" We are better off subsidizing work as needed to get more humans doing productive things."
How productive is a thing if people need a subsidy in order to do it? What definition of "productive" are you using? It does not sound like the standard economic one.
Is it your personal moral sense of what is "productive" and what isn't?
" We are better off subsidizing work as needed to get more humans doing productive things."
How productive is a thing if people need a subsidy in order to do it? What definition of "productive" are you using? It does not sound like the standard economic one.
Is it your personal moral sense of what is "productive" and what isn't?
(Based on your comments elsewhere, your personal sense of what's productive might be awfully specific:
I'm pro-capitalist because it works in reality. I like Freddie because he's a (dreaming) idealist Socialist who has really good critiques of clearly false and/or non-working policies of the Left/ Democrats, AND he writes so well it's a pleasure to read him even when I disagree.
Market Capitalism = "Private property, freely made contracts, freedom to buy and sell. Fraud prohibited, contracts enforced." Depends on anti-fraud & contract & private property enforcement = essentially a gov't. (Could be Home Owners Association security).
Certainly NOT "public (=gov't) ownership". All regulations reduce freedom, including the freedom to harm or excessively risk harm.
I'm glad drunk driving is illegal (tho I wish there were more private roads), because I understand the risk is "high" that drunks cause accidents.
Most people want Freedom. And Security. It's an inevitable tradeoff on the Pareto optimal curve that more freedom means less security. BUT, there are actually 330 million (+-) different trade-off curves in the USA, so many millions can want more of either, and even more of both.
General changes to increase security almost always reduce freedom.
Even my proposal for subsidizing jobs, and having a National (or State) Service corps to employ "everybody", needs to be paid for by taxes and reduces the freedom to not pay those taxes.
Eco? You want to argue Marxism, as in China, or USSR or commie Hungary has less pollution than capitalism?
"Mango you ignorant slut"
China is full, full, full of enviro horror shows. Degradation of environment, and dirty water, was endemic thru all commie countries - Hungarian protests in '89 were strongly against the eco problems of commies.
Yeah, Democrat Deep State government workers in the USA, like in Flint, seem too often willing (not equally, but too often) to pollute when they can get away with it. $600+ million judgement, finally, from the 2014 Democrat gov't fiasco.
Admittedly, if you asked these poor folk how much they'd pay for less pollution, it would be really really small. The poor need more, and better, jobs before much Green luxury beliefs.
You can’t have freedoms without liberties, or else at some point someone’s freedom will impose itself on another’s, which can become irreconcilable. This necessitates a balance between the two in the form of regulations of some sort, which is why laws even exist at all.
Laws are, unfortunately, prone to manipulation and corruption when left to the devices of narcissistic people who do not recognize the importance of others needs, and where they intersect with their own.
"You can’t have freedoms without liberties," - don't you mean without limits?
Most laws are specifications of harms, and "just" punishment for those convicted of doing harm. Tho there are lots of victimless crimes where one or both of the consenting adults is considered the victim of their own decision, like drugs or prostitution.
Drug addition harms the addict. Drug legalization increases addiction. Drug laws increase criminal behavior, corruption, gang violence; but decrease harmful addition.
Should we have drug laws? Good arguments both ways.
(One of the few areas my wife and I disagree; with me accepting legalization and more harmful addiction.)
No gov't free benefits can give "self respect". One must earn it, in one's own eyes. Work and production does that. Even subsidized work like raking leaves or picking up litter, worth only $5/hr, subsidized to be $10/hr, such work is worthy of dignity and self respect.
Forrest Gump-like low IQ folk, willing and able to do simple work, deserve respect AND job offers.
I read, and like, Atlas Shrugged - but the Bible is better, and both should be optional, not required, in schools.
I prefer the Chile style "forced savings" retirement, which a person owns. Such a system, put in with Pinochet and Chicago Boys, has allowed Chile to become the richest S.A. country in 2022 after being one of the poorest in 1973.
Chileans recently voted in a socialist - so I expect the, not Voldemorting, but Venezuelization and reduced or negative growth in Chile.
Anybody forced to be in a system that includes payments and benefits, can be against the system but accept the benefits after paying in the payments. Without the SS, Rand wouldn't have starved. But her system's not worth arguing about.
