Crazy pinko idea

Great Debates
61

CuBorab:

Alright, I admit it: You have confused the hell out of me.

Sounds to me like you’re arguing the same case as I am. Are you expecting me to dispute you?

Surely you realize, I am a Libertarian, I feel like government is inappropriately taking personal freedoms away from me all the time.

Also, I officially agree with this statement: “…if we all paid for what we wanted to, would it do more “greater good” while giving us back more “personal freedom”?”

The more you say things I agree with, the harder it is for me to debate you.

Only a small number of people are truly awake. These people go through life in a state of constant amazement.

62

I’m not sure that I draw as strong a distinction between market and government activity as you do, Smartass. No transactions are entirely bilateral: a whole range of presumptions about the actions of other people (including the agency of government) lie behind all market transactions. I would suppose that redistributive elements are inevitable - some part of the price you have to pay for a sustainable market system. Whether what you have (assuming you are American) is more than this amount is hard to say. This means that I pretty much agree with the post that says that the OP describes what we’ve got. The natter about calling the rich or the poor parasites is what you expect - even if the deal is good, gimme more.

What would work better? Well, I might be tempted to tinker at the edges, but in general I would say that given the apparent nature of most people, the prosperty and freedom in the West over the last century is historically fabulous. We don’t know in detail why, and that’s probably a good reason to be too adventurous in changing it.

picmr

63

CuBorab:

Oops. I just agreed with a question. Change to:

“…if we all paid for what we wanted to, it would do more ‘greater good’ while giving us back more ‘personal freedom’.”

Only a small number of people are truly awake. These people go through life in a state of constant amazement.

64

picmr:

Sounds like we are generally in agreement, and disagreements are, indeed, “around the edges”.

Being a Libertarian, I think that for any instances of government “redistribution”, you need a pretty profound justification.

I also think that your ability to see government and market as so closely intertwined is a result of the government being far too involved in areas that it doesn’t belong.

Yes, yes, I know we have to have rights protected and contracts enforced. This, in and of itself, doesn’t explain the ridiculous places the rest of my money is going.

Only a small number of people are truly awake. These people go through life in a state of constant amazement.

65

Yes, I agree!!

“Surely you realize, I am a Libertarian, I feel like government is inappropriately taking personal freedoms away from me all the time.”

I try not to assume anything.

“The more you say things I agree with, the harder it is for me to debate you.”

Sounds the “The Argument” skit from Python. So does “I just agreed with a question.” :slight_smile:

66

Here is what I envision:

Spread evenly throughout the country are government-run stores. Inside, one can find bin after bin of staple products e.g. barrels of grains, legumes, etc… Nothing fancy, nothing pre-packaged, wasteful or devoid of nutrition. Maybe there is an area to get sugar, but not to get SugarSmacks. No one in the nation (I am temporarily putting the rest of the world into a black box to make this though experiment easier) need go hungry. Without any effort (other than the trip to the store) they can secure for themselves and their family the basic sustenance needed to exist.

People leave the store and go to their government provided home, a small apartment in a giant complex. It is small, but never too small as people are guaranteed a minimum amount of square footage per person. Although there are rent vouchers provided so some people can obtain housing in the private market, most people live in these government projects because of their guaranteed availability. No one in this society need worry about being homeless.

Medicine? Well, allow me to place that in the black box with the other nations, as that would only serve to complicate issues. Let’s just consider life in my little utopia for the moment.

matt never works. He paints pictures no one likes enough to purchase. I never work. I hang out at the library two days a week lurking on the SDMB, a couple of days a week reading esoteric books in the park, a couple playing in the woods, etc… I gave up my job in the autobody business because I didn’t like it that much, and though it paid descent money most of it went towards food and shelter. I now work a few days a month to get the same amount of pocket money I had before. Seeing as how I have a place to live, food to eat, etc., I don’t really need that little bit, either. I hang out with Matt and Kimstu every once in a while and we talk for hours about political and economic systems. Our lives are idyllic. Except the park is so g*d-damned crowded.

