> We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living
Right, because valuable things don't actually cost anything to produce! That's why they can just be (automatically) handed out by some big Magic Nanny-Fairy Machinery.
We should all just get whatever we want, because we deserve it!
Every time there is any thread about anything remotely socially progressive you are there espousing your highly conservative viewpoint. This made me curious and I am really trying to understand what life experiences could have led you to have such views. I have a few questions that might help paint a clearer picture if you would be so kind? If you decide to answer please answer honestly.
Where did you grow up?
What were your parents jobs?
How much did your parents earn in yearly income?
Have you ever not eaten for multiple days on end because you couldn't afford to buy food?
What do you work as?
How much do you currently earn?
How do you personally calculate the cost and value of a good or service?
Do you understand the difference in the meaning of the words 'want' and 'need'?
Sure, anyone is allowed to hold such opinions. There is no right or wrong. The point is that opinions should be based on critical thought and then articulated in a way that reflects this. Take Marc Andreessen for example. Many of his views are very different to mine but he articulates them well and can back them up by showing his thought patterns. I respect, listen to and learn from him because of this even though I often do not agree with him.
All I was doing was pointing out that his life experiences are nothing but a fantasy to all but less than 1% of the world's population. I have never met someone who has no choice but to work in a whatever job they can find have such skewed views so your subsistence farmer proposition is highly if not completely improbable.
Sillygoose was born with more economic purchasing power than most people will ever achieve in their whole lifetime no matter how hard they work.
If sillygoose wants to be taken seriously he should first of all deal with the core premise of what we are talking about rather than make up something that he can then argue against even though it has nothing to do with the topic at hand. When he says "We should all just get whatever we want, because we deserve it!" he has made up a premise that no one else suggested to discredit a perfectly viable suggestion (UBI). That adds nothing to the conversation and deserves to be called out.
Where "skewed views" primarily means "opposing the idea of a universal basic income based on the moral principle that people should earn what they receive"? Because that's what I got out of his comment.
Exactly. How can someone who was born with more economic purchasing power than what most of the worlds population can achieve in a lifetime have the view that people have to earn what they receive? Did he earn the right to be born into a wealthy family? The world is not that simple and doesn't work on such one dimensional premises. Once that is acknowledged then there is a foundation upon which a discussion can be built.
Why not? Someone whose mother died giving birth to them can still believe murder is wrong. Heck, even someone who has consciously murdered another person as an adult can believe that. Humans are rarely capable of perfectly following their own moral codes, but that doesn't make that morality invalid. Especially when the "violation" happened as a circumstance of someone's birth that they themselves had no control over.
So I guess 2 + 2 makes whatever the hell you want it to?
> he articulates them well and can back them up by showing his thought patterns
What if his thought patterns are all fucked up, and completely detached from reality? Wouldn't it be better to change your views based on reason, logic and evidence?
I'll be throttled again real soon, if I can even post this one anymore, so I'll paste a reply that was meant for another comment of yours.
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> As I suspected you have never experienced any financial hardship. This is fine in itself but is very telling in how you perceive the world.
Having experienced it wouldn't change anything about what's rational and objective though.
> It's easy to calculate the value of something that has no direct value to you. It's called a cost benefit analysis and it is the corner stone of any business education but is applicable in many fields beyond business.
I can't help but wonder if you're trolling me, but here goes..
Since value is subjective, it cannot be calculated, because calculations require units, and there's no unit for how much you happen to want something at a particular moment. It also can't be measured or represented externally, outside of your mind.
If you're engaging in a cost / benefit -analysis, that implies that you do perceive value in something. That would be the "benefit" part. But you still can't put exact, objectively accurate numbers on the benefit.
You can, however, decide how many dollars you're willing to lose through a course of action, and you can expect to gain a number of dollars from it. But that only represents your subjective evaluation of how much something is worth to you, in terms of monetary units.
> It is however impossible to do this accurately if you are incapable of any thinking apart from ego-centric thinking.
That's insulting, especially coming from someone who's woefully unequipped to correct me on economic matters.
> If you do understand the difference then you are purposefully corrupting the discussion. Please stop doing this.
Yet another wild-ass accusation. Could you please stop?
> Every time there is any thread about anything remotely socially progressive you are there espousing your highly conservative viewpoint.
I don't think it's a liberal versus conservative issue so much as an individualist versus collectivist issue. I think social conservatives, who have a predisposition towards thinking of communities in terms of reciprocal social obligations, have a role to play yet in pushing forward things like basic income.
Everyone has a role to play. I wouldn't think it healthy to ignore or disregard certain view points out of hand just because they are different to mine. That is not the point, rather it is important to base discussion in critical thought and not purely emotional reaction (though this has some value in itself too).
I don't ever recall reading either of you or GP's comments before so maybe I'm missing something. But since when is saying "producing things has a cost" a 'highly conservative' viewpoint?
"Producing things has a cost" is n obvious, meaningless assertion; the actual suggestion here is that everyone only deserves whatever they manage to produce. That's a fairly conservative viewpoint.
It's interesting how you can recognize an Anarcho-Capitalist viewpoint when you see one, but can't recognize that being an AnCap basically just boils down to being moral, sane, rational and consistent.
