Debt Rattle March 6 2017
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Dorothea Lange Negro woman who has never been out of Mississippi July 1936 • The Government Doesn’t Actually Want Housing To Be More Affordable
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle March 6 2017]Thomas Paine neglects to observe that for a man to eat and not work, another man must work and not eat. It would be different if you could roam the wild earth with your mouth open and skittles would fall in, but being human is not like that. EVERY thing we eat, every thing we do for our very life involves work, involves transforming the raw forest into life. So it’s jolly to support the “rights” of the dispossessed, but you are and must do so only by denying the rights of those who transform raw nature into human substance with raw, precious time, great intelligence, and sweat, i.e. with hard, unrelenting work. That’s why the philosophical basis of the nation is to do what you like so long as you do not harm others, a.k.a. Liberty, as is their Right of free action given by a Creator. TAKING the life-work of others without their permission is not and can never be a “Right.” That’s why we have representation NOT of a Democracy but a Republic, and require due compensation in Eminent Domain for example. Rights, properties, can not be curtailed without excruciating due process, a point so long forgotten we can actually discuss this with a straight face.
From long experience, I know whenever I hear this language, they are about to take more of my life and work without due process, leaving me and my land more impoverished than we already are. My and our labor will go to the slightly poorer but far smarter men who do not work because — why should they? — and the wide majority of it to the redistributor’s castle and yacht as their fee. If Paine wants to return to a society of hunter-gatherers, owning little or nothing, yes, this plan may work. But I have the strong feeling that a foreign power would invade and dispossess this proposed bounty, as the people would lack adequate means of resistance, as was hard-proven the first time.
So, let me ask you, in a world of unemployed men and robot overlords, the owner of the robot factory is just going to give you your life’s worth and never ask anything in return? Nothing at all? Really now? Would that not be the income disparity we all oppose now, but times a million, with the life of every other man hung in the balance? It does not seem a plan in accordance with any part of the ten thousand year history of human nature, but maybe this time, right?
@Dr. D.
Thomas Paine neglects to observe that for a man to eat and not work, another man must work and not eat.Therefore, you must be promoting massive starvation and death.
income divorced from work- already exists. It is called capital income.
It’s also called… Welfare …. Pension ….. Disability income … Unemployment income …. Gambling …. Stock market … interest …. dividends … Debt slavery
Those that are falling through the cracks need a minimum living income
The universal basic income
Dr.D – The vast majority of workers do nothing even closely related to food shelter or clothing. Those who are the biggest consumers (and polluters) the rich, do absolutely nothing it is beneath them to work, their money works for them. The facts are that there is no need for every living breathing being to work, most of what they do is make work anyway. Your argument smacks of the old concern that nothing will ever get done unless people are desperate enough to do it or die.
Basic income is not the answer by itself. Thats like someone dying from too many leeches all over his body and all the Dr. does is put in an IV of blood and sends him home.
Private ownership of land and resources is disputable enough in itself. That all revenues of them must also be paid out exclusively to private owners, and not taxed to a degree by the community living on the land for its benefit, is quite another step. None of these things is as obvious as our ‘education’ makes them seem; what we learn is goal seeked towards a particular point of view.
It’s easy to just discard these ideas as communism or something, but Paine and Henry George were not fools.
And then we haven’t yet discussed why we tax work, instead of for instance land. Look, it’s simply not true to say that anyone would need to work and not eat for everyone who doesn’t work (and that’s presuming people wouldn’t work; some might not, but many do not now).
The oil beneath our communities’ land provides us all with an average of at least 100 energy slaves. That’s the energy required to feed 30 billion Americans, presuming an American can feed himself with his work. Now we run into entirely different problems and issues.
There are many who work hard and live in poverty. There are many who live in luxury and don’t work.
Ilargi
There are many who work hard and live in poverty. There are many who live in luxury and don’t work.Indeed; I would very much support UBI and free universal health care.
With few exceptions, most people are wage slaves.
