wrong beforehand, they didn't foresee new jobs being created. Maybe there will always be enough work, maybe it isn't going to be an issue for the next 100 years, but I still think it's worth exploring the possible negative outcomes instead of assuming everything is going to be perfect. We will just have to wait and see.
While you have plenty of leisure you are still better off because you can choose whether to work or not.
Let's just be honest. The "rich" entrepreneurs are the ones capable of arranging labor and capital goods in a way that results in products you demand. And they are rewarded for doing so with profit. If you remove their ability to do so, prices of consumer goods will skyrocket or run out and you will certainly have plenty of work to do, such as grow your own food. It is these people you are jealous of but you fail to realize you do not complain about the good products at low prices they produce. You for instance with the xbox have had hours and hours of entertainment from a piece of technology smaller than a toaster. The transaction is not zero sum, you both leave happy.
You'd rather we All be poor? No thanks. If you want to own a machine of your own, make one.
I get that automation will make things cheaper, but this doesn't address what the people with no jobs are going to do.
The only thing I'm worried about is there not being enough jobs and people starving.
If robots can one day make everything for free, then we will all be happy and fat, and who cares. I don't get how cheaper things is a bad thing? The only time there is people starving is when governments prevent markets from working. Trust me, no businessman will employ a machine to do a process that does not produce income, that is, profit from consumer demand. Entrepreneurs can only profit when they bring things to market that consumers are willing to spend their money on, and that are cost effective. If consumers do "run out of money" the machines will be scrapped in favor of cheaper production methods, that allow for the most effective use of capital. Markets adjust in this way all the time. When consumers search for the lowest prices, the market delivers. We just have no way of knowing what new products and processes that will be created in the future and just how much better off we will be. To think that this point in time is the pinnacle of civilization is to make the same mistake of thousands that came before us, who did not have near the standard of living we take for granted. As long as people are free to live and work as they please, society benefits.
If you don’t trust the rich? Why do you agree with them on UBI? (Musk, Zuckerberg)
I don't really trust them either, but it's better than starving.
It's immoral to turn the earth into a casino and create every manner of unmerited wealth!
And who will decide whose wealth was unmerited? You? Earning UBI without doing any work seems pretty unmerited. I wish manna could really rain down from the heavens, but that is not how it works. Wealth must be first produced before it can be consumed. People's freedom to spontaneously work and trade has been the biggest help to those in poverty, than any planned system.
Which casino do you own? Which mafia oligarch do you type for?
And why not me and billions of others like me who are fed up with the billionaire class and their extortions and usury and using every foul type of unnecessary exploitation and coercion to gain unfair advantage over their fellow man, women and child.
You bet a reckoning is upon us for those who espouse the plundering of the earth and its peoples!
My username is literally End Plunder. It's just that I know it is Government who plunders. And it is government who extorts us and who awards unfair advantages to special interests and companies, that they otherwise do not have in a free market.
The UBI requires theft to be funded and relies on legal tender laws to ensure their payments are usable. Both are damaging to our freedom.
it's not just guvment that plunders us; it's a toxic corporate model, and a usurous fiat/fractional system. We should have had the ability to address these corruptions but the fiat masters and corporations purchased guvment in the last 100 years. This has created imbalanced power relations and it again, is not guvment per se that is the problem. Within an anarchist society there would still need to be laws and there are laws that we all must follow ( the laws of thermodynamics/aka entropic systems) , but it would still need some type of government; but it would need to be a government which hasn't capitulated to corrupt power relations.
And BTW: Trump is the exact opposite of one who could solve these complex issues; but true, neither was O'bomber, as they both serve the fiat masters and their corporate model.
Okay we agree on: fractional banking being bad and crony govt'granted priveleges to biz as also bad?
So if it weren't for special interests, the government would be ran by benevolent do-gooders?
If the natural tendency of man is so bad that it is not safe for people to control their own lives, how is it that mwmbers of government are always good? Are they not just people with self interest too? Or are they angels?
Okay, good! We agree on two primary problems and are partly agreed on the government, although I understand your position to mean absolutely no form of government. I've pointed out that I considrer this position a strawman as it's not inevtible that government has to be toxic. But these are called intractable problems and they are difficult to solve especially when a huge part of this corruption is the corruption of the law and courts.
That aside, consider this: it's estimated by scholars that about 2 in 10 people are prone to being sociopathic and psychopathic and that this demographic seeks power and perverts power relationships. Given that fact, how would you go about keeping The Negans (The Walking Dead) from toxifying the public sphere?
And BTW: to my thinking this is exactly what has happened--the mafia won in the past century and controls almost every manner of business.