You see, despite the lengthily debates as to how best to realize our utopian dream, no system every surmounted some basic facets of the human condition. One is our intelligence in figuring out how to work the system. Right now, it is a relative minority of people out there who are lucky enough to work at a job they love. The rest of us, the vat majority of us, work because it brings us the things we need/want in life. We may enjoy our job, it may be rewarding, but it is not what we would really want to be doing with our time.

Massive amounts of people realize that they are working X percent of the time to buy food and shelter. Rather than continue to fritter that time away at a job they don’t like, they cut back their hours and supplement the subsequent loss in pay with free groceries. Market forces are not prescriptions for how to do business, they are models of observed behavior. People, en mass, will exchange an hour of labor at McDonalds for an hour of free time if the end result is an hour’s worth of flour. Mind you, most don’t quit entirely, they just cut back to a much more comfortable level of work/leisure/spending money. Sure sure sure not everyone does this, but the park is still overflowing with people. (Who, by the way, are these people who didn’t love their jobs? Don’t think there is a lot of them? How many postal employees out there really love their jobs? What about Department of Motor Vehicle clerks? Fast food clerks? Janitors? Gas station attendants? Accountants? They’re all out there now, relaxing in the park, painting ugly pictures.

Take myself for example. Let’s say that I make $30,000 a year. I pay about $1,000 a month in rent, eat (WAG) about fifty dollars a week in food. That is $14,600 I am paying out of my pocket to eat and live. Almost fifty percent of my salary. I am not even left with the fifteen grand, because of the significant tax burden placed on me by the system. But scratch that, let’s pretend that taxes don’t really go up. Let’s say that taxes hover around thirty percent. (This is almost exactly what I paid a couple weeks ago, combining Federal, State, and Local taxes.) My thirty K a year after taxes, food and shelter leaves me with $6,400. That is about a hundred and twenty-three dollars a week. Damned if I don’t take a part time job at half the salary and continue life as it was. Actually, after doing the math, I realize that if I work only twenty hours a week at $6.15 an hour, I will take home the same amount (and at $6,500 a year I will surly get to keep most of it from the tax-man) of extra spending money as I did working 40 hours a week at my current salary. I now have the exact same basket of material goods (food, shelter, spending money) and twenty extra hours of free time to pursue the more esoteric pleasures of life. I just wish the park wasn’t so freaking crowded!
What do you think Matt? Good or bad situation? Are there any glaring holes in my assumptions?

Before you answer, you may want to read up a bit on basic economic theory, especially the parts about public goods. Maybe you want to tour a public housing project or two. This will help you see other potential unintended consequences in this idea. I leave it to others for the time being to point some of those out (though this thread contains a lot of them already) if you still don’t see them. For now, I thank you for listening, and look forward to exchanging ideas with you in the future.
Rhythmdvl

Once in a while you can get shown the light
in the strangest of places
if you look at it right…

67

CuBorab:

You just had to bring up the Monty Python bit. Now, I’m starting to like you as well.

This argument is cancelled.

Only a small number of people are truly awake. These people go through life in a state of constant amazement.

68

Thank you, SmartAss.

“Oh, this isn’t an Argument. This is Abuse.” :slight_smile:

69

pldennison on my example of a freeloading artist who made good:

Well, which numbers are you looking at? If you mean “the number of arts grant recipients who don’t end up making millions from their work far exceeds the number of those who do,” I’m sure you’re absolutely right. If you mean “the amount of money the government gives away in arts grants far exceeds all the revenues that all such recipients and their funded activities ever generate for the government,” I’m not so sure, and I’d be interested in seeing some figures.

CuBorab remarked:

Excellent suggestion! Why don’t we do just that? (Sorry to keep first-person-pluralizing your brainchild, matt, but I want to run with this.) Let’s by all means adopt your assumption that the people who are sickened with outrage at this idea don’t have to contribute to it, so we can stop arguing about whether it should be considered at all and get on with the discussion of whether and how it might work.

