I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.
When your friend Steve comes to you to "borrow" $100 (that he'll never return), because he's short on rent, and he blew last of his cash on hookers and booze, it seems pretty reasonable and perfectly morally justified to either refuse outright, or condition your help on requirement that Steve gets a job, and quits his hookers and booze habit. Certainly, nobody would ever suggest that you have any obligation to enable Steve to live his desired lifestyle of leisure, hookers and booze.
However, when it's the government that comes and asks you to give them $100, so that they could in turn give it to Joe, an acquaintance of Steve living the same lifestyle that you have never even met, somehow now it is your moral obligation to pay up, as Joe clearly deserves your money. How does that work?
Because some of the money also goes to Sally who genuinely needs help. I don't understand how you can be okay with people starving or working themselves to death to survive and provide for their families, just because others do things you disapprove of.
You're also ignoring the fact that someone who is eligible for this kind of social security and spends it all on booze is probably unwell and needs treatment for addiction and the conditions that cause it. In many cases, the cause of addiction is poverty itself.
This fear of being "scammed" by the Joes and Steves of the world is completely irrational. The government is taking a big chunk of your money anyways. What's being proposed is that instead of spending tax dollars on killing poor people abroad, you spend it on helping poor people at home, regardless of their work ethic.
“ The government is taking a big chunk of your money anyways”
I think the idea is that if the government took less money, there would be more money in the hands of people to help take care of local misery.
The government doesn't generally tax poor people much, so most tax savings benefit those that can better afford life already. The whole purpose of taxes is to take enough from the ones that are still doing okay and redistribute it to stuff that more wealthy people wouldn't necessarily choose to spend it on, but that are still a net benefit to society over other causes.
So, say government increases the income limit for one of the lower tax brackets by $5,000. That's great for people who make more than that, which btw isn't all poor people, but at the same time it also gives more money to everyone who was already doing okay. Meaning inflation will soon eat up the extra money and we're right back where we started.
In order to help the poor with upgrading to non-poor, the government has to explicitly avoid extending that benefit to the rest of society, has to continue taking from middle and upper income people. It needs to be targeted, and tax cuts are a great way to target middle/upper classes while helping poor people less.
It works because that's not the calculation being made. You're not giving up money specifically to a "Steve" or "Joe". What you are doing is putting money into a pool. From that pool, the money is redistributed in such a way as to provide baseline income to people in need. Most of the people it is redistributed to are not "Steve" or "Joe", and the calculation is that it is cheaper to ignore free riders such as Steve/Joe as they are a small minority. The calculation is also that not providing this baseline is both economically bad (providing a baseline seems to be much more cost effective than dealing with effects of not doing that) and morally bad (most of the people in need of the baseline are in need of it not [directly] through fault of their own)
If my alcoholic friend from college came to me because he was short on rent or needed to buy them groceries, I wouldn't give them $100. I'd offer to buy them groceries or write a check to the landlord directly.
The government can do the same thing. If someone needs healthcare or education and can't afford it, pay for the healthcare or education. A social net doesn't mean a blank check.
What if he blew his budget buying cable TV and soda? I lived in poverty, and had many aquaintances who were also in poverty. Everyone had children, and so many of them had $30-40k a year in benefits (welfare). Everyone had gaming consoles and very large modern TVs and computers, endless soda on tap (that is all they would drink), and everyone had cable TV and bought drugs (cocaine, weed)...and cigarettes. Everyone I knew. This was just their life with no serious ambitions. I forgot to mention that most households pulling in government benefits were engaged in fraud. Often the fraud was a live-boyfriend who contributed money but who's income was not counted on the mothers' benefit calculation because she claimed to live alone with her children.
Before you make soap box comments you should be aware of reality. You might think I'm arguing against welfare benefits but I am not. The whole time I watched this state of affairs I seethed because it was middle class tax payers making up the difference in pay for walmart and other corporations who pay poverty wages.
The $100 Steve asked me to borrow will also turn directly into housing. He said that he needs it to meet his rent, and he's not lying: he will use it to pay his rent. Nevertheless, that just enables him to continue his hookers and booze habit.
If he can continue to both pay his rent and continue [his habits that you disagree with], is there a problem? Is the problem that Steve won't pay you back, or that he won't pay you back because he spent money on [habits that you disagree with]?
No, but the point is that when my friends ask me for help, I can use the circumstances under which they got themselves into needing help in my decision of whether I help them, and whether there is any moral obligation on me to help them. With government, there is no such option: they will take my money by force, use it for anything at all that they might possibly want, and all I can say is something on the order of one or two bits of feedback every 4-5 years.
