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I Think People Should be Paid not to Work, if That's What They Want: Switzerland to vote


The Anti-Targ

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Here's what I reckon. Happiness is the most important social issue. When people are happy they are healthier, they are more productive and they are less likely to commit crimes or become substance or people abusers. A lot of people who are in dead end, low paid work are intensely unhappy and their unhappiness causes them all sorts of problems, which in turn causes several social problems, which eventually costs the taxpayer money. If these people had the option of simply deciding not to work, and they get paid minimum wage they would be happier and they would eventually find a way to be productive that made them happy. It would also mean dead end jobs become harder to staff, which would mean employers would have to pay more to convince people to take on soul destroying drugery.

I believe the vast majority, like 99% of people, want to lead productive lives. If they are given the genuine freedom to find their own way to be productive, rather than be told they MUST get a paid job, which is not the only way to be productive, society and the economy will be better for it. Capitalism pretty much requires an unemployment rate of 4% or more in order to keep wage growth in check. Given I think significantly more than 96% of the population wants to be productive in their lives it is affordable for governments to pay people who don't want to work a living wage (actually, it's not that they don't want to work, it;s that they don't want to do the kinds of jobs that are available), and pay people who want to work but can't find paid work they want to do, and pay them indefinitely rather than constantly harass people to get a job and threaten to cancel their benefits. Because the over all social welfare costs to government will either be the same as what it is now or decrease. And considering these people will generally be happier and thus lead healthier and less destructive lives other govt costs will be reduced, such as healthcare costs, police, courts and prison.

If someone wants to be a musician, has a great passion for music and loves playing music for people, but just doesn't quite have the skill level, or good fortune, or connections to become a decently paid professional, forcing them to work in any other field has a negative emotional impact. If this person can spend their time writing and performing music even if they don't get directly paid for it, then they are happier, they are being productive and they are creating able to live a comfortable life. 

Some people are fortunate that their passion can also be a well paying career. Many people's passions are not highly marketable and thus can't provide them with a decent living. Is society better off by forcing these people to become burger flippers or production-line factory workers, or are we collectively better of by allowing these people to pursue their passions and find their own way to be productive members of society? 

If someone who for whatever reason is not happy in their current work, they should be able to say, fuck that and walk out and still receive a reasonable income starting the next day. People will never feel trapped in their current employment because they will have no fear about what might happen if they quit and can't immediately find another job. You won't need a whole slew of employment and labour laws to keep employers in line, because if employers treat their employees badly people will just walk out and not feel they need to stay in a bad working environment because they have family to look after and feed. You also won't need a bunch of anti-worker or anti-union laws either. The regulatory environment for labour relations will become so much simpler.

So, that's my radical idea for the week. Pay people not to work if they don't want to work, pay them a decent amount, and we will all be happier and better off for it.

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The conservative response to this is: who would work, then, if there was no incentive to do so? Who would clean our house, do our laundry, tend to our gardens? We need people who are forced by pure economic necessity to do the necessary, unpleasant and/or menial tasks of civilization so the rest of us can explore our true potential. Since they technically have the freedom to start businesses and make themselves worth more to their employer-masters, how long they clean our toilets and serve us food for depends on their laziness and how willing they are to put up with their sorry lot in life, and is not immoral. If anything, people should be rewarded for making more money, and punished for not making enough.

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The concept of a guaranteed income isn't really new; I actually do think we will have to reckon with the idea sooner or later, as technology continues to advance; I just don't see how full employment remains a reasonable goal as efficiency marches on asymptotically. But I don't know how you do that and still staff all the jobs that really do need doing.

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The concept of a guaranteed income isn't really new; I actually do think we will have to reckon with the idea sooner or later, as technology continues to advance; I just don't see how full employment remains a reasonable goal as efficiency marches on asymptotically. But I don't know how you do that and still staff all the jobs that really do need doing.

I completely agree with this. I think it's clear that we are eventually going to reach a point, sooner rather than later, where production technology has advanced to the point where only a minuscule number of people are going to be required to produce the overwhelming majority of things that people actually need. Even low-level service jobs are facing the threat of extinction due to automation - McDonalds is threatening it in response to attempts to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. We need to figure out how we are going to create a society that actually works for the most people under these circumstances. Unfortunately, we seem to be moving in exactly the wrong direction. 

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Richard Nixon tried to pass Basic Guaranteed Income in the 1970s.  

I'll do you one better - Thomas Paine himself advocated a "citizen's dividend" to all US citizens to compensate them for having a society founded upon property rights. It's actually pretty similar to Georgism

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The concept of a guaranteed income isn't really new; I actually do think we will have to reckon with the idea sooner or later, as technology continues to advance; I just don't see how full employment remains a reasonable goal as efficiency marches on asymptotically. But I don't know how you do that and still staff all the jobs that really do need doing.

In theory, wages go up to whatever level is necessary to get people to choose to work for that additional income rather than subsisting off basic income. Since people don't have to work, the labor pool shrinks and those still in it are able to make greater demands.

Or we wait until robots can do everything.

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Switzerland has actually held a referendum on the matter with the level set at 2500 CHF/month (the CHF is currently about equal to the American dollar). That said, I think we need to automate some more before the idea becomes plausible. The problem is that the least desirable jobs also tend to be the least paid and employ a large number of people. For example, very few people want to clean toilets for a living and it doesn't pay much, but if every toilet that is in use is not cleaned, people will notice. The same is true of picking fruit in high temperatures (an activity for which, in the US, companies resort to illegal actions to make the profits work out).