My first notion is that Rhythmdevl is way off with the assumption that the universally available (but, we hope and intend, not universally used) food and shelter are going to be anywhere near the equivalent of what he/she now spends about $15K a year on. Recall that I spoke of “a small bare room with shared bath,” not “a small apartment,” and “a few price-controlled staples,” not “bins and bins” of basics including sugar. We definitely aren’t planning to provide even the modest luxuries of a “working-poor” lifestyle, because we want the vast majority of the working poor, not to speak of the working upper classes, to prefer to go on working.

  1. Do we formally means-test (an administrative expense), or do we just try to make the free basics sufficiently spartan that few people will be inclined to use them just to convert living expenses into disposable income as in Rhythmdevl’s scenario? If the latter, there will inevitably be some people who’ll exploit the system in that way—let’s call them “rhythmdevls”. :slight_smile: How many rhythmdevls as a proportion of total users can our system afford to support?

  2. How shall we set up this housing? Personally, I think the “village poorhouse” model that I mentioned before is a good one in this respect: let’s avoid the Cabrini-Green-style highrises that foster crime and the “culture of poverty,” and instead place small multi-room units throughout communities of varying income levels. There will be more public pressure to keep the units clean and safe, and there will be more avenues of contact with the respectable working world to give the residents opportunities and encouragement to move up from poverty.

There are lots more issues we can mull over, but this should do to start with. What do you think?

Kimstu

70

I was thinking about this at lunch, matt (bad boy–you made me think on my free time), and it seems this whole argument of yours is a little disingenuous.

On the one hand, you would ask that society provide, essentially, “free” room and board at some basic level for anyone who wants it. This is, of course, to be paid for by outrageously high taxes on those who work and the products they buy.

On the other, you complain that society should not ask that you contribute through some meaningful, productive service or job, and you complain about an expectation of conformity, to whatever degree.

In other words, you want to make demands of society but want society to make no demands on you. You want to have the freedom, through the forced goodwill of others, to engage in navel-gazing pursuits if you wish but do not want society to expect that you give back in the form of production or commerce. How is that ethical?

71

Kimstu said

they tried such an experiment here in denver. First they provided, rent free, nice townhomes. THey had to raze them after about 8 years because they were destroyed by the inhabitants. Then they rebuilt some victorian style townhomes which had a reasonable rent, a part of which went toward ownership of the house.

They still look pretty darn nice. I lived next door to one for a year and a half. There were still some crime problems (someone got shot 20 feet from my porch) But the property was not abused.

Lesson: people only take better care of what is their own.

But as for mixing in different income levels: Exactly which middle income families are going to move into the projects?

72

Ouch, this brings up unpleasant memories: The socialist parties in Denmark tried to introduce a concept called “Citizen wages” (poor translation, sorry) , where everyone was entitled to a certain amount of monetary support from the Gvt. - but taxes, of course, would be raised accordingly. Very popular among those living on public subsidies and among those who make a living handing out public subsidies. Fell flat on its face, thank Ghod, but only after serving its true purpose: Buying a sh.tload of votes from those people.

That’s a major problem when politicians get themselves committed to schemes like this: It’s very tempting to adjust the rates a bit upwards (or to expand the number of voters getting the benefits) to gain a few percentage points. It’s ritual political suicide to adjust them downwards. Schemes like this will expand & expand & expand…

73

[hijack]

I would just like to point out this book you are thinking of is Pegasus in Flight by Anne McCaffrey. (the book set before it doesn’t have this society since at that time period (about a hundred years I guess before the second one) is more similar to us now with only slight tweaking) [/hijack]

Kimstu you mentioned free housing in places. There is something like that where I live (actually I live in those houses) only the housing isn’t free. Its at a lowered rate. Rent is regularily $550 or so a month here its more like $225 a month. (These figures are in Canadian dollars and are based on what I know from awhile ago. They may not reflect the costs at this time.) The places aren’t always in the best of shape though. We have an okay place but the roof leaks, the insulation is too thin that sort of thing.

