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Unread 12 Jul 2012, 08:10   #17
Tietäjä
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Re: RBS / Natwest / Ulster bank system Failure.

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Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk View Post
I don't think it's fair to use the opinions of random liberal arts students as the prototype for all left-wing politics.
It's not my fault they're all alike.

edit. To make it sound less obviously insulting, I've been pseudo-actively involved in both youth organizations of the leftist parties, the left alliance and the social democratic party; and on the youth side, the active 'lead' women and men are all what you'd call that internet meme that rolls around, and you can hear them rant the exact shit.

to make an example, there was a discussion on the citizen wage where the left alliance and the green party youth were discussing it; the greens had, earlier, suggested a level of 500 euros, the left alliance wouldn't agree below 1000 euros plus subsidies related to costs of living.


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What I will defend is that we as a people should care for those who are unable to work, who have retired after a suitable number of years in the work force and for those who were recently fired and are looking for a new job. I'm not sure if you were attacking that notion at all, though, so maybe I don't need to defend it at all.
No, I am not attacking the idea of a welfare state. Quite the opposite - I am sincerely extremely concerned it won't make it. I may have written about it before, but let's say the pension system. People are spending more time outside the work force than in it and yet expecting to be able to consume as if they were in it (I understand the argument of downshifting, but it involves reducing consumption. Asking for the government to give you more subsidies while you downshift doesn't sound like this).


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There are forms of employment that sit better with me. For example, working for the government would (theoretically at least) benefit society at large. A non-profit organization I believed in would be another possibility, as would an anarcho-syndicalist setup. Alas, here my apathy shines through: I'm currently working at a very ordinary public company, have done so ever since I finished uni, and am not actively looking for anything 'better'. I don't know if that makes me a hypocrite or just a lazy jerk. It may also mean I'm just not one of the typical liberal arts students you're so happy to chew out.
I'm an idealist so I work for the government, I've always worked for some branch of it (varying). I don't see any problem with what sector people work on, as long as it's a sector that pays wages, thus earns the state earnings tax income, and thus earns the state pension funds. If it doesn't pay wages, then it's an expedinture to the state and thus not so much work as a hobby.

I can imagine dozens and dozens of societally really productive hobbies that would involve less stress, less responsibility, and less involvement to schedules and bureaucracy than my current work does. I'd probably have an easier and a nicer time.

There is a dinstict difference between expecting the society you don't want to contribute to on it's terms to provide for you a living and expecting a society you want to participate in to provide you with a safety net for the unfortunate events.


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I've actually given the notion of guaranteed minimum income some thought from time to time, and generally like it, but don't have the economics wherewithal to know whether or not it's viable (yet).
As long as the robots (mentioned below) aren't around, we need a model of a society that revolves around labour force participation. The higher we want the safety nets to be set (optimally, we don't want people to be left out of the society due to unfortunate events, so we need tight safety nets) the higher labour force participation and employment rates we need to fund this.

It is counter-intuitive to work against it. It's wrong on not only economic grounds, but it's wrong on terms of being a violation of perfect duty since if we take it to a maxim, we will have no people who work and only people who live on minimum income and there is nobody paying for it. In essense, no-strings-attached minimum income systems are designed by those people who don't want to participate on the economic model we're in (capitalism, labour force participation) but want to reap the benefits of it (the standard of living) regardless. In terms of political right and left, these people are located on the left wing but they're more right wing than anyone else. I'll explain.

For people who are physically or mentally unable to participate (elderly people, severely handicapped people) there are systems in place. For the healthy, work-able 30-year-old, there are no persistent strong networks in place, because these people are expected to participate in order to fund the non-participation of those who cannot.

In human history, there have been plenty of examples of people who have the positive freedom of being able to do what they will without having to be concerned about sufficient income. Citizen wage systems are akin to this. History knows these people as kings, nobility, monarchs, sons of warlords, and so on. The only reason they were able to live so was because others paid for their living.

I prefer earned income tax credit systems which essentially are of the idea that there is a negative income tax on lower levels of income. They are mathematically more sound (in economic terms), they are morally more sound, and they retain the idea of high labour force participation rates, without potentially damaging wage-competitiveness (in the way certain minimum wage systems can: see case Germany and their recent wage politics). And I'd believe people would be far more willing to accept the notion that we will subsidies low-pay workers for working rather than subsidising people for being idle. Since it's going to come from the working people's purses anyways. The idea that we could fund any of these systems with some bizzarre notion that has to do with capitol income tax is just hilarious, at least in Finland.


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That mostly comes from a deep-seated dislike of boom-and-bust, which continues to plague our current global economic system. It seems strange to me that we continue to require "growth" (whatever the hell that means), when we're already as rich as we are. Intuitively, it seems just stupid that we're all getting our panties in a twist over what, that we're now back to a early 00s level of prosperity? Late 90s maybe? Did we really have it so bad then?
Yes, we require global growth. We have four choices: we rapidly reduce the amount of people on this planet, we dramatically reduce consumption in the west, we accept the notion that the majority of the planet's inhabitants are going to remain extremely poor on western standards, or we strive for growth. This is why we strive for growth. I'll return to this on the technology side of the discussion.

