Universal basic income trial in the US

[GodFearinGunTotin]

Wait.

There's a HUGE gap between those.

For instance, back a couple generations, multigenerational living arrangements were the norm. People took care of their own because there was a moral obligation.

Granted, that's probably not even in the top 5 of moral degradation, but it is still a thing.

On top of that, you have more affluent people charitably supporting hospitals and elder centers and orphanages. Don't see much of that, either.

Of course there's a huge gap. But as was implied up thread, if we don't have government support those over 70 with cancer or leave it to the invisible hand to care for the old and indigent, the other option is they die. We hear this all the time any time anyone argues against more welfare, universal healthcare -- either we do this by government or people die. It's certainly not the dichotomy I think exists. As you stated for years, families, churches, charities, etc. cared for their own elderly and disabled. There are plenty of options to (especially) federal government and its usual cold, impersonal, uncaring, ham-fisted "care".

 

[GodFearinGunTotin]

Families were larger, people didn't live as long and a jar of leeches was cheaper than chemotherapy is.

People used to have pensions and retiree health care, too, but those obligations have mostly disappeared.

Very few people have the funds for access to modern healthcare on their own, even with a family.



I'd rather we didn't see those numbers in the US.

We'll never know what families and the private sector support systems could have done to step into the breach now. Believing care can only be provided by a federal government program and administered by a bureaucrat highlights the blinders we have to other options. We may never know how costs and innovations would have evolved had it not been for government distortion of these markets.

(That is unless we look at examples like lasik surgery).

 

[BehindBlueI's]

We'll never know what families and the private sector support systems could have done to step into the breach now.

...like looking at countries where that's what is happening? Or this country before Medicare?

] As you stated for years, families, churches, charities, etc. cared for their own elderly and disabled.

Care to show your work? Or is this just anecdote and supposition?

 

[GodFearinGunTotin]

...like looking at countries where that's what is happening? Or this country before Medicare?



Care to show your work? Or is this just anecdote and supposition?

We've stepped into the progressive/socialism/cradle to grave paradigm where the only thing we now know is the government option. Like I said, we may never know how healthcare costs and innovations could have evolved because of the path our parents and grandparents chose way back when.

Are you asserting churches, families, and charities were not or would never be a viable option to government provided care?

 

[BehindBlueI's]

Are you asserting churches, families, and charities were not or would never be a viable option to government provided care?

It depends on how you define "viable", but feel free to contrast the outcomes of pre-SSI/Medicare with post SSI/Medicare or to compare with nations that lack a similar institution.

We've stepped into the progressive/socialism/cradle to grave paradigm where the only thing we now know is the government option.

Maybe HoosierDoc can step in here: Who pays more for a given medicine or procedure? Medicare or private insurance. Everything I see says Medicare pays less.

Given that only 10% or so of the population relies on Medicare as their sole insurance, are they really the driver of the marketplace?

Do you think private industry has any role in the cost of medicine today? You mention Lasik. Yes, an elective procedure with competitors. Sort of like generic drugs...competitors drive down price. What about non-elective drugs under patent protection? Go ahead and compare the price here vs countries that do not grant patent protections to medications. Now, I'm not saying that's a good idea or it isn't, but if you want to go the "gov't bad private industry good" route, you need to be able to explain that. Is the gov't bad for protecting patents?

Or countries that don't allow malpractice suits. Or that subsidize medical school. There's a lot more to health care cost that "socialism/government option".

On a side note, do you see any disconnect in arguing that human nature is such that people won't work if they don't have to in order to eat but also arguing that human nature is such that they will donate their resources to help others? We're so self centered and lazy we'll just sit about and starve while waiting for others to do the work, but so generous and community oriented we have no problem giving our own resources away in sufficient amounts to provide the same outcomes to the elderly as Medicare/SSI?

 

[Libertarian01]

I believe that no system is 100% perfect, nor is any one system capable of addressing all the issues of society in the most efficient way.

Our fire departments and LE departments are arguably either socialist or communist. No one pays them to come out. They are paid for by the collective and answerable indirectly to the collective through elected officials. They are not capitalist. We have found that if one person couldn't pay for their house fire to be put out it could spread. Ergo, we have implemented a collective protection that all pay for and all receive benefits from.

However, this socialist system only goes so far. I think socialism works best where people need (as decided by society) to be treated equally such as LE protection, fire protection, equal treatment in the courts etc. Capitalism is the absolute best bar none system for encouraging self growth and the ability to climb the economic ladder.

