Posted on 01/06/2015 8:25:57 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
[ Another fallacy these techies believe is that there tech eliminates jobs. So they feel guilty about that.
That idea has been around since even before the industrial revolution. And it’s false.
Hayek and Friedman provide rebuttals to this idea. ]
One problem is that if you have an economy with a perpetually debasing currency ie. A Fiat based currency, one has to keep working more hours to keep up with inflation even if productivity goes waaaay up.
If we didn’t have a our inflationary currency you could easily have families with a single breadwinner. but we have seen as they burden people with more taxes and the most cruel tax of all, inflation, you have to have TWO or MORE members of a family fully employed either full time or at least one full and one part time to makes ends meet...
And that is WITH the benefit of labor saving technology, in a way tech is a double edged sword, tech in our case is only treading water above inflation, and when tech stagnates we all drown. Without Tech we would have a Re-Set 100 years ago...
Kill inflation and reset the economy and you could easily have single breadwinner families and parents with far more time for their kids and with less need for constant employment by people, there would be less unemployment eventually.
This whole idea of a “basic income” for everyone is completely insane. Wouldn’t it be better to just give each person in the U.S. a trillion dollar coin instead of a “basic income” coin? After all, the cost to make a “basic income” coin is the same as the cost to make a trillion dollar coin, and everyone would be RICH and not have to exist at just a subsistence level with the trillion dollar coin. Everyone could buy anything they wanted and no one would ever have to work again.
The coins could be made from a base metal, so they would be cheap to make, and a few extra ones could be minted for the government itself, so taxes could be completely eliminated and yet government could still function. It’s such an elegant solution I don’t know why it hasn’t been implemented yet.
For myself, I’m going to start by buying a pony and the Broncos NFL football team. And I won’t even need pony food stamps to feed my pony because I’ll be so rich I’ll be able to afford all of the Purina Pony Chow my pony could ever want.
So did Kipling:
‘As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man-—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:-—That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her mire, And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins, When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!’
I think, as technology advances, it’s a useful question to ponder. What do you do, if machines have advanced to the point where they only need relatively minimal supervision from humans, from the mine to the store?
Cockamamie ideas like these crop up among those who are embarrassed by their wealth. If they are serious, there should be no argument from them when one suggests that in order to implement a minimum income, there must be a maximum income. Posit that those with incomes over $100,000 should surrender the remainder to the government for reallocation. Also, acquired properties beyond a modest home should be seized and redistributed to recover the sunk wealth that will go to pay those more feeble than the billionaires.
Like everything else, it’s a good idea if done right, a bad idea if done wrong.
And like everything else, it will be done wrong, because the collectivist government will do it wrong on purpose, in order to increase the public acceptance of the increase of collective dependency.
Kipling bump!
There is no way we should inflict our twisted, heinous, deviant thinking on an unsuspecting universe.
It still wouldn’t work of course. There is not enough money to make it work, then what happens when everyone decides to stop working?
Think of an island with 100 people.
Inefficient, no machines - everyone has to work just to eat.
Opposite extreme situation - super efficient machines - only 1 person has to tend the machines, 99 can sit on the beach all day, have what they need, and pay the 1 guy for their food, clothing, shelter - all made by the machines - in coconuts they pick up on the beach.
That 1 machine tender would be quite rich in coconuts - since everyone else has to pay him for their food clothing and shelter.
At some point, those 99 would wind up wanting more and different things. A boat to look for other islands. Books. Artwork. Calculating machines. Etc. More than that 1 machine guy could make with his current machines.
Some enterprising ones among them would go into business making and selling these things.
Thus, you’d then have some of them employed and working.
Now consider our world, run by financial elites.
Their plans currently are to make most Americans poorer. Anything they can have made overseas they do. Even if it can profitably be made here. They then tell the sheeple it’s because “costs are too high here”, “Americans won’t do the work”, etc., which are lies.
They’re simply moving us in the direction of the 99 people sitting on the beach, and the machine guy is just an importer.
And they’re purposely making sure to squash any new efforts to put those people to work in the private sector.
They are planning on making Americans poorer by increasing government spending (thus increasing taxes), cutting pay and eliminating US jobs, and increasing consumer prices, until the US is brought down closer to the status of China in terms of per capita wealth and income.
They think Americans will accept merging with a regional or world government if they are in enough economic pain. Certainly if we lose a war, the US will have little choicein accepting world government.
It makes whatever the value they set, meaningless.
And why limit it? Why be so hard-hearted to keep people just barely scraping by. Who are they to limit others to a basic living level?
Money will mean nothing. Work will mean nothing.
This is just so wrong.
More robots, of course. And the idiot billionaires would think they’d get even richer selling them.
So the answer is to tax the robot wages, that’ll keep everyone in the money! lol
Does anybody learn anything from history or is the Ego to powerful..
bkmk
That’s a laugh, the billionaire marxist tech elite want to pay third world wages to experienced degreed engineers.
The handout they insist the gubmint should regulate would not be necessary if they didn’t depress salaries for personal profit.
Yep....instead of UBI though, it’s called EBT.
Liberals used to hold up the military health system as the perfect example of socialized medicine. Free treatment for all its members, etc.
That system only works because the pool-of-patients is very small compared to the pool-of-payers for it. When the pool-of-payers become the pool-of-patients, the theory and implementation breaks down.
The first generation would coast slowly downhill as the productive classes would not immediately abandon their ambition and work discipline. The decline will not take long. The idle will turn equality into an even greater fetish than it already is, and vote continuously to plunder the dwindling surplus produced by the still-productive. The question is what happens two or three generations into the experiment, when the saving remnant has shrunk to a tiny size, and the mass of the population has abandoned any felt need to work.
Answer: people will fight. Here and there, creative and energetic people will put in some extra effort and create something of value. The indolent will try to steal it. Residually competent subcultures will hive off, separate themselves from the mass, and look for ways to defend their turf. And people will fight over status, ethnic or religious differences, gang affiliations, or out of sheer boredom.
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