Bear Ribs
Well-known member
You asked why people would do office jobs. I answered that office jobs would have to be more pleasant and provide a better quality of life than the miserable existence they do now.
Validity of Left-Right Divide Concerns
- Thread starter CurtisLemay
- Start date
That would still not make people whose needs are provided for free to want to work. A nice office is not nearly enough.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
You cannot possibly prove that bald-faced assertion, nor can you actually be sure.
Now granted I'm in the same boat in that the exact situation I'm describing hasn't been tried. However I can look at basic market forces. Humans want things, things beyond merely having the bare necessities covered. People in this very thread have mentioned wanting mansions. How do you get that? Working for it. Even if there's soup kitchens, you still need to work for a mansion.
Some people want mansions instead of apartments, steak instead of lentils, a vacation to Europe instead of walking to the neighborhood park. Those people will do work to get them because we see that happening today, many people work long hours and hard jobs to get a nicer house, better car, and flashier vacation than doing a bare minimum to get by. Those people will continue to do so even if they can pick up a bowl of stew at the local soup kitchen.
What will change is that people will not work horrible, soul-crushing jobs at low wages under an abusive boss because their baby daughter will starve if they don't. But y'know what? I prefer a society that doesn't force people to do horrible soul crushing things to avoid watching their children starve to death.
Someone has to do a lot of the "the horrible, soul crushing jobs" to keep modern civilization functioning at all, and more specifically, it has to be a lot of someones. Like building and maintaining the apartments and preparing the lentils. In that system that's really gonna be a lot of someones. Don't find enough of someones volunteering to do that specifically, and suddenly you have the very stereotypical problems of communist countries - multi kilometer queues to soup kitchens (first 200 get served, the rest, sorry, get up earlier next day, because lentil farms are understaffed), and decade long wait times for "free" apartments.
And starting with that, there will be a massive encouragement to play funny games with the system, games that make no sense when you pay for all your stuff. Like selling or renting out your free government stuff. Or cheaply modifying them into better stuff in clever ways, rather than paying full and heavily taxed on top of that price for better things, or otherwise sitting in various forms of the welfare trap.
Long story short, a society where you get a nice and easy life by being cunning and ruthless in playing the system, while working hard gives a nice and absolutely not easy one.
Is that a society you would like to live in?
....given that's how things work now, I don't find this line to be a very persuasive argument.
And the rest is more of the same. "People will abuse the system!" Yes, and...? People always abuse every system. They abuse our current system. They abused the Communist one (and even made it a feature sometimes).
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
I'm rather tempted to suspect you're not arguing in good faith here as it looks much like you rolled out a laundry list of prefab anti-communism rants rather than engaging any of my points. Free apartments? I already dismissed that possibility earlier and called for less rent control and zoning law reform instead, but here you are ranting as if I proposed free homes for everybody. Renting out their free stuff? The things I've called to be available are education and soup kitchens tied to the nation maintaining a strategic food reserve, you're planning to rent your free bowl of stew to somebody who can go in and get one as well? Engage the actual argument, not your list of complaints that have nothing to do with what you quoted.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
So, I'm going to have to chime in her on the theme, The overwhelming majority of people will not work if basic essentials and very basic entertainment are supplied.
They will vote for themselves to get more and larger subsidies. They will riot for such things. They will go out and steal such things. Once an entitlement mentality is created, a person doesn't see themselves as lacking the things they want because they haven't earned it yet, they see themselves as lacking it because 'The Man' is keeping it from them, and it is their right to take it back.
This is very basic human psychology.
As an additional element, Yes, most people who are chronically homeless and/or in poverty today (in the USA) are there because of the bad decisions they have made and continue to make. Some people crash out because of just one or two bad decisions, some because life just screws them over. People do not stay in poverty though, unless they keep making the decisions that got them there in the first place.
And one of the absolute leading elements there, is sex before marriage, children before you're ready before it, and single-parent homes.
Now...
(Edit: Your most recent post since I responded to this makes it clear I misunderstood your position. I apologize for that, but it's clear to me that at least one or two other people think that free housing should be a thing, so I'll leave the argument up.)
You are failing to account for a number of things here.
