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posted by martyb on Tuesday December 08 2015, @11:28AM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:28PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:28PM (#274021)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 09 2015, @06:01PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday December 09 2015, @06:01PM (#274036)

    You believe in the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, etc or you are not an American.

    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.

    You say the magic words "There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is His Prophet." and mean it and you are Muslim

    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.

    Good luck being taken serious as a nuclear physicist if you dispute E=MC^2.

    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.