Ever wonder why the stimulus package isn't working?Follow

If one goes bad, it will ruin the rest?

Edited, Aug 5th 2009 7:06pm by TirithRR

I think we should force people who complain about welfare to go on welfare for a month. See how they like it. See if they become "hooked" on it.

I read recently that the weekly allowance for asylum-seekers had been reduced to £38 per week. So if you're an asylum-seeker, genuine or not, it's illegal for you to get a job while your application is being processed, which can take up to 6 month or a year, and in the meantime you have to live on £38 per week. I'd like to see Sun journalists try that. £38 won't even buy them their week-end gram of coke.

Once again, we could try to clamp down on tax evasion, on creative accounting, we could penalise the people who steal from the state eventhough they already are stinking rich. But yeah, welfare-recipients are a much easier target. It's cowardly, really.


Edited, Aug 6th 2009 10:55am by RedPhoenixxx

Whoa. Hang on justtamint. You mean people have been coming here from like, say, the FFXI forum and getting paid 38 pounds for it?!? What a ripoff! I've been here since forever-- check out my born-on-date! --and I never got a halfpence!

This is just another example of The Man keeping a conservative down. No wonder this place is chock full of nancyboy liberals.
/shakes his head ruefully

Totem

They can spend more time with the child, for one. Babysitters and childcare lack a certain family quality.

I'm amazed you take issue with the welfare system and not the ridiculously low wage that entry level jobs will provide that make the opportunity cost of staying on welfare non-existent. Oh, it's obviously a problem with welfare and not the ******* capitalistic market that rewards greed and luck that discourages people from working. Let's not bother increasing the actual utility of work, giving people a better incentive to go out and get jobs, but perpetuate a class imbalance that punishes people for not wanting to die, instead of rewarding people for wanting to live.

Not at all. What you mean to say is that I don't understand basic capitalistic economic principles, which of course is false, but besides the point. You're assuming that the advocation of increased wages is to be applied in the framework of a capitalist economic system, which, as you have intuited, would be dumb. It's like trying to extinguish the sun with a garden hose. The means of equalizing social class would require an upheaval of "basic economic principles" as you conceive of them, with higher mandated low wages as a natural consequence. Of course none of this addresses my criticism, which is that the market economy you so love to fellate is just as guilty of creating wealth discrepancy as are dudes who calculate that they are better off not working because the pay along with 25 cents can buy them a cup of coffee.



As an aside, I might have to revise my position on the passive voice.



Reward people based on the value of their lives, as human beings. My god that was easy.

Soo, the conservative opinion is to scrap welfare. Since there are really more people than jobs, what? Let them starve in the streets? Shoot them? Euthenasia?

Sounds like pre-revolutionary France... Looks what happened to those rich bastards.

Economic principles do not change based on what sort of mechanism you prefer. Something cannot have more value than it actually has. If you artificially grant it a greater value, you do so at the expense of something else. The only way your ideas might work is if you have some sort of centralized authority determining what everything is worth. Um... That's pretty much failed every time it's been tried.

The relative value of a burger flipper's labor to a computer programmers labor isn't arbitrary, and it has nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism simply allows us to determine the "true" value of something. Every other mechanism creates false values, introduces inefficiency, and ultimately increases inequity within the society.



Even your own sentence belies the ludicrousness of what you're saying. "higher mandated low wages". Um... "low" is a relative statement. Those wages are lower than other wages. If you "raise the low wages", you must by necessity also raise the high wages, right? And then you're right back where you started from. If the farmers wages go up, the cost of his product increases as well. Thus, the true value of the wages paid to everyone else decreases in relation to the increase in the cost of goods. Any effect you create is short lived. Again. Barring some massive authoritarian price controls, everything will re-adjust to maintain the ratios of value.



The mistake you are making (one of many) is thinking that I believe that wealth discrepancy is a bad thing. It's not. If everyone gets the same value for their labor, everyone will do the easy jobs and no one will do the hard ones. Why bother spending years taking classes to learn computer programming, then years more honing your skills if you're going to earn the same wage as you do now flipping burgers? It's a ridiculous and unworkable prospect.

Wealth discrepancy (really "wage discrepancy") must exist. Eliminating it would make everyone "equal", but they'd all be equally poor, not equally rich. And the whole would suffer far more as a result.



What do you think will happen? If the burger flipper is suddenly costing his employer twice as much per hour, what happens to the price of burgers? If you apply this to all labor, everything rises in cost in direct relation to the increase in wages. Barring the aforementioned price/wage controls and this will ripple through the entire economy adjusting the cost of both goods and services (including wages) for everyone. Raising minimum wage always has this effect. Either slowly if there aren't too many people currently under the new minimum, or faster if there are many.



And who gets to decide what the dollar value of a life is? And what happens when the total value of all the labor in the country is less than the value we've placed on all the lives of all the people in the country?

See. If you reward people based on the value of their labor, they will labor more in order to gain more reward. If you just reward them based on the value of their life, and we assume that everyone is "equal" (and thus their lives are worth the same), then no one has any reason to work hard or even at all. But someone has to, right? Someone has to do the labor in order to generate the pool of reward, right? You can't feed everyone unless enough people are working to grow food, and transport food, and distribute food right? Someone has to do this. But who?


We've already seen what happens under your proposed system. The amount of labor done in the society ends out being the absolute minimum needed to provide just enough to keep everyone from starving to death, and not much more. Worse, those who manage to gain control over the central planning of the system reap rewards, while the rest are impoverished.


Capitalism isn't a perfect system, but it's better than every other system anyone has ever tried. Of course, modern socialists (which I'm assuming you are) believe that they can do "just a little price controlling", and not hurt anything. Well. They're just not collapsing the system quite as quickly is all. It's still really moronic.