Not enough to make it a serious problem. But then I'm neither a Puritanical moralist nor a "better 10 (or 100) good people starve than one bad person gets benefits", either.
If society agrees to give $100 to the military you have no say in how they spend it.
If society agrees to give $100 to Steve then you have no say in how that move is spent.
If you think it's better not to give to Steve anything and you lobby to change the law and are successful. When Andre is affected by this change he decides to make up the difference by breaking into your place and killing you. At least Steve doesn't have his hookers right?
Interesting to hear this, when I modeled “Steve” after two people I personally know. One is my family member, and the other is my middle school acquaintance. Their lifestyle is exactly enabled by the money they get from government. Should I believe you, or my own lying eyes?
Neither of course! Either believing your own experience to generalize well or believing someone random on the internet would be crazy talk.
What you should believe is the research on this, which admittedly is difficult with anything this politicized. What I base it on is a combination of reading some of that (though I'm no expert) and knowing some people quite well who have had state level responsibility for programs of this kind.
Fraud, and "Steves" certainly exist, but it seems that the numbers are small enough they don't have much systemic impact, there are many much bigger issues.
That's what I meant by "to a first approximation"; not that it doesn't exist, but the effect isn't of 1st order importance.
I am confused by this. The comment is against taking care of lazy people directly, but also hits on government spending which would be the way to make direct personal care of lazy people indirect. As to the infinite money - we have more than enough productive capacity to supply basics of life to everyone without trying to somehow further weigh if their laziness needs to be punitively motivated for basic living support.
Is this some fear that if we provide basic supports for everyone that "too many" people would not move beyond basics? That really seems unlikely.
I was replying to an absolute statement, "every lazy person deserves x". My point is that there are probably more aspects to consider in general.
Your claims that we have "more than enough" are unproven, imo.
Let's take housing. Is your claim that there is enough good housing around for everybody, or that it could be built quickly? How quickly - how many houses are needed, by your estimate? How many building workers are available, and how fast could they build? How many heavy machines (cranes, trucks, bulldozuers...) are available on short notice, to speed up the building?
I don't think many such machines are sitting around idly, and the same goes for construction workers. That means housing is already being built at maximum capacity, and yet there still aren't enough affordable houses.
Just because Apple can make billions of dollars of surplus, doesn't mean there is the equivalant of building machines sitting around idly, waiting to be hired with Apple's money (taking Apple as an example of a rich surplus company).
In fact that money is just debt, literally IOUs - "I owe you". Apple selling an iPhone to people for 1000$ means they trust those people will someday repay them with something worth roughly 1000$. That something could be a building machine. But that machine does not have to exist yet - at the point of sale, all there is is Apple's trust in "the people" to at some point provide that building machine.
Now if Apple were to say today "screw it, we are spending all our money on building houses for the poor", it would probably result in the equivalent of a bank run. Apple would try to rent or buy 10000 construction machines in a single go, but that many machines don't exist. So "the people" would have to go oopsie and say "actually, you can not get a bulldozer for your money".
Its actually quite a good claim, for example if we examine UK: we have more empty houses than we have homeless people, and we have more food thrown away as waste than what would be needed to feed said homeless people.
Furthermore, suppose you were to budget 3000 calories of basic food for every person in Uk, you'd find it's a tiny fraction of national budget.
So the only reason those homeless people don't get their houses is that nobody wants to give them to them? I rather doubt that number. More likely those empty houses are in places where nobody wants to live, or that are unsuitable for homeless (because the environment to support them is missing in the location).
The empty houses in UK and especially London is a well-known and researched problem, they are prime real estate where the owner decided that renting them out is not worth the trouble, they are just land-banking and waiting for their 'investment' to grow. Many (of those) owners don't even live in UK.
We had a 'homeless' guy build his house in a forest, but ofcourse the government showed up to remove him. Many people would sort themselves out if we did not prevent them from doing so.
The narrative of shortage is an obsolete idea from the 19th century. We produce more food, steel, oil, and every other real industrial good than we know what to do with. These discussions are like fighting WW2 with medieval tactics.
Today's economy is not limited by production like it was 100 years ago, its limited by consumption. By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty, the '1st world' is reducing consumption and destroying it's economy.
Think about it - how can we have abandoned factories, unemployed workers and surplus of all materials?
