Working for a living

Let us assume most people have a goal of not dying. People will take whatever steps they deem necessary to accomplish this goal.

People need certain things to survive: food, water, shelter, clothing, energy, medical care. They also need secondary things that help us get their primary needs: education, transport, communication. Lots of thing-needing going on.

We live in at a pretty nice point in history. The things people need to survive exist in the world! This is much better than the alternative, where we have to actually create what we need. (Admittedly some people still do that, but they're outside the scope of this article.) Since our survival needs are owned by someone, survival is simply a question of effecting the transfer of these things. There are three basic ways of doing this:

1) Steal. Someone gives you what you need involuntarily. This could be burglary, fraud, looting, war, or other forms of theft.

2) Trade. Someone gives you what you need voluntarily, in exchange for something else they want. This includes shopping, barter, and labor.

3) Gift. Someone gives you what you need voluntarily, with nothing in exchange. This includes charity and government welfare, though government welfare includes some involuntary aspects.

All people do some combination of these three things to achieve continued survival.

First, we want to avoid theft, if nothing else because it's destabilizing to society. If theft is endemic, it forces everyone who isn't stealing to spend additional resources on security, which are resources spent not making the world better. We try to dis-incentivize theft through punishment. But no matter what punishment scheme you put in place, people will steal if they can't get what they need to survive, either through trade or gift. Thus, to prevent theft and maximize overall efficiency, we must make sure that survival is otherwise achievable through trade or gifts.

First, we consider trade. The overwhelming majority of humans have exactly one thing to trade: labor. We work, and in exchange we obtain things we need. Our labor has a value, and our survival needs have a value. The ratio of these determines how many hours one must work to survive. This number will vary from person to person, year to year, and place to place.

But what if that ratio gets out of whack? What if the typical person needs to work fifty hours to survive? Seventy? Ninety? If the number of labor-hours required to survive is more than a typical person can supply, if the cost of living goes up or the value of labor goes down too far, it becomes literally impossible to work for a living.

(Now, I am not presently arguing that this has occurred today, here, or at any other time or place. I am simply pointing out the boundary conditions of our present system.)

Supposing this occurs, and that we still want people to not turn to theft, we have a few options:

1) Make labor worth more than its market value. This can be done with minimum wage laws, or with the artificial creation of new jobs.

2) Make cost of living less than its market value. This can be done with price controls, or with subsidization of survival needs.
3) Decouple cost of living from labor. Give people their survival needs whether they've earned them or not.

None of these are free-market solutions; all are some form of government intervention. From this, we have an inescapable conclusion: the free market only leads to a stable society as long as people can earn a living. Once the cost of living exceeds the labor available to an individual, for whatever reason, government intervention is required to preserve stability.

Of course, that leaves trivial details like when and how...

Bet you don't understand socialism

I've seen a large number of posts about Bernie Sanders, most of which show a distressing lack of understanding. I'm not some hardcore Bernie fan, I just hate misinformation. I'm writing this to respond to all of these mistaken posts at once, in order to help mitigate the damage being caused. Unknowingly repeating a lie does just as much damage as lying on purpose. If you spread misinformation, you have a moral obligation to stop. So please, if you see any of the same lies I have, don't share them. Shut them down. Now, on to the corrections:

Socialism is not communism. Communism advocates the elimination of money, property, and government. Socialism was originally conceived as an intermediate step towards communism, but it's never actually been practiced as that. There are a huge number of variants of socialism, and treating them all as if they're the same as each other and the same as theoretical communism is lazy and dishonest.

Socialism is not inherently totalitarian. The Soviet Union was a socialist dictatorship. Europe is a socialist democracy. This is why Bernie Sanders is called a democratic socialist. This is completely distinct from being a Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, or any other unpleasant-ist.

Democratic socialism, by definition, does not eliminate individual freedom. By every measure taken by every group, Europe is at least as free as the United States, if not more so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Justice_Project#WJP_Rule_of_Law_Index_2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Property_Rights_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

Socialism is not a fundamental rewriting of the structure of the United States. Everything we do is socialist. Don't believe me? Suppose I told you you were required to pay taxes to fund your protection against calamity. You don't get to opt out and trust to your youth or wealth to save you; everyone is required to pay, and everyone is protected. Does this description of socialized medicine make you angry? Sound un-American? Well, I'm not talking about medicine; I'm describing fire departments. And police forces. And jails, and courts, and elections, and schools, and emergency relief, and the military... where's the difference? What some call socialized medicine is just an extension of the fundamental concept of every government, including ours: taxes suck, but they're often better than the alternative. That transactional balance is where the discussion has to be. Are you getting what you're paying for? If the discussion is about having taxes at all, you're really contemplating whether you want to have a civilization in the first place. That's not a discussion I care to have. If you think having no government would be great, move to Somalia. You'll find it more to your liking.

