Wednesday, April 26, 2017

work ethic is a code word for slavery

Universal Basic Income (UBI) has the same rationale as Universal Health Care.  Provide the means to survive without a work requirement.  The recent legislation attempt in the US to replace the flawed ACA (Obamacare) health plan with an even more flawed and (lower quality) health plan that would push 24M Americans out of coverage, and failed to pass only because the so-called freedom caucus (a wing of Republican party) found the bill insufficiently oppressive. They used the language of "work ethic promotion" as code for "insufficiently oppressive".  Some Democrats share the Republican's deep hatred for the American people by not supporting the alternate "Medicare for all" bill.  Nanci Pelosi's voiced concern is that it would mean higher taxes.

Structural oppression to maintain the people's work ethic is fundamentally equivalent to supporting slavery.  Its a transformation of the unacceptable physical chains and abuse of slavery, with less visible, structural chains that force us to seek kind masters to alleviate our food and shelter (and healthcare in US) insecurity.  High abundance dictates that we should make the world/society more welcoming (easier) rather than harsher.

Work is awesome!!!!
It provides fame, fortune, a positive source of self identity, a feeling of helpfulness, pride of creation and responsibility, and the means to form a family, and/or buy boats, hookers and intoxicants.

The benefit of work sells itself.  For necessarily evil reasons, however, leaders and politicians wish to structure a harsh world such that those benefits need to be supplemented with harsh consequences for failing to do or find work.  Conventional thinking is that the labour market must be unfairly coercive towards labour suppliers and create a bias towards employers.

Slavery and oppression are awesome!
Most people support slavery.  Its not a rational support, but it is rooted in philosophical belief in the work ethic.  Still a significant number of powerful people do directly benefit from oppression.   If you want to buy a house, you will get a better price from a seller financially overburdened from owning another  house, or desperate to pay for a medical procedure.  Buy products manufactured in low cost third world areas because they are cheaper.  Forcibly manufacture desperation in your own society so that you can oppress your fellow citizens into conditions competitive with the third world, or to consider the military a sensible career choice.

Its only this last (very small numbered, but powerful) group that has a rational interest in opposing UBI.  For the rest, their position in the harsh hierarchical order is probably a zombification they prefer over unknown freedom..

Yet the necessity and desirability of having others to exploit decreases every day as machines grow more capable of following direction without question or relative expense.  Remote control of (military) murder weapons only needs to pay the operator enough to overcome the moral deficit of the actions without needing to convince them that the actions are more important than their fears.

The family farm - origins of the work ethic
Families are communes.  The wealth is shared within it.  But a family is also a hierarchy.  Parents teach their children a work ethic in order for them to help around the house/farm, respect for their creators, and aid them in their old age.  Developed nation birth rates declined in large part because of socialized eldercare.  There's less of a need for children to help.  The birth rate decline started with industrialization.

The freeloader problem exists (only) within communes.  A fixed amount of work is required to sustain the household, farm or commune.  All work that I avoid, you have to do.  Both of us are unpaid to do the communal work.  So work ethic is important to the household/commune to ensure a fair share of duties.

Outside of the commune, freeloaders are an opportunity (not problem) for you
If no one else in the world wanted to grow wheat, I would like to  grow it all because I love bread so much.  If no one else in the world wanted to bake bread, I would do it all because I love boats, hookers and intoxicants so much.    Extremely high wealth potential exists for any activity that other people are too lazy to do.

Outside of your commune/family, your work is paid for.  A small portion of your profits being used to pay for freeloaders (through taxes) enhances your wealth compared to an exterminist policy.  If 50 out of 100 social members are productive, and share the burden of socialized support for the population, then on average each productive person supports the subsistence of 1 other.

It does not take twice as much work for me to produce wheat for 100 vs 50 people.At the cost of just 2% of my production, I get to double my sales, and more than double my profits.  Other productive people and businesses support most of the "hippies".  The hippies can also provide me with hookers and intoxicants and entertainment.

