[lhorie]

> taxpayers are supposed to be on the hook

It's interesting that people frame social safety issues as "taxpayers money sharking". The reality is that privatized healthcare in the US means middle class americans typically pay quite a bit more than socialized healthcare countries (see medical debt collection industry).

It's even more mind boggling because the ones that stand to benefit the most from socialized infrastructure are older people (who typically pay the most for healthcare), yet they seem to be the most opposed group. When you put companies in charge of basic country infrastructure, you ought to expect that they're going to optimize for their own profits, over even stakeholder interests (see also telecom sector, energy sector, etc).

There's this weird pervasive idea that not paying a company out of pocket means you are funding hobo lifestyle rather than funding a systems that passes savings back to you and fuels a healthier and more diversified economy. The reality is that all that extra money spent on private healthcare ends up either being spent in clerical bureaucracy like the US healthcare insurance payments dance, or profit margins for a company.

With a private model, by definition, there's no socialized safety net for the less privileged. But then you get rich people like Ben Shapiro complaining that there are druggies around his mansion in LA. As a Canadian, I find that hard to relate to.

[Barrin92]

I'm also not American and not old and I don't know if it sounded that way but I didn't come at this from a "hobos leeching money" standpoint. My point is that social safety doesn't just happen at the government level, and a plurality of entities, including private ones, can be responsible for it.

In my country employees at sizeable firms have guaranteed representation on the board of their firm. (30%). Stakeholdership can be enshrined in law. Small and middle-sized business doesn't just optimise for profit but employs people for life. (the unemployment during covid did not go past 6-7%).

Is that less 'efficient' in a direct sense? Yes, but it's also autonomous and decentralised and robust and gives people real stake in their workplace and control over their life. The perversity of gig work is how it alienates and atomises workers.

You're essentially building a super fragile system in which benevolent government taxes single minded competitive companies to send checks to fluid workers who get ordered around by an algorithm. That system has so many single points of failure it's not even funny. the US, ironically enough, already suffers from a version of this. What happens when the army of Uber drivers and table cleaners doesn't get their 2 trillion relief fund because one guy in charge of the entire thing throws a tantrum?

[lhorie]

That's a great point. I was mostly speaking about a common line of rhethoric specific to the US situation. There are certainly many interesting models outside of north america that ought to come to light more.

The employment security thing is something I sometimes see being argued as a weakness in the sense that it reinforces incumbents as opposed to promoting entrepreneurship (and indeed, the US being the polar opposite does show anedoctal evidence of strong entrepreneurship).

Even in the US, there are relatively common ways that companies provide stakeholdership (equity programs, for example). But I'm not convinced that this type of stakeholdership is necessarily aligned with the interests of the population at large. Unions, for example, are notorious for disruptive strikes.

IMHO, the gig economy falls into a weird area: drivers are technically independent and ought to be free to set their own prices, much like say freelance programmers can be sole proprietorships who are on the hook for their own healthcare expenses, but the ridesharing industry is extremely price sensitive, to the point drivers could easily put themselves out of work by increasing prices.

There are many lines of thought about how that dynamic ought to play out, ranging from "side gigs are just hustling between real jobs", to sacrificing some drivers in favor of allowing a subset to earn a higher minimum income, to the socialist "it's only fair if everyone gets the same treatment, even if it's not ideal for everyone", to the "this industry is important enough that government should subsidize no matter what" sort of thing you see in agriculture and many public transit systems. I'm not sure there's a right answer there.

> one guy in charge of the entire thing throws a tantrum

I think the model that makes the most sense here is the one in the name of the social safety net in Canada: employment insurance. Insurance in the traditional sense of the word: a collective pool of money from a diversified population which can be deployed systematically to bail out some subset of said population in rare emergencies. Naturally, in real life, that's not exactly how it works, especially in such large scale prolonged emergencies, but still, it's a model I like.