All of it. Fundamentally wrong. Rand lived what she wrote about. People with your opinions only fantasize about yet another failed attempt at collectivism... the collection of ideologies that always fail and always end up in more profound human misery, suffering and death.
So, for you, "productive" means "productive of 'self-respect'" — productive of a sense of having "earn[ed] it, in one's own eyes"?
I do have moral intuitions about the dignity of work, and I suspect they overlap with yours. I am less optimistic, though, about it being workable to define "productivity" that way. For example:
"I had one patient who worked for GM, very smart guy, invented a lot of safety features for cars. He was probably actively saving a bunch of people’s lives every time he checked in at the office, and he still felt like he was worthless, a burden, that he was just draining resources that could better be used for someone else."
I think it's fine for you to have a spiritual notion of "productive" that works for the average person, but not tough edge cases. After all, most people are average. On the other hand, we're no longer so keen on letting tough edge cases just curl up and die anymore, either (seriously, even when someone is Officially In Hospice Now, our system is set up to make this tough).
Scott now writes at Astral Codex 10. He's talking about "imposter syndrome" of worthy folk feeling unworthy.
"Productive" for me is doing work that has value for others. Nobody I know thinks less litter is not better than more litter.
But the "market value" of such work might be so low that few choose to do that work, when there are other alternatives. Including getting gov't benefits, like food stamps, for doing nothing. UBI makes more folk do nothing, which will be terrible for many, probably most, who need more self respect.
Avg IQ =100; almost nobody is exactly average; some 34+34 = 68% of the people are within one 15 point standard deviation of 100: 85-115, which are all sort-of average.
You really think staying home playing video games and watching porn and masturbating all day leads to self respect?
I know Scott's new place, but old classics are still old classics.
"'Productive' for me is doing work that has value for others."
Yes, but how do you *know* it does, unless they're willing to pay you? "Don't play dumb, Midge," I can imagine you saying — because that's exactly what I'm telling myself right now.
But I've also been in volunteer situations where the volunteers took on unusually unpleasant work to make life more pleasant for everyone else involved — and were ultimately treated as "losers" and "parasites" for volunteering, with overt appeals to the reasoning that, if the work were truly worth anything, it would be paid, not volunteer!:
Work does not *have* to be paid for in a free market in order to be "worth something", but the sad fact is that, in a pluralistic society, it's hard to *prove* it's worth anything unless it is.
"You really think staying home playing video games and watching porn and masturbating all day leads to self respect?"
No, *not typically on the margins*. (Indeed, I belong to a tradition that still sees masturbation as a sin: nonetheless, if someone were wanking as a distraction from drug cravings or active suicidal ideation, what kind of shriveled heart would I have to have to not consider that the lesser of evils?) But I also know it's common enough for some people to behave like that and somehow still end up thinking higher of themselves than others who've earnestly beavered away through all the traditional advice about self-improvement.
This is not the economic or Marxist definition of production, there are two different concepts being discussed here.
However, there should absolutely be value seen in productivity and work, yes. I think most Marxists would agree that self worth and dignity is manifest by the generative power of an individual to create change in the world around themselves.
Also, social security is a form of welfare, so there’s that.
SS is both welfare for poor folk, and forced savings for all workers. And a huge benefit of (Christian) capitalist society. It's good to take care that older people, too old to work, have enough for food & clothes & a place to live. Maybe not full "middle class", but not absolute poverty.
Tho those getting it had to work at least 10 years, paying taxes, so they've "earned" it, even those who get more than was taken from them.
Mhmm. So if Ayn Rand was on social security, the welfare system you just described (which doesn’t address the issue of what causes poverty at all), that’s in contradiction with what you claimed her to have not done…
SS isn’t an “earning”. It’s a redistribution-subsidization tax. This is, as you said, not a bad thing. Dunno why Rand would be against that either.
Christian ideology is often spurious correlated to producing capitalism. Check out Max Weber’s “Capitalism and the Protestant Work Ethic” and it’s criticisms. There’s reason to believe that religion can enhance, enable and influence capitalist ideology, but it is not the cause.
