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 Originally Posted by boost
Right, but we don't have a free market, and in our current system labor does need to be empowered, else the balance tip too far.
Decreasing regulations on industry does just that. I agree that labor should be empowered. I also think business and consumers should be empowered. The biggest areas of improvement we can do for all of the above is stopping the state from creating disparities. Workers' biggest enemy is the state. Unless you're talking about "Labor", which is a pseudo-monopoly granted special status by law. "Labor" and its legal backing is responsible for all sorts of awful things for workers, businesses, and consumers, like lack of competition in broadband, mountains of red tape for any projects, and high costs for the purpose of pricing non-Labor members out of the market.
On another note.. I haven't heard anything about the universal minimum income stuff that was getting buzz some time back. What are your thoughts on that? Is it possible that something of that sort could create a better society? And maybe I should rephrase that-- is it possible that a universal minimum income could be much easier to get to, compared to a true free market, but would still offer a dramatic improvement to society?
I've posted this before
https://medium.com/@morganwarstler/g...s-1d068ac5a205
This would be infinitely better than the current system, but just about anything sensible would be better since the current system deeply discourages productivity
That said, I think no welfare is better than even the most well constructed welfare system. That means an absence of welfare in everything: education, healthcare, wage floors, a bunch of others. The reason I think this is that the primary burden on the poor in this country is high costs of these services and the high barrier to entry into employment, both of which are mainly a product of the welfare state. They're also a product of the regulatory state, with all sorts of harmful laws including licensing and zoning. It isn't that the poor suffer from a lack of revenue, but from a lack of social mobility. The left-wing thinks it understands this, which is why it pushes for more subsidization of services for the poor, but that really just increases the problem by increasing the costs of the services and making it even more difficult to get work and develop skills.
The US pays assloads for education. It is gargantuanly expensive, yet we get very little value from it. Only a fraction of what we learn in the system goes towards our overall productivity and prosperity. Not to mention it has rewired culture norms in such strange ways that we believe things like teenage rebellion is normal. Regulations and welfare in healthcare have turned something that inherently probably would cost less than food into something that costs so much it is gobbling up the economy, and almost nobody is truly getting better care.
Without going to far with it, the basis for why welfare doesn't work is that it displaces costs. It promotes overuse of a service or product, which increases its costs, which is a feedback loop that is tough to shut down. In a hypothetical system without welfare and burdensome regulations, employment and increasing skillsets would be about as easy as walking through the park. It's the attempt to eliminate this problem by throwing money at it that the problem grows even larger. The problem would be eliminated by value selection of choice, which allows a fluid cost/benefit analysis even at the poorest, most inadvertent levels
Higher education is a great example of this. Two decades ago, you didn't need a bachelors degree to get a good white collar job, but now you do. Why? Because that was when the government decided it would guarantee college loans to anybody and everybody. Now college is virtually mandatory and ridiculously expensive. Everybody is going into massive debt, losing years of productivity due to opportunity costs, and finally getting employment doing things far beneath their education levels. Education in this country is a behemoth of waste, entirely because it's welfare. College subsidies do not help the poor at all. Instead they make it that much harder for the poor to get employment and develop skills. The barrier to entry in good employment is oh so much higher because of education subsidies.
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