But we’ve been indoctrinated by the Christian “work ethic”, which I consider bullshit and brain washing; that to be morally upright one must “work hard” (what ever that means).
Hardly the mantra of free thinking and properly educated humans.
If one is educated in the west via forced education; the gods help you. You do indeed have some very hard work ahead to break free of your indoctrination.A wide number of issues. First, as you may guess, I don’t mean the working person literally starves, just that he does work for goods he can’t enjoy, just as the receiver gets those goods for work he doesn’t do.
Astonishing hyperbole to advocate mass dieoff. If people keep their own work, they will do the work they feel like doing or must do to survive. It’s the opposite that happens in history. While yes, some always fall off if work is required, some are falling off now. Some fell off in every socialist systems, too. In fact, to support a few extra at the bottom, 100% of the society was impoverished, a perfect example of diminishing returns. However in systems of mass redistribution, when the center fails as is happening now, millions die because they have no goods, no skills, and are not nearby the work that sustains them. Then like France or Ukraine, Zimbabwe or Berlin, they attack and wipeout the very production and producers that sustain them, no longer understanding how production works. So you get the same number of people unserved PLUS the option of a mass dieoff. If you’re in Lexington, 1840, how do you not eat? You wander off to a field and cut a deal with the farmer to help him grow more, win win. You glean the field or sit in his church or on his porch until he helps you. If you’re in Lexington today, the fields, the factories, the energy that sustains you are 100, 1,000, 10,000 miles away. That’s baked into a re-distributive system because you and the whole neighborhood no longer has a shovel, a shuttle, a loom. You have an EBT card from Chase, calling on a farmer in Argentina and an oil rig in Alaska. No leverage, no options. So, direct opposite: if you work you have skills, options, networks, tools, leverage, values. Your argument is literally that working kills people, but sitting around saves them. I don’t see how that can be supported.
This helps solve the second problem that most of the work we do is useless. Granted. But that’s not related to whether the work people do is then handed to others. I mean, 50% of the work is handed away in taxes now. Are we richer? Are the poor cared for in Cleveland or in Greece? Not so much. It is however, wildly more inefficient. The problem is that the system has been hijacked, and the work is all mispriced. That can only happen with widespread intervention.
This goes to having oil slaves. Sharing the oil with “The Nation” is fine but you don’t get oil from a puddle with a bucket. Somebody has to find it, drill it, ship it, refine it, and this is ever-harder, less certain work, now at a 10:1 energy ratio. So, the guys who get up at 5am and work with toxic, dangerous, rare, expensive equipment should just give it away? Hand it to the guy who pushes the fries button, the mattress salesman, safe and warm on the 9-5? Because it’s the “people’s” oil. Okay, so far as it goes, if the fry cook wants to drive out to North Dakota in January with a $5M drill and get a couple gallons to refine in his apartment. Otherwise you’re telling the guy standing in the cold in January he doesn’t matter. We’re just going to take his hard work ’cause he didn’t build that. (TM) And he won’t then stay home for what reason, exactly?
This is not to say the work is properly compensated because it overwhelming, hilariously isn’t. How about a stock clicker clipping pennies off a Cisco router in Secaucus, or a Congressman insider trading in collusion with the CEO of Apple, offshoring his profits or paying zero taxes like GE. But to say “it’ll be fair if we redistribute it”, well WHO redistributes it? The same government that allows the tax dodge and the stock clipping? The same government that has so openly, murderously failed us today? Every time for 100 years they’ve added redistribution it’s gotten measurably LESS fair, as the redistributors succumb to predictable blackmail and human weakness. The Soviet Union redistributed it on behalf of the people, and had the same system: a shattered working class with collapsing cities in poverty and a few palatial estates for insiders. We need to move beyond that to systems that have been proven to work. Of which there are very few.