My law firm pays learning disabled adults to perform a variety of tasks, some of which have modest utility, most of which we simply wouldn't do but for our desire to employ them. We get some government subsidy for employing them that offsets some portion of the cost, but we all understand that there is still a net cost to us in excess of the benefit of their work. Is it productive? No, not as you and I understand that term. Are we going to keep doing it? Yes, we are. It's charity, but unlike most charity, it isn't degrading. It enhances these people's sense of independence, it makes them more responsible. The things Ben Franklin said about work and idleness are true, regardless whether millennials would call it all cringe. We have citizens that suffer from severe mental health problems and/or drug addiction. I don't have any easy, compelling solutions to those problems, but if there are any, some form of fulfilling make-work is likely to be part of it.
Really? You've never met someone that finds it degrading to buy their groceries with a SNAP EBT card? Never met a child embarrassed by using their free school lunch benefit?
I would add that there are probably a number of jobs that could be done by adults with learning disabilities that would be productive. However, you are absolutely correct, IMO, that work enhances people's sense of independence. It also increases self-worth, self-confidence and sense of purpose.
I agree with Jordan Peterson that the west is having a crisis in people failing to fine enough life meaning. He describes it as having three primary ingredients: love (loving and being loved), spirituality (belief in something bigger than self), and meaningful work. However, he says, and I agree, that work is meaningful even when there is a feeling that it is not meaningful work.
We should not only crush any no-work narratives being promulgated today, but we should both strive to make sure work opportunities are plentiful for everyone, and to encourage people to work and discourage them from accepting a life without work.
Would sex work and the disability fraud I described in reply to ih8edjfkjr count as better than "a life without work"?
Who decides what's work?
(For example, as a fairly traditionally-religious woman, I sometimes run into traditionalist men who have more difficulty than they realize reconciling the "sacred" unpaid work of women in the home with supposing that modern women who only do this work aren't really working at all.)
For one thing, I asked about a specific scenario ("the disability fraud I described in reply to ih8edjfkjr") that I doubt should morally count as fraud, but instead ought to count as something by your own rhetoric you might approve of: maximizing useful work in an intermittently-able person who may lose what intermittent ability he has without steady benefits.
That's very sweet, and I'm glad you do it, though I'm likewise unsure why most charity should be degrading, or what kind of make-work would be generally fulfilling — or whether exemption from minimum-wage so more people wouldn't have to do make-work but could do real work at their own pace would be better.
Granted, the disabled people I know tend not to be stupid, but skilled people with relapsing mental or physical problems for whom some form of disability fraud (getting paid for their skills when they can, but not reporting it if they can't get by without disability benefits) might serve their dignity (pride in using real skills to provide someone else a net benefit rewarded with pay) better than "honest" make-work would. It does seems reasonable to suppose, though, that others might benefit more from the steadiness a more "make-work-y" job might provide.
I know of landlords whose own experience caring for disabled family means they look the other way when their building managers hire the intermittently-sane to help them commit disability fraud — a chance to use real skills for real pay during their lucid months, knowing psychiatric care would disappear altogether if steady benefits did. I've heard of 14(c) exemptions both exploiting the disabled and greatly enriching their lives.
I have an instinctive horror of multiplying carve-out which themselves may be abused, and pessimism that supposed safeguards against idleness, fraud, and malingering, will succeed in punishing enough wrongdoing that they justify punishing those whose "wrong" is suffering ill-suited to carve-outs.
Good for you guys. I used to work for HP. They contracted with PRIDE Industries to bring in the handicapped, and put them to work. Also I spent many years at Intel, again PRIDE Industries did the janitorial work. I was very glad to see the participation, and work alongside the handicapped.
" We are better off subsidizing work as needed to get more humans doing productive things."
How productive is a thing if people need a subsidy in order to do it? What definition of "productive" are you using? It does not sound like the standard economic one.
Is it your personal moral sense of what is "productive" and what isn't?
(Based on your comments elsewhere, your personal sense of what's productive might be awfully specific:
https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/it-takes-two-sides-to-fight-a-war/comment/4891645
)
I'm pro-capitalist because it works in reality. I like Freddie because he's a (dreaming) idealist Socialist who has really good critiques of clearly false and/or non-working policies of the Left/ Democrats, AND he writes so well it's a pleasure to read him even when I disagree.
Market Capitalism = "Private property, freely made contracts, freedom to buy and sell. Fraud prohibited, contracts enforced." Depends on anti-fraud & contract & private property enforcement = essentially a gov't. (Could be Home Owners Association security).