Can you please tell me which words you found large, colorful, unnecessary, or difficult to understand, so that I can laugh at you for not being able to speak simple English? Thanks.



I don't think you believe that it is bad. I believe it is bad and I think that you should think that it's bad, and that something is extremely ****** up with your ethical system for not thinking that it's bad, but I'm aware that you don't.



I think that I was making a nod to Samira, who thinks that the use of passive voice distances the speaker from responsibility, about which I had previously disagreed with her, but now a being forced to revise that position, as you seem woefully content to throw caution to "the market" as if it's some self-aware entity that divorces you from all economic social responsibility.



Really? Because if we're throwing around unqualified and totally ******* unsubstantiated psychological evaluations of the populace at large, I'd like to make a few myself: people don't work based on the value of their labor anyway, because they attempt to get the most **** for themselves without doing any work at all, and the entire market economy serves only to reward how conniving you can be, instead of how hard you work. Is that true? I don't have a damn idea, but it sounds about as appealing as does your own characterization.



Don't get me wrong gbaji. I don't want a little bit of price controlling. I want a lot of bit of price controlling.

The difference is that I can explain exactly why I believe it's not bad, and describe in detail the horrific problems which occur when you attempt to eliminate wealth inequity, while all you can do is insist over and over that it's bad.

I told you why it's not only not bad, but is necessary for a health economy and helps to maximize the productivity of the whole. Care to give a counter reason? Something beyond just "I believe it to be true"?



Yes. Really. Why is this even remotely debatable? I already gave an example of how someone would only be willing to spend the time learning how to program a computer if he knows he'll make more money as a result than he does today flipping burgers. Maybe you could respond with something more than just "Really?" and an dismissal of my statement as "unqualified". Pretty please?



It's pretty close actually. Um... But the guy hiring him is working just as hard to pay the least amount for the most work. Between the two, they will arrive at a price for the labor that satisfies them both, or neither of them get what they want. I'm not sure what point you think you're making here cause you haven't refuted anything I've said. You just keep insisting that it must be wrong, but can't seem to explain why or how...



Ok. Communist then. Um... How well has that worked out historically? Were "the people" all happy and content in their utopian workers paradise?

Lol... What's staggering is that you likely honestly believe those sorts of policies are good for labor!

Ah yes. I forgot how literal you can be. Um... how about "best value" instead? How about "most likely to accurately reflect the relative value of a good or service"?


While you're correct that "value" is a purely subjective term, that does not mean that it's useless. Given that economics is entirely about people placing value on things, it's somewhat absurd to get into a debate about economic systems while insisting on tossing out the basic concept that something has "value" relative to something else. If the people collectively value the labor of a programmer more than that of a burger flipper, then that *is* the relative value of their labor. And it's not just arbitrary. That valuation is based on a whole set of other things. How much of my labor am I willing to exchange for a computer program? That's why a video game costs X amount of dollars. The dollars represent hours of your labor, The more people are willing to exchange the fruits of their labor for yours, the more valuable your labor is (and thus the more dollars it's worth).


It's not rocket science, and it's very natural. From the first two guys trading one thing for another, this process has been used. That's why I say it's not specific to capitalism. The relative nature of the value of goods and services is a core concept of economics. Period. Capitalism is just a system which chooses to use that method to determine the reward (payment) one gets in return for labor. It is the most "natural" method. Every other method attempts to force things to be worth something different than what those buying or selling them think they are worth. Thus, they always require authoritarian power to impose them (because people wont naturally trade something they value greatly for something they don't values as much), and they always result in an overall reduction in both labor productivity and general prosperity for the population as a whole. Sure. Such a control system can conceal those losses for awhile, but eventually all the wealth is squeezed out, and then the people are left with nothing.


The only factor is how much control is in place, and thus how long this process takes. The Soviet Union had massive controls in place, and it took about 60 years for them to realize their system was unsustainable. The socialisms of Europe might last 100-150 years before they hit those points. But they will hit them. You're advocating an economic system which, if not removed at some future point, will lead to collapse.


Heck. The current troubles were in right now were pretty directly caused by government attempting to modify the relative cost and value of property. They wanted to make sure more people could buy stuff they couldn't afford, while continuing to keep the investment value of said property high. Obviously, you can't get something for nothing, so the whole scam was on borrowed time. That one took only about 8 years to collapse...

Honestly it's people like you, not like gbaji or even varus, because the extent to which they are acerbic and poor moral figures (whatever extent that may be) is entirely justified and in line with their own beliefs, but people like you in particular, make me want to rethink my position that everyone deserves the same class and value attributed to their lives. I've never seen a single line that you've espoused ever remotely approach the bare minimum of empathy, thoughtfulness, understanding, or even self-reflection when it comes to your own foibles in order to be considered human. As much as I disagree with gbaji, I respect the fact that he thinks about his beliefs and tries to make them coherent, whether or not I think he fails at it often. I don't like varus much either simply because he's a ******* *******, but sometimes he's a magnificent ******* *******, and I don't have to hate him as a person despite that his beliefs might make me angry.

You? I've never seen even anger out of you. I'm not even sure if I've felt anger toward you or if it's just indecisive disgust. I mean, I feign more disgust than I feel a lot towards conservative opinions, but ultimately they aren't really execrable or anything. From you I've seen nothing but venom and hate and bigotry, and it kills my faith in humans.

What I'm a tryin' to say, is that I don't like you, and I'm a bit miffed that I have to speak to you in the same breath as I do gbaji, because it taints my opinion of him as a rational human being.