--- Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote:
> My point is that you'd have to have a hell of a lot
> of socialistically
> pampered layabouts to equal the social cost and
> waste represented by
> mega-middleman Stewart Rahr (the wholesale drug
> profiteer mentioned below)
> and his entrepreneurial ilk.
Changes the subject again. I wasn't talking about waste but about destabilizing resentment.
I agree with John
> Thornton that it's nuts to
> think people in a guaranteed-income society are
> going to sit around on their
> asses all day, squinting at the sun, just because
> they *can.* I'd get
> damned bored doing that and lose all sense of
> self-respect -- wouldn't you?
Yes, but remember, I'm a driven, type-A Calvinist Protestant work-ethic type guy -- you don't get a Ph.D in philosophy and then practice big firm law unless you are. I'd hesdtitate to generalize from my own case. I don't think I'm better than other people, and John T thinks I'm worse -- he wants fewer people with my motivational structure.
Note that I don't disagree with a guaranteed income. I think that everyone whould be guaranteed enough for a life I'd describe as cushy. That's a pretty damn generous conception, no? What I disagree with is that everyone should get equal incomes regardless of their contribution or society's needs. I'd want to guarantee everyone a job where they could make a good income, unless they were unable to work, in which case they'd get other support.
But I'd want give them an incentive --a positive one -- to show up on time and do their job. I don't believe John T's and your notion that boredom avoidance and self-respect would be enough for that. especially for jobs that are not intrinsically rewarding, but even for many that are.
For example, I've worked in academe and have seen what happens to most professors who get tenure. They don't publish. They teach the same stuff year after year. ANd these are people with jobs are are potentially as good and rewarding as jobs can get, and which they chose voluntarily. The problem would be much worse with boring, dirty, or dangerous work. Most legal work, for example. (That falls in the boring category.) Would I do document review if you would paid me as much if I didn't? No fucking way.
I realize that my own idea of a high guaranteed income faces some of the same problems I raise for you -- believe it or not, though in these circles I pass fora
right winger, on the American political spectrum I'm a loony leftist, an unpatriotic rotten doctor commie rat -- but the idea of tying reward to contribution at least acknowledges taht there is a problem that you can't solve by evoling hwo the wonderful side of human nature will just blossom, and bad side wither, unde socialism.
> And frankly if a few people do just sit drinking
> beer all day it wouldn't
> both me at all. Drunks on a park bench aren't as
> offensive to me as the
> eyesores so typically created by the rich, e.g.:
A few people is one thing. Where is your cutoff -- 10% of the population? 20% 50%? The fact is, free-riding is _rational_ -- that's the problem. That's why there is so much of it. That is why it is not going to go away. That is, in large part, why anarchism will never work and why we need a government -- to change the incentives and create the goods that we would not create on our own if we could use them at no cost.
But further, and additionally, _you_ might not mind some goof-offs, but you fail to appreciate how pervasive and widespread resentment is against this sort of exploitation -- it is exploitation, not the sort capitalists perpetrate, but it is unfair advantage-taking nonetheless. People hate it a lot worse than they hate capitalsit exploitation. Why would they hate it less if it were the main kind of exploitation that they encountered?
Yours with his head in the clouds but (hopefully) his feet on the ground
jks
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