The invisible hand works marvelously for most endeavors. That said, there are issues where it will fall on its face. It is driven primarily by greed and desire for economic growth. This doesn't work for everything. For example, take very rare diseases. Some diseases only affect a small amount of people every year. Ergo, there is NO economic incentive to seek a cure that could cost billions of dollars to discover and be put on the backs of a few dozen or hundred people a year. They could never pay for the cure. Ergo, this is another place where capitalism fails and we must depend upon the good will of society to fund research into solving these problems.

I like the idea of UBI if and only if it were to replace all other mechanisms of social safety nets. I personally have met hundreds of people through my driving experience who are totally dependent upon the social safety net due to their medical disabilities. Some of them are given a mere few hundred dollars a month in disability income. As some of them were born with these conditions there was NO WAY for them to go out, get a job and stand on their own to buy private disability income insurance. Do we, as a society, want to care for our truly disabled who through no fault of their own are or were unable to seek growth through work and capitalism? If the answer is "yes" in any way then perhaps the UBI would be an awesome replacement to the myriad of government programs on the federal, state, and local level. Billions of dollars could be saved by simplifying the system and removing the massive redundancies and paperwork. If the answer is "no" then we fall back to the good will of individual people to help carry other folks.

Next comes the issue of unwillingness and inability to work. These are somewhat separate issues. The first is laziness. Is being lazy and unwilling to work a mental illness? I believe it might be. You see tremendously successful people today who are beyond rich. Taylor Swift, Jeff Bezos, Vladimir Putin, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet, etc etc etc. Any or all of these people are fabulously rich and could retire tomorrow and do nothing but live a life of luxury and pampered care by others. There are tens of thousands of people just like them. Yet they CHOOSE to work! They choose to continue to drive themselves to distant horizons. I believe this is the nature of most people. Most normal human beings want to be useful and contribute in some way. I believe it is very few who would choose not to work, not to contribute. That said, they DO exist. They are parasites on society. What do we do with them? This is where I also believe that the capitalist society will weed them out and keep them from draining too much from others.

The second group is unable to work. Either through lack of finding the right job, having a lower intelligence to achieve well in certain fields. Etc. This group can be helped by better identifying early on strengths and weaknesses to find these folks a career at which they can excel and love to participate in. This group only needs to be taught to fish, or hunt, or trap, or make the fish hooks. They are lacking only in access to training which can be corrected if we are willing to invest in an educational system that will focus on identifying their strengths. We used to have it. We used to have shop class, and home ec, and other school programs that didn't try to shove everyone down the rabbit hole of the ivory towers of higher education. Today our system is a one size fits all you must go to college or your a failure bum mindset from many. A shame really.

Regards,

Doug

 

[GodFearinGunTotin]

It depends on how you define "viable", but feel free to contrast the outcomes of pre-SSI/Medicare with post SSI/Medicare or to compare with nations that lack a similar institution.



Maybe HoosierDoc can step in here: Who pays more for a given medicine or procedure? Medicare or private insurance. Everything I see says Medicare pays less.

Given that only 10% or so of the population relies on Medicare as their sole insurance, are they really the driver of the marketplace?

Do you think private industry has any role in the cost of medicine today? You mention Lasik. Yes, an elective procedure with competitors. Sort of like generic drugs...competitors drive down price. What about non-elective drugs under patent protection? Go ahead and compare the price here vs countries that do not grant patent protections to medications. Now, I'm not saying that's a good idea or it isn't, but if you want to go the "gov't bad private industry good" route, you need to be able to explain that. Is the gov't bad for protecting patents?

Or countries that don't allow malpractice suits. Or that subsidize medical school. There's a lot more to health care cost that "socialism/government option".

On a side note, do you see any disconnect in arguing that human nature is such that people won't work if they don't have to in order to eat but also arguing that human nature is such that they will donate their resources to help others? We're so self centered and lazy we'll just sit about and starve while waiting for others to do the work, but so generous and community oriented we have no problem giving our own resources away in sufficient amounts to provide the same outcomes to the elderly as Medicare/SSI?

It's late and I'm getting tired to go into a deep dive and take these point by point.

I think I could argue protection of intellectual property is a good thing and is probably a competitive advantage for innovation and entrepreneurship in the US.