Think what 'productivity growth' means - if 40 hours a week was enough to feed and clothe everyone 70 years ago, and productivity went up 400%, how many hours do we need now?
That why we have useless hobs, and 60% of employees believe their job is useless.
The problem is not about morally corupt rich people being in charge, its about morons being in charge. If they were clever but evil, at least the system would not crash every 8 few years
> By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty
I am sick of hearing about poverty as a growing problem. It simply isn't.
Median income, and the lowest income quintile, have grown steadily. The percent of Americans living in poverty has been declining. Median wealth is still lower than it was before the 2008 crisis, but it was growing strongly before and has grown strongly since the Great Recession.
All trends are upwards. Do not confuse growing inequality with growing poverty. Some are getting richer faster than others, but statistically everyone is getting richer.
Is there a specific metric in mind when you say people are being pushed into poverty? Or is it something you have just heard elsewhere?
The housing situation in London may be special, and I would bet you can find socialist laws behind it that make renting out properties nonviable (like rent controls and making it impossible to get rid of bad tenants). Here in Berlin there is a similar discussion, some people claim empty houses are the cause of the crisis, others say it is a myth. Since I had that debate recently I looked up the articles who found no such surplus, but the "believers" just want to believe, because it is such a handy explanation.
I don't think number of houses is the problem, either. People need houses in certain places. That's why homeless hang out in San Francisco where a flat costs 1 million dollars, while a couple of hundred of miles away it would presumably be much, much cheaper.
As for your production, it still all costs energy, and getting energy also costs labor (and even wars, remember the wars about oil).
Abandoned factories simply have turned out to be not economically viable. If you think you can do better, why don't you pool your money with some friends, buy such a factory and start it up again?
You merely display the typical arrogance of socialist who always believe they could run everything better with a "planning economy". And when they finally get to try it out in the real world, they get a major painful reality check.
Take your factories: since they were not economically viable, it would be wasteful and a net loss for society and the economy to start them up again.
You are partially right about increased productivity, and it actually has improved the lives of many people. I personally am very glad that I don't have to spend my waking hours doing hard labor on a field just so that I can harvest some potatoes. Most people in the west have enough to eat, and clothes they can wear, many even have a nice smartphone on top.
Some resources are still limited, though, such as nice places to live in.
And the world population has also grown by a couple of billion people compared to 100 years ago. Your job that fed a family at the beginning of the 20th century still feeds a family today, only in China.
About 10 million cars are produced in the USA every year.
An RV/Trailer type thing is like a car - so quite easily you could imagine producing that many of these 'tiny houses' every year with car style factories.
About 600k people are homeless in the USA. That's about equal to the number of RV's produced every year.
So that solves 'physical' homelessness quite quickly if there was an effort to. (that disregards that some homeless choose to homeless out of mental illness etc)
Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs.
It’s ironic you say the government doesn’t have infinite money to spend.
We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter. There is not a person, well one, on my block in Marin County that has not benefited financially from the virus, but will be getting $1400 to blow.
Most of the people I know who don't work who are sometimes dismissed as lazy have mental issues. In the family of ADHD, or anxiety. Unable to focus on pursuing a particular path long enough for it to pay off. Easily frustrated and prone to giving up when frustrated. And often a crippling doubt that they're capable of doing anything worth being paid for in the first place.
I suspect clever lazy people without barriers to social or economic participation usually seek out, and often obtain, jobs where they're paid to do approximately nothing. Lazy people, assuming that category is even meaningful, aren't masochists who want to live in poverty. There's more going on there.
> Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs.
Without the job, they would have extra 8 hours (plus commute time) a day to meet their non-job friends.
The OP was specifically a bout "lazy people", so your claim that they are not lazy does not make any sense at all.
You can argue that there may be no actual lazy people, but that is another discussion.
"We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter."
Are you really not aware that the bill for that will simply come later (as it is a debt taken out on behalf of the population), and in the process of creating those two trillion, existing money has already been devalued?
Since people can multiply, infinite amounts is a possible scenario. Also scarcity - think of "a kingdom for a horse". If there are 1000 apples and 1001 people, and everybody who doesn't get an apple starves to death, the 1001th apple would be worth an infinite amount of money to the 1001th person at least, or to the person who wants to save them by all means.
However, when it's the government that comes and asks you to give them $100, so that they could in turn give it to Joe, an acquaintance of Steve living the same lifestyle that you have never even met, somehow now it is your moral obligation to pay up, as Joe clearly deserves your money. How does that work?