You can have government without aristocracy, and are more likely to if you limit the powers of corporations. Government and corporations are both made of people, who can flip flop between the two at will. The only thing you can do to prevent aristocracy is preventing any official from becoming Too Big To Have To Respond To Democratic Pressures.
6 Likes
Wait, you are enjoying your work? You better figure out the monetary value of that much enjoyment and report it on your taxes.
9 Likes
Unless that âgovernment aristocracyâ is the military, of course, which you support in the name of patriotism. How does that work?
3 Likes
The only thing you can do to prevent aristocracy is preventing any official from becoming TBTHTRTDP
Well, the other thing you can do is to defang the powers of government, so that influence over it is not worth buying.
This margin is too small to contain an entire argument. But an externally focused military does not aim to control life within the country. What I was referring to as government aristocracy does.
Thatâs all true and I no problems accepting it, but what about wanting more? In that perfect communist society we all get to live pretty well, but we only get X, getting more than X is extremely difficult because we are all sharing. I look at society from a more tribal or farm oriented stance. If everyone does their job on the farm they should all get some part of the goods, but if they do nothing they deserve nothing. If I am only ever going to get X in life why should I try and be better, why should I exhibit any personal responsibility - the government will take care of that for me. Why should I try and make the farm better if at the end of the day my extra work just goes to others?
If at some point we get automation to the point where I see us as a post scarcity world, then at that point I feel we can talk about people doing what they want. There will always be people who want to repair robots, work farms, do manual labor, ect⌠To me just giving things to people less fortunate isnât the answer, their needs to be a path for them to follow to get back to being a productive member of society if possible. I donât care so much about taxes as long as they are not being wasted, and I see waste in ever sector of government and I see greed in ever aspect of the private sector.
If I itemized, maybe, but Iâm a renter, and DREAM of only paying 30% of my take-home on rent. Also I think there was an article a while back on BB that showed that people who work in non-profits and social service already take a hit in pay because they âshould feel good about the workâ which is itâs own reward (If I call that a âtaxâ will @fche let us call tax rebates a âsubsidy?â). Hell, my boss drags out that old saw on the reg.
6 Likes
So aside from your usual ignorance of facts and history youâre saying itâs fine for government to aim to control lives in other countries as long as it doesnât do it here. Or rather as long as it doesnât affect you personally, since your borders donât extend beyond your own self-interest.
5 Likes
Right, of course you do. So in this system that youâre proposing, does the company provide the lube or is that classified as a benefit, so employees have to provide their own?
9 Likes
Yeah, I was parodying that logic. Itâs disturbing, and itâs a product of thinking that everyone is working for their own benefit. In reality people make decisions for all kinds of reasons, but then people come and just define it all to be self interest (of course is person A does X and person B does Y and both are âbecause of self-interestâ then self-interest have zero predictive power, but economics is philosophy, not science). If people were paid for the value their work created then weâd be assigning teachers better salaries than hedge-fund managers. Instead, people are paid the amount they are able to extract, so wages are largely determined by heredity.
If you really feel that way then itâs okay, thereâs enough food to go around, weâll float you.
You see, to me itâs not âgiving to the less fortunateâ itâs about giving to the outright assholes who are perfectly capable of work and just donât want to. For all of history weâve had to make rules about who gets to eat because there wasnât enough food to go around. But every time a new wave of automation comes around, itâs seen as a calamity instead of as a good thing. I canât remember how many times Iâve seen this in the paper recently. Automation is going to take over everything and there will be no jobs.
If we went back hundreds of years and picked and random person and said: âIn the future weâll have abundant food and housing and clothing as well as all kinds of other things that people want. Weâll have medicine that cures almost every illness you worry about. People will live 80 years on average. Children will die very rarely. And weâll have all of this without having to do much work at all.â is that person going to think we are describing an unrealistic utopia or a dystopian hellscape?
My four-year-old wanted her other parent to get her some milk. I offered to get it and she refused. She wanted the other parent to get it. I told her that if she wanted to drink milk she could have milk, but if what she really wanted was to boss us around then we werenât interested. I know itâs a very recent thing in human history, but we have enough milk now. Itâs the desire to command others that is getting us into trouble.
If we actually said, âHey, if you donât want to work, thatâs fine, no one needs to work.â do you think that the hedge fund managers and the CEOs and the other supposedly self-interested economic actors would say, âHey, enough money to live for zero work, thatâs effectively infinite wages, thatâs better than what Iâm being paid now, Iâll quit.â I donât think there is any chance theyâd do that. What if we said, âForget just food and wages, you can have whatever you want. Gold plated yachts, whatever. The catch is that you donât get to tell us what laws to pass or who gets to live where or what infrastructure to build.â do you think theyâd take that deal? I bet youâd have trouble finding even one who would.