All government dollars to medicare/SS come from taxpayers (and actually, it's coming from future taxpayers now). Forcing people to participate in wealth transfer schemes such as these is certainly not charity. It's forcing people to be give their dollars to something the voting majority believes is more important. It assumes the individual is incapable of choosing what is in their own best interests for themselves. You can't make people charitable but you can make them defendants and prisoners for not paying their taxes.

I agree there's a cost problem in healthcare. I contend a large chunk of that is due to government interference and how it distorts markets.

That's all I've got for tonight.

Have a good one.

 

[jamil]

Ok. I think I understand.

I think the ideological obstacle for me to agree, though, is that the small-scale democracy model shares most (maybe all) of the same qualities that you're talking about.

The group, as a whole, decides what to plant, where to plant it, and who will tend to it. Only after that model reached a level of sustainability did the shift to private ownership even make sense.

Those competing human characteristics - greater good and desire for freedom - are what Marx described in his work. There is a fundamental tension there.

It is also why (IMHO) the movement toward socialism is so slow. So far, it hasn't appropriately struck that balance. People always want to be free. They only work together when there's a clear benefit to doing so.

Historically, socialism has not been able to establish any real upside.

Marx was mostly full of ****.

 

[jamil]

Taxation is theft by that metric.

All governments are immoral, all government programs are oppression and evil.

I'm not as radical as you are, sorry.

What? So there’s nothing in between? He’s talking about wealth redistribution. The in between is limited government. Which is what our founders intended. It’s not the case that you either have a welfare state or no government at all, which is the implication of what you said.

 

[jamil]

No...I thought you believed the pilgrims were socialist. Especially when you say things like they all got equal shares regardless of work, HTF am I to know what you're thinking and respond to that vs what you are posting?

I'm obviously not the only one who didn't read your mind, either. Again, I have no problem with you having a different opinion. I know you don't know me in real life, but I am extremely literally minded. Words have meaning. I expect when someone uses a word, they know that meaning and are using it to represent that meaning.

How do we understand each other? We use that **** between our ears. If we’re interested in actually understanding what each other is saying, most people can usually figure that out. We’ve already identified that “Socialism” as an economic system, the means of production is shared, and there’s generally no private ownership other than personal items. Sounds an awful lot like the system we were taught in school that the early settlers used. As far as UBI goes, it’s certainly more “socialist” than it is capitalist.

And maybe you’re younger and weren’t taught the same things we were taught in school. If that’s the case, then I guess there’s a possible reason for the disconnect. But just for avoiding confusion in future discussions, some old timers will likely call things like UBI socialism. And it’s not that they’re trying to say it’s exactly the same as shared means of production. They’re saying it’s shared financial resources, and that really is fair to informally call socialism. We’re on a gun forum, not an economist forum.

 

[Shadow01]

What? So there’s nothing in between? He’s talking about wealth redistribution. The in between is limited government. Which is what our founders intended. It’s not the case that you either have a welfare state or no government at all, which is the implication of what you said.

Nothing wrong with a safety net that is well regulated and run. Problem is they turn into “you owe me that” programs. What no one addresses is as a society we accept taking money out of stranger’s pockets to provide for the less fortunate, but we never mandate that family of those less fortunate be the first to carry that financial burden. Why is it acceptable for me to help pay for Mary’s needs, but we don’t force Mary’s two sons to be the first in line with a required monthly stipend? Granted this doesn’t work for those with no family left, but I see forcing the general public to pay without making family the first to be burdened as legal theft.

 

[BehindBlueI's]

How do we understand each other? We use that **** between our ears. If we’re interested in actually understanding what each other is saying, most people can usually figure that out. We’ve already identified that “Socialism” as an economic system, the means of production is shared, and there’s generally no private ownership other than personal items. Sounds an awful lot like the system we were taught in school that the early settlers used. As far as UBI goes, it’s certainly more “socialist” than it is capitalist.

And maybe you’re younger and weren’t taught the same things we were taught in school. If that’s the case, then I guess there’s a possible reason for the disconnect. But just for avoiding confusion in future discussions, some old timers will likely call things like UBI socialism. And it’s not that they’re trying to say it’s exactly the same as shared means of production. They’re saying it’s shared financial resources, and that really is fair to informally call socialism. We’re on a gun forum, not an economist forum.