'How hard am I willing to work for how much gain?' Even an efficiency apartment is not cheap to build, and has costs involved in its maintenance. Utilities cost money as well. If the government is paying for your basic housing and food with taxpayer money, you can sit on your ass and do nothing and keep what you already have, or you can work for thousands of hours to get a better place. Let's go with the cost of a smallish house in a low-cost area, about 60 grand. If we assume an hourly wage of 15$/hour, that's going to take you 4,000 hours of work to be able to purchase. That's 100 weeks of work, or around two years of labor.
But wait, we haven't accounted for taxes. Even if we assume a low tax rate (so unlikely as to be preposterous in a society where government provides everyone housing), then that's about 20% income tax. That changes it to 12 $ an hour, so now we're at 5,000 hours of work, or 125 weeks.
That is, assuming that this individual spends none of their cash on short-term luxuries, and that they have no responsibility whatsoever for any of their needs at all. Do I need to explain to you how people with that level of restraint are so statistically rare, that as far as societal planning is concerned, they functionally do not exist? It is beyond foolish to try to plan your society over the one in a million.
So, a person has a choice. They can sit on what they have, or work 40 hour weeks for the next two and a half years to try to get what they want. If we assume a functioning banking sector (also hilariously improbable in this extremely socialized system), they can probably buy it and take a mortgage after six months to a year.
Or. They can sit on what they've got, and take odd jobs to provide themselves short term luxuries (tasty foods, video games, etc), and just stay there, living off of the taxpayer's dime.
I can absolutely tell you which of these two things is going to happen more often. It's going to be the easier option. And once you create that societal divide, it can only end one of two ways. Either more and more people get frustrated with losing increasingly enormous percentages of their income to able-bodied people who refuse to contribute to society and quit to live on the dole, or the two parts of society become embittered to the point where they start trying to use force to exert dominance over each other.
This isn't just theorization or hypothesizing. This is observable in the patterns of living of the chronically poor.
Who are the primary buyers of lottery tickets? The poor, because it's easier to dream of winning it big and waste money than to save five or ten dollars here and there and gradually save for a better life.
Who are the primary victims of casinos, losing entire paychecks in single visits? The poor, for the same reasons as above.
Who are the most likely to blow all of their money on luxury goods, rather than save and invest for the future? The poor. It's part of why they're 'the poor,' because of poor money management.
Who are the most likely to be alocholics? Not just regular drinkers, but 'I am never sober if I can help it' alocholics? The poor. Many beggars immediately blow the money they're given on alcohol, because they can go to charities for actual food and a place to sleep. Losing money to this is also a big part of why the poor are the poor.
Who are the most likely to be heavily addicted to hard drugs? The poor; see the above.
Who are the most likely to repeatedly lose jobs due to poor attendance, poor performance, and poor showings at job interviews? The poor. And while sometimes yes, this is because of bad bosses, there are also plenty of jobs out there with okay or just mediocre bosses, that will let you get your foot in the door if you can hold that job down for six months.
I have been the homeless person looking for a job. I have slept in a homeless shelter, I've slept on a park bench. I've spent months looking for jobs and gotten turned down again and again. When I finally did get a job, it was a horrible place to work, with profanity and personal attacks all over the place, one of the people I worked under chewing me out for 45 minutes straight one day.
But I stayed at the damn job until I could get something better. Then I pushed at the kind of work I wanted to do, and got a better job still.
And this pattern and tendency isn't just something from my own personal anecdote. Ask people who regularly work with the poor. Broken families, money blown on alcohol, drugs, video games instead of food or saving for a downpayment on a house or to move to a place with lower cost of living and better job prospects. See what things look like in places like Skid Row in LA.
Most people who are chronically poor or outright destitute, are there because they refuse to make better decisions with their lives.
Yes, some people need psychiatric help. By all means move them to an asylum. Some are legitimately crippled. Provide them with support and care. Even those who keep making bad decisions, I am all for charities voluntarily helping them. But you do not give those people a legally-enforced ability to dip into the the pockets of those who have made good and wise decisions with their lives. That is called a perverse incentive, and as has been proven since the Great Society was implemented half a century ago, all it will do is sustain and spread these problems.
You cannot give people money until they are no longer in poverty. People whose lives are broken don't need another or a bigger check in their lives, they need people who care in their lives. They need someone who will get personally involved and invested, and help them get their heads on straight.