"Teaching" work ethic to the hippies is counterproductive for me
If I am the only one growing wheat for a 100 people market, I sure as hell don't want to force anyone else into competing with me.  Even if I were lucky, and teaching/forcing  a work ethic upon the masses drove the hippies into bread baking or boat building, there is the much more important consideration that UBI supports them in the most (cost) efficient way possible.

Hateful work indoctrination programs such as conditional welfare, police and prisons to deal with hippie non-compliance (including survival motivated theft) means an even more expensive solution involving employing/forcing unproductive people to inflict unnecessary conflict and hate on the hippies. The conflict itself distracts from hippie productive pursuits.

Financial destressing/security helps the productive classes too
The most important obvious benefit of UBI, or anti-poverty programs in general, for the productive is that the poor spend it all, and so tax money flows right back up to taxpayers.  The less obvious, but even more important benefit of UBI specifically for the rich productive is that, UBI is a safety net for everyone.  Not just the poor.  This means that the only reason to have savings is having more wealth than you know how to spend. (An alternative reason to have savings today is an emergency/rainy day fund, or planning an early retirement, or funding children's early adulthood education or support )

Lower income variability, and assured future income subsidies means a lower need for emergency savings, and setting aside for children's adulthood (they will be able to pay for their own education through UBI), among productive people.  This necessarily means, more spending, and so more income for society as a whole as more work is needed to collect all of that spending.  Since income always flows up to those with more wealth than they know how to spend, this is a benefit to people at all income levels.

It is this point that UBI is an improvement to life for people at all income levels, and with all possible attitudes towards work, that leaves as the only rational opposition to UBI as the manufacturing of misery and desperation  for exploitation.

The right may have more evil motives for expolitation:  military service, slums, sweat shops, motivated servitude in pursuit of unethical behaviour, intentional destabilization of regions to promote violence and racial tensions.  But the left can also wish for exploitation to persist as it justifies hierarchical empires to combat it:  Union dues, government charitable services, unnecessary work.

Controlling the work ethic of others is a root of this irrationality
The need and acceptance of controlling others is a root of this root, but the thinking around coercing work ethic is clouded by misunderstanding society as part of the same family farm.  Other people's laziness (outside of our commune) is the source of our profits.  Oppression causes savings and hoarding (and therefore not trading for your profit) in defense against that oppression, and violence, fraud, and other costly antagonism in reaction to that oppression.

Coercing work ethic is necessary in forcing tax cuts for successful companies and people (where success is portrayed as work ethic).  It helps convince the public that the rich deserve to rape society, if other workers share a bit of the traits that are glorified.

Proof that UBI and higher taxes leads to more wealth and income for the rich
An empirical point is that the GINI coeficient (measures wealth inequality) for Denmark is (slightly) higher than that of the US.   Denmark is recognized as having a generous social safety net.  Logically this is explained by most people not needing to save in Denmark, and so savers are typically those with more wealth than they know how to spend.

In a simplified economy designed to approximate the US economy, with $10T consumer spending, 200M non-senior adults can be provided UBI of $16k/year, at an average tax cut of $4000 ($800B in  program cuts).  Couples with household income of $160k could break even taxwise, with those earning less getting a net tax cut, and those earning more a net tax increase. 

$2.4T in redistribution is accomplished (16k * 200M less 800B program cuts)  All of which is taken from savers and given to those with high propensity to spend.  Furthermore, households near the  $160k income threshold would typically save for kids college education and early retirement opportunities.  Both of these needs are significantly alleviated by UBI:  Kids will be able to fund their own education, and UBI income supplements significantly reduce the savings requirements for any sustainable income level.  So existing savings by those earning under $160k will be drawn down, and the increase in consumer spending will likely be greater than $2.4T.

$2.4T in increased consumer spending on a $10T base, is 24% growth.  Since all income flows up to rich savers, this will mean a greater than 24% increase in the incomes of the highest earners, and a much higher benefit than any tax increases they face.

More wealth for the rich should not be understood as negative under UBI.  They get rich by providing more value to lower income groups which have an easier opportunity to acquire that value.  Even though lower income groups will have less reason to save, they may still choose to do so in order to climb up the wealth ladder.  Poverty and lack of opportunity are real problems.  Wealth inequality is not a real problem.