Did they teach you that words mean things? If I'm on an economics forum and want to argue guns, it's cool if I talk about the shoulder thingy that goes up and assault rifles mow down children because it's not a gun forum and I don't know any better? How often do we rail on the role of the uninformed in the gun control debate, the assumptions without evidence, the "feels" vs facts?

Use that ****** between your ears to learn something about the topic you're trying to discuss.

GFGT and I have already arrived at an understanding of what he was trying to say, and he even posted his own quote of what led me to think he was saying what I responded to, but thanks. As far as older or not, I have no idea which of us is older or what it matters.

 

[jamil]

Nothing wrong with a safety net that is well regulated and run. Problem is they turn into “you owe me that” programs. What no one addresses is as a society we accept taking money out of stranger’s pockets to provide for the less fortunate, but we never mandate that family of those less fortunate be the first to carry that financial burden. Why is it acceptable for me to help pay for Mary’s needs, but we don’t force Mary’s two sons to be the first in line with a required monthly stipend? Granted this doesn’t work for those with no family left, but I see forcing the general public to pay without making family the first to be burdened as legal theft.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment. I think giving people an existence such that they really don’t need to strive for something can create societal problems in itself. We now reward women to crank out fatherless babies like Big Macs, and creating perpetual future dependents is only one consequence of that.

In any economic system there will always be unproductive people, due to some inability. I’m not opposed to some kind of safety net, but it hase to require some responsibility for all but the most needy of the needy. If this safety net is such that an otherwise able bodied individual can exist without having to take some responsibility for his own livelihood, the population of that kind of person will have a much higher crime rate, which furthers societal cost.

I kinda think a UBI will tend to further the income gap. It will help some people take risks because they still have something to fall back on. The most competent of those risk takers will invent the future Googles and will make those fortunes. And I guess we could just try to confiscate those fortunes to help pay for the rest of society’s universal income. You know, because their fortunes should be shared with the people. So some of you will need to forgive me for calling that socialism.

 

[T.Lex]

Marx was mostly full of ****.

I think you and I have agreed to disagree on that point before.

The principles that Marx described, over the long term, seem to be playing out the way he predicted. Not necessarily the cataclysmic clashes, but the movement of societies.

The Bolsheviks' attempts (then the Maoists and others') to impose what he described is the sticking point.

On the "what to do about it" stuff, we should all go back and look at the New Deal. Figure out what started us down this path and we might have a good starting point for how to fix it.

 

[GodFearinGunTotin]

I think you and I have agreed to disagree on that point before.

The principles that Marx described, over the long term, seem to be playing out the way he predicted. Not necessarily the cataclysmic clashes, but the movement of societies.

The Bolsheviks' attempts (then the Maoists and others') to impose what he described is the sticking point.

On the "what to do about it" stuff, we should all go back and look at the New Deal. Figure out what started us down this path and we might have a good starting point for how to fix it.

Personally, I'd go back further than that. I know we're becoming a more and more secular society but there are biblical ideas that would probably fix a great percentage of all of this.

Sadly though, we've generally turned to worship government now and put our trust in its benevolence to solve these things.

 

[BehindBlueI's]

Why is it acceptable for me to help pay for Mary’s needs, but we don’t force Mary’s two sons to be the first in line with a required monthly stipend?

You pay for Mary's needs with the understanding that, should you find yourself in the same situation, your needs are met in the same way. Like insurance, you aren't just paying for other's claims, you're funding the safety net that will catch you if you fall as well.

That said, this actually is the tradition among some Arabic and Asian cultures. The eldest children are your safety net. It works well for wealthier families, as I've seen first hand with my in-laws. For poor families, it simply increases the chances of generational poverty. If I'm paying for momma, that's less money I have to train for a better job or to send my kids to college, etc. For the poorest of families, it means you don't get any help other than what you can convince charities you require and your outcome is more bleak. Additionally, it makes it harder for children (or adult children) of poor families to move to follow job opportunities, etc. There's always trade offs. On one hand it enforces family bonds and reduces social burden, on the other it reduces mobility (both physical and economic) and can lead to more poverty down the road. I also wonder if it doesn't contribute to larger families than you can actually support (if you only have one son and he dies, you have nothing to fall back on), but I don't really know.

 

[jamil]

I think you and I have agreed to disagree on that point before.

The principles that Marx described, over the long term, seem to be playing out the way he predicted. Not necessarily the cataclysmic clashes, but the movement of societies.

The Bolsheviks' attempts (then the Maoists and others') to impose what he described is the sticking point.