Most self-proclaimed "Anarchists" I come across are actually something like Marxists, nonsensically railing against evil capitalist oppressors, without wanting to even discuss what capitalism means.
I went to one of their gatherings once, and out of around twenty people, only one seemed rational and open-minded.
The rest were intent on figuring out what kind of "activism" they'd engage in, and didn't want to discuss whether what they were doing actually made any fucking sense at all.
> Every time there is any thread about anything remotely socially progressive you are there espousing your highly conservative viewpoint.
Oh? Well, from my point of view I'm espousing independent thinking. Questioning things is a sign of doing that.
> Where did you grow up? What were your parents jobs? How much did your parents earn in yearly income?
I grew up in Finland, in an upper-middle class family.
> Have you ever not eaten for multiple days on end because you couldn't afford to buy food? What do you work as?
Nope. A developer.
> How much do you currently earn?
Around three thousand euros per month, before taxes.
> How do you personally calculate the cost and value of a good or service?
I don't. Something either has value to me or it doesn't. If you've actually read my messages, you may have noticed me talking about how value is subjective. In a nutshell, Value is utility as a means towards an end.
For example, how do you "calculate" the value of something you don't want at all?
> Do you understand the difference in the meaning of the words 'want' and 'need'?
As I suspected you have never experienced any financial hardship. This is fine in itself but is very telling in how you perceive the world.
It's easy to calculate the value of something that has no direct value to you. It's called a cost benefit analysis and it is the corner stone of any business education but is applicable in many fields beyond business. It is however impossible to do this accurately if you are incapable of any thinking apart from ego-centric thinking.
It was not clear that you understood the difference between want and need from your post. If you do understand the difference then you are purposefully corrupting the discussion. Please stop doing this.
No, we should all be able to get whatever we need because for the first time in history, we can.
If individuals would like to pursue even more (ie the things they want), they should be free to do so, so long as those wants don't occlude the afore stated needs of others.
The interesting thing is that we (humanity) could now actually do this if we wanted to. In the past, the laws of physics (and our lack of knowledge) prevented this. Now only politics do. The "Magic Nanny-Fairy Machinery" is real, and it looks like in the end, all it will require to operate is natural resources. We are piss poor at equitably distributing preexisting natural resources amongst ourselves.
I'm guessing his point was that we're so accustomed to relatively comfortable living (especially here on HN), that we take valuable things for granted.
That leads to a sense of entitlement and confusion. We don't see how valuable the things we have are, so we end up thinking they should be "free", without realizing that nothing of value is actually free, because otherwise it wouldn't have value.
So if we experienced real hardship, our thinking would shift, and we'd appreciate valuable things more and we'd feel less entitled.
My point in another, heavily hissy-fit-downvoted message, was that everything of value costs something to produce, and therefore things can't just be handed out for free, because the things themselves are not actually free.
The same applies to "free money" in the form of Basic Income. People like to fantasize about not being personally responsible for their choices in life. Instead, they'd just get free money every month without having to work. "We have the technology!! Why aren't you giving me free stuff?! Damn capitalist oppressors!!"
People should think about how things work in the real world.
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Suppose Service X costs you $500 per month to produce. If you keep giving it away for free, you're incurring a loss of $500 per month. That is not sustainable.
In a similar fashion, running the Nanny-Fairy-Machinery and producing things with it would definitely cost something, and that's why giving the output away for free wouldn't be sustainable. It's a Marxism-tinged pipe dream.
>Suppose Service X costs you $500 per month to produce. If you keep giving it away for free, you're incurring a loss of $500 per month. That is not sustainable.
>In a similar fashion, running the Nanny-Fairy-Machinery and producing things with it would definitely cost something, and that's why giving the output away for free wouldn't be sustainable. It's a Marxism-tinged pipe dream.
The reason any of this is being discussed is because the cost of producing basic needs should be going down because of automation, technology, etc. and won't be stuck at $500 or whatever value you choose over a long period of time. It's not impossible for Service X to get to the point where its cost to customers is not worth handling actual currency from its customers (which is what happens if the number you pay always remains at $500/mo).
Eventually we get to employ robots to do hard labor better than any human can for longer periods of time until we're paying fractions of a penny per hour in 'wages', initial cost and maintenance included. The ability to do this just wrecks any intuition we have about what it costs to produce things.
The idea is that $500 is not a fixed cost. First technology came for labor (ex. farming that used to take man-years of labour now takes hours and will soon require effectively 0 man -units), now its even coming for capital as well (a small lump of clever sand can perform what millions of dollars of capital equipment used to do). The only real fixed cost in the long run is going to be the natural resources required to produce things, which are here already. All that remains to us is to decided how to distribute these amongst ourselves.
Most of our political effort right now seems to be spent maintaining an ugly clot of laws and regulations attempting to artificially maintain that hypothetical $500 "cost" and not answering that deeper question.
Sillygoose should get whatever they want for playing the game of capitalism the luckiest and the best (but mostly the luckiest), and everybody else who is unluckier or less good should suffer, to provide for all of sillygoose's wants as cheaply as possible, rather than having their own basic needs met.
Right, because valuable things don't actually cost anything to produce! That's why they can just be (automatically) handed out by some big Magic Nanny-Fairy Machinery.
We should all just get whatever we want, because we deserve it!