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from the handouts-instead-of-gov't-jobs-or-worker-owned-cooperatives dept.
Common Dreams reports
As a way to improve living standards and boosts its economy, the nation of Finland is moving closer towards offering[1] all of its adult citizens a basic permanent income of approximately 800 euros per month.
[...] The monthly allotment would replace other existing social benefits, but is an idea long advocated for by progressive-minded social scientists and economists as a solution--counter-intuitive as it may first appear at first--that actually decreases government expenditures while boosting both productivity, quality of life, and unemployment.
[...] The basic income proposal, put forth by the Finnish Social Insurance Institution, known as KELA, would see every adult citizen "receive 800 euros ($876) a month, tax free, that would replace existing benefits. Full implementation would be preceded by a pilot stage, during which the basic income payout would be 550 euros and some benefits would remain."
[...] Under the current welfare system, a person gets less in benefits if they take up temporary, low-paying or part-time work--which can result in an overall loss of income.
[...] As Quartz reports, previous experiments with a basic income have shown promising results:
Everyone in the Canadian town of Dauphin was given a stipend from 1974 to 1979, and though there was a drop in working hours,[PDF] this was mainly because men spent more time in school and women took longer maternity leaves. Meanwhile, when thousands of unemployed people in Uganda were given unsupervised grants of twice their monthly income, working hours increased by 17% and earnings increased by 38%.
[1] Link to The Independent in TFA was redundant IMO.
...and, before anyone shouts SOCIALISM!, this is actually Liberal Democracy (of the Bernie Sanders type).
An actual move toward Socialism would subsidize the formation of worker-owned cooperatives. An initiative to do that was floated in 1980. 5 percent of taxes would have gone into a pool (kinda like USA's Social Security fund). The Finns rejected it. Source: Prof. Richard Wolff
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 08 2015, @02:27PM
You are very misinformed about the administrative costs of welfare programs: As an example SNAP (food stamps) spends at most 5% [politifact.com] of its funds on anything other than paying for people's groceries. Social Security overhead [ssa.gov] is similarly quite low.
As far as what the purpose is, it depends a lot on which state you're in: In some states, the goal is to do exactly what it's supposed to do, namely keep poor people alive when things go wrong for them. In other states, the goal is to force poor people to take drug tests and be required to take *any* job that they can get, regardless of whether that job is something they can do. In other states, the goal is to have so much ridiculous bureaucracy that people who need help don't get it from the government but instead rely on "faith-based" charity and the like. But the important thing to realize is that many welfare systems in the US are designed to not function correctly.
As far as Finland's proposal goes, yes, it absolutely is socialism. But in my view, that's not a problem, because socialism is an economic system, not a political system. If the people of Finland decide they don't want socialism anymore, they can simply vote in a new government that dismantles it. And seeing as how the Finns are doing much better by most measurements (GDP per capita, life expectancy, educational attainment, etc) than, say, the US, I'd be hard-pressed to argue that they're doing it wrong.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 08 2015, @02:58PM
And seeing as how the Finns are doing much better by most measurements
There's no dispute of that on either side, which is weird, because there's a lot of hand waving about how Finland will be ruined, as if we should care, as if hand waving proves anything, yet the actual numbers on the ground imply its a lot more likely Finland will be bailing us out rather than the other way around, aside from the size disparity.
I think the opposition tactics at this time are a pretty strong indication everyone on all sides thinks the Finland experiment is highly likely to work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @06:07PM
Actual Socialism would determine the total amount of work required to be done in the area and divide that equally among the workers available and would have those workers deciding what to do with the profits (with each worker having an equal vote).
If you still have a system where some workers are without work and/or a living wage because of greed [wikimedia.org] or poor planning, you have Capitalism.
If you still have a system where there are idle rich and unequal distribution of wealth, you have Capitalism.
...and Prof. Richard Wolff, a Socialist, does not like the Basic Income notion.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday December 08 2015, @09:41PM
If you still have a system where some workers are without work and/or a living wage because of greed or poor planning, you have Capitalism.
Actually it is you who are totally ignorant as to Capitalism.
In an unfettered market, it is pretty much impossible to have unemployment. This is Econ 101 stuff. The wage rate is the clearing point on the supply and demand curve where all willing sellers of labor find a willing buyer. Unemployment is a feature of government interventionism, government meddling with the unfettered free market, this concept is universally agreed on by all economists. It truly is Econ 101 stuff and you are entirely ignorant of it. Attempts to Handwave reality away with undefinable slogans like 'a living wage' are mere sophistry.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 08 2015, @10:26PM
So let's say there's no minimum wage, none of that OSHA/MSHA nonsense, no Affordable Care Act, and so forth. Heck, let's get rid of child labor laws too. Any other labor regulation you'd like.
Well, in 1900, in the US, those were precisely the conditions in place. So, according to your argument, unemployment should have been at or near 0%. But in fact, it was about 10.0% [ssa.gov].
