I humbly submit that the number of people on this forum in 2019 who want to watch and then discuss a Milton Friedman video has to be single digits. And I am definitely not in that group despite having had an office next to Friedman when I was a graduate student (and had lunch with him on numerous occasions).

But people who phrase it this way need not be doing it for that reason. If your read reply #94 you will see that Mason is not only not guilty but didn't even realize what you are implying. This type of assumption is the main flaw of the semi smart posters here.

Let's change the thread title to "Disinclined to access the labor market"

Where do you think the money goes?

When a “watch my youtoob” drive by is your best post...

In a forum where, presumably, everyone is already concentrating on the poker profits by all the multi-table action, can't you lay out the bullet points of this video?

Let's see how OP takes some good-faith advice on how to best respect and communicate with the other members of this forum:

sigh

Counterpoint: The simple dichotomy that conservatives love reducing government bureaucracy and liberals like bureaucracy is simplistic. Other things like paternalistic and moralistic imperatives come into play. For instance, in the search to create an incentive to work for Medicaid recipients, conservatives in the states have built hugely inefficient government bureaucracies to track mandated work requirements with the end result that the program will kick many more people off the Medicaid rolls because the inefficient bureaucracy than it'll find people who didn't complete the work requirements, and one could say that kicking the most people off via inefficiency was the entire point.

On the other side, many leftists support Medicare for All not just because it gives healthcare to everyone, but precisely because it'll be cheaper than the current mix of government and corporate bureaucracy we have because of economies of scale and increased market power.

i thought the reverse income tax idea was great but toward the end of the video the host made some really good points about how it wouldn't eliminate the need for social workers which freidman reluctantly agreed with. so although it was his probably his initial intention to come up with a scheme to eliminate government workers, it doesn't hold up when you get into the details. although it seems like it would definitely free up some time for social workers to focus on the real hard cases.

plus giving money to a bunch of poor people would obviously be great for poker

giving money to poor people would be great for poker because in poker, unlike the global economy, money doesn't trickle down. if a fish or a pro has a big day at 2/5, they never move directly to 1/2 to splash around. they move up! if someone had a killer session at 25/50, they're not changing tables to play 5/10.

in fact, the opposite is true. if 10 fish show up to the poker room and spew a single 1/2 buyin each, that money gets picked up by the best players at 1/2, who will take their winnings and try their hand at 2/5, where they might be the fish, or are most likely not the best player at the table. the extra money the good 2/5 players make from the 1/2 players picking up easy money at 1/2 will boost their bankrolls and encourage them to take a shot at 5/10, and so on.

in conclusion, socialist policies including a reverse income tax would be an incredible boon for all poker players.

No mention of the previous failed experiments? All of the trials that have been run have resulted in happier people who did absolutely nothing to improve themselves ergo society as a whole. The thing I wonder about these experiments is how they are even valid. UBI is meant to replace things like welfare, rent control, etc....it would seem these trials are missing the largest part of the equation.

absolute increases to the money supply are not going to end well, unless you want to start playing around with price controls and possess the ability/desire to isolate your market from the global economy


the superior solution is to balance wealth within society to keep the poles from spreading so far apart that people are fundamentally unable to relate/communicate with one another

paying people to sit on their asses will lower the population's productivity, thereby damaging the population's global competitiveness and increasingly inviting foreign encroachment on vital resources

meanwhile undermining economic behavioral incentives will increase the need for policing and the violence inherent therein, for many if not for all

Yes. A broad middle class is the way, but that's been diminished. Also, in terms of national defense, I suspect that too few very rich people and too few very poor people will go to war for their country so the diminishment of the middle class is a diminishment of national security unless societal mobilization and morale don't matter in modern warfare.

What if the situation arises, due to technology, that those with average IQ are not able to be productive above the level of subsistence(this would wipe out the middle class)?

Would the supply of medium and low skilled labor need to be slashed?

Hasn't Egypt, for many decades, had laws against some farm equipment so that the peasants would still have work? That can't be the right idea. That's the equivalent of a UBI, no?

Why in addition? If the negative income tax supplies enough money there would be no need for "in addition."

mason

I'm not talking about the proposal. I'm only talking about the one idea of giving money to those who are unwilling to work, which.

Mason

Hi gregorio:

You're describing something that has some similarities to the negative income tax, and I suspect it works fairly well.

Best wishes,
Mason

Currently government spending in the US isn't nearly enough. So for any program to provide "enough money" it will have to either in addition to existing benefits or be a very large sum. Also it doesn't negate the need for things like single payer healthcare, social housing etc. Those basics are still going to need to be in place.

A universally applied NIT couldn't replace all welfare benifits because some of those welfare benefits are based on age or situational discrimination. For instance a child allowance or universal child care are to increase your income specifically if or when you have children. Same with an old age pension. Do we want to incentive 70 year old people to work? Should we? Presumably you could work that into a NIT but conceptually it's in the same boat as any other welfare system of having a bureaucracy verifying the info.

A NIT isn't a bad thing, it's all in the same box as any other system. It's a matter of looking at the outcomes of the system as a whole.

I really resent this. The government currently gets a LOT of money that it just straight up wastes. Let's figure out how to use the money we have halfway right before we reach deeper into debt or raise taxes. Not saying we won't probably end up with more taxes in the long run, but first let's take a big chunk out of the military and retirement spending categories and redistribute that to infrastructure, education, and basic research. If we still have unfunded needs for long term investments after that we can raise more money.

Obviously to do universal healthcare we'll need to raise taxes, but that's literally going to cost less after than we are spending now, so I don't really see it as a 'tax hike'. Not when it costs north of 12,000 a year per body for me to get health insurance for my small business for 3 employees lol.

EDIT: Obviously we put taxes back to the level they were at in the late 90's ASAP and eliminate capital gains as a separate form of income. That isn't going to be that meaningful of a revenue raise though.

Maybe we give da monies to those unwilling to watch that old man video.

You sold me. Sounds like a damn good start.

Friedman isn't going to look good in the history books. The basic logic over the last few decades in the corporate world has been held up by some blatant falsehoods: 'the market is very efficient', 'the only duty a corporation has is to its shareholders' (this one is all Friedman, and it's why he won't look good in the history books in a hundred years), and 'monopolies aren't bad if they don't impact prices to consumers'.

When you combine those three you get some really ugly conclusions. Things like believing that anything that increases the stock price must be good for the long term value of the stock. They are using that to justify stripping capex and R&D budgets to do share buybacks right now.