Getting Business leaders advice on the economy is like getting polution and climate advice from coal miners

Business leaders have no goal for employment, research or investment.  All of which are necessary for economic health and growth.  Business leaders want to hire slaves, want to cheat customers without repercussion, pollute freely, have innovation subsidized, and bailed out by government when they fail.  They don't want money in order to do economically productive activities, they do econoomically productive activities because they want money. 

Business tax cuts directly reduce employment and other investment because lower tax rates means less of a tax refund for those activities.  Any filth that tells you differently, is lying, trying to steal from you, and trying to destroy your country.

If destroying the economic health of a society can be done while milking it dry for a greater share of the milk for business leaders, along with the opportunity to acquire the rubble at bargain prices, with a good share of the bailout subsidies meant to redress the destruction, then that path to destroying the country is the advice business leaders will provide media and political leaders, and the latter can often value the friendship of business leaders more than their constituents economic health.

Free and fair labour markets


UBI relies on the market principle that work will get accepted at a sufficiently high offer.  I recognize that slavery, and oppressive conditions approaching slavery, can motivate more work more cost effectively than fair markets can.

But the only change to labour markets that UBI causes is higher wage offers and better work conditions needed to be made to compete with the leisure or entrepreneurial options available to the worker with UBI.  Businesses are not at a competitive disadvantage with each other, and can just raise prices to pay for the higher costs.

There's also the potential for lower wages under UBI.  Labour regulations become less necessary.  If there are 1M applicants per job opening, but the applicant's needs are for beer money (because food and housing is covered by UBI), then some applicants may be happy with a wage offer that is for beer money.

UBI promises a happy society with high wealth inequality
Under UBI, the rich get richer by manufacturing the abundance for a very broad consumer base.  The poor happily trade their UBI money for those goods, secure in knowing more will come next month.  The alternative gets ugly:  culling people to save on taxes, similar to recent republican healthcare bill compromise to deny insurance coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions, exterminating them, so premiums can be reduced for the healthy.

Exterminism is the logical alternative to UBI

Automation in just transportation, retail, and food service will mean massive social disemployment.  Meanwhile, all of those industries need significant numbers of consumers with disposible income to survive and thrive.  The exterminism option is also the choice that ensures economic collapse.

The appeal of exterminism is that once "we" don't need people for military and police (especially), then exterminating anyone that might require social support saves the cost of that social support.  The seeds for this are already firmly planted.  First you come for the muslims and mexicans, and the nazis will cheer for it, for they are neither muslim nor mexican, but are too stupid to understand that genocide does not create jobs.  It creates empty housing and abandoned cars, and excess food capacity, then just scavenging for those goods. The weapons used to exterminate the early waves of undesirables can easily be turned onto expanded groups made desperately criminal by the spiraling collapse.

But before you start the explicit extermination on racial/ethnic grounds, you should destroy the social safety nets such as healthcare access and welfare.   Manufacture crime increases to strenghten police and prison resources, and show society how undeserving the criminally desperate are of social support.  An invisible sheppard's hand can manufacture hate and violence among the sheeple and the goats.  Short sighted cost savings are often mistakenly chosen despite the obvious economic benefits of population sustanence.

Greater than 50% chance that exterminism wins
US Republicans favour exterminism.  Climate destruction and war is one path to exterminism they favour.  But, even if we escape that fate, robocops can be as little as 10 years away.  Corrupt electoral and governance processes may make democratic opposition to exterminism irrelevant.

Even if there is a clear path towards great economic shared prosperity, there may be too many idiots who will follow those who see profit from actions directly leading to collapse.  For example, coal is a dead techology.  There should never be another dirty coal electric plant built even on profitability grounds.  But if someone can make a dollar keeping a coal plant from shutting down for 5 years, regardless of the destruction caused, he'll use that power to make a dollar.

