There is a difference between a job you like, and a job you do because you believe "work sets you free" or because you believe work is a some sort of value or a necessary pain everybody has to take part in.
I'm unemployed and I really don't think I have any duties to work in fast food or to deliver pizza because I must contribute. If I decide I can live poor and be happy with welfare, I will. I think it's a great thing to be able to live a frugal life and still be healthy enough.
I hear so many people yelling about moochers and parasites, it's becoming weird. Everybody wants everybody to behave like superman, yet nobody realizes you can't educate everyone to have enough qualified workers.
My great fear is that as time passes, more and more people decide to live like I do, and economies might change because people stop consuming.
I can think of all the bullshit jobs people do and then come to the conclusion that it'd be better for me to do what I can to contribute to society through research, participation in free software projects, volunteering, etc.
Doing that I could be useful to thousands, maybe even millions of people. As opposed to, say, wasting the time of hundreds of people trying to sell them stupid magazines they don't need or want while leeching money off of the poor grandma who doesn't know how to say no.
Alternatively, I could spend the time to build something that somewhere down the line could become a useful product to share with the world, or a profitable business that could pay back all the tax money I used up (and more).
Doing a bullshit job 8 hours a day leaves me too exhausted to do anything particularly useful with the little free time I have.
Most jobs are honest and do people a service, you don't even need to look hard or anything.
If you want impact, and can write software, there's plenty of well-paid jobs for that in the US; Silicon Valley and elsewhere. That not only lets you contribute taxes instead of living off them, it also helps you be more productive, focused, and impactful.
Is teaching a bullshit job? Installing solar panels in people's roofs? Doing the accounting that keeps a hospital working? Cooking or waiting in a small restaurant where the firemen next door have lunch?
Interesting. Honest question, do you believe in anything other than laws as a guide for life? I suspect you do, but I don't want to assume so, given your comment. I find "if it's legal, it's okay" problematic given that laws change. If laws can change, what drives that change if not some code the laws are meant to approach?
You don't believe morality exists, or is that a fancy way of saying "I don't have morals?" Because the welfare and healthcare system you are looking forward to live off exists only because of morals.
I don't think they exist because of morals. If you want a country that is thriving, lower classes should have a good living standard. The lower class is the basis of any country. Even if you have very smart people at the top, they can't do a lot if the people under them can't count or have poor health.
I believe that if you set a good minimum standard, it will trickle up.
Also if you don't want riots in the streets, you should make sure the lower classes are living decently.
That's not morals, that political intelligence. Crowds with empty stomachs are a political nightmare.
Universal free healthcare exists in Europe and not in the US, and I don't see any riots caused by it. Riots were not the reason it was established in Europe either. Same with education.
You can argue that it's economically beneficial for the higher classes in Europe, or convenient for the politicians. But even if it's the case (which is anything but obvious), that doesn't change the historical origin of those policies.
I see a lot of drug related prison sentence, and riots do happen in the US in some neighborhood, and it makes the news. Not to mention the gun violence and recent prison riots.
What I was saying is that if you want peaceful streets, you have to care for the poor, if not things will get messy. To me things are not really peaceful in the ghettos. High welfare helps "taming" the problems poverty creates.
Not sure what are you trying to say with the drug fact. Or how riots in a prison would imply the welfare state doesn't derive from morality: In a prison you don't have to work, nor pay for your healthcare. So if anything it shows the opposite of your point.
Do you not believe in morals at all, or do you just not believe in universal morals? What about ethics?
I ask because your position takes on very different implications depending on exactly what you believe. In my experience, most people who say they don't believe in morals actually seem to believe very strongly in them; they just don't believe that the morals of the majority should be imposed on others who don't share the same values. I don't necessarily want to assume that's your position, though.
Depending on where you are in the world living solely off benefits isn't very appealing to most. Much more likely that most will be forced into it rather than choosing it.
What's wrong with taking the opportunity while it lasts? You can't really think of problems like that, it doesn't lead you anywhere. If there is a hole to exploit the system, it will get exploited. No matter by who.
As a side note, recently there's been a drive to not normalize fascist slogans or ideas in mainstream politics. Among those, "arbeit macht frei" is a particularly offensive one, since it was written on the gates of Auschwitz.
Just saying. When someone quotes this kind of phrase to us, we should remind them where they got it from and refuse to treat it as normal.
>I'm unemployed and I really don't think I have any duties to work in fast food or to deliver pizza because I must contribute. If I decide I can live poor and be happy with welfare, I will. I think it's a great thing to be able to live a frugal life and still be healthy enough.
Good for you!
>I hear so many people yelling about moochers and parasites, it's becoming weird. Everybody wants everybody to behave like superman, yet nobody realizes you can't educate everyone to have enough qualified workers.