Attempts to Handwave reality away with undefinable slogans like 'Econ 101 stuff' are mere sophistry.
Oh, and "Unemployment is a feature of government interventionism, government meddling with the unfettered free market, this concept is universally agreed on by all economists." is decidedly not true, unless you think Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Ben Bernanke, and Janet Yellen (to name just a few who would disagree with you there) are not economists.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday December 09 2015, @02:03AM
Well, in 1900, in the US, those were precisely the conditions in place.
Why do say these things when you know I will only hurt you. :)
Let us examine this claim, shall we? There are no truly reliable records, according to the U.S. government at least. BLS has nothing and I found some suggestions at ssa.gov which is probably your source since it mentions the 10.0 @1900 data point. Keep reading. They speak of unemployment in various trades and specifically exclude agriculture. What is this? A trade has no unemployment rate, a man laid off as a dockworker can sign on as a crewman on a ship, go be a lumberjack, whatever it takes. This is the unfettered free market, you assure me! But history does not agree. Go ask Google about the history of the organized labor movement and your confusion will be resolved. Labor unions raise the rate of labor and cause unemployment as a by-product. Of course unions are semi-government entities in that they are allowed partial (and usually unofficial) access to the State's monopoly on the use of violence; there ain't be a union yet that didn't crack heads. Modern unions are fully State sanctioned monopolies giving them direct access to the State's force.
this concept is universally agreed on by all economists." is decidedly not true,
Show me somebody who disputes the law of supply and demand and I will show you a politician, not an economist. Most of the people you mention would use weasel words like "structural unemployment" but when you look it up it is fancy language for unemployment caused by things like unions, minimum wage laws and other interference in the market. They know the price of their policy proposals and think it worth it. But at least they know there is a price, you seem to still be ignorant of those basics of your so called economic policy choices. Of course some of the people you cite do not believe in the free market as a concept and can scarcely even be put into the economics category. Communism is not an economic theory, it is a political/religious idea. Marx has about as much relevance to current economic thought as Freud on modern theories of the mind.
Your homework assignment. "The impossibility of economic calculation under socialism." Search that phrase and stretch your mind. The Wikipedia article is OK but the original paper is also available. The Internet is truly a marvel.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 09 2015, @04:40PM
OK, how about going further back, to a time when labor unions were illegal? Say, the 1830's. According to you, without labor regulations, and without legal state-sanctioned labor unions, unemployment must be 0%. But in fact, in 1837, while we don't have exact figures, we do have all sorts of historical evidence that unemployment quickly became rampant after a banking crisis. The same sort of thing had happened in 1819. The onus is on you to explain that obvious contradiction - no labor law, no labor unions, what's causing the unemployment?
That's a classic No True Scotsman [logicalfallacies.info] argument: You said "all economists say X", I provided a list of economists, many of them quite prominent in the field, that dispute that, and you responded by declaring that by definition none of those people can be economists.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:28PM
I'm saying you don't actually know what some of those people actually believe. Other than the hardcore Marxians they do believe in economic basics like supply and demand, structural unemployment, etc. They just also believe in interventionism, mostly for reasons best described as religious since it isn't a position most reason themselves into but accept as articles of faith in the Government as God. Helicopter Ben and Yellen may be dead wrong about just about everything and acting more as politicians in their positions at the Fed but they have at least studied economics.
As for the others, it is not a "No True Scotsman" fallacy to say anyone who rejects the Law of Supply and Demand is not an economist. It is definitional, reject that and you need a different term for your new philosophy to avoid confusion. Some things are so basic that it is a requirement. You believe in the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, etc or you are not an American. You say the magic words "There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is His Prophet." and mean it and you are Muslim, and if not there is no amount of weaseling that can convince anyone that you are one. Good luck being taken serious as a nuclear physicist if you dispute E=MC^2.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 09 2015, @06:01PM
That's not the way that works, actually. I'm an American in a legal sense because I was born to at least one parent (actually, in my case, both parents) who were American citizens, and also because I was born within the United States. And in a social and practical sense, I'm an American because all of my permanent residences have been within the United States. But I don't believe in the ideas of the Pledge of Allegiance, both because I think my allegiance should be to the country and its people rather than its flag, and because the bit about "under God" is thoroughly against one of the fundamental values of that country.
Actually, that's not the only thing you have to do to be a Muslim. Many of the splits within Islam come from the fact that various leaders disagree on the specifics of what you have to do to be a Muslim (e.g. ISIS declares that the Iranian ayatollahs aren't Muslims and vice versa), but they do all agree that there are 4 other steps you have to take as a Muslim - charity, prayer, observing Ramadan, and the Hajj if you can somehow manage it.