Is a world based on slavery necessary?
There is obvious appeal to business leaders for creating and maintaining a desperate subclass for which work ethic is "whipped" up, and structurally shaping a labour market composed of desperate sellers forced to aggressively outcompete each other, and powerful buyers able to dictate oppressive terms

For UBI not to cause production collapse, the labour market would still need to function when people may refuse to work.  Employers offering better wages and work conditions is not a world collapsing situation.  Fairly power balanced labour markets exist in professional sports, entertainment, and have existed in stem fields and mid 20th century high demand conditions which gave rise to unionized manufacturing labour.  In the case of stem fields and manufacturing, industry was thriving when wages were higher.  Entertainment and sports are still thriving now.

Quite obviously, balanced markets work themselves out just as easily as coercive markets.  So there should not be a panic or opposition over allowing fair labour markets.

Automation makes slavery no longer necessary.
Forcing other people's work ethic only benefits the slavers, and threatens you with culling/extermination, not to mention increases the competition you face for work.

RoboCops, RoboSoldiers, RoboDrivers, RoboMiners, RoboBuilders, RoboFoodservice all promise to eliminate the need for slaves.  Unless immediate consciousness that renounces work ethic politics and the false notion that exterminating/deporting groups of people can ever create more work for the slavers' favourites, then your eventual extermination is threatened too.  When only white republicans remain, poor white republicans will be put up for extermination.

Liberating people from slavery (and letting them survive and thrive) with UBI, lets 9B people contribute to the improving abundance in the world.  Art, design, software, science are more useful and profitable and affordable the more people they benefit.  A robot is very useful in providing food for 1M people.  For 4 people, research into improved automation is not worthwhile.

Even if it should be obvious that more people helps all of us be richer, the stupid believe what they do despite reason.  Power rather than wealth can motivate slavery, and then when slavery is no longer useful, extermination rather than pursuing the market opportunities that UBI fed people would deliver for you.

Laziness, Greed, and Fear
  1.  Everyone is lazy.  Even the poor opt to pay for pipes to deliver water and energy (automation) rather than going out every day to collect it from nature.  (property rights/regulation may prevent that option in some places).  UBI gives everyone the means to pay for their laziness.
  2. Everyone is greedy.  No one would respond to a $5M offer for their house or their labour with an argument with the bidder for it being too high of an offer.  Where greed is destructive, is the use of coercive power to further accumulations.  Greed ensures, under UBI, that people will volunteer to permit other's laziness in exchange for their money.
  3. The overwhelming political majority can be made afraid of false phantoms as a result of the combination of relative stupidity and information imbalance relative to the wizards.  Jealousy, hatred, and envy are also easily manipulated negative emotions.  Where UBI equalizes opportunity, society can be much more harmonious, and individuals can look to themselves to improve their lives as they see best.  The significant difficulty facing the world is that political structure rewards manipulation with an objective of obtaining power to abuse power.  It is greedy to lie and distribute the spoils of victory to favorites, but why engage in difficult struggle if not to abuse the power of victory?  UBI as a social dividend is fundamentally incorruptible, and its appeal is based on avoiding the abuses of traditional political liars.
 The commonality of these 3 attributes is that none of them will ever be changed, but with automation and abundance, individual laziness becomes a positive for the rest of society as it improves "much needed" work opportunities.  Phantom manipulations of fear and hatred must be exposed because tax cuts for the rich and accelerated climate destruction is the straight line path to extermination.


