[Tietäjä]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

That said, one caveat: I'm not so sure a citizen's wage would result in everyone refusing to work. Such a citizen's wage would after all be a living wage, not a yacht-jet-villa wage, no matter how many idealistic kids would like that. And in any case, I for one don't think I'd be happy idling the rest of my life away. Sure, a couple of weeks of vacation from time to time is nice, that always feels like it's over too soon. But 40 years? I'd get bored out of my skull.

I think the idea of perfect duty invalidates all this. No matter what you make of it, citizen wage models are structures where the work of some people is used to grant some people a high degree of personal freedom. If you're opposed to capitalists stealing money from the middle class (to live a life of a free lord), and you're not opposed to leftists stealing money from the middle class (to live a life of a free lord, even if on lower level) then I'll just invite you to join the people in the golden robes in Bolgia six.

If you discuss it with the left, they don't feel they're idling. They feel they're doing all sorts of things. Typically this is art or meditation or philosophy or something like this. They're just not in it for money (for most of them have realized they lack the talent for it).

In short, a lot of them are (on personal level) driving for it because they've realized they've got things to do, but the things they'd want to be doing aren't things anyone could ever actually be paying a salary for, but they don't want to be doing things that'd be paying them a salary. But they want a salary. So they turn to the state, and ask to reduce enough from other people's salary, in order to pay them a granted salary.

The problem of scope is vivid on the differences between the coalition party (right wing, suggesting as low as 300 euros), the greens (who are unarguably the most realistic and intelligent in their suggestion - it still heaps a lot higher a tax on the median worker than there is right now, though), and the left alliance (who will blow it completely out of proportion). Incidentally, social democrats aren't very interested in it, surprise surprise, because there's still the trade union pressure: trade unions rightly see citizen wage models as attempts to tax their members more, thus they're reluctant to give them support.

Then there becomes questions of what's okay and what's not. Some want living expenses related subsidies added on top: this is due to the obvious fact that in certain parts of Finland 1000 euros a month tax-free is well able to get you rent (maybe 300-400, if you live in a cheap place, for a one-room flat, less if it's say state built for the purpose of giving home to low-income people!). In Helsinki, 700-800 is the rent level. So if you top it with tax-free living subsidies, you wind up with 1500-1600 euros net income per month.

This is more than a low-salary worker earns (net).

If you drop it below, people will complain it's not sufficient for minimum living, while it ideologically should be, and they'll use this as a political hammer. In fact, they even suggested - the lefts to the greens - that they should, strategically, initially accept a low level of citizen wage as a system (in order to get the system in place with the agreement of other parties), and then start using leverage to slowly heighten it.

Then again, I'm fairly privileged: I'm reasonably intelligent, fairly well educated and as a result, have a generally nice job. The construction worker or cashier next door probably doesn't quite feel the same way.

I'm on your boat too. However, I do sometimes consider, that if it was fiscally realistic right now, I might read a PhD (it's possible I'll do it anyways at some point), or MsC on something interesting (sociology and psychology are topping the list right now). That being said, as a student, I had subsidies in the range of 400 euros a month (8 months a year, that's 3200 net) and and I worked the first summers on lower-pay (say 4 months, total 5000 net), which means I managed quite fine on around 700. But this is a bit off. But yeah, right now I'm quite a rare a commodity in a sence that I'm on a job I genuinely like, and well, I'm writing on the field of my work on a forum so I suppose that does somewhat mean my job's a bit of a hobby too.

That does sound pretty interesting. I'll read up on it, thanks for the pointers.

It's also curious in the fashion that a negative earnings tax would also be oblivious to the source of earnings. Maybe you would be working 3 days a week spending the rest of the week doing something else. Maybe you'd be in between schools on contingency of temporary low-salary jobs.

That seems to fit pretty well with what I said about people being afraid to spend. Doesn't it?

It does indeed. Has to do with the business cycle thinking.

No, no, no. I did not mean to imply that we can reduce the labour force by an appreciable fraction without feeling it somewhere. Earlier in your post, you wrote this:

I've rarely heard this expressed as succinctly and as accurately. If I were the benevolent dictator of the world, I guess I'd be more inclined to focus on the second (and first, to a lesser extent) choice, rather than the fourth, partly because exponential growth is not maintainable and partly because the extreme equality that exists in the world today is something I have a serious problem with.


I'm not sure if you're making reduced worker productivity (when we ignore technology) out as a bad thing, especially because you also used the word 'utopia', which is rarely used in a positive sense, in my experience.

I'm not making reduced worker productivity a bad thing; I was simply pointing out your misinterpretation on GDP. It doesn't matter whether it's createn by robots with artificial intelligence or not. The "value" of our manual labour in comparison to the "value" of machines and tools is already a tiny minority: which is why the reference to plows and tractors.

Yes, I agree with you: the more technology we can develop that can realistically take over people's jobs and do them instead, the more time off we can have (we're already having a lot in comparison to agrarian cultures; yet we're producing a lot more. it's not because we're better as humans, it's because we're equipped with superior gadgets).

That said, advancing technology is the only reason we've had a period of "exponential growth" in the first place, and it's the only thing that will ever be able to allow it to continue, or transform into more environmentally friendly. More efficient technology, more environment-friendly technology, all will increase GDP when put into production.

There are of course problems: an engineer of the field might argue that we'd already have sufficient AI to set up say car traffic as computer controlled. They might claim, that this could reduce the amount of traffic accidents dramatically. They'll admit, that some accidents would happen and this would be the fault of imperfect AI and programming. Just that, it'd be a big a societal step to lay the blame on something else than a human: would the company that made the code be held responsible, and to which level? Which company would want such responsibility?

If I was the benevolant dictator, I'd put all the best minds available working tirelessly to produce technology that could free more people from what essentially is "forced work" (in terms of philosophical freedom, very few of us would probably - I might be - doing the work they do currently if they hadn't had the need to do it for sustenance. this isn't "freedom" in the sense where citizen wage would grant it, but it could only grant it to a select few).

Interesting. It was my understanding the True Finns were largely nationalistic and eurosceptical, as opposed to our Freedom Party, which started out islamophobic and only became eurosceptical when 'the people' became disillusioned with the demands 'Brussels' made of us.

They are however similar in that there's a dichotomy between their economic views (left-wing) and their societal ones (right-wing). Being left-wing on economic issues appeals to the same feelings of entitlement that enciting hatred and fear of outsiders does, be they Muslims or Greeks. This is not strange or non-sensical, but it is new.

Yeah, they're pretty much opposed to anything the liberal left would come up with (as it occurs to me now, perhaps they're "conservative left"). Feminist-liberal left would allow more immigrants: because everyone's worth their humane value. True Finns feel this ignores the fact that they, as lower middle class white people, are made the pay dogs. They don't want more people here consuming the social welfare network. They're not anti-immigrant: they'd welcome immigrants that work, but probably simply kick out ones that don't (if they had a trigger).

Euroskeptical, yes. But this is another pony they flog with the "they're making us pay for the living expenses of the slacky meditarrenean people". It's knit to the same bit. It's wrong and leftist propaganda to understand this as systematic hatred towards immigrants, it's not. I believe most of them would genuinely welcome immigrants that work hard to in the system, but they perceive most immigrants as deadweight. In the same way they perceive euro as a system to attach deadweight (Greece) to us. They're simply, on their immigrant stance, more in favour of assimilation than immigration.

Their intellectual arguments are no better than that of the liberal left (which is often poor too), but they're just less "socially acceptable". I'll go further about this in the feminism part.