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[–] analfaveto ago
I wasn't calling you personally lazy. It was the impersonal "you." The rant was directed at the average American "victim" of today.
Who is going to decide what is adequate pay? You? Trump? Some wise professor at Harvard? The party that won the last election? Are we going to have an endless list of professions and how much each person working in each one of them "deserves" to be paid? Do all surgeons deserve the same pay or are we going to have subdivisions within that list? Do you want to go the socialist route? Because that has gone so well the thirty-odd times it has been attempted, right?
We need burger flippers as much as we need cancer researchers. With automation coming strong, we may not need burger flippers in the near future, but the overwhelming majority of people who are flipping burgers right now do not have the potential to become cancer researchers. Those who do have the potential already have the means. Grants and loans have been available for a very long time.
[–] lipids ago
Universal basic income. It removes the coercive nature of employment which enables low value jobs. It removes the welfare cliffs that existing programs succeed from. It enables people to take risks like starting their own business. It supplements the income of those in low wage jobs so they don't fear poverty.
It's expensive to be poor and too many industries exist to exploit the poor. These industries do not create wealth but extract it.
[–] analfaveto ago (edited ago)
We already have a universal basic income; it's called unemployment benefits. Should unemployment benefits be higher? Perhaps. The real problem is the way the unemployment benefits are structured. As soon as you get a job, you lose your dole money, which doesn't really give people an incentive to get a job, especially if it's a low-wage one. If I'm getting £50 a week for doing bugger all, I'm not going to get a part-time job unloading lorries for £60 a week, am I? That would be stupid. The solution was given a very long time ago by Milton Friedman, with the negative income tax, but nobody has had the sense to implement it. With the negative income tax, you would get £60 a week for your work, but because your income is below the threshold of x, you get an additional (x-60)*y a week (with y < 1, obviously). That would provide you with a basic income AND give you the incentive to work.
Your second paragraph is nonsense, especially the last sentence. In an economy where transactions are voluntary, it's impossible for a company to make a profit without creating wealth. Even casinos create wealth. If an individual puts money on red on the roulette knowing the expected value of his return is negative, it's only because he values the possibility of earning some free money more than the prospect of losing the same amount with a slightly higher probability. He may regret his actions later, but that's irrelevant. Call it excitement. Call it entertainment. Call it what you want. If people are willing to pay for it, it has value.