The parasites are getting better organized,not a good thing.
Plus they seem to be actively recruiting.
But who would ask me “Would I like fries with my order?”
Sooner or later, you run out of other peoples’ money.
Why would I work if I know that I’m paying for everyone else to have a decent life without working? Why not be like them? Stay at home and wait for my check.
And if everyone decides to give up on working, the government may find revenue generation challenging.
Guy’s had WAAAYYY too much KOOLAIDE.
> says Santens, who lives in New Orleans
Says all I need to know.
I say give him a monthly stipend. In exchange he has to agree to be sterilized.
And who apparently don't believe that this will lead to EVEN MORE people who choose not to work. More and more and more. Why should they bother? And with less people working there are less and less who provide the tax dollars that fund this stupid guaranteed income BS.
Is it any wonder basic economics is not taught anymore? This mentality creates an every growing pool of leeches.
Sounds like a pyramid scheme to me. Eventually, there will be more takers than donors.
It’s called being a government employee...
Just have the government print more money, better yet give all of us a printing press. Next problem.
What happens when the men forget how to fish and the robot breaks down. Can the men live on the hydraulic fluid?
I’ve got no problem with people who want to contribute - they have the right to be foolish with their own money. Just don’t demand mine.
What if everyone didn’t have to work to get paid?
Then only the people who wanted to wrk for their own dignity would work. Of course then they’d be paying for those who choose to not work, along with those who truly cannot, which is, what? Ten percent
Duh
That’s what we have now
Job growth isn’t keeping pace with government. When you have HS librarians making $150K a year and then retiring on 75% of that, you’ve got a lot of private sector job destruction going on.
The trouble with jobs and job creation is government.
Societies and governments throughout history have tried this same scheme again and again.
Reaching the “bread and circuses” stage is not a sign of a healthy society.
If you build a man a fire he will be warm for a night. If you light a man on fire he will be warm for the rest of his life.
I’m all for basic free income. In return, you voluntarily forfeit your right to vote - on anything.
Fair is fair.
Why limit ourselves to just a free “basic income” for everyonewho doesn’t want to work? Wouldn’t it be better to just give each person in the U.S. a trillion dollar coin for not working? Then everyone who doesn’t work would be RICH and not have to exist at just a subsistence level. Furthermore, everyone could buy anything they wanted and no one would ever have to work again. The coins could be made from a base metal, so they would be cheap to make, and a few extra ones could be minted for the government itself, so taxes could be completely eliminated and yet government could still function. It’s such an elegant solution I don’t know why it hasn’t been implemented yet.
BTW, when I get my trillion dollar coin for not working I’m going to buy a pony and the Denver Broncos. Oh, and then I’m going to buy my own private jet airplane and the Mona Lisa, and then ...
I do not think this concept is necessarily socialist / communist. The proponent is arguing that technology will make work irrelevant. Is that true? Maybe.
Conservatives need to think long and hard about the role of intellectual property rights. Should we support open-sourcing everything? I think not. The founders put the very reason for ip law in the Constitution: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”.
This is not natural law. Natural law gives me the right to own things. Ip law is a social contract and as such relies on the consent of the governed. Are we being served? Big corporations buy, sell and create ip. Little people, not so much any more, even though the original intent was to benefit the actual inventors and other creative types such as authors.
We the people are giving up the right to make copies of movies, music, books. We are giving up the right to reverse engineer every product and make it cheaper. We give up the right to duplicate pharmaceuticals for a fraction of their cost. Why? Because it encourages innovation. What do we get in return? Access to these innovations, inventions, works of art.
Is this a fair deal? I think ip rights should be on the negotiating table.
Look at it this way - if the director of engineering at Google is correct, computer power will match the intelligence of human beings within the next 12 years or so. And computing power and robotics will get better and cheaper so that we could theoretically have machines that do all of the work we could do, only better.
Who should have the right to financially exploit this scientific progress? Only Google? Only Facebook? Only Amazon?
We need to look at how wealth is created. It is created by work, innovation, and exploitation of natural resources (i.e. putting them to use for work or innovation). I am not really aware of any other ways wealth is created. (I am open to suggestions.)
I do not think a living wage from the government is absolutely against conservative principles. I think that if it is based on the value that the government can create by protecting ip rights through laws and treaties, and based on tariffs applied to imports, then it could be one possible conservative approach to the changing face of technological progress.
I add the following caveats though. It should be given to every citizen regardless of how rich or poor or anything else they are. It should not come from borrowed revenue (printing money is a hidden tax), and it should not come from income tax (which should be abolished anyway). It could come from tariffs and taxes on goods that receive ip protection.
Then what will be the incentive to work and invent? To have more than a living wage. All of the things that are protected by ip laws cost money and may be out of reach to those who just have a living wage.
A living wage could replace all of the broken government programs and consolidate them into a simple system.
My two cents. Hopefully will not provoke knee-jerk reactions. Intended to provoke thought. I am open to have my opinions picked apart and proven faulty, but please put a little thought into it if that is the intention.