There is also Habitat for Humanity which has a long waiting list. But what they do is build townhouses and houses for people. They pay a certain amount each month and must do 500 hours of service with Habitat and eventually they own the place outright. Now eventually if they get back on their feet and plan to move out to another location (or another city for jobs or whatever) Habitat buys the house back and they sell it to another family that needs it for the same cost. The hours of service are done at the construction site doing anything from drywalling to painting to whatever is needed that doesn’t have to be done by professionals (like plumbing and electrical). It works quite well actually.

Our whole world I think would work a lot better if we could all find stuff that we are good at and enjoy and can get payed for to do so we won’t starve and need to live off of public help. Too bad its a dream. But then I’m 17 I can still have a few hopes not yet crushed by the harsh reality of living on my own with endless bills and hours of work which I hate crushing my spirit.

[hijack again]I’d also like to say that its totally possible that if this idea gets through we might eventually end up like the earth told about in Decision on Doona (another McCaffrey novel) It doesn’t go into too much detail about earth but you get the idea that earth is populated almost completely the only open land being ‘square miles’ which most people don’t even bother to see.

They live in their little boxes day after day being fed and pampered totally. The whole society is run by a group of people and there aren’t enough people even interested in learning about how this works so that the whole thing will collapse on itself within a generation or two and the suicide rate is abnormally high as well since no one has any motivation for anything. Not even art.{/2nd hijack]

74

Ok, OK, OK. We’ve gotten a bit whirled away in the process of the thing before resolving the moral issues. I’d rather decide whether people have a right to eat or not before we start accounting for each lentil.

I’ve heard not working referred to as a form of suicide. I’d say that’s a bit disingenuous - it’s more (in this society at any rate) like walking out into traffic. And we could argue that Bob, who walks out into traffic is partially responsible for his own situation. However, does that mean the truck shouldn’t stop? Should the truck driver say, Ok, his choice to walk out into traffic is now bearing fruit, and just plow into Bob? Or shouldn’t the truckdriver at least attempt to avoid the collision anyway? And shouldn’t the traffic cop try to rescue Bob from imminent death, whether he put himself in that position in the first place or not?

I would argue that the responsibility to save Bob does indeed rest on Bob, but also on the truck driver (as the more powerful party) and on the traffic cop (as the servant of the state). This doesn’t excuse Bob’s actions or make him less responsible if he gets squished by doing something stupid. But it will hopefully keep him from getting flattened unnecessarily.

Speaking of the market, I’m distressed by the continuing view of the market as some kind of force of nature, as unregulatable as the weather. Wrong. Human beings created the market, and human beings can and should regulate it if it is bringing unjustifiable levels of harm to bear on the citizenry. I know that due to certain unfortunate historical events, some people find the phrase “market regulation” to be unpalatable. That’s why I propose a combined system: buffer the unregulated effects of the marketplace with measures to ensure that your population does not freeze or starve.

About the paintings (getting a bit specific here): People keep talking about unsaleable paintings and no value to society. As a piece of culture and a focus of dialogue, a painting has a value much different from its price tag. A painting or a book is not a loaf of bread; it has intellectual content above and beyond what people are willing to pay for it. That’s why (changing the subject slightly) there was such a furor about the Japanese millionaire who wanted to be cremated along with Van Gogh’s “Irises”, which he owned. It is true: he owns the physical painting. But the cultural value of “Irises” belongs to the whole world, or at least to the society to which it is relevant, which would be impoverished if the painting were to be destroyed. That’s why things like paintings and books and monuments transcend their physical and financial status, and that’s why the value of an artist to society is based on more than how much his paintings sold for. Remember that Van Gogh lived in poverty, died in an asylum, and never sold a painting.

