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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: 3, Interesting) by zugedneb on Tuesday December 08 2015, @12:43PM
Eventually we will still end up there: all will not need to work to provide for all.
When is that eventually, though?
Also, I would still work my ass off...
More free software, more free and open engineering - and for the "greater good", instead of escapism.
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 08 2015, @01:29PM
This assumes that new and exciting things will never be created and need people to work to produce them. Progress creates more work not less.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @02:44PM
Only a minority of people work on new and exciting things. The majority of people work on old and boring things that will eventually be rationalized away. And actually, if those people do not need to get boring, badly paid jobs just to survive, maybe they can use the time to learn something that enables them to work on new and exciting things.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:25PM
The majority of people work on old and boring things that will eventually be rationalized away.
Explain otherwise normal people none the less putting on their peasant hat and growing a garden. They'll always be social signalling BS like that. When the weather is foul and I'm stuck doing peasant work on my suburban estate I complain to myself about this, why can't all these bastards just have a natural prairie instead of trying to emulate a crap middle class imitation of a feudal English manorhouse? Bastards. Then I go back to mowing the lawn and clearing brush.
Another example of weird seemingly pointless social signalling is in neocon circles they have a nearly sexual fetish for small retail business, a couple hundred bucks a month guaranteed will go right into renting that quaint little store front for our froo froo antique store. "Job Creatuhs! Job Creatuhs!" Or our filthy family restaurant will be full of people because no one can microwave reheat processed glop from Sams Club quite like we can. Neocons have a huge fetish over it and as long as running a small business gets them immense social capital they'll keep on losing money every year. From an economic standpoint having a hundred people in a city center LARP that they're real retailers is strangely useful and moderately entertaining to the tourists. It keeps them out of trouble and off the streets anyway.
I bet plenty of tech type people here would live in eternal startup land, kinda like every unemployed loser in California has been a wanna be actor for the last century or so, every goof who can string two lines of code together but isn't good enough to actually get hired will be "running his own startup". You get a lot of social capital for being a startup founder, well, at least until everyone else figures out that everyone knows every loser can be a tech startup founder.
boring, badly paid jobs
Market pressure will eliminate boring just like financial markets eliminate lack of capital. Come on, be honest, every guy's got a little kid in him who would like to F around with heavy construction equipment. Due to labor market pressure there won't be obnoxious overseers and crap working conditions either. If you could basically F around with a bulldozer all day with some friends having fun while incidentally digging a ditch, they'll be people willing to do it. Heck, people might pay to access a nice enough playground. Its the minecraft effect. People will build insane stuff in minecraft even if you mildly stand in their way or slightly make fun of them. You can whip slaves to build a pyramid, or you can have a fun working environment and get out of the way of the people who make a pyramid in minecraft for the sheer fun of it. Here's an interesting thought experiment. Making AI to replace people is really hard... Isn't it easier to make an AI that is just smart enough to prevent drunk people from killing each other? So me and the boys from work will head down to the gravel pit with a couple six packs and the AI will make sure we call get home drunkenly safe in a (robot-)cab and maybe we fill some rail cars with gravel and maybe we just dig trenches to spell out obscene words and pix for passengers of airplanes to look at and wonder who let those drunken idiots play with construction equipment...
Its kinda like painting. You can torture an illegal alien with beatings, non-OSHA gear, and low pay to paint a room, but the world also has people that you just can't stop from painting fine art, its gotta be expressed by them or they burst, you don't even have to whip them (unless they like that kind of thing).
You have to pay people a lot of money or threaten them with prison if you want to treat them like soldiers aka treat them poorly. Yet, the boring sequel game industry shows people will pay boatloads of money to run around with guns and shoot anything that moves. How interesting is that, that merely changing management style converts a workplace of mercenaries and convicts into freely paying donors and volunteers...
And from the powerful bird:
Progress creates more work not less.
Progress always eliminates work. Its just that for a century, temporarily, we've been explosively ramping up energy consumption. Mostly by the one time gift of burning fossil fuels. And increasing energy consumption expands work faster than progress can destroy it. So far, for about a century. And that's ending.