Why mainstream political ideas are worthless compared to UBI
  •  Minimum wage:  accelerates drive to automation.  Eliminating jobs and leaving many more desperate to compete with others, driving them to unethical service or behaviour.
  • Job guarantees:  Force people to do useless work, based on work ethic retardation.  This leaves people too tired to develop themselves and/or produce something useful.
  • Infrastructure and government expansion:  Like the job guarantee, job-creation is the worst possible justification for programs or projects.  All programs/projects should be proposed solely on inherent value.  No one actually wants a job.  They want the wage.  UBI provides the job creation benefits while freeing up the time to do something useful or interesting.
  • Institutionalized retraining programs:  While there is a role for institutionalized education, large scale bureaucratic determination of your institutional attendance is far less productive than UBI.  UBI should be enough to get a computer, internet, 3d printer (or other tool), and pursue independent study of your choice that may be more relevant and interesting to you and your goals.  UBI should also be enough to enroll in structured education programs, without an institutional hand compelling you into them.  A bureaucratic/institutional bias towards education makes education more expensive and less beneficial to the institutionalized.
  • appeals to inequality:  Raising income taxes is needed and effective.  UBI doesn't reduce income inequality even if it eliminates poverty.  The latter should be the goal.  Shaming people into paying you more won't work.  Violence towards the rich will get you exterminated.
  • Politically established channels for labour empowerment:  Labour needs to have power to take power.  UBI gives them that power in that it is the privilege to refuse work, making it easier for those that want work to compete.  But a fight to help unionization is a fight against more powerful forces, and a fight consumers side against.  UBI is an individual's empowerment to collectivize or not collectivize in a way that does not impose the choice on the losers.
  • Minincome:  The sabotaged Ontario pilot that is designed to fail pays 0 net BI to those making over $34k, and includes clawback/deduction rates as high as 93% on some lower income brackets.  Minincome forces the poor to pay for all of the costs of BI.  High clawback rates force people to either work for nothing, or not work.  Extremely counterproductive.  The Ontario pilot further reduces the BI amount for couples, disempowering people from forming civil partnerships.  Minincome has important "cheating" problems as well.  Only corrupt vermin attempting to promote other failures in this list as an alternative to UBI design such brainlessly destructive policies to vilify the poor for not having the work ethic to take jobs with 0 takehome pay.
  • Higher Daycare subsidies: Meant to push people (women) into work, its not necessary under UBI.  The UBI is the daycare fund, and you only need daycare if you are earning income.  Though it generates tax revenue to force people into work and further daycare workers
  • Social housing and poverty programs:  has historically been a racist policy of ghetoization and poverty traps, that provide race bait resentment, that races other than their own are getting free stuff, despite the ghettoization, impoverishment and criminalization of those races.  UBI empowers people to live where they wish, and racist supremacists should see no objection, since no race gets more, and they are already convinced that their race will naturally thrive more than the others.
  • Higher conditional (need-based) programs: This is the fundamental problem with work ethic.  They are conditional based on the pressure to stop needing aid, but it is simultaneously a poverty trap in that work involves loss of benefits.  We don't need to force a work ethic on people because natural greed will ensure that, under UBI, people will work to take others' money.
  • Labour protections from robots:  automation is awesome when it saves you from doing needless extra work.  That makes it awesome for society and businesses so that they not force you to do useless work, useless by definition, if an automated process does it more efficiently.  Taxing business profits regardless of their level of automation captures the social value of automation, and those profits should be used to fund UBI thereby compensating all of those searching for useful endeavours.  Protection from robots is a dead end policy in that international competitors will not force their population to do useless work, but will be able to sell useful goods at better value than what the wasteful slavery produces domestically.
  • Wait until the robots come before UBI: is a recipe for exterminism.  Even when the US significantly outperformed OECD peers over the last 8 years, a highly exterminist republican regime gained power.  More tax cuts, and the necessarily ensuing economic destruction, is the only path they follow.  Exterminism is just further along the same path.   UBI while jobs are still available speeds up the automation path, but does so with economic growth and shared prosperity.  Once you start down a path where Robocops guard Detroit concentration camps with the economic power comparable to famine stricken Sudan, its easier to dismiss the value of economic support to the group to the same level of famine stricken Sudan.
Every idea other than UBI is terrible
UBI maximizes social prosperity and liberty,  empowers workers, lets everyone set the exact work-life balance they wish, reduces everyone's stress and their impacts on health and crime, and eliminates poverty.  Only petty and evil power strugles to fight for a better outcome for their narrow slice of society would get in the way of this.

The work ethic counterproductive delusion is the widespread complicity to the power struggle agendas that are likely to lead towards mass extermination, unless the delusion is broken.  Telling other people how awesome work is, just makes them compete with you instead of hiring you to do the awesome work.