On the "what to do about it" stuff, we should all go back and look at the New Deal. Figure out what started us down this path and we might have a good starting point for how to fix it.

Marx was correct in understanding the stagnating effects of income inequality on the economy, and of course boom and bust cycles. But he was completely wrong in his predictions of society would fare. Rather than creating conditions which would organically result in a revolution, capitalism created the most prosperous people in history. Yes, there are some people left out of the prosperity. Yes, the most competent people tend to have much higher incomes than the least competent. But historically there are fewer poor people in the current era than ever.

So yeah. Marx was full of **** up to his ears. That revolution he thought would come naturally, organically, came only as a self-fulfilling of his own prophecy. Some ideologues, created by Marx's sophistry of fake moral virtue, got tired of waiting and decided to push things along and initiate the revolution. It's only still an idea well thought of by some because they're brainwashed by other ideologues.

I don't think income inequality is inherently the problem. It's just a symptom of the root of the problem, which is the disparity between the most competent and least competent people. In a meritocracy--every economic system is a meritocracy whether formally or not--the most competent people are at the way top, and the least competent people are on the way bottom; it's the phenomenon created by human nature. THAT's the problem that causes the income inequality. And there's no solution for that problem now.

I think that problem isn't really an unmanageable problem unless two things happen. First, the number of people who fit into the category of no demand for the labor their competence can produce becomes a significant portion of society. That lower class of people siphons people from the middle class as their competencies become less in demand. Second, the rest of the people in the middle sees their standards of life actually decrease because of other economic factors, poor policies, etcetera.

Those two things haven't really happened yet. We're not really seeing decline in standards of living compared with previous generations. But because technology is outpacing competency, it seems self-evident that the number of people at the bottom will increase as technology outpaces the need for their competence. It also seems self-evident that the burden this unproductive class has on society will affect the middle class. So it seems obvious to me that the solution lies somewhere in helping the less competent be more competent.

I don't know what that looks like. But it just seems to me that that is the problem to solve. Wasting time with Marxism nonsense isn't productive. We will be a better society if make ourselves a more self-responsible, more competent society. We certainly don't build that with helicopter-mom-ing policies.

 

[jamil]

Did they teach you that words mean things? If I'm on an economics forum and want to argue guns, it's cool if I talk about the shoulder thingy that goes up and assault rifles mow down children because it's not a gun forum and I don't know any better? How often do we rail on the role of the uninformed in the gun control debate, the assumptions without evidence, the "feels" vs facts?

Use that ****** between your ears to learn something about the topic you're trying to discuss.

GFGT and I have already arrived at an understanding of what he was trying to say, and he even posted his own quote of what led me to think he was saying what I responded to, but thanks. As far as older or not, I have no idea which of us is older or what it matters.

That's not a very representative argument. "The shoulder thingy that goes up" isn't anywhere near the equivalence of saying that forcing the sharing of resources is socialist. Because it is, at least a little.

About "older" thing. My only point that makes age matter is the perspective we have from what we were taught in school. I'm not sure exactly when, but at some point schools mostly stopped teaching that the reason the early settlers failed was because communal sharing doesn't work. It's probably a cold war era thing. I was just saying that if you went to school after that stopped being taught, it could explain why it wasn't initially apparent to you what GFGT was saying. I knew what he was saying, but GFGT and I are similar ages, and I was taught the same thing he said. No salt intended.

 

[T.Lex]

Uh... on the historical bit... I think it is equally as plausible (based on my reading over the years) that the "earlier" version of why the colonies had trouble was influenced by politics more than the current version.

Don't get me wrong - I find SIGNIFICANT issues with public school curriculum (to the extent I'm aware of it). I'm just not convinced that is a valid argument - the communal living being the problem.

 

[jamil]

Personally, I'd go back further than that. I know we're becoming a more and more secular society but there are biblical ideas that would probably fix a great percentage of all of this.

Sadly though, we've generally turned to worship government now and put our trust in its benevolence to solve these things.

That's another one of those self-evident things, that the extent to which individuals take responsibility for themselves, makes the society they live in better. If everyone in society can provide for themselves, and behave themselves, to the extent that they're capable, that society is superior to a society which requires lots of laws prescribing behavior. It's a society that can handle liberty. But postmodernism is producing a society incapable of handling liberty. It seems a lot like a religion of itself, except it's producing a fake morality that looks to me like it requires people control.