Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[T-hawk]

Leisure equipment such as sports equipment or a bicycle
A family holiday away from home for at least one week a year
A hobby or leisure activity
Attends organised activity outside school each week - added in 2011
Fresh fruit and vegetables eaten by children every day - added in 2011
Warm winter coat for each child - added in 2011

This is why UBI cannot work. Lifestyle inflation. No matter how much you give out, everyone will find reasons to claim that it isn't enough and demand more. You can never enable everyone to live comfortably because they will redefine comfortably to include more luxuries and redefine luxuries to be entitlements.

[Huinesoron]

Leisure equipment such as sports equipment or a bicycle
A family holiday away from home for at least one week a year
A hobby or leisure activity
Attends organised activity outside school each week - added in 2011
Fresh fruit and vegetables eaten by children every day - added in 2011
Warm winter coat for each child - added in 2011

This is why UBI cannot work.  Lifestyle inflation.  No matter how much you give out, everyone will find reasons to claim that it isn't enough and demand more.  You can never enable everyone to live comfortably because they will redefine comfortably to include more luxuries and redefine luxuries to be entitlements.

Which I imagine is why 'hobby' was removed from the adult list. If you look over that list, while it certainly includes luxuries (the holiday, for instance), it's far more spartan than the list for children.

Because... you know, they're children. You say "no matter how much you give out, everyone will find reasons to claim that it isn't enough and demand more", but what you're talking about is whether a young child:

• Gets access to toys
  
• Ever leaves their home town (note that this holiday doesn't include 'not with relatives')
  
• Gets to do something they enjoy (I assume this is tied pretty closely to the sports one)
  
• Gets to interact with other children their age outside school
  
• Gets adequate nutrition
  
• Stays warm in winter
  

No-one's saying these are fundamental human rights or anything. What they are saying is that children - who bear no responsibility for the family they were born into - should be allowed a decent start in life.

hS

[T-hawk]

What they are saying is that children - who bear no responsibility for the family they were born into - should be allowed a decent start in life.

And that "decent" will escalate without bound, since everyone will always justify that their child deserves just as much as the next one possesses.

[Gavagai]

Attends organised activity outside school each week - added in 2011
Fresh fruit and vegetables eaten by children every day - added in 2011

Definitely did not have any of these during my own childhood. Actually happy about not having the first of these.
This whole list is a total joke, of course.

[Gavagai]

No-one's saying these are fundamental human rights or anything. What they are saying is that children - who bear no responsibility for the family they were born into - should be allowed a decent start in life.

Against that no one argues, the question is who is supposed to pay for this decent start. You claim that any moron can unilaterally impose obligations on his neighbors by forgetting to use a condom. Don't you see how ridiculous is this?

[TheHumanHydra]

Your contempt for liberal thought is not appreciated and again betrays ideological fanaticism. But a better riposte would be that not thinking about the health and welfare of the little guy is the standard feature of conservatives when they approach policy, which explains why the policies usually hurt people -- and why they are wrong by every standard of Christian morality.

This requires a stronger response than I gave, because there's something very wrong with it.

What are my views? I believe there's an artificial division that has been imposed between right- and left-wing thought, and approve of the fact that young conservatives are trying to integrate some traditionally left ideas in this age of realignment. I think there's something valuable on both sides.

What are your views? Conservative policies don't care about the little guy, 'are wrong by every standard of Christian morality'. You are the fanatic.

You yourself evince ideological fanaticism as well as contempt, but then project your own ideological blinkers onto me. Utterly ridiculous. It's not hypocrisy though, you're just massively unaware of your own biases because you're just a newbie at this sort of thing.

Ipecac, if you knew me, you would perceive me as almost the farthest thing from a fanatic. With regard to my political views, I have voted for each of Canada's three main federal parties once. I would probably be best described as a 'Red Tory', meaning that I am myself socially conservative and believe with Conservatives in minimizing state debt, but with Liberals believe in socioeconomic policies designed to assist the populace at large and the less advantaged. This is by definition a middle-ground position and not at all fanatical.

I am surprised and pleased by your second paragraph. I would be interested to hear you elaborate on some of the leftist ideas you find compelling.

As for your third and fourth paragraphs, I think you should realize that I appropriated a sentence of yours in the heart of what I said there and inverted it to apply to you -- so that any accusation of fanaticism should result in a look in the mirror.

As for the remark on Christian morality, it was intended to cut at the disturbing tendency observable in American conservatives (I believe you are American, please correct me if I'm off the mark), who correlate with evangelical Christians, of apathy toward the less fortunate around them. This could be expressed in words such as, 'each person has their own burdens to bear. It's their responsibility to deal with their own problems. It's an immoral imposition on my freedom to require me to help'. But it is immediately evident that the teaching of the Bible is in direct contradiction of these sentiments ('If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?'). Your views so far have seemed to me characteristic of the former attitude. It would please me to be shown wrong.

[SevenSpirits]

With regard to escalating standards for what children deserve: I think this makes total sense. Here's my argument for my position, which is a pro-UBI argument primarily directed at libertarians or other free market / private property champions, who I believe to be almost correct but not quite.

The concept of private property (combined with a free market, etc), while it has many benefits, has one major injustice, which is the baked-in assumption that those of us who are alive right now get to divvy up all the stuff in the world between us. That leaves nothing for people who arrive in the world in the future, i.e. babies.

This works out to a rough approximation solely because when new people are born, there are usually people who feel personally responsible for them. Those people often effectively bequeath a large amount of their private property to the babies. In addition, many countries have state policies of giving some minimal amount of property to babies that don't have much. (I don't literally mean that they are giving babies the deeds to material wealth; rather they are allocating wealth for them and spending it on things they think the babies need, seeing as the babies are pretty bad at handling that themselves.)

