| Let's me just start by saying that I understand and respect your argument, and your motivations for them. I am sure you're a good hearted person, who just wants to help his fellow citizens, and that is a good thing, and one in which i feel we can agree as a goal to achieve. Please do not take my arguments against your proposals, as insulting or demeaning, that is in no way my intention. I only mean to point out where their flaws lie, and why they will not work as you expect them to. Let's break your arguments down to their core: >You keep saying that businesses, in effect, ought to be the sole arbitrator of what the value of labor is, and any infringement on that ability somehow limits people's options and that said limitation is more exploitative than whatever the business is doing. >You've gone further to say that it would be better for someone to be trapped in poverty working some dead-end job that pays only the absolute minimum to get any worker, with no possible avenue out via education or entrepreneurship or whatever, than to not have access to any job at all. >This system is deeply flawed in that it allows for the potential value of a person to be "zero", in that they cannot access base necessities of life (shelter, food, water, healthcare, etc) much less the "luxuries" of equity like education. You misunderstood the argument here. I state that the economic value of hiring someone can be less than the cost of hiring that someone. In addition, I stated that if a minimum wage is imposed, unless that minimum wage is so low that every persons value added is greater than it (in which case the minimum wage would affect no one), then such a minimum wage would merely result in those people who are affected go from X to Zero. The problem that you're having here is you are confusing the cost of labor (and value) with peoples necessities for modern life, when the two things are not related at all. >I suggest what if the system was flipped? What if the population got to decide what was best for itself, instead of businesses. The population already decides what is best for itself, indeed it is a minimum wage that actively prevents them from doing so by closing off their best options and condemning them to subsisting on the public dole. >Instead of businesses setting the sole value of slices of a human life (which they've done in the past and has led to things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things. We already do this in part through public education, which even in some cases provides the "food" and "shelter" components. (This is obviously limited by the rest of the student's socioeconomic circumstances, but the point remains: this is not a foreign concept in US thinking.) >If citizens had access to this base standard, it (a) prevents the problem of human life being valued at "zero" and having such a thing as a poverty cycle, (b) removes the burden of healthcare from businesses' pocketbooks, which will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses, and (c) give a lot more flexibility to the population in the choices they can make. I am going to assume that you are talking about doing so via a UBI, as you discussed in a previous comment, rather than through some central planning system of goods production and distribution? If so, then that would actually work much better than the current system with means test, bureaucracy and other massive inefficiencies. That being said, you need to consider the terrible incentive structure involved with the statement "we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things." On a fundamental level this implies that the cost involved with providing these benefits are "fixed" per person, and scale with population, regardless of the economies ability to sustain such expense. What happens when the expense gets so great that it cannot be sustained? And if you "index" it to economic performance, how do you feel that cutting everyones benefits in the middle of an economic depression will go in an election? Do you truly believe people will be content keeping such a system as is over time? What stops the creeping increase of benefits? Furthermore, if the benefits are sufficiently large, what sort of motivation will people have to work at all? And indeed, those who do work and generate wealth, why must they be punished for it (by being forced to sustain those who don't even try)? Finally, a final question, you say: >will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses Why is this a goal of yours at all? Why do you think that interfering with the way businesses work will increase the pie? Why do you want to pick winners and losers? >To this last point: In my school district, there was a group of anonymous donors ~20 years ago who assembled a fund that would pay for the college education of any student who graduated from that district, with some minimum required GPA. In effect, free college, if you make it through the public school system. (The assumed motivations of these corporate donors being to increase the highly-educated labor pool with ties to the region, that they could then hire from.) We had a graduation rate of less than 50%, in part because most of the families of the students were so poor that they absolutely needed the added income of the student to stay afloat--and they couldn't work a job and manage school at the same time. So they dropped out, and merrily became part of the poverty cycle. UBI, or something like it, would have prevented that. The problem is that such benefits would have the opposite effect, because the thing that most keeps people in poverty is not lack of money, but lack of motivation and lack of options. UBI would remove motivation, like any other form of ameliorating their situation would do. And Minimum wage laws (and other restrictions) would remove their options. I understand we're you're coming from, but I have seen first hand how those sorts of policies don't work, and how lack of cash and education isn't as much of