10 Likes
Iâll take your point. Not sure I agree â if you have found the right guy â that itâs enough to excuse the comments as made, but having a more complex understanding of where someone is coming from is always a good thing. Hopefully weâll get confirmation from the source, if heâs not banned.
4 Likes
Iâd agree, mostly. What stops me from being hard-core communist is that the function of income at almost any percentile level seems to increase as inequality increases until it reaches a high enough point that it declines down the other side (and the US seems pretty far from that point, even now).
From a straight income point of view, even poor Americans have it much better than their equivalent decile counterparts pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Iâm not certain that most Americans making $60K would be willing to earn $45K as long as people earning $2M earned only $500K.
Itâs one reason why I consider it important to keep inequality down in my own country. Once people have tasted higher earnings, itâs very hard to go back, no matter how large the social cost. Certainly the average industrialized voter will fight tooth and nail to preserve the truly massive inequality between their country and the rest of the world. Witness the growth of candidates on both the left and right trying massively increase global inequality.
Better to have never been given the opportunity for those higher earnings through higher inequality (except by migrating to the US, which still happens in as large numbers as the US will allow).
No, I wouldnât. The people making $2M? Fuck those guys.(*) Now, if the my $60K would drop to $45K and the people making $20K would actually get paid enough to get out of poverty? (You know, decent medical for everyone, education, all that wild exotic stuff?) Yeah, letâs do that.
Edit: (* - That is to say Iâm not in favor of punishing them, unless, of course, theyâre whiny little whiners that whine.** Slashing their income has no appeal in and of itself, but improving the lives of the impoverished does.)
** - Such as those that complain that they might have to give up their 3rd (or greater) home. Just a random example, of course.
9 Likes
20 posts of derailment later, weâre starting to get back to my point: the rich arenât âjob creatorsâ - the real job creators are a sizeable middle class with a decent amount of disposable income.
Without a great many folks being able to buy stuff, entrepreneurs will swing their dicks in vain.
14 Likes
Has everyone considered that wealth is just a half-arsed proxy for societyâs esteem?
(If you disagree, I challenge you to break it down to something as fundamental.)
Money is just a concept that we all agree on; it has no inherent value beyond denoting our collective judgement of value. And what society currently says, effectively, is that some people deserve to live in obscene luxury, while others deserve to be denied food, shelter, and medical care.
And, staggeringly, itâs not hard to find people, particularly American people, who are happy to defend and justify this broken arrangement. It makes my fucking blood boil.
9 Likes
There is about as good as the Libertarian argument gets. Given no objective metric for value, money represents how much we value something (barring fraud, etc.), with the proviso (which often gets lost) that people who are not âvaluedâ, cannot give value to something else.
That said, I obviously think that the collective will of the people (as poorly expressed through government) can express esteem that they do not express individually. For example, providing healthcare, government assistance, etc.
Reason #637 why I am not a Libertarian is that I believe individual action is not the only legitimate expression of our esteem (or beliefs in general).
6 Likes
I donât think your perception of income inequality throughout the world is in line with reality. A quick check of the wikipedia list of countries by income inequality shows you a sampling of the countries that have more extreme inequality than the US. It varies depending on what measure you use, but it includes economic powers like Sierra Leon, Honduras and Rwanda.
A monarchy would usually have extreme income inequality, as the wealth is almost entirely controlled by a single person. Dictatorships too. If you compare US incomes to other countries you find itâs one of the highest in the world, but has a lot of countries not too far off (and a few above). So if you take Norway, which has about 10% lower average income than the US, and compare at each decile to the US youâre going to find that Norway is better off at the lower deciles. Take pretty much any good thing you can think of - lower child mortality, lower poverty, higher average education - and map it against income inequality and the result is that income inequality is just bad. Most parts of the world came from a monarchy/dictator state, passed through an inequality state similar to the present US and arrived at a better state.
I donât doubt that as you start approaching 100% income equality the relationship breaks down - we are talking about a metric, not something we should gamify and maximize for its own sake.
As for people not wanting to do something that is better for them because they canât see past their end of their noses, weâre all painfully aware of that problem.
6 Likes
The problem is with a complex specialized society you need some sort of credit for labor done as barter completely falls apart and so far money is as far as I can tell the best solution.
Why we value it over doing the work and other things is what is fucked up.
What really makes me have a conniptions is the whole âgold standardâ folks where they donât realize gold is fiat currency as it is worth X amount because well we say so.
4 Likes
[goldbug voice]But, but, gold! It has inherent value! See how shiny it is? See its luster and beauty? It can provide a more solid foundation than paper can, because I believe it can, and because I donât trust the government. How do I know that they wonât print more money and make my money worthless? But they canât print more gold! [/goldbug voice]
I wish that I was exaggerating, too⌠
7 Likes
But I can wipe my ass with paper gold leaf falls apart.