I do think the time of this idea will come -- barring some kind of Luddite government, automation is simply unstoppable. The current areas where it is in development is fast food and trucking. We're not there yet, but here's an article about how the end of long-haul truck drivers will result a collapse of the low-paid jobs because the jobs lost are not just the drivers themselves (of which there are quite a few), but also the restaurant and hotel staff which provide services to them.

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Aren't we talking about the joy of "Basic" as described by James S.A. Coury's "Expanse" Series?

TAT,

If you make "Basic" too lucrative people will stop working then who's tax dollars act to support the people on "Basic".  It has to be a Basic sustanance level of income or it kills itself.

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If someone wants to be a musician, has a great passion for music and loves playing music for people, but just doesn't quite have the skill level, or good fortune, or connections to become a decently paid professional, forcing them to work in any other field has a negative emotional impact. If this person can spend their time writing and performing music even if they don't get directly paid for it, then they are happier, they are being productive and they are creating able to live a comfortable life. 

Some people are fortunate that their passion can also be a well paying career. Many people's passions are not highly marketable and thus can't provide them with a decent living. Is society better off by forcing these people to become burger flippers or production-line factory workers, or are we collectively better of by allowing these people to pursue their passions and find their own way to be productive members of society? 

If someone who for whatever reason is not happy in their current work, they should be able to say, fuck that and walk out and still receive a reasonable income starting the next day. People will never feel trapped in their current employment because they will have no fear about what might happen if they quit and can't immediately find another job. You won't need a whole slew of employment and labour laws to keep employers in line, because if employers treat their employees badly people will just walk out and not feel they need to stay in a bad working environment because they have family to look after and feed. You also won't need a bunch of anti-worker or anti-union laws either. The regulatory environment for labour relations will become so much simpler.

So, that's my radical idea for the week. Pay people not to work if they don't want to work, pay them a decent amount, and we will all be happier and better off for it.

Are you serious?

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In some sense we have the makings of this system in place now.  It is not called out as a straight payment but many states are getting to the point where people are getting 45k to 50k in assistance.  Not exactly easy street but its good enough to get by.

I think it would be an interesting experiment. I suspect the divide between the skilled workers (valuable) and unskilled workers (low wage) would widen even more. Other interesting things might happen as well. I could see the black market economy growing a lot in that type of economy. If you are getting paid 40k a year to not work and earn another 30k or 40k by working under the table or side jobs then all of a sudden you are making a pretty good living versus a job at a restaurant.

 

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Aren't we talking about the joy of "Basic" as described by James S.A. Coury's "Expanse" Series?

Sort of. One of the main differences between the world of the Expanse and our own is the level of automation. The Expanse has human beings doing things in the medium-term future that are already done better by machines today. We should be able to afford a better basic income in the future.

 I could see the black market economy growing a lot in that type of economy. If you are getting paid 40k a year to not work and earn another 30k or 40k by working under the table or side jobs then all of a sudden you are making a pretty good living versus a job at a restaurant.

The thread title says otherwise, but in almost every implementation of this idea, there is no "under the table." In order to avoid poverty traps and ridiculous amounts of money spent on making sure that people who are getting the money qualify, such schemes are usually universal basic income schemes. That is, everybody -- from the poorest of the poor to billionaires -- will get the basic income and whatever you get from work goes on top of that. Of course, taxes will necessarily have to increase so the incentive to cheat will still be higher, but there will be no qualitative change in the black market.

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If you make "Basic" too lucrative people will stop working then who's tax dollars act to support the people on "Basic".  It has to be a Basic sustanance level of income or it kills itself.

Isn't this the simplest argument against socialism?  That if people don't have to work they wont?  Yet a great many people continue to work despite being comfortably set up in life.  People, for the most part, will always yearn for even more than they have and look for ways to gain it.

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I don't understand all of the responses implying that this is trolling or a joke. What do you guys think is going to happen as our machines continue to improve? The Luddites were wrong in their time because the machines created during the Industrial Revolution were primitive and relatively unintelligent. They needed people to build them, people to operate them, people to maintain them and people to repair them which resulted in the creation of more jobs than they destroyed. However, this has been changing for some time now: modern machines are built mainly by other machines (with some human input), they can partially maintain and repair themselves (again, some human input is required, but not much) and they are advancing towards being self-operated.

Furthermore, the construction, maintenance and repair parts that are left for humans require intelligence and expertise -- the "assembly line" type of repetitive task is going out of style and exists only in industries where the cost of automation is still too high relative to human labor (which is generally dirt cheap). In other words, not only is the number of jobs decreasing, but most people will not be qualified (or possibly even able) to do most of the remaining jobs. Right now, this has mostly hit manufacturing, but as time goes on, it will also apply to the service industry (see the example with fast food above) and, eventually, to the more intellectual jobs. Today, a relatively complicated tax return can be done by an average citizen without the assistance of a human being. More complex and less routine analytic tasks still require people like me to program the computers and make sure that there aren't any nonsensical results, but the machines are getting smarter and I fully expect that they will eventually be able to make do without me (or at least without most people like me -- a small number may remain for the sake of sanity checks).

There are several professions which are mostly immune and many others in which there will be a few jobs left, but most of the low-skill jobs are toast -- machines can do them faster, better and cheaper than any human being and they do not tire or demand better working conditions. When this happens (and it's already well on its way), full employment will no longer be possible and society will have to change. It's not a joke or trolling to plan for it.

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Skynjay,

Not socialism but communism.  People like to be paid for their work.  It does give them a sense of value.  Perhaps such a State could arise with a high level basic income and not fall into some sort of totalitarian nightmare like every other attempt at centralized communism, but, I doubt it.

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