a barrier to escaping poverty as creeping regulations are. My grandfather was born in 1929 in a tiny village of twenty people in a poor mountainous area in interior Portugal, growing up he had to walk 20 kilometers each day to the nearest town to attend primary school, which he attended for only 4 years. This is not a rich area, and the conditions there, both at the time and today would be considered absolute poverty. For reference, electricity and running water (and sewage) only arrived to the area in the 1990s. His father was a woodchopper, and his relatives and ancestors were subsistence farmers. At age 13 his father gave him a bus ticket to lisbon, enough money for 2 nights at a shared hostel, some food and enough cash for him to purchase a bus ticket back home. He went to Lisbon and began working in construction. He eventually resigned and started his own company building apartment buildings, single family houses, and other such construction work. He was never wildly rich, but he was able to build himself and my grandmother a perfectly respectable middle class life. He did this with 4 years of schooling, a bus ticket and a couple of days of "runway". There was no minimum wage. There was no health and safety regulations. There was no public health service. There was no free education (beyond the 4 years of primary education). The reason he managed to do this wasn't because he "had a leg up on everyone else". He did this off the back of his own hard work, good decisions, a little bit of luck, and most importantly because no one was stopping him. If there was a minimum wage back then, he would not have been able to be hired or hire people himself. If there was restrictions and licensing requirements on construction, he would not have been able to build the houses he sold. If there was age limitations on being able to work, he would not have been able to come to Lisbon at age 13. Each of these limitations and regulations may individually make perfect sense, however collectively they ossify any form of social mobility. If I were born today in that village, I would not be able to take the same path out that he took. I would have to find something else, or I would be stuck in that poverty cycle you described, and I would be stuck there not through lack of intelligence, or because the poverty is keeping me there, but because the well intentioned policies you are supporting would keep me there and prevent me from escaping. |
We keep mixing the domain of our discussion; sometimes I'm talking about a hypothetical ideal situation, and sometimes it's a "reasonable" step we could make from the current economic structure. I haven't been clear on when I've been making those distinctions, and will attempt to be better.
I would generally agree that the humanitarian value of a person's life vs the economic value of a person's life are separate concepts, but they are intrinsically related by the fact that in our current system of resource distribution, e.g. capitalistic economy, the humanitarian-value is intrinsically associated with the economic-value.
In my ideal system, this would not be the case, or that association would at least be loosened. I believe we can make some progress towards this ideal in the ‘real world’ through the existence of ‘force multipliers’: Food and housing production have skyrocketed since industrialization. There are similar effects in terms of housing and infrastructure (water, sewer, etc) for a population. I think it is very possible for us, with our current level of industrial output as a species, to feed/clothe/house/whatever the population of the planet.
I do not think it is possible for us to do that with indefinite population growth, to your point:
> What happens when the expense gets so great that it cannot be sustained?
In the maximally-ideal world, the population would self-regulate to stay below the carrying capacity. We see this even now in effects of education suppressing birth rates, so this doesn’t seem like an impossible goal.
In summary,
1. I believe our current technological and industrial capacity would support a UBI-like system for everyone, right now
2. I do not believe that it it would be sustainable to do so with unchecked population growth
3. I do not know what the best real-world avenue to prevent outgrowing the capacities of such a UBI-like system would be, but suspect there are tools we have now (education) that we could explore that may help.
4. The fact that such a UBI-like system would be difficult to impossible in our current economy is not an indictment of the concept of UBI, but of our current system of resource distribution.
Onto the core of our disagreement:
First:
> The population already decides what is best for itself [ ... ]
and second:
> The problem is that such benefits would have the opposite effect, because the thing that most keeps people in poverty is not lack of money, but lack of motivation and lack of options.
I fundamentally disagree on both points.
While the USA does exist in a democratic system, there are many examples where businesses have overpowered the general population, or where those interests have turned groups of the population against each other. As far back as the founding of the US, white businessmen fought to restrict voting power away from the general population, and worked to pit working whites against enslaved blacks. In the Mexican-American war in 1846, business interests sought to clear a path across the continent to California, bulldozing Mexico in the process, using conscripted forces. Recent examples include nuking Japan to secure economic control under the USA, despite strong indications that Japan wanted to surrender, or the false-WMD pretense to invade Iraq for control of the region’s natural resources.
Less extreme but still insidious examples include Citizens United, the slipshod state of campaign finance regulation, or modern tax code being fundamentally friendlier to the ultra-rich than the far larger middle- or lower-classes.
