Posted on 10/17/2017 6:43:06 AM PDT by pabianice
You wanna tighten the workforce? BUILD THE DAMNED WALL!!!
Have you ever noticed that no economist can ever tell you what is going to happen, just make excuses for what actually happened? They’ve got a better gig than meteorologists that can never really tell me how much snow I’ll see.
No use trying to reason with these people. They are incapable of understanding.
Yeah, we get that a lot. I have a Ph.D. in economics and I can tell you that history is strewn with the wreckage of attempts at universal income, from New Harmony, Walden, to the recent Soviet Union. It simply doesn’t work because it kills incentive and means taking from the productive and giving to the less productive. Eventually, it falls under its own weight.
These kids need to study the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Luddites - who had the same complaints & fears of automated systems destroying jobs and leaving people without incomes, fears which were misplaced as job markets changed to hire people into other work.
The fears about AI are strange to me. I’ve studied implementation of AI - it’s nothing more than searching data for suitable answers; nobody can articulate what the _actual_ concern is.
The “right to leisure” is patently absurd. The staggering stupidity of dubbing it a “right” aside... We live in the most luxurious culture of all time: the _average_ TV-watching time spent is around 40 hours per week, a full-time job spent doing nothing; what more leisure does anyone want? Much of the drive for UBI is to “give people the opportunity to pursue their dreams” ... well, most people don’t have “dreams” worth pursuing; sorry to say, but seriously? how many people would really turn copious free time into “productive” (very broadly defined) efforts, and not just watch TV, putter aimlessly, get high, or pointlessly copulate?
The ultimate failure of UBI is the confusion of surplus productivity with the fragility of wealth. Humans need a minimum caloric intake - which isn’t free, is destroyed by consumption, and serves only to provide a limited window to produce more caloric or other “income”. UBI presumes others are producing so much extra wealth that this (and other basics) can be supported with little/no impact or consternation upon the producers. UBI makes this presumption while willfully blind to the fact that such redistribution _wastes_ that wealth (literally turns to $#!^) instead of leveraging it into more productivity. They’re so dazzled by the surplus of wealth that they don’t see how hard it was to come by, nor how fast that surplus can be squandered & discouraged.
UBI is offered as a solution to unemployment, on the pretext that unemployment will rise due to increased automation - not realizing that there will ALWAYS be more to do, which others will pay for, which is cheaper to hire a human to do instead of automate.
UBI is offered as a springboard to greater productivity, on the pretext that people can’t “move up” when they’re stuck in a menial job - not realizing that _most_ people will do nothing productive given copious free time; of those who may do something interesting, most still won’t do anything that actually advances production of basic necessities.
UBI is offered as a use of surplus productivity, on the pretext that some people are so hyper-productive that vast numbers of others can live off such excess without discouraging the actual producer - not realizing that it’s the receipt of one’s own hard-earned rewards that keep that productivity going, and that confiscating much of it (just so it can be squandered) eliminates the incentive.
Insofar as we DO have a massive welfare state, UBI is (I concede grudgingly) the most efficient & fair way to distribute that welfare: give the same poverty-line sustenance to everyone, so those that can’t/won’t produce can get by, and those who do produce just re-absorb their own money. Alas, this too shall fail, precisely because (A) lots of people will be quite content living at the poverty line so long as they don’t have to work for it, and (B) lots of people will then become bored & jealous and use their copious free time to demand ever more from the productive - who will eventually “go Galt” leaving millions to just die.
Final under-discussed issue: UBI will raise entire generations (moreso than current welfare) on the complete lack of work. When the surplus productivity falters, these will have no comprehension of how to fend for themselves. What a cruelty to impose upon the dependent poor!
My speech will pay for their speech to protest and burn my home when I am at work when I disagree.
THis is an absolute no no scam.
But while it is busy dying, it kills the economy and country that implement it.
Very true, but Snowflakes don't bother with details like failed experiments.
“The Time Machine,” by H.G. Wells
Look what happens when you take animals raised in captivity and turn them loose in the wild. That's when you see, there really *is* such a thing as a free lunch!
The pursuit of happiness. But the Constitution doesn’t guarantee their right to do it on someone else’s nickel.
Whoops, wrong doc. But the right isn’t found in either doc.
It's the next clause after the right to free birth control pills and free abortions.
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