And a final thought. Some people have expressed outrage over my plan on the basis of the idea that it would mean money for nothing. They don’t want to have an ethical relationship with other members of their society, and they believe that a state of nature ought to prevail, in which we reap what we sow by the sweat of our brow.

Pursuant to this, they argue that we ought to be made to work, whether we enjoy it or not, whether it fulfils us or not, at whatever is profitable.

In other words, we ought to be controlled. We ought not to do what we do best, we ought not to do what we have a talent for. We ought to be a society of joyless wage-slaves who spend between one-third and two-thirds of our waking time doing something which is not fulfilling to us. And society is no more than a production unit.

Sure, it’s the way of nature. But isn’t the purpose of a society to enhance human beings beyond what nature dictates, and to permit us to grow and explore our potential beyond what we could have before? Is a society whose citizens spend between one-third and two-thirds of their total waking lives engaged neither in the democratic process nor in fulfilling labour, really the best we can come up with? Is it the best we can do? Is it even healthy as a society?

I would say, no. Ethically speaking, humans ought to have existential freedom. Humans ought to be able to work at things that benefit others and fulfil themselves. And humans ought to be free to chart the courses of their lives unfettered by what the market, which is not regulated by the good of society, would have them do.

It may never be achieved; then again, true justice may never be achieved, but we still have courts.

Can we argue about the merits of this ethical position before we start counting lentils and arguing about taxes?

75

Not really what I was saying:

Not that government and market are intertwined, but that I don’t see the sharp qualitative distinction between the two sorts of institutions: there are elements of coercion in markets, there are voluntary exchange elements in the activities of government.

With regard to your post matt_mcl, a couple of comments. First, to some degree, a lot of posters here (including me) see markets as a liberating, not a controlling force. Secondly, I think your ethical question:

has been addressed here to some extent. Some posters are disagreeing with you because they are unwilling to enhance the position of others at the expense of others.

The issue, I guess, is whether only liberty as such matters, or whether outcomes matter too. For most people, a major reason for liberty is that it brings good outcomes in the long term. For (philosophical rather than political) libertarians the outcomes are irrelevant: it is liberty itself which matters. Myself, I would not prefer liberty at any cost to outcomes, if it came to that choice.

picmr

76

I’ll try to stay focused on the ethical implications, Matt, and avoid the discussions of incentive and the value of art. You said: “But isn’t the purpose of a society to enhance human beings beyond what nature dictates, and to permit us to grow and explore our potential beyond what we could have before?” I agree, as I’ve said. But I think your characterization of of society as “no more than a production unit” fails to consider something - that in order for people to have such necessary things as housing and food, they must in fact be produced. Ideally, they should be produced by the people who enjoy and find fulfillment in producing them. But even if they do enjoy it, their production can be claimed by “society”, while the production of so many other people cannot. (They don’t produce necessities.) This introduces inequality. Of course we can attempt to alleviate this inequality by giving the farmers and builders something taken from the others, to even things out. But this is what a market does. The difference is that now freedom is reduced. The freedom lost is the freedom for each person to decide his own needs and the value of his endeavors. Is this freedom any different from the freedom to chart the course of one’s own life?

“We ought not to do what we do best, we ought not to do what we have a talent for.” It isn’t a case of us proposing this, while you’re proposing the opposite. Of course we think we should do what we do best, what we have a talent for, what we enjoy. We just don’t insist that you be forced to value it more than you freely choose to value it.

By the way, you seem to imply that those who disagree with you here are against being charitable. No one here has said that people shouldn’t help others; what they object to is the taking of their property for a purpose they disagree with. Can such taking advance freedom?

77

Charity vs. welfare: John Ralston Saul has talked about this more eloquently than I can. I’ll quote him.