A Bureaucracy cannot love you.
An individual can.
If you want to see the poor and destitute in society lifted out of their harsh circumstances? Go meet someone who is in those kinds of circumstances. Don't try to help a whole community, try to help one person. Get to know them, their problems, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Show them Love. And not the 'love' of foolish gratuity, but measured gratuity and rebuking in kindness.
That's how you can try to help someone. I've been the person in need of that help, and I've been the person trying to help, and I can tell you, it's rough. Going into that means coming face to face with human brokenness, and that's very difficult. It hurts seeing people suffer like that, and that it's so difficult is a huge part of why people keep trying to just write a check, or make someone else write a check, and won't deal with it themselves.
If you're too afraid to confront that yourself, you're not going to be able to help much by trying to push societal reforms, especially if they're ones that have failed repeatedly in the past.
I know there are some people here on the Sietch (like Sunhawk) who do get personally involved in helping people who are in a place of profound brokenness. If you already are one of them, great. If you aren't, please give putting your own hand in a try before you push for the nth-thousandth government program to try to solve the problem.
They will vote for themselves to get more and larger subsidies. They will riot for such things. They will go out and steal such things. Once an entitlement mentality is created, a person doesn't see themselves as lacking the things they want because they haven't earned it yet, they see themselves as lacking it because 'The Man' is keeping it from them, and it is their right to take it back.
This is very basic human psychology.
As an additional element, Yes, most people who are chronically homeless and/or in poverty today (in the USA) are there because of the bad decisions they have made and continue to make. Some people crash out because of just one or two bad decisions, some because life just screws them over. People do not stay in poverty though, unless they keep making the decisions that got them there in the first place.
And one of the absolute leading elements there, is sex before marriage, children before you're ready before it, and single-parent homes.
Now...
(Edit: Your most recent post since I responded to this makes it clear I misunderstood your position. I apologize for that, but it's clear to me that at least one or two other people think that free housing should be a thing, so I'll leave the argument up.)
You are failing to account for a number of things here.
'How hard am I willing to work for how much gain?' Even an efficiency apartment is not cheap to build, and has costs involved in its maintenance. Utilities cost money as well. If the government is paying for your basic housing and food with taxpayer money, you can sit on your ass and do nothing and keep what you already have, or you can work for thousands of hours to get a better place. Let's go with the cost of a smallish house in a low-cost area, about 60 grand. If we assume an hourly wage of 15$/hour, that's going to take you 4,000 hours of work to be able to purchase. That's 100 weeks of work, or around two years of labor.
But wait, we haven't accounted for taxes. Even if we assume a low tax rate (so unlikely as to be preposterous in a society where government provides everyone housing), then that's about 20% income tax. That changes it to 12 $ an hour, so now we're at 5,000 hours of work, or 125 weeks.
That is, assuming that this individual spends none of their cash on short-term luxuries, and that they have no responsibility whatsoever for any of their needs at all. Do I need to explain to you how people with that level of restraint are so statistically rare, that as far as societal planning is concerned, they functionally do not exist? It is beyond foolish to try to plan your society over the one in a million.
So, a person has a choice. They can sit on what they have, or work 40 hour weeks for the next two and a half years to try to get what they want. If we assume a functioning banking sector (also hilariously improbable in this extremely socialized system), they can probably buy it and take a mortgage after six months to a year.
Or. They can sit on what they've got, and take odd jobs to provide themselves short term luxuries (tasty foods, video games, etc), and just stay there, living off of the taxpayer's dime.
I can absolutely tell you which of these two things is going to happen more often. It's going to be the easier option. And once you create that societal divide, it can only end one of two ways. Either more and more people get frustrated with losing increasingly enormous percentages of their income to able-bodied people who refuse to contribute to society and quit to live on the dole, or the two parts of society become embittered to the point where they start trying to use force to exert dominance over each other.
This isn't just theorization or hypothesizing. This is observable in the patterns of living of the chronically poor.
Who are the primary buyers of lottery tickets? The poor, because it's easier to dream of winning it big and waste money than to save five or ten dollars here and there and gradually save for a better life.