We have had socialized health care for decades, just an extremely bad version of it. Federal law requires hospital emergency rooms to treat people regardless of ability to pay. Who do you think pays the ER bills of those who can't pay for themselves? All the patients who can pay, obviously. We're already not free-market by shifting costs away from point of consumption. Wouldn't it make more sense to shift the costs to some place consciously chosen to do the least damage, instead of forcing them onto those barely able to pay, ruining additional lives and creating more medical bankruptcies? What outcome can there possibly be from that, except the creation of more poor who can't pay? If you want free-market health care, you have to be in favor of letting ERs throw out people who can't pay. Horrified by that? Good, you're a decent human being. But you're also one flavor of socialist. Get over it. Personally, I think that if we're going to have socialized medicine, we should have a variety that doesn't suck.

Some forms of socialism work better than our present systems. Europe has been more socialist than we are, and getting better results. Anybody who tells you we have the best health care on earth is lying to you. Look at the survival rates of serious medical conditions; many European countries are comparable to the US, and for some diseases we're way behind. Our infant mortality rate is triple what it could be. That's 17,000 babies per year dying unnecessarily. We're 40th in life expectancy. And we're paying vastly more for this substandard system.

This country was not founded in opposition to socialism. We were founded in response to a failure of representative democracy. It would be no less of a failure to tell the people of this country that they can't have socialized medicine, if that's what they choose to have.

If I see any more lies I need to respond to, I'll update this post.

Sanders vs. Tocqueville, Round One: FIGHT!

This is an expansion of my response to this article in a discussion with a friend.

Looking through Sanders’ speech, one can’t help but think he believes that the vast majority of America’s economic problems will disappear if more people have more stuff.

Uh... yeah. That's kind of a tautology. If your problem is lots of poor people, then those people having more stuff gets rid of that problem. Redefining the problem to be a spiritual one, wherein we just ignore the fact that we are starving, is a delaying tactic. It by no means prevents the inevitable social instability that comes from millions of people being unable to feed their children.

This article is just so much noise, ignoring the fundamental reality: the programs Sanders proposes have a decades long track record of providing better measurable outcomes in every way. Ignoring the measurable well being of actual people in the name of abstract philosophical goals is just another from of despotism.

The American experiment is that people rule themselves, by a government of their choosing. It has nothing at all to do with a rejection of socialism. If the people want socialized medicine, it would be unamerican to tell them they can't have it because a man two centuries dead said so.

Every law trades the freedom of some people for the security of some people. This is the fundamental concept of government. Laws creating police and courts and jails to protect us from robbers require us all to pay taxes; we don't get to opt out and just take our chances getting robbed. Laws creating militaries to protect us from invasion are identical. There is no conceptual difference between those scenarios and laws protecting us from catastrophic medical expenditure, or environmental destruction, or joblessness.

The only question is which trades are good. How much freedom (typically in taxation) do we sacrifice, and how much do we gain by doing so? Each trade should be analyzed for its own merits. To claim that the trades that were good 200 years ago will remain the only good trades for the rest of time is not an position that can be rationally derived from any set of premises. It is an axiom in itself, a religious belief, and its implementation leads, as I say, to despotism. 

As Jefferson said, the Earth belongs to the living.

Robin Hood conversation

A Facebook friend posted a link to this article. I found the following conversation interesting, so I've recorded it here.

Me: False dichotomy. Robin Hood both robbed an overreaching government, and stole from the rich to give to the poor. In his case they happened to be the same. The ultimate lesson doesn't change either way: allow wealth to become concentrated to the point that most people have difficulty making ends meet, and law and order breaks down. Surely nobody can believe that if everyone was starving, but it was because all the wealth had been acquired by legal monopolies, Robin would have just been fine with that situation.

(How bad do things have to be for a criminal to be the hero of the story? I could think of a few names in the last few years one could say that about, actually...)

Complete equality of outcome is idiocy, but government can remove all reward for hard work just as thoroughly by allowing unchecked concentration of wealth as by preventing it entirely. If you want a functioning market system, and more fundamentally a stable law abiding society, government is required, and must take a path between the two absurd extremes typically presented by neoconservative commentators.

Beware those who present you with such false dichotomies. They're trying to shut down your reasoning process. Just like sound bite politics.

Friend:  I understand your point. However, in the stories, he didn't steal from rich individual citizens. He stole from a wealthy government (King) or Church which came into its wealth by immoral means (robbing from poor families, unfairly taxing, requiring tithes)

Me: My point was that difference does not change the applicability of the story, nor would that difference have changed Robin Hood's actions. My greater point is that arguing over Robin Hood is a cheap distraction from the fact that the American lower and middle classes have been taking a beating for thirty-five years, while the rich get richer and leave the rest of us with no hope of bettering our situation.

Friend: I think the two are mutually exclusive. This position assumes all wealthy individuals achieved this wealth through illegal means, or immoral means. That simply is not true. 

Me: I make no such assumption. I do assume that having a stable society is preferable to having an unstable one, and that having a large number of desperately poor people and a few very rich ones leads to an unstable society. How those rich people got there is beside the point. You can argue over a standard of morality all you want, but at the end of the day you have robbery and food riots either way.

Ultimately, we're arguing over a marketing slogan, rather than discussing the actual issues that desperately need to be addressed.