Yes, and based on a poll I conducted this morning, 97.43% of Americans believe the government has a long-term role in helping such people. 53.62% of respondends to the same poll also believe that when able-bodied folks are involved, the government’s role should be a short-term safety net, not a way of life. The other 46.38% were lifetime recipients of government assistance.
lol reading a Ghibli post is like playing 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, only with any issue and CO2 emissions. Its quite entertaining.
I read that comment and wondered what the hell those words could have been considering they were immediately followed by “fucking”
This is what disability insurance is for. Sadly, not enough workers are smart enough to buy it. ‘It will never happen to me’ mentality.
Now you’re starting to understand. The tentacles of the ban plant food crowd are everywhere, meddling in everything. No alarm though. They know what is best for all of us. And it won’t cost you a thing.
Not one single person has caught onto the Batman reference. I thought for sure that the guy with the Bruce Wayne avatar would.
Ahh yes, now that you mention it, that did sound familiar. From The Dark Knight Rises. I just watched it a few months ago.
Bruce Wayne avatar…good one.
My dad never said memorable stuff like that to me. No wonder I turned out like this.
I caught it if it’s any consolation.
Enabling policies where everyone is able to survive is a long-term death sentence for the human race. I write that without hyberbole. Let’s play this out. Every country on Earth adopts a minimum wage that affords their citizens the ability to survive, if not prosper. For those that don’t have a job, they get welfare, again enough to live on. And, obviously, free healthcare.
What happens? Let’s make a couple assumptions first: A) Every country can somehow maintain full-employment; and, B) they don’t run out of other people’s money to spend on social programs. Okay. What’s the logical outcome?
Are you currently worried about over-population, climate change, over-fishing, deforestation, the current mass extinction going on, lack of fresh water, and lack of food? What happens when population growth goes parabolic? Cause that’s what will happen under these policies (to a greater degree than it is already).
Now, every person on Earth is in danger because we’ve filled it with people that really shouldn’t exist in the first place. Sounds harsh, I know. If, instead, we give everyone the opportunity to prosper in a free market, some will prosper and some will die. We find a natural equilibrium with the strongest surviving.
Thankfully, socialistic policies can’t work over the long-term anyway because those two assumptions I made above always topple the system.
tl;dr: natural selection ftw
But can’t we just lower the reproductive rate so population doesn’t increase? Death rate of humans is 100% - the decrease/increase in total population has to do with longevity and birth rate, not survival rate. Japan people aren’t dying of poverty, but their population is decreasing. Without natural selection, humans will not evolve on a genetic level, but they still can become stronger, smarter, more robust, etc. due to technology and medicine.
^Sure, why not? If the government is going to be all up in our shit anyway, they may as well tell us when we can reproduce.
It doesn’t have to be government controlled. Japan has no birth control law. Having a kid will just get too expensive and people will naturally have fewer of them. Take Manhattan residents for instance. Having more than 2 kids is prohibitively expensive for most people who live in the city, since housing costs are so high. If earth resources become so constrained that there is not enough for each marginal human, then the population will regulate itself.
It’s not the developed world that would be the problem. How’s the growth rate look in the poorer countries?
Edit: Also, Japanese people stopped having sex in general because they prefer video games (seriously). Your point is interesting becuase the people that reproduce the most now are the ones that can’t afford it.
i have to disagree with STL. there is an incredbility strong correlation between high transfer payments and low birth rates. in Europe, where socialism and transfer payments are rampant, they have declining populations excluding immigration. controlling population is about giving people the opportunity for a better life. this starts with basic sustenance and educational/economic opportunity. canada has a lower birth rate than the u.s. this is because daily life and economic opportunity is better for the average person. i’m unsure how you can even start to argue your point.
Given the high population growth in developing countries, it’s clear that resources are not a contraint yet; there are still far more resources available to developing populations to support the same lifestyle for more people. But lifestyles and population are both increasing; so eventually, resource demand will meet supply, and then, these countries will self regulate.
Wow, there actually are some people here who think a minimum wage > $0 might not be the last step before concentration camps and gulags.
The challenge is that automation is pushing down the cost of labor, so there’s less work that needs to be doing and yet more and more people around who have to find something to do in order to eat. So more laborers + less needed work = wages pushed down.