Who are the primary victims of casinos, losing entire paychecks in single visits? The poor, for the same reasons as above.
Who are the most likely to blow all of their money on luxury goods, rather than save and invest for the future? The poor. It's part of why they're 'the poor,' because of poor money management.
Who are the most likely to be alocholics? Not just regular drinkers, but 'I am never sober if I can help it' alocholics? The poor. Many beggars immediately blow the money they're given on alcohol, because they can go to charities for actual food and a place to sleep. Losing money to this is also a big part of why the poor are the poor.
Who are the most likely to be heavily addicted to hard drugs? The poor; see the above.
Who are the most likely to repeatedly lose jobs due to poor attendance, poor performance, and poor showings at job interviews? The poor. And while sometimes yes, this is because of bad bosses, there are also plenty of jobs out there with okay or just mediocre bosses, that will let you get your foot in the door if you can hold that job down for six months.
I have been the homeless person looking for a job. I have slept in a homeless shelter, I've slept on a park bench. I've spent months looking for jobs and gotten turned down again and again. When I finally did get a job, it was a horrible place to work, with profanity and personal attacks all over the place, one of the people I worked under chewing me out for 45 minutes straight one day.
But I stayed at the damn job until I could get something better. Then I pushed at the kind of work I wanted to do, and got a better job still.
And this pattern and tendency isn't just something from my own personal anecdote. Ask people who regularly work with the poor. Broken families, money blown on alcohol, drugs, video games instead of food or saving for a downpayment on a house or to move to a place with lower cost of living and better job prospects. See what things look like in places like Skid Row in LA.
Most people who are chronically poor or outright destitute, are there because they refuse to make better decisions with their lives.
Yes, some people need psychiatric help. By all means move them to an asylum. Some are legitimately crippled. Provide them with support and care. Even those who keep making bad decisions, I am all for charities voluntarily helping them. But you do not give those people a legally-enforced ability to dip into the the pockets of those who have made good and wise decisions with their lives. That is called a perverse incentive, and as has been proven since the Great Society was implemented half a century ago, all it will do is sustain and spread these problems.
You cannot give people money until they are no longer in poverty. People whose lives are broken don't need another or a bigger check in their lives, they need people who care in their lives. They need someone who will get personally involved and invested, and help them get their heads on straight.
A Bureaucracy cannot love you.
An individual can.
If you want to see the poor and destitute in society lifted out of their harsh circumstances? Go meet someone who is in those kinds of circumstances. Don't try to help a whole community, try to help one person. Get to know them, their problems, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Show them Love. And not the 'love' of foolish gratuity, but measured gratuity and rebuking in kindness.
That's how you can try to help someone. I've been the person in need of that help, and I've been the person trying to help, and I can tell you, it's rough. Going into that means coming face to face with human brokenness, and that's very difficult. It hurts seeing people suffer like that, and that it's so difficult is a huge part of why people keep trying to just write a check, or make someone else write a check, and won't deal with it themselves.
If you're too afraid to confront that yourself, you're not going to be able to help much by trying to push societal reforms, especially if they're ones that have failed repeatedly in the past.
I know there are some people here on the Sietch (like Sunhawk) who do get personally involved in helping people who are in a place of profound brokenness. If you already are one of them, great. If you aren't, please give putting your own hand in a try before you push for the nth-thousandth government program to try to solve the problem.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
I do indeed do charitable work around my hometown, mostly light house repair, mowing lawns, driving people to job interviews/doctor appointments, and buying groceries for the handicapped and elderly that have trouble leaving their homes.
And I'm highly displeased to see, literally two minutes after pointed out the same strawman, another person who didn't read the posts and is going on a rant against free housing I said wouldn't work and that I wouldn't support.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Check the edit in my post, which was made as soon as I saw yours.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
I see your edits and I appreciate it. As I said, I personally am active in my community helping the poor. Admittedly I wind up helping the elderly more than the working-class homeless but I don't really see a problem with that. I've gotten an impressive amount of wisdom from some of my elders in return although also some long boring stories, but stories those people needed to tell for their own mental health.