What comes to having so bad: on real terms, the amount of subsidies for say unemployed has steadily grown and grown. And more is being required over and over. Why do even the most fervent of the leftists that are thinking about safety nets requiring more and more, whilst on their other hand they're critisizing growth as a paramount? How can they have both?

They can't. They're just blinded by their ideology. Earlier this year I was in a pseudo-conference arranged by the leftist youth parties. A presentee there laid down some alternative measures to GDP, such as the happy planet index. I asked if we should correct it's figures for revolutions and uprisings, given that China, Egypt, and Syria all beat Finland on it. The next presentee I asked on poverty and growth. She critisized growth, and mentioned that this and that many people still live with less than a dollar a day. I quickly calculated for how long we could triple their income (to a presumed three dollars a day) if we socialized and fully liquidiated the worth of Berkshire Hathaway. It yielded a result of a few days. The 99% on global level is so massive that we can blame the 1% all we want but even the wealth they possess wouldn't be sufficient for long.

The answers were, in order given: "You're right, perhaps it should involve something concerning the freedom of expressing one's opinion too" (so to say, she considered a revolution an "illegitimate form of expressing opinion" - I felt this was missing the point). "Perhaps we need to produce more in addition to more fair allocation, but it doesn't have to mean it happens through GDP growth" (this is an oxymoron: if we produce more, we either a) increase the GDP and are able to measure it, or b) increase the GDP in a way we can't measure - even now, we can't completely account things like domestic work to GDP, but we acknowledge that it is there).

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Of course, I do realise that the problem is not that we're now slightly less rich than we were 10 years ago, it's that we are afraid to spend money. Consumers are afraid they'll lose their job, so they want to save up in case that happens. Investors are afraid to because they no longer believe that spending money will give them a ROI.
But paradox of thrift is a different story altogether.


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My take on it is that at some point, we should be so rich, and so technologically advanced, that we could actually reduce what we now call jobs to hobbies, by giving everyone a flat minimum living wage and instating a flat income tax. Whether we've reached that point already, I don't know. It would certainly not perform as well on the classical economic indicators like GDP, but then I'm not really a fan of those anyway.
You're arguing that reducing the amount of human capitol required in production outputs is somehow not going to be visible on GDP. Here you're wrong. 99% of the GDP growth you perceive on a trend doesn't come from people being better or more productive. I would argue that the average worker is far less productive now, through hours worked alone, than he was in the agrarian society.

99% of the GDP growth is development of better technology. It's easy to be a technocrat in this setting, and I perceive it as the only probable out. It doesn't need to mean only increasing productivity, but also more durable, more "green" production. If we replace all workers with robots that do four time the work, and spend 2 hours a day monitoring and maintaining them, we'll be left with far more time for hobbies and the joys of life, and we'll experience an unpreceeded rise on all economic indicators that have to do with productivity. Of course, the more "effective" these robots are, the higher we can set the fixed amount we pay to people, no? It's an utopia.

Technology is a big deal. From plows to tractors, from cards to databases. It's always been a big deal, and it's the biggest of all deals in terms of GDP growth.


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We are all too satisfied to go crazy like that. So instead, we focus on questions like: do we get to retire at 65, 67 or after 40 years of job experience? Do we get 2 years unemployment benefits of X, or a year's worth of 1.5*X? Should our highest tax rate be 50% at 50k, or 60% at 150k?

It's almost completely meaningless. No wonder people are disillusioned with politics.
It's extremely meaningless. It's meaningless to the point where the future of the welfare system depends on it. Two years higher a retirement age could mean massive savings that could be directed elsewhere. But people have a strong habit of not wanting to work.


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Yes, I largely agree that the way politics has changed into a media circus is going to harm us in the long term (and quite probably in the short term too). For all of the left's flaws, here I lay the blame squarely in the court of right-wing populism. You have your True Finns, we have our Freedom Party and we're all in the business of some good old 1930's scapegoating.
True Finns isn't a political party with a clear agenda, however. It's simply a manifestation or a backlash to leftist feminism. Leftist feminism considers all women and all ethnic minorities to be victims that need understanding - if something doesn't go as they'd want, it's the society's fault. White men are excluded from this, despite forming the majority of say unemployed and school drop-outs. True Finns is an umbrella term under which more or less every disillusioned white male from the ghettoing neighbourhood falls under. It's also a leftist movement by economic terms, or at very "worst" central.



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It may interest you that this is the system that is in place in the Netherlands. We call it the Polder Model. The recent surge in right-wing populism has put some dents in its legitmacy, at least in the eyes of the masses, as has recent internal trouble in our largest labour union, but it's still going strong.

You're not alone in admiring it, according to the Wikipedia article I linked, it's met with "universal acclaim". I never knew.
This is interesting indeed. I'll read the economist pieces on the links. Thanks. I view it as a very good way of the state as a "neutral" ground bringing some moderation to the demands of both sides and trying to settle it in a fashion that'd benefit the "big picture".

Last edited by Tietäjä; 12 Jul 2012 at 10:28.
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