The advantage of our system of private property is that it provides excellent incentives for behavior that leaves everyone better off. It is clearly better than even a functional system that redistributes wealth equitably, even discounting the fact that such a system would be ruined in practice by individuals cheating the system. But the fact that new people are at the mercy of charity is still an injustice inherent in our rules regarding private property.

At the same time, we know the following:
1) Capital (/property) tends to concentrate over time in the hands of fewer and fewer entities. (In fact, war has been a mitigating factor here, and if we want to build a world without war we'd better have a substitute for its one beneficial effect.)
2) To varying extents, distribution of property in the present is influenced by unjust actions in the part for which appropriate reparations are all but impossible to assess.
3) People change over time, and do not 100% deserve the consequences of their past selves' actions. (Our society acknowledges this in the concept of a statute of limitations, bankruptcy, letting criminals out of prison after a period of time, etc.)

To me, all these factors point towards private property (and the 100% continuity thereof) being not quite correct. I think there is some rate at which we should (morally and practically) be redistributing wealth, so that new people who enter the world have some immediate concrete claim on it, and so that there is a natural defense against wealth concentrating indefinitely. That rate should still be a lot closer to 0% (libertarian utopia) than to 100% (communist utopia) - I'd say maybe a 5% annual tax on wealth that's redistributed equally to everyone. (Wealth tax: I don't know of a great way to do this, but a decent way might be to make everyone declare the value of their stuff, and pay 5% of that. Your honest declaration is enforced by treating it as an offer to sell your stuff for that much money that anyone can accept.) I'm sure economists can do a better job than me at calculating an appropriate rate.

Practically, we're very far off from a global UBI, because we are divided into states with hugely disparate standards of living. I believe we can get there someday, and of course at all times we can try our best to make a world that's good for its people.

Back to the children: I claim they deserve some fraction of the stuff in the world to be allocated to them, and the amount of value in the world is growing faster than the population. It makes perfect sense for the amount we consider children deserve to go up over time. The fact that this higher allocation is described in the form of concrete things rather than just a higher quantity of money is an artifact of humans thinking in human, not abstract terms.

[ipecac]

Ipecac, if you knew me, you would perceive me as almost the farthest thing from a fanatic. With regard to my political views, I have voted for each of Canada's three main federal parties once. I would probably be best described as a 'Red Tory', meaning that I am myself socially conservative and believe with Conservatives in minimizing state debt, but with Liberals believe in socioeconomic policies designed to assist the populace at large and the less advantaged. This is by definition a middle-ground position and not at all fanatical

This just means you're in the middle with respect to Canada, and not that you're not a fanatic.

As for your third and fourth paragraphs, I think you should realize that I appropriated a sentence of yours in the heart of what I said there and inverted it to apply to you -- so that any accusation of fanaticism should result in a look in the mirror.

I did wonder what that silly inversion was supposed to do. It doesn't work on me because I can say both with complete equanimity both that there's something in some of the left's ideas, and that they don't think about higher-order effects when they try to implement the policies (with bad consequences as can be expected). Bacchus' comment in the past about leftist wonks forgetting about the interpretation of policy is a good example.

It does work on you because your view is completely biased, as below.

As for the remark on Christian morality, it was intended to cut at the disturbing tendency observable in American conservatives (I believe you are American, please correct me if I'm off the mark), who correlate with evangelical Christians, of apathy toward the less fortunate around them. This could be expressed in words such as, 'each person has their own burdens to bear. It's their responsibility to deal with their own problems. It's an immoral imposition on my freedom to require me to help'.

[ipecac]

With regard to escalating standards for what children deserve: I think this makes total sense. Here's my argument for my position, which is a pro-UBI argument primarily directed at libertarians or other free market / private property champions, who I believe to be almost correct but not quite.

The concept of private property (combined with a free market, etc), while it has many benefits, has one major injustice, which is the baked-in assumption that those of us who are alive right now get to divvy up all the stuff in the world between us. That leaves nothing for people who arrive in the world in the future, i.e. babies.

As was brought up earlier in this thread, how policies are socialised and the prevalent attitudes in society matter. At various points in many societies, it was regarded as a given that a central duty of earlier generations is to 'invest' for the future generation. At such times people slog and work 'to give their children better lives' (a thought growing more and more alien in our times). Private property with free market is not, per se, antithetical to this.

What has been destructive in modern times has been increasing atomisation, from other people including past generations (and therefore future ones), combined with a culture of consumerism and debt, that is what is going to economically hit the future generations.

Mass permanent welfare is 'needed' because safety nets and the attitudes of the past have disappeared, possibly something like that has to be done for children because things have fundamentally changed.

As for the rest of the post, I read all this stuff about 'equal opportunity' and decreasing relative poverty as a wish that the poor can attain towards middle class. I'm not sure in the first instance whether this should be taken a goal, because my understanding is that the existence of a sizable middle class is a historical aberration and whether it can be stably maintained is an open question. It is possible, as some have suggested, that next wave of automation will just wreck the current order.

[Gavagai]

The concept of private property (combined with a free market, etc), while it has many benefits, has one major injustice, which is the baked-in assumption that those of us who are alive right now get to divvy up all the stuff in the world between us. That leaves nothing for people who arrive in the world in the future, i.e. babies.

Why do you think this is an injustice?

1) Capital (/property) tends to concentrate over time in the hands of fewer and fewer entities. (In fact, war has been a mitigating factor here, and if we want to build a world without war we'd better have a substitute for its one beneficial effect.)

This empirical assumption is unfounded.