“You can usually tell when the concepts of democracy and citizenship are weakening. There is an increase in the role of charity and in the worship of volunteerism. These represent the élite citizen’s imitation of noblesse oblige; that is, of pretending to be aristocrats or oligarchs, as opposed to being citizens… The rise of democracy was driven by the citizens’ desire to escape from the paternalistic and arbitrary charity of those with money. They accomplished this by replacing charity with a fair, balanced, arm’s-length system of public obligation. The principal tool of that obligation was taxation.”

It’s always demeaning to live off of handouts. But it’s much more demeaning to live off of handouts which are given to you by the wealthier to make themselves feel better. It’s less demeaning to feel that your handouts are given you as a citizen in accordance with your rights not to starve or freeze.

78

Another few interesting quotations:

“Freedom is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish Liberty. As if every Man was to regulate the whole of the Conduct by his own will. The Liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which Liberty is secured by the equality of Restraint… This kind of Liberty is indeed but another name for Justice… but whenever a separation is made between Liberty and Justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe.”

  • Edmund Burke

“Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.”

  • Edmund Burke

“The message [of neoliberalism] is simple. You have a free choice: the labour market, the workhouse prison, death, or go somewhere else.”

  • Noam Chomsky, <i>Perspectives on Power</i>

“Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as “one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger.” A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist – the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force.”

  • Emma Goldman

“A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.”
-Samuel Johnson

“People always believe
that the victim deserves his fate
It is the most sinister of the little
judéo-christian jokes.”
-Dany Laferrière, <i>Chronique de la dérive douce</i>

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“[T]he ideal of the rugged individual opening up the American West is still applied as an essential truth to ten million citizens living in the small area of New York City, as if ten million bulls should and could be squeezed into a china shop.”
-John Ralston Saul, <i>Voltaire’s Bastards</i>

“A human being no longer economically viable cannot merely be exterminated or allowed to starve and die.”

  • SingleDad
79

[QUOTE]
**
Ok, OK, OK. We’ve gotten a bit whirled away in the process of the thing before resolving the moral issues. I’d rather decide whether people have a right to eat or not before we start accounting for each lentil.

matt mcl: Many people would rather die than eat lentils :slight_smile: Sorry - in seriousness, I think this question can really only be answered by each individual. And so -

You are walking down the street with a nice big portion of your favorite food. You are hungry. Along the way is a person - shabbily dressed, with a shopping cart, bony-faced. You don’t want to offer money, which may go to X substance, which you don’t approve of. Do you give them some of your food?

So I myself am torn on this issue. On the one hand, I think it’s unethical to invoke the “survival of the fittest” argument. On the other hand, I think it’s unethical to freeload off of others. I also think that sometimes, people just need some help. I know of a young woman who graduated from a good college and went out into a depressed job market in an area where there were no jobs immediately available to her. Without a job, she could not buy a car to get work in a better area (public transportation was nonexistent in said area). She took a job cleaning stables, and tried to get Medicare (health insurance inthe US that’s state subsidized), but was told that she made too much money. Was she resentful of having paid taxes for many years to be denied help? Yes, and I think that is justifiable. Did she resent being told to “work harder” when she was already working seven days a week? Hell yes. Did she eventually find more work? Yes, through determination and effort. And this was a college-educated, Protestant-work-ethic-havin’ young lady. What about those members of our society who are simply not mentally equipped for anything that pays more than minimum wage, which isn’t really enough to live on? What do we do with them?

Forgive the long post. My point is that sometimes hard work just isn’t enough, and that matt mcl has raised a good question about the ethical implications of allowing people to go hungry in the name of “the way of nature” (especially since if we obeyed the “way of nature”, there’d be a lot more animals wandering around to really enforce “survival of the fittest” :))

80

[QUOTE]
**
Ok, OK, OK. We’ve gotten a bit whirled away in the process of the thing before resolving the moral issues. I’d rather decide whether people have a right to eat or not before we start accounting for each lentil.<<

 The answer of course is no. I understand that food is something that every human being on earth needs to survive. However need is not a virtue that entitles someone to something he or she has not earned. You and I are not entitled to something simply because we exist.

Marc