Certainly NOT "public (=gov't) ownership". All regulations reduce freedom, including the freedom to harm or excessively risk harm.
I'm glad drunk driving is illegal (tho I wish there were more private roads), because I understand the risk is "high" that drunks cause accidents.
Most people want Freedom. And Security. It's an inevitable tradeoff on the Pareto optimal curve that more freedom means less security. BUT, there are actually 330 million (+-) different trade-off curves in the USA, so many millions can want more of either, and even more of both.
General changes to increase security almost always reduce freedom.
Even my proposal for subsidizing jobs, and having a National (or State) Service corps to employ "everybody", needs to be paid for by taxes and reduces the freedom to not pay those taxes.
Eco? You want to argue Marxism, as in China, or USSR or commie Hungary has less pollution than capitalism?
"Mango you ignorant slut"
China is full, full, full of enviro horror shows. Degradation of environment, and dirty water, was endemic thru all commie countries - Hungarian protests in '89 were strongly against the eco problems of commies.
Yeah, Democrat Deep State government workers in the USA, like in Flint, seem too often willing (not equally, but too often) to pollute when they can get away with it. $600+ million judgement, finally, from the 2014 Democrat gov't fiasco.
https://www.michiganradio.org/criminal-justice-legal-system/2022-02-04/federal-judge-trims-attorneys-fees-request-in-flint-water-settlement
Admittedly, if you asked these poor folk how much they'd pay for less pollution, it would be really really small. The poor need more, and better, jobs before much Green luxury beliefs.
But he reads and subscribes to Freddie. As you noted originally. People are more complicated than the labels you want to throw on them -- both of you.
You can’t have freedoms without liberties, or else at some point someone’s freedom will impose itself on another’s, which can become irreconcilable. This necessitates a balance between the two in the form of regulations of some sort, which is why laws even exist at all.
Laws are, unfortunately, prone to manipulation and corruption when left to the devices of narcissistic people who do not recognize the importance of others needs, and where they intersect with their own.
"You can’t have freedoms without liberties," - don't you mean without limits?
Most laws are specifications of harms, and "just" punishment for those convicted of doing harm. Tho there are lots of victimless crimes where one or both of the consenting adults is considered the victim of their own decision, like drugs or prostitution.
Drug addition harms the addict. Drug legalization increases addiction. Drug laws increase criminal behavior, corruption, gang violence; but decrease harmful addition.
Should we have drug laws? Good arguments both ways.
(One of the few areas my wife and I disagree; with me accepting legalization and more harmful addiction.)
Liberties are limits to freedoms. “Free from” means that a freedom cannot impede upon something, which is a liberty.
It’s hard-baked into the US constitution, yet not many people seem to understand that.
Yes, but considering that the top 10% of the people pay 90% of all the taxes, it kind of evens out.
Yes, Reading Freddie is like reading Trotsky. Completely wrong solutions, great rhetoric.
Go checkout Marxists.org. They have a great online library.
No gov't free benefits can give "self respect". One must earn it, in one's own eyes. Work and production does that. Even subsidized work like raking leaves or picking up litter, worth only $5/hr, subsidized to be $10/hr, such work is worthy of dignity and self respect.
Forrest Gump-like low IQ folk, willing and able to do simple work, deserve respect AND job offers.
I read, and like, Atlas Shrugged - but the Bible is better, and both should be optional, not required, in schools.
It would be stupid to be forced to pay for SS and not accept benefits - she wasn't dumb. Nor on welfare.
"Ayn Rand was not on welfare when she died. She was, however, receiving Social Security payments. "
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Ayn-Rand-died-on-welfare-and-in-fact-was-on-it-a-few-years?share=1
But good art can be made by bad people - didn't you read Freddie about that in the last couple weeks?
I prefer the Chile style "forced savings" retirement, which a person owns. Such a system, put in with Pinochet and Chicago Boys, has allowed Chile to become the richest S.A. country in 2022 after being one of the poorest in 1973.
Chileans recently voted in a socialist - so I expect the, not Voldemorting, but Venezuelization and reduced or negative growth in Chile.
Anybody forced to be in a system that includes payments and benefits, can be against the system but accept the benefits after paying in the payments. Without the SS, Rand wouldn't have starved. But her system's not worth arguing about.
