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Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

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Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

FadeToBlack&Gold said:
To be honest, I'm a little surprised that 61 year-old Greta hasn't been canned for a younger, anorexic blonde yet.
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She's got Authoritarian blue blood. Tailgunner Joe was best man at her parents' wedding.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

It's a bit droll that the Democrat administration is replacing the founder of the Democrat Party with an evangelical Christian, Second Amendment rights proponent, Republican....

I guess Ms Tubman was not "bitterly" clinging to her guns and her religion, eh?
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

FreshFish said:
It's a bit droll that the Democrat administration is replacing the founder of the Democrat Party with an evangelical Christian, Second Amendment rights proponent, Republican....

I guess Ms Tubman was not "bitterly" clinging to her guns and her religion, eh?
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1) The Republican and Democratic parties were not what they are today
2) The world was different back then. Almost everyone clang to their guns and religion, so it was simply a religious woman who might see herself as a vulnerable black woman in a society where half the people there saw her as simply lost property.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

FreshFish said:
It's a bit droll that the Democrat administration is replacing the founder of the Democrat Party with an evangelical Christian, Second Amendment rights proponent, Republican....

I guess Ms Tubman was not "bitterly" clinging to her guns and her religion, eh?
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I saw this meme yesterday on Hot Air. You should at least have copied the pic too; it was pretty good.

The parties flip-flopped on race between 1948 and 1968. The modern Republican party is heir to Slavery, "States Rights," and Jim Crow, and the modern Democratic party is heir to Abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement. This is obvious from the policies they each promulgate.
 
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Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

Do conservatives have some sort of allergy to calling it the Democratic Party? When did the incorrect pronunciation become a lame attempt at a slur?
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

FadeToBlack&Gold said:
Do conservatives have some sort of allergy to calling it the Democratic Party? When did the incorrect pronunciation become a lame attempt at a slur?
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Well, for a while I was calling it the Demoncratic Party, but then I met Kepler. :)

As to Ms. Tubman on the $20. We had Pocohontas on the $20 back in Reconstruction Days. It's not a big deal. Washington & Lincoln are untouchable, IMO.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

I'd like to change the world but I don't know what to do.

Maybe.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

Kepler said:
I'd like to change the world but I don't know what to do.

Maybe.
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I think the basic human condition would make this a monumental failure. I disagree with some of the critics that it would "tank [a] country's economy." It just wouldn't. The lower and middle classes spend almost everything they earn. This would allow them to do two things: 1. Maybe save a little each month for retirement. 2. Allow them to live a slightly improved life.

I do agree with the criticisms that it would hinder the need for people to have a job. You should have to do something productive for the country to earn something. I'd be much, much more in favor of a WPA or TVA sort of program rather than a complete giveaway of money.

ETA: Besides, how would you even be able to test its effects? You would need an entire country to convert to this for at least two generations for it to be meaningful (in my opinion).
 
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Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

Nothing stops you from having a job, though. It just removes the gun from your head.

I think one thing it would do is make awful jobs a lot more lucrative. Now we keep a population near subsistence level so we have a labor supply that is forced to do awful jobs. A significant GI would mean people would say, "yeah, I'll clean your toilets for you. Shall we say $300k to start?" And if the robots can do it cheaper, fine. I mean, until they revolt and enslave us all...

I agree you really can't test it absent some sort of weird deliberate "human subject rules be d-mned" socio-psych experiment where you ship 1000 people to an island off Borneo and come back fifty years later to see if they've built the Workers Paradise or just settled into the same ol' wage slavery crap we always wind up with.

Removing the gun from people's head sounds like a pretty good long-term goal for society. It was once argued that slavery was absolutely required by economics, but it turns out it's actually pretty wasteful along with being, you know, morally sub-optimal. Maybe "work or live in grinding poverty" will come to be regarded in the same way.* Maybe in a prosperous future work will be optional. Right now work is optional for lots of people, and they still do it. Just on their terms.

We could do anything assuming we can achieve a sufficient surplus. We may not be there yet, but it's a decent target for say a century or a millennium. It will require a completely different set of ethics, because now "not working" equals a parade of disparagements (unless you're rich). But our ethics will change over time; we've seen that happen again and again. It was once unthinkable to live according to any clock less granular than the seasons. Factory work changes our thinking. Our thinking will probably be unrecognizable to us in 500 years.

Effective immortality via medical advance might make non-force work a necessity. No population is going to accept working eternally. Our word for that is hell. We can really only get away with treating so many people so badly now because they know life is short.