There’s nothing in the dynamic that says that the wage has to stay up above the amount that’s required to eat and live in a place that has at least a modicum of dignity, so the only real way we can get wages up without some kind of government intervention is to cull the labor force - maybe a nice plague, or concentration camps for vagrants, or just find a place where they can quietly starve. Because nothing would be worse than government setting a floor on wages or engaging in transfer payments, because that will lead to concentration camps for non-vagrants, and that would be bad because I suppose people might die even more quietly (assuming that concentration camps actually are the next logical step after a minimum wage).
It seems strange that we celebrate technologies that eliminate jobs and then tell large numbers of people that the reason they can’t find work is that they are too dumb or too lazy and don’t deserve to work for a position that can pay enough to feed and clothe and shelter them without bearing the marks of privation. The economy increasingly appears to have a few jobs that pay extremely well and more and more jobs that pay ever more poorly.
The well paying jobs tend to require substantial access to capital or unique connections to powerful or wealthy people. That’s how you erect barriers to entry to protect your compensation. If you are just selling labor (even intellectual labor), increasingly you will have your compensation competed down. For now, there seem to be a few wealthy plumbers, but it’s the plumbing company owner that makes out well. If the plumbing owner can, they too will pay $0.01/hr to attract labor. That’s not to say that plumbers are inherrently bad people - they are responding to incentives, too, but it does mean that “everyone should learn plumbing” is not going to change things markedly.
Even considering that the inflation adjusted median income has more-or-less stagnated for 40 years, add to that the fact that job security has declined and what you get is a risk-adjusted loss in median income. Most workers don’t stop to think in terms of risk-adjusted earning so they don’t have the tool to do the analysis that explains just why they feel so anxious. It’s not just that they haven’t gotten a real raise in ages - it’s also because their liklihood of facing long periods of unemployment has increased dramatically - they have fewer benefits from the jobs that they do have. They are in fact more vulnerable and what safety net there used to be has been made thinner and poorer.
But it’s comforting to say that the bulk of these people must be in bad shape because they are lazy, or that they learned the wrong skills, and not because changes in technology and the distribution of profit between capital holders and workers squeezed them out of the system. That way, when they quietly starve, we can pat ourselves on the back for having made the right chocies.
Of course, one can say that there’s nothing to fear, because the people displaced by technologies 100 years ago moved to cities and found work in other industries. Of course, that took at least one or maybe two generations before displaced workforces adapted, and a lot of that happened when government intervention and taxation was high as part of post-war settlements with the people who fought. So hoping that large numbers of displaced workers in Detroit and the Rustbelt will adapt and find new well-paying work is not that likely within a generation. That group of people - some say - just needs to be put out to pasture and hopefully will disappear quiety. God forbid we actually try to do something to help them. That just gets in the way of taking their stuff.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/09/03/3478289/koch-brothers-minimum-wage-fascism/
"Koch Brothers’ Top Strategist: Minimum Wage Will Turn USA Into Nazi Germany
In a newly released audio recording, obtained by The Undercurrent, a man identified as a top Koch strategist warned that an increased minimum wage could turn the United States to a fascist state."
Bchad, back to furthering his fascist agenda.
Seeing as how we were on page three of this debate, I felt it was time…
At least get it right. It’s not fascism. If you want to give it a scary name, call it communism.
I do feel that Marx was basically right in his diagnosis of the problems of capitalism. He didn’t have a viable solution, because this dicatorship of the proletariat stuff creates irresistable incentives for men like Stalin or Mao to engage in effective coup d’etats and things do get scary there. So keeping power unconcentrated would be the goal I would shoot for, but that also includes power that comes from concentrated wealth.
But Marx not having a solution does not therefore mean that his criticism of capitalism was wrong, for the same reason that a doctor saying “I don’t know how to cure this cancer,” doesn’t therefore mean “I am unable to recognize this cancer.” Nonetheless, it’s not entirely clear that a capitalism where assets are so highly concentrated is all that much freer than these other scary outcomes. Of course, it *is* freer for those who have capital, which is why they are so frightened of the others (though they will generally prefer fascism to communism, for reasons that aren’t hard to guess).
How do you continue playing the Monopoly game when one player has all the money and property? As wealth concentrates, life resembles the final stages of Monopoly more and more. Now imagine that the $200 you collect as you pass GO gets smaller and smaller the fewer people there are left in the game.