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by skulk 31 days ago
Well, I do agree that the redistribution system is absolutely broken. Most welfare recipients do in fact work (and benefit others) but our capitalist redistribution system has decided that they don't deserve to live with dignity, leaving the centrally planned redistribution system to pick up the slack.
1 comments
mothballed 31 days ago
The fallacy here is you're trying to frame things in terms of "deserving." An African child deserves life and wealth as much as an American one. A guy slaving 16 hours a day ripping shingles off of roofs "deserves" a mansion and high-dollar escorts as much as the playboy heir of some mega-corp. Some starving African child probably deserves to rip the computer/tablet/phone you're writing this with out of your hand and sell it for a bucket of rice to feed his family. Play this fallacy out to its extension and the whole thing collapses in any system that's attempted to roll out the "deserve" system beyond a pretty constrained fraction of its GDP, and then both the deserving and undeserving end up worse off.
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skulk 31 days ago
You're fixating on the word deserve in my post, but that's got nothing to do with my point. I'm saying that the market has decided that it doesn't have to pay a living wage since the government picks up the bill to keep things going. I think that's perverse.
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mothballed 31 days ago
I'm confused whether you want more welfare, or you're trying to ban jobs below a certain "living" wage floor (which are probably mostly occupied by the poorer).

There is a somewhat intermediate of this, proposed by Milton Friedman, called the negative income tax. I can't say I'm sold on the idea but it does solve some of the problems of the local maximums encountered that keep people trapped in the welfare system and from trying to get more lucrative income.

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skulk 31 days ago
Probably some mixture of better statutory labor protections and more class solidarity (collective bargaining), but generally I don't know. It just boils my blood that Walmart can publish a document explaining to its employees how to apply for government food assistance (to buy food from Walmart itself) and this is business-as-usual in the USA.
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