fakeasfake wrote:
communism is a political ideology and has nothing to do with economy. the education in america is really bad. you guys should invest
Actually, in practice, communism, despite being a political ideology, has everything to do with economy.
I am guessing you were educated in American schools.
1. Automation will eliminate so many jobs, this is unavoidable. The economy/world will NOT adjust "like it always has," because nearly every job will be done by a machine, and machines will be improving things, including themselves.
2. How to divide this is easy: Look at an individual's base income over a given span, and that's it. Adjust for inflation, which is more than what reality has done, so there's a win. If someone in Iowa wants to then move to California, they won't have enough money to do it. No issues there (Iowans moving to CA).
3. The efficiency of machines, together with elimination of wages, will fund this alone. If a company would rather pocket the profits from eliminating employee wages, then collectively nobody buy their goods/services, and they go bye-bye.
4. Any shortfall from this system (there wouldn't be any) could be funded the same way major banks create money from nowhere to keep themselves afloat.
You all can b*tch about this forever, but you would have disputed cars, electricity, vaccines, the industrial revolution, the internet, the WWW, smart phones, electric cars, autonomous vehicles. It's going to happen whether you think it is, or not.
I would agree that, given wide-spread automation, some sort of a universal income scheme will have to be eventually implemented.
But right now, I would just settle for a much smaller step, such as universal health care.
UBI is a key component of sheer stupidity.
fakeasfake wrote:
communism is a political ideology and has nothing to do with economy. the education in america is really bad. you guys should invest
There is a time I may have been a supporter.
However, Ireland for example has an extensive investment in education. A lot of highly educated and talented people. And the economy is shite.
Name me a country with great education and a red hot economy. Places like Norway look good on the surface due to them handing out oil money to the people. Alaska does that. Norway has only 5.2 million people, in the space of GW Bush's farm
social welfare wrote:
I would agree that, given wide-spread automation, some sort of a universal income scheme will have to be eventually implemented.
But right now, I would just settle for a much smaller step, such as universal health care.
Like the one that California is just now figuring out is really expensive?
Yet the country is full of Trump supporters without health insurance who visit the ER for everything, which they have a lot of, thanks to wonderful lifestyle decisions.
That's real cheap.
Too bad we can't just think of it like this:
A. This concept takes loads of money from everyone in the US who works, and pays for people who are stupid.
B. This concept takes less money from everyone in the US who works, and makes the stupid people make better decisions.
And yet the Republican way, the way of personal responsibility, picks A every single time.
(I'm talking about health care here, follow along.)
Concerning the UBI: Anything that will torpedo the existing welfare state is a good idea.
The day the US implements Mark Zuckerberg's idiot idea of Universal Basic Income is the day that the US's reign as the greatest nation and economy on Earth officially ends. The result of automatically giving all people some sort of income that barely gets them by will completely erode the motivation for probably half of our population to do anything positive with their life. We'll have even more mindless drones doing nothing productive with their life and the productivity of our workforce will begin to fall for the first time in US history.
Everyone here talking about eroding of motivation is absolutely a lunatic or totally out of touch.
The government already gives loads of handouts to various groups. There already is a large safety net in place.
In fact, some studies estimate that average welfare payouts in many states exceed the value of a minimum wage job.
Yet, we don't see the entire population descending into sloth and laziness.
Let's try and focus on evidence and not gut-feelings. In the case of economics and population level behavior those are usually wrong.
https://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/work-versus-welfare-trade
the problem is not the safety net. the safety net provides people with the least amount of money that they need to survive. The problem is that more and more people are so lazy that they don't mind having such a minimum income. They convince themselves that a life of poverty or borderline poverty is acceptable. Then, the SJWs come around and tell those people that they are poor because the government is oppressing them (the same government that is keeping them alive) and that they should protest to get more opportunities (which they are still too lazy to take).
different perspective wrote:
We'll have even more mindless drones doing nothing productive with their life and the productivity of our workforce will begin to fall for the first time in US history.
No, it won't. You missed the part about robots being used to replace the workforce itself.
Bad Wigins wrote:
Capitalism is a form of slavery in which the slaves are given currency to facilitate the distribution of the goods produced. The currency has no intrinsic value of its own. After receiving the currency for his labors, the slave goes off and labors further to procure and transport goods for himself, thus supporting the distribution process and performing its final phase himself.
This system has broken down for several reasons. Primary is the fact that in an overdeveloped economy of frivolous luxuries, labor loses value and the slaves are no longer given enough currency to grease the gears of the machine properly. This presents, for the slave-owning caste, the problem of reconciling the false work ethic it promotes with the desperate need to get things moving again. Already for years they've been trying to give away money, but all the middle-class charlatans whom they've brought up on business virtue will have none of it.
Communism is, indeed, public ownership of the means of production. Currency is still used, but issued by the public's representative government rather than private slaveowning entities like the Federal Reserve.
Who gets paid the profits of the FOMC? ................US Treasury, who appoints the majority of FOMC members?..........politicians.
Under communism currency is debased in plain sight hence the ideology of Marxism will always crash, under the Keynesian-regulated capitalism that we have now, currency is debased by banks & hedge funds behind closed doors, making those asset owners rich while those receiving income are clueless but when they realize what is happening they revolt making a new temporary equilibrium. All philosophical systems fail because they don't understand human complexities.
Democrats are communists. Did you just find out?
It will be the death of us, not because of idealogical drift, but because lack of resources will slow productivity growth dramatically. Much higher percentages of GDP going to old people and health care, less to investment. So far standards of living continue to go up for the country, but in the last 10 years probably not for the median American. The first revolution was political, the rise of Trump and Sanders. When the realities of a governing majority afflict the Republicans, will voters choose the Sanders alternative as the second act?
oh oh oh yeah? wrote:
Shared misery.
Exactly what we have now.
The Oligarchs are stealing all the wealth while doing nothing for society. No matter how much they have tits never enuff and they are a miserable bunch of people. Just miserable.
And they are making everyone else miserable via poverty and repression.
DiscoGary wrote:
"From each according to their ability. To each according to their need."
This is a staple of communism and it's exactly the same as universal income coupled with universal health care and other handouts to those "in need".
That's quite false.essence of the thread wrote:
DiscoGary wrote:"From each according to their ability. To each according to their need."
This is a staple of communism and it's exactly the same as universal income coupled with universal health care and other handouts to those "in need".
UBI would go to everyone regardless of need. That's the "universal" part. It is the same basic income for everyone. So it is in no way going to each according to need. It's quite the opposite.
It's much the same with universal health care. Everyone would get the same basic health insurance plan. You might argue that a sicker person gets more health care, but that's just how insurance works. The base insurance plan would be the same for everyone regardless of need.
I don't know if UBI is a good idea, but it's certainly not communism.
The problem with objecting to UBI on ideological grounds is that at some point, UBI won't be optional, it will simply be needed for a consumer-based economy to continue to function properly.
As a significant segment of the workforce is replaced by robots, the rate of consumption of goods produced by a robotized economy must be maintained. If income-deprived consumers fail to materialize, the economy will fall apart in a disinflationary death spiral.
Failure to implement a UBI-like scheme will results in an ideologically pure, but economically dysfunctional system.