What is a “Capital Income”? “Capital,” is stuff. If you borrow my shovel, should I loan it to you for free? It wears out. What if you break it? In concept, “capital” like money is no different. It’s a marker chit, an open call on PHYSICAL goods in the real world that do real things and like all of us are subject to entropy. So if I loan you my shovel, should I not get paid? But I didn’t do any work! …Oh but I did the work of getting the shovel you want. You won’t pay rent? Fine, I won’t loan it then, make your own shovel out of your own cash labor. This doesn’t speak to whether the rent is accurately priced, but perhaps you see the point of how “Capital,” is not, and can never be divorced from “Work.” Somebody invented it, somebody made it, somebody stored it, somebody fixed it, somebody lent it. That’s work, the seen and the unseen.
Same with “Taxing the land.” Okay, great. Now send that land a legal writ and tell it to deliver a chicken to the SNAP kitchen in Muncie. What? It can’t? Only humans deliver taxes by human effort? Even cutting a tree standing right there or lifting a bucket of water requires limitless human work to transform the “land” into something of value? Yes. And if you tax the “land”, it’s indistinguishable in practice from taxing the work done on that land. Which is all done by ME, not your theories. I’m the one you’re taxing. It’s my life that goes down the drain paying those taxes, in hours of my life I cannot enjoy and cannot recover. YOU then take those hours of my life, using them to relax and watch cable, type on free internet, while I’m in the cold, struggling with a deadly chainsaw. You’re welcome.
This isn’t theory. In my area of flyoverland, most able-bodied people are not working in lieu of the few remaining people who are collapsing of over-work. And as there are ever-fewer workers, ever-less is being accomplished. Such that at this point, the infrastructure itself — electric lines, roads, pipelines, railroads, grain facilities — have collapsed and no longer exist. Yet the solution is to give MORE to the people who aren’t working. And that would be FROM the ever-dwindling handful of men who still are working, with ever-worse tools, for ever-decreasing pay. But nevermind the rights of the working, the only rights that matter are the rights of the people who left the stove cold, the fields empty, and the grain elevator rot.
How do you think that story will end? As a systems analyst wouldn’t you suggest that we cannot redistribute wealth until we have some means by which to HAVE wealth? To create it? And since that means is near collapse we might need to employ more men to do more of the work that now needs to be done? And if redistribution worked so well, what went wrong in the last 100 years? What went wrong in Cuba, Vladivostok, Venezuela, and everywhere else it’s been tried? Is it possible that men who work are as other men and share and help voluntarily, fairly, efficiently, and whose efficiency and local application leads to better outcomes? Because as much as men complete, they also cooperate. In fact, they cooperate far, far more.
What we have today is a system that based on insiders gaming the system for themselves and selling it with happy words and ideas like “sharing”, by which they mean *I* share and they don’t. They could care less. They did not care when 10% of the population was downtrodden, desperate, and unrepresented, and they also do not care when 80% of the population is today. They don’t care what they have to say, do, or report, what lies they tell, what professors they have to pay to write happy books that “should” work, what judges or newsmen or Congressmen or armies they have to buy off. They don’t care. Outlawing commerce and public property is a positive boon for them, because all that remains is the system of raw power and personal favors they already live in, but has eliminated pesky representation and equality under the law. They’d love for you to hand them these keys and say “fix it for me.” Lies. Corruption. Bribery. Murder. Leading to unequal enforcement of the law. That’s your problem. Allowing men to make things, swap them, and keep them from being stolen? Not so much.
Do you believe you have the right to create? To make things? Do you think you should be allowed to trade the things you create for the things made by your neighbors? Do you think others should not be allowed to come to your house and steal your things because they want them? Congratulations, you’re a capitalist.
income divorced from work- already exists. It is called capital income.
It’s also called… Welfare …. Pension ….. Disability income … Unemployment income …. Gambling …. Stock market … interest …. dividends … Debt slavery
Those that are falling through the cracks need a minimum living income
Therefore, what are you promoting for a solution?
Massive starvation and death or The universal basic income
Remember it’s zero sum
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