However I urge you to look at my actual proposals, not the strawman you have in your mind. I haven't proposed free housing, or whatever you're imagining. What I've proposed is that the money we spend now to pay farmers not to grow food is instead spent to pay them to grow food for the government, which will be stockpiled against an emergency situation, and distributed to soup kitchens as it grows older. This is hardly a subversive radical piece of communism. Actually it's a policy that already exists in the US. What I want is to expand Government Cheese, not pay for free housing for everbody.
Edit:: I'd also like to point out that lentils make any soil they're grown on more fertile. That's one reason they're already amazingly cheap. Expanding Lentil production is something many farmers would love to do.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
I don't think I could support government programs like that; I've seen too many perverse incentive feedback cycles to do so.
However, if it was handled at the state level, rather than Federal, I could perhaps say 'I'll abstain from this issue and let you try.'
Actually, if it came as part of throwing out the entire current system, I could support what you're talking about, as at least not as bad as what we have now.
The little detail is, how much is there to be gained from abusing the system? If the system is all-encompassing, obviously its a whole lot. Possibly more than there is to be gained by working rather than abusing the system, and then people act accordingly. If on the other hand there isn't much of a system to be abused, few people will even bother.
You did mention "mansion instead of apartment", in context of things being available for free.
Plenty of countries have strategic food reserves, usually not giving it away though - selling recoups part of the costs, and few would want enough of it for the rotation to be so huge that it could feed everyone. Not that any developed countries have a problem of starving people anyway.
What do you mean by education? If its access to information, then its already practically free, due to IT revolution making this have such an insignificant price (at least to those that are not effectively policed in copyright protection, which is most) that anyone with access to internet and a device that can do so can have way more than he will ever want to read, watch or listen to.
If its a teacher's work hours, then of course its a scarce resource that has many uses.
Like babysitting. Which as many more or less seriously say, is a role that public education fulfills even if in academic terms it fails.
If its access to a stocked university level chemistry lab, now that's a whole lot of value in a whole lot of uses.
Yes. If i don't need it, why not? Either to someone who for some reason wants or needs two, or to a pig farmer.
If you would have read what i posted you would have realized That wasn't my issue, in many cases it seems like the adults are the ones pushing the children in the first place.
Fair enough, though it still doesn't change the actual law as reported. I get the feeling we are speaking past eachother or maybe i haven't articulated my self particularly well. I'm against the left pushing this stuff on kids full stop. From the laws passed,articles in leftwing publications and they're own words the left want's increasingly extreme amounts of trans stuff pushed on children. Saying 'well it's fosterkids' or 'parental consent' is quibbling over details that don't change what they are doing and trying to do.
I wasn't talking about detransition anything so it was confusing to parse.
Also does anyone know how i do spaghetti here? Trying the quote button made a mess of things and it would probablly help me address
ShadowArxxy better?
If you would have read what i posted you would have realized That wasn't my issue, in many cases it seems like the adults are the ones pushing the children in the first place.
Fair enough, though it still doesn't change the actual law as reported. I get the feeling we are speaking past eachother or maybe i haven't articulated my self particularly well. I'm against the left pushing this stuff on kids full stop. From the laws passed,articles in leftwing publications and they're own words the left want's increasingly extreme amounts of trans stuff pushed on children. Saying 'well it's fosterkids' or 'parental consent' is quibbling over details that don't change what they are doing and trying to do.
I wasn't talking about detransition anything so it was confusing to parse.
Also does anyone know how i do spaghetti here? Trying the quote button made a mess of things and it would probablly help me address
ShadowArxxy better?
When you posted that article, what you said was, "I should have added a 'and then' to that part about surgeries. Though the drugs is spot on unfortunately fam."
If the article headline of "New California Law Allows Children to Get Transgender Treatments Without Parental Consent" was actually accurate, you would have been right. However, as I have shown by referencing the actual law in question, the headline is grossly inaccurate. The California law in question absolutely does not allow children to get transgender treatments -- even "just" hormone therapy -- without parental consent.
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Bear Ribs
Well-known member
No I didn't. I mentioned it in the context of motivations for people to work, improving one's lifestyle being a reason to keep working even if you can get a bowl of lentil stew free at the soup kitchen. Stop misrepresenting my position.
But the US already does so, and these terrible consequences you predict haven't happened with Government Cheese. Why would these problems you foresee that aren't happening now suddenly become so severe if Government Cheese is expanded to also include Government Lentil Stew?