I don't think people want to acknowledge how much social capital goes into enabling us "supermen" who actually do work for high incomes. If all the roads get cracked and the trains break down, I'm going to be a less productive worker because I have a harder time getting to work.
Although the "Just saying" part (from the GP) irritates me. You're not "just saying," because if you were there would be no need to explain that to us. It's little more than an underscoring of the passive-aggressive intent of a statement.
No; they're a set of ideas and connotations existing in a historical and cultural context. What distinguishes words from mere sequences of letters is meaning.
>I'm unemployed and I really don't think I have any duties to work in fast food or to deliver pizza because I must contribute. If I decide I can live poor and be happy with welfare, I will. I think it's a great thing to be able to live a frugal life and still be healthy enough.
Why do you think that you should have the right to live off of other people's work? Welfare checks aren't fairy money, they're money that came out of other people's paychecks.
For example, because half of other people's work is bullshit. Or because a third of other people's work output is used to take them from home to work. Or because the amount on the paycheck is totally unrelated to the value a worker produces. Or because a quarter of other people's work is not about creating value, but about destroying it and driving all of us always faster towards a catastrophe.
In short, because most of world organised around work is nonsense. So getting a bit of money to live poorly without work is not any more nonsensical. That's a way to see it.
So why not try and fix the mismatch between the paycheck and the value produced by the worker rather than just abandoning the idea of producing any value at all? Even if someone is paid 10% of what they produce, I'd rather have them doing that for 40 hours a week than doing nothing and collecting a welfare check.
Because the people with a lot of power are actively opposed to any fix?
A huge number of people want this mismatch to be fixed, but are wise enough to know they have zero ability to do anything about it.
We're in the midst of discovering just how useless "consciousness raising" slacktivist campaigns are, and that was basically the last hope for being able to contribute to a solution for a lot of people.
study: "I" would rather have "them" ... in discussions like this we must exchange perspectives with all citizens. From the highest to the lowest. Even to the lowliest we must see that their fundamental needs are the same.
What he thinks is irrelevant. The system is in place to allow people without jobs to survive. We either have to have that, or guarantee that everyone has a job - I come from a former communist republic that tried to do the later, it's not pretty. I would much rather live in a country that let's him live off welfare than in a country that tries to shove a job everyone's throat.
Yes, jobs are available, but they also get filled quickly. There's no shortage. The unemployed can out-bid each other in a "how-low-can-you-go" competition, but that just leads to working poor.
But isn't this idea that work is some kind of moral obligation to society exactly the problem if it's true that work is going to disappear? Do you think his contribution to society is zero or negative simply because he doesn't have a job? Perhaps it's just easier to measure if you have a job what your relative contribution to society is because you can place a dollar value on it.
It's also the money that subsidizes people to work the jobs that corporations don't pay enough wages to live off of (e.g. Wal-Mart 'Associates'). Everyone wants goods produced as cheaply as possible, but doesn't want to pay their producers living wages.
Because he is no longer living on the back of other people. He is living on the back of robots and machinery.
Hating him for once personal live style choices (aka salary-man) in a world that that discards those daily by the dozen- seems- slightly envious?
So right now it comes from other people's paycheck but does it have to? Why don't rich countries like the US, Switzerland or Japan not print money to cover their spending?
Inflation is not the problem it used to be and I actually think it's a much better measure of the economy's capacity than unemployment. Would inflation of 4% be that bad for the public and financial system anyways?
In the US at least I strongly oppose tax-based welfare because I percieve it as a rigged system where the wealthy can avoid paying their fair share through loop holes and classifying their income differently than mine. But inflation in a sense is unavoidable and progressive since the more money you have the more you lose to inflation if you don't invest it. This is especially true if the cause of inflation is labor scarcity and not some other key resource like oil.
>Why don't rich countries like the US, Switzerland or Japan not print money to cover their spending?
Printing money is equivalent to a tax on all US dollar holdings. The value of the printed money is subtracted from everyone else's holdings by inflation. Doing this excessively, e.g. to fund the entire public sector, would cause an inflationary spiral, as everyone tries to get rid of their rapidly-devaluing dollars as quickly as possible.
> Why don't rich countries like the US, Switzerland or Japan not print money to cover their spending?
The US is doing exactly that, and has been for decades. Since the 2008 debacle it has being doing even more of it.
> inflation in a sense is unavoidable
If you mean politically unavoidable, I agree; no government in human history has been able to avoid messing with the currency.
If you mean unavoidable period, I'm not sure why it would be. There is nothing in principle impossible about having a currency that cannot be inflated.
What do you mean by decades? The US has been borrowing money but that hardly translates to printing it. I can definitely see how quantitative easing essentially translates to printing a couple of trillion to buy outstanding debt but that has already stopped.
By unavoidable I meant that if you hold currency, you are subject to it. Especially if you are holding assets that are appreciating at a slower rate than inflation. Essentially I don't think the wealthy get to loophole or lawyer their way out of inflation the same way they can with taxes.
