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how are you even a left libertarian. is it supposed to mean you're gay but also rich?
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@lain ubi feels pretty "left libertarian" to me, dumping bureaucracy and monitoring with a "simple, flat system to help everyone"also "quit prosecuting victimless crimes, please", "when it makes sense to do so, help people rather than punishing", "whenever feasible, replace corporate monoliths with open-source, decentralised group projects" seem to fit the label well
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@lain that one sure, mmm. the emphasis on cooperating over competing, though, i think is a difference most people draw
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@shmibs ubi / negative income tax is a good example, the rest all seem pretty much just libertarian to me. how could you be libertarian and in favor of prosecuting victimeless crimes
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@ilja @lain what you're calling "right-wing" is what i called "libertarian", removing bureaucratic oversight from areas it's no longer neededremove the government from the role of telling people when they can and can't be helped, when and how they have to pay people and for what, what hoops everyone needs to jump through and paperwork filled out or else *consequences*, fines and jail and robodebt etc == "libertarian"and then the "right" vs. "left" component as"right": and then everyone works hard and competes with one another, and the ones who do the best and are the most deserving will naturally come out on top"left": and then we all work together to make a simplified, universal system that helps everybody in a way that's more efficient and reliableso another "libertarian left" position might be "cancel all affirmative action-type programs, because they're top-heavy and hyper-specific, letting the government decide who is and isn't worthy of assistance, and replace them with a blanket system designed to passively catch everyone who needs it"
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@lain @shmibs Even ubi / negative income tax (which I consider a specific implementation of ubi) isn't per sé "left". Here (Belgium) we had a political party called Vivant once who's economically right wing and wanted to implement ubi.One reason I don't consider ubi inherently "left" is exactly the fact that ubi *is* a flat system. You still need an extra social net in order to protect people who fall victim to decease for example. You can (and, imo, should) add such systems, but they aren't inherently part of ubi. And, iirc, these social nets were exactly were vivant wanted to divert the money from to pay the ubi.Another thing is that ubi may help people, but, and this was the reasoning Vivant had, it can also help businesses securing more profit. If you have a ubi, then businesses may need to pay less wages and minimum wage could even be eliminated. This is a very right wing view on ubi imo.
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@benis @ilja @lain how is it not the reverse?that is to say, how does dissociating work from the ability to stay alive take away wage bargaining power from the worker rather than give more of it?
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@ilja @lain @shmibs UBI is the quintessential plutocratic policy: deny people a satisfactory wage, but let them have enough for basic subsistence, so that they may be hungry enough to take any scrap of a job that's offered to them at any price. classism itself.
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@shmibs @ilja @lain satisfy the base level of Maslow's pyramid, but deny all other levels through wage compression.
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@benis @ilja @lain the current system, at least in the us i can talk about more definitively, but it seems so in many other places, is:"deny all levels of the pyramid as a baseline, and use wage-compression to only half-satisfy the base-level whenever possible, so that people are desperate enough to take whatever jobs available without negotiation, and work multiple jobs at once, because the alternative is homelessness and oftentimes death"to which what you presented seems an improvement. but again, i'm not convinced of what you've said either, because, to me, wage compression seems *less* likely under such a scheme rather than more, because a person who can survive without having to immediately agree to whatever poop job is in a better position to negotiate wages and working conditions (through e.g. concerted strike, or just walking away). how do i have that backwards?