* I thought of a better example. In the Greek city states citizenship was originally granted based on having fought in the army. This was considered completely rational. If you didn't do this, society would literally come apart. Somebody had to do it; no free riders. In future eyes, our instincts about having to work to escape poverty may be regarded the same way. It all depends how good we get at generating useful productiveness out of minimal (or zero) human work.
 
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Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

Kepler said:
Nothing stops you from having a job, though. It just removes the gun from your head.

I think one thing it would do is make awful jobs a lot more lucrative. Now we keep a population near subsistence level so we have a labor supply that is forced to do awful jobs. This would mean people would say, "yeah, I'll clean your toilets for you. Shall we say $300k to start?"
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Jokes aside, or at least half-jokes aside, who will clean our toilets then?
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

dxmnkd316 said:
I think the basic human condition would make this a monumental failure. I disagree with some of the critics that it would "tank [a] country's economy." It just wouldn't. The lower and middle classes spend almost everything they earn. This would allow them to do two things: 1. Maybe save a little each month for retirement. 2. Allow them to live a slightly improved life.

I do agree with the criticisms that it would hinder the need for people to have a job. You should have to do something productive for the country to earn something. I'd be much, much more in favor of a WPA or TVA sort of program rather than a complete giveaway of money.

ETA: Besides, how would you even be able to test its effects? You would need an entire country to convert to this for at least two generations for it to be meaningful (in my opinion).
Click to expand...

If you put $35K into everyone's hands, and then they can earn their wages and salaries on top of that, you've just expanded the budget constraint of every person in the country. Demand will go up for most goods, and there will be a brief period of drastic inflation before it returns to normal rates. Comparing their before-and-after situations, you're not going to see people better off by $35K, it might be more like $10K of pre-inflationary value as the markets will adjust prices.

Just a quick example, bakers will need more input ingredients and oven capacity. So the millers will need more wheat, the farmers will need more seed, and Monsanto will get more money which it will then have to payout to either the government in support of the $35K base or flat out to its employees by mandate. The low income earners will be slightly better off, but not by nearly the amount that the program's designers anticipated or to the degree they used to sell the public, and the middle income earners will get hit the hardest as their wages will stagnate again, while the top income earners will find a way to protect themselves to feeling any real impacts (there are always ways).
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

dxmnkd316 said:
Jokes aside, or at least half-jokes aside, who will clean our toilets then?
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As I said: either (1) we'll make smart machines that do it more cheaply or (2) we'll pay people whatever it takes to clean our toilets or (3) we'll do it ourselves.

What we won't do is maintain a subsistence level labor pool that has to work for the lowest salary to do the worst jobs. That's where wage slavery is actually butting up against real slavery.

Work will become non-coercive.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

St. Clown said:
If you put $35K into everyone's hands, and then they can earn their wages and salaries on top of that, you've just expanded the budget constraint of every person in the country. Demand will go up for most goods, and there will be a brief period of drastic inflation before it returns to normal rates. Comparing their before-and-after situations, you're not going to see people better off by $35K, it might be more like $10K of pre-inflationary value as the markets will adjust prices.

Just a quick example, bakers will need more input ingredients and oven capacity. So the millers will need more wheat, the farmers will need more seed, and Monsanto will get more money which it will then have to payout to either the government in support of the $35K base or flat out to its employees by mandate. The low income earners will be slightly better off, but not by nearly the amount that the program's designers anticipated or to the degree they used to sell the public, and the middle income earners will get hit the hardest as their wages will stagnate again, while the top income earners will find a way to protect themselves to feeling any real impacts (there are always ways).
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I understand this argument, but it ignores that early dollars are worth FAR more than later dollars. Giving the poor a floor below which they can never sink does more than just push inflationary forces into the economy. It alters the negotiation by allowing both parties to walk away.

The fundamental flaw at the center of libertarianism and Austrian economics and Randianism and all their fellow travelers is they posit that trades are always mutually non-coercive. This fails at the subsistence level. We should try to fix that.
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

I can't wait to read from these loonies when they find out their cockamamie ideas of increasing money flow doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that it'd be a much better solution for the country as a whole to approach this from the other direction and lower costs...
 
Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0

Kepler said:
I'd like to change the world but I don't know what to do.

Maybe.
Click to expand...
Don't we actually have a glimpse at what the effect of this might be? This is effectively society giving an "allowance" to people, is it not? Rather than tying it to grades or chores, the other two popular allowance methods, this will be the "no strings attached" allowance that many parents choose to use.

My recollection is there have already been studies (albeit, done on children) as to the effect of such grants. Might be worth looking at those again.
 
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