Notably, “the population” is not a homogenous group, and can have flawed reasoning for reasons beyond conspiratorial interference. It’s still clear that “the population” has not been able to “self determine” in many ways, due to the interference of the wealthy elite.
Secondly, I fundamentally disagree that a lack of motivation keeps people in the poverty cycle, and that providing UBI-like benefits would reduce their options.
I find the notion that people exist in poverty due to lack of motivation to be naive at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst--especially when juxtaposed with the motivations present in the adversarial system that is our economy. Businesses' core interest lies in maximizing profit, which in turn means minimizing cost-of-goods-sold: primarily, labor. This means widening the labor pool as far as possible, limiting the amount paid to labor, and preventing labor from ever gaining real power. To ignore the actions the wealthy elite have taken to achieve those goals and instead blame the poverty cycle on a lack of motivation for those trapped in it is, again, disingenuous.
Are there people who will choose not to put in effort to take advantage of opportunities? Yes. Are there people who will 'exploit' e.g. unemployment benefits when they don't need them? Certainly.
Is motivation the primary reason people exist within the poverty cycle? Absolutely not.
How would those trapped in the poverty cycle work multiple low-paying, high-effort jobs where they have to deal with angry, entitled customers day after day, with little to no opportunity for advancement, and an entire economic system arrayed against them, if not for motivation?. I guarantee you that my middle-school video production teacher, who worked at Lowe's in addition to her job teaching at the worst school in our district, spends more of her time doing 'work' than any of the Walton family.
None of the dozen or so homeless people I see along my walk to work are "unmotivated" to address their situation, or "unwilling" to do work. But how many jobs require an address to run a background check? Or banks to open a checking account? How are they supposed to interview for work when they haven't had access to a shower in days? And that's assuming they're not also dealing with mental health issues, or addiction, or medical issues, or any of a dozen other things that could complicate their life.
There are certainly anecdotes about people who have overcome these circumstances, as there are outliers in any case, but focusing on them and ignoring the majority who cannot escape is a mistake.
> UBI would remove motivation, like any other form of ameliorating their situation would do.
UBI would not remove their motivation to escape from the cycle of poverty; UBI would remove them *from the cycle of poverty.* They are no longer restricted to the maximally-exploitative job you've been hypothesizing, they can go to school, go into construction, decide to become an artist. If their activities end up not being economically-valuable in the capitalistic sense, who cares? So long as we have sufficient people to turn the wheels of the systems the population depends on (which should be trivially easy between the supply of people motivated to do so and a mild incentive to engage in those systems, i.e. a reasonable wage) it doesn't matter what these people choose to do.
> If there was a minimum wage back then, he would not have been able to be hired or hire people himself.
The labor movement of the ~1910s in the US has plenty of examples of where raising the minimum wage--or in some cases, instituting one--in fact did not result in the loss of jobs, but the creation of them, and the ability for people to become more upwardly mobile in terms of socioeconomic status--at the same time that businesses were fighting tooth and nail (literally assaulting strikers and labor group organizers) to prevent people from achieving those gains.
The current state of the wealth inequality divide in the US is testament to there being money available in the system to absorb the cost of an increased minimum wage. See the commonly cited statistic of Denmark having a significantly higher minimum wage than the US, with a nominal rise in the cost of (say) a Big Mac, and with significantly less unemployment than the USA over the last 10 years.
While your grandfather's achievements are remarkable and respectable, they are a poor metric by which to decide that regulations and minimum wages and age limitations on work are problems preventing those trapped in poverty today from improving their standing. Again I'll cite the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire: without regulations and safety standards, you end up with hundreds of people burning to death in preventable circumstances. Or bridges collapsing in high winds. Or children being poisoned by the powders used in textile mills. Or buildings collapsing due to poor structural support. Or cities being poisoned by lead in their water supply pipes.
While I can understand and am aware of circumstances where "regulations" are indeed frivolous and impinge development, I am not convinced that age restrictions and licensing requirements are the core things at fault for others stuck in poverty cycles. The implication that they are somehow at fault is to completely ignore the exploitative nature of the businesses which recklessly endangered their workers--including children!--when they weren't subject to these kinds of regulation.
I suspect your grandfather’s success has more to do with the luck of being poised to enter into the industrial explosion of the time, and your extrapolation that he was able to do so because of the lack of minimum wage, regulation, etc, is simply survivorship bias.