Now what happens to work when energy consumption declines because the cheap stuff has all been burnt, and progress destroys another bazillion jobs on top of it? Basically the civilized world looks like the 3rd world, best case scenario, while the 3rd world basically starves and dies. Or fights till we're all dead, perhaps on both sides. Or immigrate till we all starve equally?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @01:49PM
Many people would still work, after all they still want their cars and houses and smartphones and cable TV while this "basic" income would only really pay the rent on a tiny apartment and basic groceries.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday December 08 2015, @05:04PM
Initially it might be small and only pay for a craphole. But it is a certainty, and everyone who voted to enact this is counting on it, that every future election will turn on exactly one issue. Resolved: Basic Income is too low and should be increased. A few politicians will take the con view and prosper due to local conditions but the vast majority will take and win on the pro side.
The whole scheme is wicked and based on an evil idea. Thou Shalt Not Covet. There is a reason those old fractious, covetous Jews put variations of that as three of the Ten Commandments along with Thou Shalt Not Steal. And every other moral code has similar injunctions even if they don't hammer it quite as hard. It leads to very bad things.
There is no money fairy. There is no 'stuff' fairy either. The government doesn't have any free stuff to hand out, all it can do is steal it from the politically weak and give it to the strong. As soon as the poor discover they have the political strength to use the government as a tool to indulge their envy of the productive and wealthy few the whole democracy idea dies. Exactly like it has every time in history. Our Founders tols us that the government (and by extension every Western democracy/republic that copied) they gave us was designed for a religious and moral people and would serve no other. This is precisely why.
(Score: 1) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday December 09 2015, @12:11AM
And theocracy worked SO well for us in the past, didn't it? Working reeeeeal nice for all those hellholes in the Middle East, huh?
Don't be stupid, Morris. You're as much of a fundamentalist--blinkered, implacable, unreasonable--as any of the mullahs, when your economic shibboleths are at stake.
All of this is assuming that scarcity will always be the rule all the time everywhere forever. We are well past the technological point where the very basics of life (water, basic housing, basic food) should be in any way "scarce." It boggles my mind how pseudo-Calvinistic zealots like you would rather see hundreds of thousands perish than see your ideals tainted.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by jmorris on Wednesday December 09 2015, @01:32AM
All of this is assuming that scarcity will always be the rule all the time everywhere forever.
If food someday ceases to be a 'economic good', i.e. traded for money, then that will be an entirely different situation. But today if you can't stretch forth your hand and call a lasagna out of the Internet or a replicator. If you want one Stouffer's/Nestle has to trade with a lot of people to get the ingredients, hire a lot of people to run a state of the art, safe, clean manufacturing (Ok, I hope the one I have spinning in the microwave was made in such a place...) facility, transport it to Walmart, etc. And they all have to pay taxes. None of those people love you, they certainly don't love me, none do it for the lulz, they all want to get paid; because they want things too. That lasagna I'm about to chow down on is most certainly an 'economic good.' If I am to eat it, you can't so we must all bid on it, resulting in establishing a price. So long as the price we consumers are willing to pay exceeds Nestle's cost to make and deliver them they will keep making them. Yum. This is the division of labor, supply and demand; This. Is. Economics. No government intervention or socialist bullcrap can do anything other than make it harder for me to get my lasagna, and for others to simply be forced to go hungry tonight because you dumb fucks raised the price too high for them.
It boggles my mind how pseudo-Calvinistic zealots like you would rather see hundreds of thousands perish than see your ideals tainted.
Yet it is Capitalism that feeds the hungry and socialism that fills mass graves. Your so-called good intentions kill, while my greed feeds the hungry billions. Every single time each system is tried we see the exact same result. The formula for prosperity is dead simple. Establish the Rule of Law, keep the money sound enough to make economic calculation practical, enough public safety to allow longterm investment and capital formation without fear of roving bands of warlords, freedom to start a business and keep the profits along with suffering the losses. Do those fairly simple things and prosperity results. Every time.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:24AM
Ah, and here you have hit on the problem: loss is socialized. Cronyism. We do NOT have capitalism in this nation. And something I wish to hell you people would wrap your minds around: we never will.
Got it? Humans do not work that way. Purity of ideals is nice and all, but humans are imperfect. Power goes to power, money to money, privilege to privilege. Without some kind of countermeasure, laissez-faire inevitably results in feudalism. The things you decry as socialism are all that's holding us back from a dystopian nightmare. And so long as you speak out against them, I challenge you to quit driving on the interstate, quit drinking treated water, wave the snowplows away from your street, and so forth. What Obama meant by "you didn't build that" is that no man (or woman!) is an island.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...