Poverty Sucks

[brainbomb]

Poor Life is a poor life

[brainbomb]

The purpose of this thread to encourage a radical expansion of the welfare state. I would increase the lowest income american job to 800,000 a year. Cut the military entirely. literally erase entire branches of the military, all of them. End charity. Cap wealth at 120 million dollars. and seize all the rest to raise the average lowest americans income to 800,000 per year.

End all corporations. and nationhood. end statehood. impose substantial term limits. legalize everything.

[Octavious]

Pretty tricky to have a welfare state if you've abolished the state, no?

[StevenC.]

Poor Life is a poor life

It's simple. Stop being poor.

[Senlac]

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money.

Margaret Thatcher

[TrPrado]

"0 years in Congress because Congress doesn't exist anymore" is definitely a substantial term limit if I've ever seen one.

[Jamiet99uk]

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money.

Margaret Thatcher

Except at the very lowest level, there is no such thing as personal property.

[orathaic]

Poverty sucks, giving people money is a perfectly valid solution.

Not necessarily other people's money, because you can simply print money; of course you could argue that this erodes the value of savings, and that is true, if you suffer hyper-inflation. But with a fiat currency you are not entitled to know your savings will never inflate... There may be an implicit social contract based on economic 'common sense' that your central bank will maintain low levels of inflation by controlling the money supply.

However, you can maintain the money supply in other ways. Like having sufficient sinks. The closest example of a working economy is Eve online's virtual economy. Which does have economists employed to help maintain (because the company knows it could lose hundreds of thousands of customers if it fucks up with hyper inflation.)

So we can model systems which just hand out cash to people, we just need to figure out how to balance sinks and faucets...

[Senlac]

Tell you what, go & do a marketing campaign for that printing money idea down in Venezuela. See how many takers you get for it...

Good ideas are fragile delicate things easily killed off, often prematurely...
Bad ideas are like zombies, no matter how many times killed off, some bloody idiot resurrects it, claiming splendid originality...

[Jamiet99uk]

Governments print money all the time. That's what a Fiat currency is.

[Senlac]

Germany in the 30’s, more recently Zimbabwe & currently Venezuela are all star turns at this dumb trick.
Of course Governments “print money”, including those with solid currencies, but they aren’t obsessed with giving free money to poor lives. Nobody should suffer enormously through inability to compete in modern society, but neither should they prosper equally to those that do strive, innovate & work hard.
There’s a reason Socialist states are becoming a rarity, they fail. You know like Darwin predicted & all that.

[TrPrado]

Democracies hate them! This one cool trick gives governments more money.

[orathaic]

@Senlac, are you then against increasing the US national debt?

[Senlac]

@Senlac, are you then against increasing the US national debt?

I have no strong opinion & don’t reside in USA, nor could predict the impacts of various levels of US national debt available to policy makers.
I do have some knowledge & long interest in history, hence my reference to some past (& one current) disastrous economic policies.

[orathaic]

I don't live in the US either, but the fact is the US has basically created this debt, by printing I owe you cards, and continues to fund it's military by expanding it.

It is the biggest counter example I can think of.

The EU's central bank (the ECB) has just ended the 'quantative easing' program where they have pumped billions of newly created euros into the balance sheets of European banks, the last 10 years has amounted to a net increase in the supply of euros mostly to make sure banks don't fail.

That makes two massive programmes which are seen as standard practice.

If you carefully control supply and demand of money in the system, you can avoid the hyper inflation of venuzuala, or similar. Imagine all taxation is destroyed when given over to the state, and all payments from the state are newly created currency. You would find it very difficult to convince people that their taxes pay for the police, education, healthcare, and roads... (and getting them to pay taxes at all).

And yet this is entirely equivalent to what we actually have in place. It can work, so long as you don't tell people, and you destroy enough cash (removing it from the system) to avoid hyper-inflation...

[Senlac]

I don't live in the US either, but the fact is the US has basically created this debt, by printing I owe you cards, and continues to fund it's military by expanding it.

It is the biggest counter example I can think of.

The EU's central bank (the ECB) has just ended the 'quantative easing' program where they have pumped billions of newly created euros into the balance sheets of European banks, the last 10 years has amounted to a net increase in the supply of euros mostly to make sure banks don't fail.

That makes two massive programmes which are seen as standard practice.

If you carefully control supply and demand of money in the system, you can avoid the hyper inflation of venuzuala, or similar. Imagine all taxation is destroyed when given over to the state, and all payments from the state are newly created currency. You would find it very difficult to convince people that their taxes pay for the police, education, healthcare, and roads... (and getting them to pay taxes at all).

And yet this is entirely equivalent to what we actually have in place. It can work, so long as you don't tell people, and you destroy enough cash (removing it from the system) to avoid hyper-inflation...

Your talent at economics is beyond mine. However I never deluded myself that tax payments funded public services.
Taxation alongside interest rates, are clearly the mechanisms used to control currency inflation & might serve little other purpose (the cynic in me says so anyway). Maybe it’s just that the ECB & Fed are good at it, while Venezuela isn’t?

[orathaic]

Does it matter if taxation is used to keep the inflation down (limiting the money supply, thus keeping money 'scarce' and valuable...) interest rates have a separate function of encouraging savings/investments....

[Senlac]

Does it matter if taxation is used to keep the inflation down (limiting the money supply, thus keeping money 'scarce' and valuable...) interest rates have a separate function of encouraging savings/investments....

If that question is addressed to me, my answer is I neither know nor care.

Most of the Governments I have ever lived under (in many different countries) were democratically elected by which the people have given permission to be taxed. Under those circumstances who am I to comment on the purpose?
As long as Government motivates people to live in peace, with minimal limitations to freedom, I don’t care what they do with tax revenues.

It may be clear from above that I have very rarely been a citizen of the place in which I’m resident (permitted to vote/have an opinion on who should govern).
I have tried during my life to seek out places with competent Government (without too much corruption) allowing freedom to live/work happily.

[orathaic]

It was kinda, but I also didn't get time to finish... The point would be, if taxation is actually destroyed, in order to prevent inflation (control the money supply); along with interest rates taking money out of circulation and into investments, as you alluded to; does it matter?

I think the psychology does. I think if you told school children that money paid in taxation was simply destroyed, they would not understand and not get on board with it. It is much more convienant for a state to tell them it is used for funding things they consent to using.

But from a pure accountancy point of view. You just need a sink in the system. Something to sink currency out of supply at a fast enough rate to prevent inflation.

You can then create faucets pumping money into the system to address govt policy (ie fund the key concerns of key supporters of the state)

If you're interested, there is a YouTube video about how democracies and dictatorships are both bound by the same kinds of rules ie 'keep your key supporters happy' https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

[MajorMitchell]

I'm amused at the notion that Margaret Thatcher could make an objective assessment of Socialism unaffected by her own political ideology. It's easy to be critical if you misrepresent the target of your criticisms. And intellectually lazy.