Regarding the unemployment benefits: I have a hard time being upset at some people who managed to temporarily have tax dollars diverted to normal every day people instead of the terrible things most of our tax money usually goes towards. That's a free market win IMO and how it should be. That some people made more on unemployment is just an indictment of how poorly paid they were to begin with.
By taking away those benefits, is it really incentivizing people to work hard, or is it coercing them to work because they will end up on the street if they don't?
In this current system hard work isn't valued. But it isn't due to handouts. The owner class captures the majority of the value and it's only getting worse. On top of that there's a finite number of good decent jobs that actually fulfill people and provide social value. We should be aiming to work less as a culture, not more, and get to that post-scarcity future.
Hi Adam, thanks for reading and thanks for the comment.
> By taking away those benefits, is it really incentivizing people to work hard, or is it coercing them to work because they will end up on the street if they don't?
I think the frustrating but true answer is, it depends. For the single mother trying to take care of multiple kids while also working? 100%, she deserves access to benefits. For the frustrated, young, healthy, single college graduate with a degree in underwater basket weaving who can only find employment serving coffee and also happens to live in an expensive city? Maybe not.
Like it or not, the reality of a capitalist system is, other things equal, if you choose not to work and be productive when you're otherwise capable of it and don't have access to other resources, you will end up on the street. I don't love this aspect of capitalism. I wish we lived in a utopia where we had ample resources to support everyone's preferred lifestyle and no one had to work more than they wanted to, and everyone was free to be their fully actualized self. Maybe someday we'll achieve this, but we're not there yet. We don't have those resources.
The problem is differentiating between those who deserve benefits (or handouts, or whatever you want to call them) and those who don't. That's the hard, contentious, impossible part. This is the one reason I think UBI might actually make sense - because it removes this problem by giving _everyone_ access to precisely the same level of support.
> The owner class captures the majority of the value and it's only getting worse.
I've seen mixed evidence of this. Here's some data that says that, in fact, labor share of income is more or less constant over time:
> On top of that there's a finite number of good decent jobs that actually fulfill people and provide social value.
This is not how the economy works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy. I know it can feel this way in the short term, but over the long term the goal should be to increase the number of such jobs. We've done it many, many, many times before and I'm sure we can do it again!
> We should be aiming to work less as a culture, not more, and get to that post-scarcity future.
Regarding the unemployment benefits: I have a hard time being upset at some people who managed to temporarily have tax dollars diverted to normal every day people instead of the terrible things most of our tax money usually goes towards. That's a free market win IMO and how it should be. That some people made more on unemployment is just an indictment of how poorly paid they were to begin with.
By taking away those benefits, is it really incentivizing people to work hard, or is it coercing them to work because they will end up on the street if they don't?
In this current system hard work isn't valued. But it isn't due to handouts. The owner class captures the majority of the value and it's only getting worse. On top of that there's a finite number of good decent jobs that actually fulfill people and provide social value. We should be aiming to work less as a culture, not more, and get to that post-scarcity future.
Hi Adam, thanks for reading and thanks for the comment.
> By taking away those benefits, is it really incentivizing people to work hard, or is it coercing them to work because they will end up on the street if they don't?
I think the frustrating but true answer is, it depends. For the single mother trying to take care of multiple kids while also working? 100%, she deserves access to benefits. For the frustrated, young, healthy, single college graduate with a degree in underwater basket weaving who can only find employment serving coffee and also happens to live in an expensive city? Maybe not.
Like it or not, the reality of a capitalist system is, other things equal, if you choose not to work and be productive when you're otherwise capable of it and don't have access to other resources, you will end up on the street. I don't love this aspect of capitalism. I wish we lived in a utopia where we had ample resources to support everyone's preferred lifestyle and no one had to work more than they wanted to, and everyone was free to be their fully actualized self. Maybe someday we'll achieve this, but we're not there yet. We don't have those resources.
The problem is differentiating between those who deserve benefits (or handouts, or whatever you want to call them) and those who don't. That's the hard, contentious, impossible part. This is the one reason I think UBI might actually make sense - because it removes this problem by giving _everyone_ access to precisely the same level of support.
> The owner class captures the majority of the value and it's only getting worse.
I've seen mixed evidence of this. Here's some data that says that, in fact, labor share of income is more or less constant over time:
- https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-share-of-gdp?tab=chart&time=earliest..latest&country=~USA
- https://taxfoundation.org/blog/labor-share-net-income-within-historical-range/
> On top of that there's a finite number of good decent jobs that actually fulfill people and provide social value.
This is not how the economy works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy. I know it can feel this way in the short term, but over the long term the goal should be to increase the number of such jobs. We've done it many, many, many times before and I'm sure we can do it again!
> We should be aiming to work less as a culture, not more, and get to that post-scarcity future.
Well this is something we both agree on! :)