I meant labor scarcity not in the exonomic sense but in the sense of literally running out of people to allocate. I think it's clear that if businesses have to compete for a dwindling pool of workers prices will inevitably rise.
The US money supply has been increasing fairly steadily since WW II.
> The US has been borrowing money but that hardly translates to printing it.
The US has indeed been borrowing money. But it has also been printing it.
> I can definitely see how quantitative easing essentially translates to printing a couple of trillion to buy outstanding debt but that has already stopped.
QE is just the latest round of printing money. (More precisely three rounds, since there was QE1, QE2, and QE3.)
> By unavoidable I meant that if you hold currency, you are subject to it.
Only if the supply of currency increases. Why is that unavoidable?
> I meant labor scarcity not in the exonomic sense but in the sense of literally running out of people to allocate. I think it's clear that if businesses have to compete for a dwindling pool of workers prices will inevitably rise.
No, it's not clear at all. What is clear is that the price of labor (wages and salaries) will increase relative to the price of capital (e.g., interest rates). But that does not mean price levels in general will rise. That depends on how well businesses can substitute capital for labor. In the age of automation, that is usually "pretty well".
Printing money out of thin air also robs the productive part of the society out of their assets. A higher inflation without an actual increase in productivity (and thus investment returns) will reduce the value of everyone's assets. This sort of "Robin Hood" schemes have been executed by some populist governments, but I don't know of any which worked out well.
The only fundamental difference is taxing income to pay for welfare vs. taxing wealth.
So the point in an economy with underutilized resources money printing does not necessarily translate money printing to inflation directly. More importantly, the US has carried out a huge money printing scheme: QE. The federal reserve bought a couple trillion of US debt de facto reducing the amount of outstanding debt. What I am arguing for is QE with a higher tolerance for inflation.
I don't understand you try to characterize money printing with runsway inflation. For one I am
Not arguing for unlimited money printing I am talking more about QE style money printing. You don't continue pumping money into the economy if it's already at full capacity and you have reached your inflation target. In fact the United States has printed trillions of dollars through QE but what we experience right now is a very far from runaway inflation. What I am saying is perhaps we need higher inflation to get full employment. I also don't think a 4% target is exactly Venezuela levels of inflation.
The rich are even more capable of evading inflation than they are evading taxes. I'm sure Warren Buffet has proportionally less of his money in cash than I do.
> not print money to cover their spending? [...] Would inflation of 4% be that bad
Inflation is a tax on currency holdings. So if a person has $10,000 and inflation is 4%, they are effectively paying a $400 tax on it –– because the -4% loss of value is transferred to the one causing the inflation, i.e. the printer of money, which is the government. The people would just divest their US dollar holdings, and switch to investments with better capital preservation, and ROI.
> a rigged system where the wealthy can avoid paying their fair share [...] But inflation in a sense is unavoidable and progressive
Most people with non-trivial savings invest their money. People who have a basic level of understanding of how to manage their finances understand that cash in a bad investment. The US dollar has an effective "investment yield" of -2%. The best interest rates you can get in the US, don't exceed 2%. If I lock up my money in a 5-year CD (certificate of deposit), I get close to 0% returns. Why would I ever settle for 0% returns on such a terrible illiquid investments?
Most sensible people will invest any cash (USD/etc) they have, and will aim to maximize their investment returns, concordant with their investment goals. Most of the wealth in the world (held by people with lots of savings, and by companies/institutions) is in the form of stock/shares and bonds. Currency is just a medium for transmission/exchange of money. Most of the wealth in the world is held in stocks, bonds, and property, and not in currency.
> the wealthy can avoid paying their fair share through loop holes and classifying their income differently than mine
The solution to that is simply going back to classifying capital gains[1], dividends[2], and carried interest[3] as regular taxable income. The current regular federal income tax system[4] is very progressive and effective. Getting rid of that would be the wrong thing to do, FICA taxes are a bit regressive, but that can also be easily fixed by eliminating the Social Security wage base[5].
So I understand that the real solution is to fix the tax system but I doubt that is politically realistic.
I think you are also assuming that returns on all investments would stay the same under increased inflation which I seriously doubt.
More importantly I understand that wealthy people have a smaller portion of their wealth in cash than poor people what I am arguing for is that perhaps inflation is at most no worse than our current taxation scheme.
I'm unemployed and I really don't think I have any duties to work in fast food or to deliver pizza because I must contribute. If I decide I can live poor and be happy with welfare, I will. I think it's a great thing to be able to live a frugal life and still be healthy enough.
I hear so many people yelling about moochers and parasites, it's becoming weird. Everybody wants everybody to behave like superman, yet nobody realizes you can't educate everyone to have enough qualified workers.
My great fear is that as time passes, more and more people decide to live like I do, and economies might change because people stop consuming.