In 2011, there was an observation in a serious experiment that suggested that special relativity might be wrong. Subsequent retests determined that there was an error in the experiment, and the observation was not repeated successfully, but it's not like the people who made that observation were kicked out of the physics departments they worked for. Furthermore, in science, it's not about belief (like it is with Islam or political allegiance) but about standing up to testing: Physicists support special relativity because it has so far stood up against experiment, not because they think Einstein is an inviolable source of truth.
When we go to apply your definition argument to economics, you basically are arguing that the laws of supply and demand cannot be questioned. Which is a strange notion, since economists such as Thorstein Veblen have found cases where those laws don't hold true in reality, which means those laws aren't laws after all. And behavioral economists have repeatedly demonstrated that actual humans don't even come close to making perfectly rational economic decisions, a pre-condition for those laws. Why would you demand adherence to "laws" that are demonstrably wrong or at least incomplete in order to accept somebody as studying the field where those "laws" were first put forward?
To apply your argument about economics to physics, you are basically arguing that Einstein was not a physicist because he disagreed with Isaac Newton's laws of momentum and force, because up until Einstein Newton's laws were considered basic and inviolable rules.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday December 09 2015, @03:52AM
You aren't talking about reality.
Why don't you expand your horizons [wordpress.com] a bit? I know you won't, but at least you can't honestly say that no one can refute your arguments.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:18AM
Defective premise warning. They accept as given that the government must meddle and then circle around and argue a free market does not currently exist (which is true) and cannot ever exist (which is not).
Point #2 does have virtue though. The current practice of publicly traded corporations is defective in that it allows shareholders to freely reap profits while avoiding all responsibility for wrongdoing. This problem isn't unknown in serious economic thought.
#3 though is a horrible muddled mess. Misses himself discusses the difference in wage rates between unlimited trade and unlimited trade AND unlimited mobility of labor. Yea, unlimited immigration is going to suck hard. Of course the other important difference between wages in different countries is accumulated capital and the effect that has on the productivity of labor.
#6 argues the virtues of inflation. No. Here I stop and just skim, the stupid burns. Natural inflation and deflation which can occur even in a real free market with solid metallic monetary units (i.e. PMs) are tolerable. They are by their nature temporary adjustments, a side effect of money itself being just another commodity subject to supply and demand. Intentional inflation via money printing is always an evil.
#9 has some merit but of course as presented is just commie agiprop
#12 says governments can pick winners and losers in the economy better than the invisible hand. What is it with you guys and the fetish of government competence, a claim utterly unsupported by any tangible evidence anywhere, anywhen. Your philosophy actually requires omniscience by the State, but I'll take a good verifiable claim of merely above average competence sustained long enough to rule out blind chance.
#14 is industrial stupid and envy. If you guys really believe that why don't rich lefty types run their own companies this way? Screw middle management! Pay em crap! Spread the wealth around and show everybody how it should be done. I won't wait to see it, because it won't happen.
#15 is ignorant. We capitalists recommend stable rule of law and property rights as the first step to economic development in the third world. We take it as a given that the people there will engage in entrepreneurial activity if that prerequisite is met, they will accumulate capital and begin the march up and carry their countymen with them.
#16 is exactly wrong. We aren't smart enough to understand the market well enough to meddle. No planner CAN be knowledgable enough. Information Theory has now utterly ended this argument.
#17 is almost sefl evidently true. Rule of law and stable money are far more important in getting economic development kick started. Education beyond teaching the ruling class the importance of limiting their activity to those areas and not killing the goose before it can start laying golden eggs is the most important thing.
#19 is true. Since the author realizes and even makes a point of noting we do NOT live in a free economy it is kinda lame to have the rest of the document, which argues against the current order and uses current events to condemn a free economy.... ah well, intellectual consistency has never been the mark of the progressive.
The summary is full of lulz. "My criticism is of free market capitialism, and not all kinds of capitalism." OMG Give me the effing roll of duct tape so my brains will kinda stay in the same spot when my head splodes reading that. Weapons grade stuff you found there.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday December 09 2015, @06:10AM
See. I told you so.
Your inherent biases limit your ability to process differing viewpoints.
How sad for you.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday December 09 2015, @06:22AM
And no, I'm not going to respond point by point to your sloppy and selective (and if I do say so myself, ineffective) rebuttal of the source material.
You are a fanatic [reference.com] (although I think this definition [brainyquote.com] applies to you as well), so it's extremely difficult to have reasoned discourse with you, unless I agree with your dotty ideas.
As such, please carry on with your myopic and self-destructive world view.
I won't try to get involved with you and your love affair with the propaganda you've internalized. Toodles!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @02:48PM
Nonsense. It would be true if production of workers were done by worker factories with the intent to sell/rent them to companies. Such worker factories would then just ramp down worker production if less workers are needed. But workers are created by people without asking whether the job market is in need of more workers. Indeed, they don't think of it as producing workers, they think of it as having children.