Chile's economic success was heavily dependant on its nationalized copper mines, which even Pinochet didn't privatise
Funny, Wrong, but funny. Another form of art called unknowing satire.
All of it. Fundamentally wrong. Rand lived what she wrote about. People with your opinions only fantasize about yet another failed attempt at collectivism... the collection of ideologies that always fail and always end up in more profound human misery, suffering and death.
So, for you, "productive" means "productive of 'self-respect'" — productive of a sense of having "earn[ed] it, in one's own eyes"?
I do have moral intuitions about the dignity of work, and I suspect they overlap with yours. I am less optimistic, though, about it being workable to define "productivity" that way. For example:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/
"I had one patient who worked for GM, very smart guy, invented a lot of safety features for cars. He was probably actively saving a bunch of people’s lives every time he checked in at the office, and he still felt like he was worthless, a burden, that he was just draining resources that could better be used for someone else."
I think it's fine for you to have a spiritual notion of "productive" that works for the average person, but not tough edge cases. After all, most people are average. On the other hand, we're no longer so keen on letting tough edge cases just curl up and die anymore, either (seriously, even when someone is Officially In Hospice Now, our system is set up to make this tough).
Scott now writes at Astral Codex 10. He's talking about "imposter syndrome" of worthy folk feeling unworthy.
"Productive" for me is doing work that has value for others. Nobody I know thinks less litter is not better than more litter.
But the "market value" of such work might be so low that few choose to do that work, when there are other alternatives. Including getting gov't benefits, like food stamps, for doing nothing. UBI makes more folk do nothing, which will be terrible for many, probably most, who need more self respect.
Avg IQ =100; almost nobody is exactly average; some 34+34 = 68% of the people are within one 15 point standard deviation of 100: 85-115, which are all sort-of average.
You really think staying home playing video games and watching porn and masturbating all day leads to self respect?
Or maybe you think respect doesn't matter?
I know Scott's new place, but old classics are still old classics.
"'Productive' for me is doing work that has value for others."
Yes, but how do you *know* it does, unless they're willing to pay you? "Don't play dumb, Midge," I can imagine you saying — because that's exactly what I'm telling myself right now.
But I've also been in volunteer situations where the volunteers took on unusually unpleasant work to make life more pleasant for everyone else involved — and were ultimately treated as "losers" and "parasites" for volunteering, with overt appeals to the reasoning that, if the work were truly worth anything, it would be paid, not volunteer!:
Work does not *have* to be paid for in a free market in order to be "worth something", but the sad fact is that, in a pluralistic society, it's hard to *prove* it's worth anything unless it is.
"You really think staying home playing video games and watching porn and masturbating all day leads to self respect?"
No, *not typically on the margins*. (Indeed, I belong to a tradition that still sees masturbation as a sin: nonetheless, if someone were wanking as a distraction from drug cravings or active suicidal ideation, what kind of shriveled heart would I have to have to not consider that the lesser of evils?) But I also know it's common enough for some people to behave like that and somehow still end up thinking higher of themselves than others who've earnestly beavered away through all the traditional advice about self-improvement.
"The heart is deceitful above all else."
This is not the economic or Marxist definition of production, there are two different concepts being discussed here.
However, there should absolutely be value seen in productivity and work, yes. I think most Marxists would agree that self worth and dignity is manifest by the generative power of an individual to create change in the world around themselves.
Also, social security is a form of welfare, so there’s that.
SS is both welfare for poor folk, and forced savings for all workers. And a huge benefit of (Christian) capitalist society. It's good to take care that older people, too old to work, have enough for food & clothes & a place to live. Maybe not full "middle class", but not absolute poverty.
Tho those getting it had to work at least 10 years, paying taxes, so they've "earned" it, even those who get more than was taken from them.
Mhmm. So if Ayn Rand was on social security, the welfare system you just described (which doesn’t address the issue of what causes poverty at all), that’s in contradiction with what you claimed her to have not done…
SS isn’t an “earning”. It’s a redistribution-subsidization tax. This is, as you said, not a bad thing. Dunno why Rand would be against that either.