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@benishow is subsistence a bargaining chip rather than liability? there again, it sounds like you're just saying the opposite of what i did without a reason i can figure out (maybe i'm too dumb?)and to the latter, job markets are currently flooded with completely unnecessary useless jobs. the trend over the last decade or two has been eliminating those jobs in order to increase corporate efficiency and gdp, and economic stress is only accelerating that trend. that is to say, for a significant proportion of the current labour market, leaving the market entirely would be a contribution to gdp rather than a draw on it. manned fast food, por ejemplo, is an absurd thing to continue when factory production of those same foods (and even vending machines that on-demand-slice-and-cook french fries) have been a thing for decadeshumans have only been kept in these pointless jobs because there's an up-front transition cost in equipment and customer-spook, and minimum wage being kept unlivabley low has helped encourage companies not to pay it. that balance is starting to break down, though, and things like increasing minimum wages to levels that don't let people die can only accelerate the changein a low-tech agrarian society, having as many children as possible is a net economic benefit, because you can send them out to do manual farm labour. when factory farming happens, the contribution of those 11-year-olds is suddenly redundant, and they become an economic drawunless everything collapses completely, fewer workers in the traditional job market is going to be an ongoing trend no matter what. and continuing to tie that work to subsistence will let some struggle and others die
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@shmibs @ilja @lain one part of it is that workers have their subsistence as a bargaining chip in the wage bargaining process; losing it weakens their position.another part of it is that those who hate their jobs the most would surely leave them (hitting the country's GDP) and thus they'd stop contributing to the social programs they benefit from; once they realized that they need more money than what is necessary to survive, they'd try to get back into the job market, and drive down wages through the simple mechanism of supply and demand: a higher supply of workers drives down their prices.the net result would be the need for an ever higher public deficit to finance UBI because the unemployed don't contribute to it, and there would be ever more people who'd stop working once their salaries became low enough, destroying either the State, UBI, the national economy, any combination of the three, or all three at once.
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@shmibs subsistence is a bargaining chip because an unlivable wage won't be taken by anybody, leaving the position unfilled.>bullshit jobs damage GDPThat's exactly the opposite of truth, since GDP is the sum of all the earnings made inside of a country. Any earnings raise GDP simply because of its definition.If you're arguing they're money badly spent, their employers would like to disagree with you.>child labor is inefficientYes, unskilled manual labor is useless in an industrial society, which explains why children don't work anymore in the first worldRegarding the last paragraph, the current trend is towards all the economy being in the hands of one individual, with everybody else being dead. This is obviously flawed, and will be averted sooner or later.
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@benis say you're deathly ill and will die without treatment. are you more or less likely to "shop around" for doctors who won't overcharge than a person who is more mildly ill with a chronic condition that can be ignored for a while?unlivable wages are already being taken, by millions of people, because when subsistence is on the line "wait and get a job that may or may not open up somewhere else" isn't a choice---re: gdp, don't think so? not an economist, but, if you're calculating wages + profits, removing the wages paid to a no longer employed person ought to be directly countered by the increased profit for the company that no longer has to pay those wages, i thought. and, if there's also increased efficiency by dumping that person, profit ought then to increase more, meaning net gdp boostlong-term this means wage transfer from those no-longer-employed people into the company (and, without intervention, economic collapse), but---mmm, it needs to be averted. aside from ubi, what feasible approach is there?
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@benis > long-term unlivable wages kill the employee by definition, eventuallyyes... and?in a choice between die now and die eventually, people generally go for the latter, taking on multiple jobs, more roommates, and worse living conditions in the process> workers are employed to create revenueif a company can bring in more money without a worker than with, why keep that worker around? or say that company A expands into B's market. A is more efficient than B because it employs fewer people per store/region or something. A expands and employs more people, but overall jobs go down> employment policiesinventing more useless jobs? there's infrastructure renovation to be done, sure, but aside from that? needs to be done, but it's a big investment expense up-front with only gradual returns later on> increasing taxes for the bezos clubok sure. which taxes, then?
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@shmibs you're being blinded by temporary effects: sure, there always are desperate people who will take anything, but long-term unlivable wages kill the employee by definition, eventually; the same is true for GDP: sure, that month an unpaid wage could increase the employer's margin, but workers are employed to create revenue, so if you remove your revenue creators you're going to go under after a while.>what to doheavy regulation of the financial markets, followed by increased marginal taxation for the top income brackets, and spending the increased fiscal revenue in employment policies for the working classes.the reasons behind this are:-our unregulated financial markets allow for the escape of capitals after taxes are announced but before they're enacted;-increasing taxes for the Bezos club doesn't affect their lives in the slightest since they're so goddamn rich in the first place;-decreasing joblessness directly correlates with an increase in wages long-term, since any new position at a company must be eventually filled by poaching somebody else's employees, and you can only do that by increasing their wages.
lain
バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
Banned for siding with pleroma developers
Benis
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