Further the US has an actual serious hunger problem. 11.1% of the population is food insecure. I do not consider over a tenth of the population of the nation "no problem." I live within six blocks of a Salvation Army Food Kitchen and Shelter and I've seen the effects firsthand. By some crazy coincidence, my actual post called for providing enough food to feed... about a tenth of the population, ie. the number of people who are currently going hungry.
I dunno, maybe if you actually read my posts you'd know what I said about education, since I explicitly spelled out that taxpayers cover 13 years of education for all children already and I was in favor of expanding that to cover an actual job-granting diploma instead of the half measure we do now. But it certainly appears you didn't read what I said since you keep repeatedly asking about something already covered thoroughly upthread.
And again, why would these terrible problems you foresee that aren't a problem with K-12 suddenly become a problem with K-16 or K-Trade School?
Because it was a program limited in scale to a relatively small amount, given only to recipients of means tested government aid.
Obviously the effects on market and population scale behavior would scale with the program, so expanding the quantity of food and scope of it to all people at all time may well have much greater effects.
Don't you play terminology games with me. "Food insecure" is a term that has a certain definition (which is rather non-standardized, wide, complex and often connected with outright subjective factors and documented economic status), which technically does not require the people defined as such to have any medically definable long term caloric intake deficiency, or even any other kind of diagnosable malnourishment. In fact a lot of the food insecure people are downright obese.
So congratulations, you have allowed yourself to be manipulated by propaganda.
That's not a "serious hunger problem", a term that probably reminds the average reader of pictures of severely malnourished third world children, that's a "food insecurity" problem.
Diplomas are in no way a guarantee of a job. Some types of diplomas give better chances of a job than others, and the more people have one, the less of a guarantee of a job they are going to be. But guess a credential/degree inflation affected society looks fancy in global statistical rankings. Doesn't prevent unemployment though. Ask Greece:
Which Countries Have The Most Unemployed Graduates? [Infographic]
Which countries have the most out of work college graduates? According to a recent OECD report, the unemployment rate for people with a third level education in Greece is just under 20 percent. Indeed, many of the countries with the highest rates of graduate unemployment across the world have...
www.forbes.com
But there are plenty of terrible problems with US public schools, in case you haven't noticed that through the rising popularity of alternatives to US public schools.
There is also a different set of nasty issues with US higher education. You really think something nice will come out of combining these two setups?
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I would say that a huge part of the problem there is at this point, you've had one-going-on-two generations of Americans who have been very explicitly and unambiguously taught that earning a college degree from a reputable university is how you earn your place in society, only to find that the goalposts have been radically changed, that entry level career positions often simply do not exist regardless of degree, and many of the very same people who were pushing "college or bust!" are turning around and pretending that earning a degree isn't hard work at all so that they can sneer at millennials for being "entitled".
I would argue that expecting a hard-earned degree in a serious subject to be meaningful is an entirely reasonable expectation and that it is a malicious misuse of the word "entitlement" to say that American kids are "entitled" for believing that the world generally works as they've been taught, especially when it very much did work that way for previous generations. I don't think it's in any way, "Not taking responsibility for our own choices" when people have pretty blatantly yanked the rug out from under us after using it themselves and then wiping their feet all over it.
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
Isn't that something that should inherently be handled at state level? Why is Federal government even involved in stuff like that?
Just to give my 2c, but I have talked to the people who have lived through Communist system in Yugoslavia, and to people who still work in state services. And the story is the same: you have one or two people who break their backs working, and then several who laze around and receive pay for the work of aforementioned two. That is what I call the Communist mentality, and is big part of the reason why Croatia is in gutters.
CarlManvers2019
Writers Blocked Douchebag
You know what, maybe if that’s the case, then I guess people have to pretend they’re incapable or crippled or “not too able” lest they end up having more worked piled onto them specifically
Though I guess those several will force those two to do their work
I guess there’s a reason Gulags are used for forced labor then
That's exactly what happens in these cases. Then the managers usually end up shoveling even more work on the few competent workers, because they know that's the only way things get done, and this ends up increasing the burden on said competent workers in a vicious cycle. In a sane work environment, the ones not doing their work would be fired. But Communism is opposed to that...