Christian ideology is often spurious correlated to producing capitalism. Check out Max Weber’s “Capitalism and the Protestant Work Ethic” and it’s criticisms. There’s reason to believe that religion can enhance, enable and influence capitalist ideology, but it is not the cause.
Working people pay into SS. But given the abuse and misuse of the funds, it would better for many people to just have that money to invest themselves.
That’s an interesting way of ignoring how that would affect the impoverished.
Why are people impoverished?
My law firm pays learning disabled adults to perform a variety of tasks, some of which have modest utility, most of which we simply wouldn't do but for our desire to employ them. We get some government subsidy for employing them that offsets some portion of the cost, but we all understand that there is still a net cost to us in excess of the benefit of their work. Is it productive? No, not as you and I understand that term. Are we going to keep doing it? Yes, we are. It's charity, but unlike most charity, it isn't degrading. It enhances these people's sense of independence, it makes them more responsible. The things Ben Franklin said about work and idleness are true, regardless whether millennials would call it all cringe. We have citizens that suffer from severe mental health problems and/or drug addiction. I don't have any easy, compelling solutions to those problems, but if there are any, some form of fulfilling make-work is likely to be part of it.
Really? You've never met someone that finds it degrading to buy their groceries with a SNAP EBT card? Never met a child embarrassed by using their free school lunch benefit?
Is that charity? I've heard plenty of people say government benefits aren't charity.
Bingo. Thank you for what you do there.
I would add that there are probably a number of jobs that could be done by adults with learning disabilities that would be productive. However, you are absolutely correct, IMO, that work enhances people's sense of independence. It also increases self-worth, self-confidence and sense of purpose.
I agree with Jordan Peterson that the west is having a crisis in people failing to fine enough life meaning. He describes it as having three primary ingredients: love (loving and being loved), spirituality (belief in something bigger than self), and meaningful work. However, he says, and I agree, that work is meaningful even when there is a feeling that it is not meaningful work.
We should not only crush any no-work narratives being promulgated today, but we should both strive to make sure work opportunities are plentiful for everyone, and to encourage people to work and discourage them from accepting a life without work.
Would sex work and the disability fraud I described in reply to ih8edjfkjr count as better than "a life without work"?
Who decides what's work?
(For example, as a fairly traditionally-religious woman, I sometimes run into traditionalist men who have more difficulty than they realize reconciling the "sacred" unpaid work of women in the home with supposing that modern women who only do this work aren't really working at all.)
Disability fraud is disgusting and very common.
That does not answer my questions, though.
For one thing, I asked about a specific scenario ("the disability fraud I described in reply to ih8edjfkjr") that I doubt should morally count as fraud, but instead ought to count as something by your own rhetoric you might approve of: maximizing useful work in an intermittently-able person who may lose what intermittent ability he has without steady benefits.
Yes, in Hayward, California, I saw these signs offering to buy diabetic test strips, what's that about?
That's very sweet, and I'm glad you do it, though I'm likewise unsure why most charity should be degrading, or what kind of make-work would be generally fulfilling — or whether exemption from minimum-wage so more people wouldn't have to do make-work but could do real work at their own pace would be better.
Granted, the disabled people I know tend not to be stupid, but skilled people with relapsing mental or physical problems for whom some form of disability fraud (getting paid for their skills when they can, but not reporting it if they can't get by without disability benefits) might serve their dignity (pride in using real skills to provide someone else a net benefit rewarded with pay) better than "honest" make-work would. It does seems reasonable to suppose, though, that others might benefit more from the steadiness a more "make-work-y" job might provide.
I know of landlords whose own experience caring for disabled family means they look the other way when their building managers hire the intermittently-sane to help them commit disability fraud — a chance to use real skills for real pay during their lucid months, knowing psychiatric care would disappear altogether if steady benefits did. I've heard of 14(c) exemptions both exploiting the disabled and greatly enriching their lives.
I have an instinctive horror of multiplying carve-out which themselves may be abused, and pessimism that supposed safeguards against idleness, fraud, and malingering, will succeed in punishing enough wrongdoing that they justify punishing those whose "wrong" is suffering ill-suited to carve-outs.
Good for you guys. I used to work for HP. They contracted with PRIDE Industries to bring in the handicapped, and put them to work. Also I spent many years at Intel, again PRIDE Industries did the janitorial work. I was very glad to see the participation, and work alongside the handicapped.