Answer for: Would you be willing to give up your personal wealth as the price for living in a sharing society?
#3 Yes
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You serve your personal welfare by securing the public welfare.
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Yes you do. But to what extent do you go?
Some supplementary questions to consider:
How much should the State take and spend on what it thinks is needed and how much should it leave to the individual?
What percentage of your wealth would you hand over to the State to buy social goods that you could share in when you needed them?
How much wealth would you wish to retain to choose to do with as you liked?
Are you happy to pay high taxes out of your income and let others decide what to spend the money on?
Would you not be happier if you could retain the money and spend it as you saw fit?
How much personal freedom are you happy to give up to the State?
Some would argue that the best way to avoid the hassle and slippery slope of government control is to make use of private charity.
All good questions. But they can't really be answered without a lot of specifics.
"What percentage of your wealth would you hand over to the State to buy social goods that you could share in when you needed them?"
That depends on what services they provide. Just because we're sharing doesn't mean we throw out a cost benefit analysis.
"Would you not be happier if you could retain the money and spend it as you saw fit?"
Maybe, again this depends on specific circumstances. If I had a serious illness and couldn't afford treatment I doubt keeping all my money would make me happy.
"How much personal freedom are you happy to give up to the State?"
No more than is necessary.
Friar, aren't you confusing two issues? If we choose to form a government, no matter what type it is, we must give up some freedom and make some sacrifices.
I'm not sure what that has to do with anything I said.
My point is that we can't avoid the hassle of government control, only seek to minimize it. Also that a "sharing society" doesn't have to mean government control of the economy. As you said in the other thread:
"In the end I believe we can be a sharing society without government redistribution."
I see. What I meant was avoiding the hassle of government redistribution. It was intended to be a reply to Thoralby's last three questions there.
Private charity - the libertarian answer to replace taxation and State benefits/help. Hmmm. I wonder about that. I guess it is supposed to work when the capitalist economy delivers riches to some people and they have so much, they then start to feel for other people and their needs. It didn't work very well before the various welfare systems were put in place in the twentieth century. All it did was to produce a pool of cheap labour so the rich could have servants for next to nothing and the rest could either go to the poor house and be made to do work in exchange for a bed and some basic food, or starve.
The charity approach exists but it does not deliver nearly enough to cover the needs of the poor. Unless human beings undergo a collective change of heart, I think that the charity approach, as the sole means of protecting the poor, would lead to the 21st century equivalent of the workhouse.
I like to be left alone by the State - I like to do what I want - I don't work anymore, but I am conscious I can do that because I have some level of independent means that I got together by working within the system. I am also aware that millions don't have that opportunity and they must work for others, no matter how hard the work or badly paid it is, to feed their families. In these circumstances, I believe there must be some sort of State aid - some sort of welfare system. However, I can understand it when working people complain about some of the people on welfare - there is some fraud in the system - the poor aren't all sweetness and light - they do lie about their circumstances to get free money. Another however - I also understand why the poor do this. From their ghettos, they see rich people earning loads of money and having a lifestyle they will never have. They understand the lie that hard work will bring rewards. The sort of hard work they are educated to do will never bring them riches and so they lie and cheat the welfare system because they feel they have been lied to and cheated by a society that promised them the good life and never delivered it. So I don't blame the poor.
@thoralby: I'm puzzled by your arguments. First, FZ indicated that he was in favor of safety net social services -- to provide critical assistance to people in dire need. Most people (except maybe some very hard-core libertarians) agree that a government-provided safety net is reasonable. It's best to rely on charity beyond the safety net, because we've learned that government entitlements act as a behavior reward system -- which ironically rewards undesired behavior and punishes the desired behavior. Hence, the correlation between single-parent families and poverty is huge, and growing. The ghettos as well as rural slums have been multiplied, augmented and expanded by the welfare system. Charities didn't "produce a pool of cheap labour". Labour is always cheap when supply is abundant, and the output is meager. With industrialization and exponential increases in the power of labour to produce value, wages increased and produced a large middle class. This of course was independent of welfare systems, either in Europe or in America.
Secondly, you say this: "They understand the lie that hard work will bring rewards." What is this? You got yours without hard work? I didn't. Hard work absolutely brings rewards. If there's a conspiracy to keep people in poverty, it's a manifestation of the law of unintended consequences -- consequences of the welfare system, and of the increasingly dominant free trade ideology.
Money is just the sawdust in your dustpan after carving the wood of life.
Its the function of your carving that is most important. Some people carve guns and bombs, some forks or bowls, and then some carve things I do not yet understand.
MDAdams
"Hard work absolutely brings rewards."
Hard work in the corporate world might well bring great financial reward but most people who inhabit that world are well educated, intelligent and have the sort of abilities that the corporate world is willing to pay a lot for.
However, let me give one example to show this is not true for everyone.
A person without education from a poor background where there is a lack of self belief/poor self worth - cleaning offices at minimum wage from 4 in the morning till 8 in the morning. Goes on to next badly paid job as a shelf stacker in a supermarket - from 9 in the morning till 6 in the evening. Goes home exhausted to cheap, rented apartment and a family to feed. This person is typical of many millions. Not everyone has brains, not everyone has a good education, not everyone has abilities that lead to success in an advanced capitalist economy. Hard work at the beck and call of others is the norm for such people and their type of hard work is a matter of survival. These people would laugh at anyone that said "hard work absolutely brings rewards".
Also, there are more shelf stackers, cleaners and other people paid at similar levels in the world than there are corporate success stories.
The tired myth that hard work always pays is just that - a tired myth. And it is not even hard to prove. I wonder how it has survived so long and I also wonder, greatly, how the capitalist classes get away with trotting it out as frequently as they do.
I would modify what you said to say:
"Hard work sometimes brings rewards if it is the right sort of hard work, otherwise not."
@thoralby: So, what do you think is the cure for uneducated, unmotivated, unintelligent people? In most industrialized nations, education is available to the motivated, and motivation is a state of mind. When I started my first minimum wage job, with no college education, I obtained a motivated state of mind because I didn't want to be poor. If the taxpayers had supported me THEN at some level of comfort, my motivation wouldn't have been sufficient to encourage me to wash windows and eat beans & rice, while learning ohm's law.
I'm not sure what your specific recommendations are. As Earth Tsar, what system would you impose? Would that system create more innovation, motivation, wealth and longevity of life? Or would mediocrity and stagnation be result?
MCAdams
"So, what do you think is the cure for uneducated, unmotivated, unintelligent people? In most industrialized nations, education is available to the motivated, and motivation is a state of mind."
Education works for many people but it fails to work for others. Sometimes it is because that education is poor and sometimes it is because those being educated do not have the capacity to benefit from it - they are not intelligent enough to get beyond a very basic level. Motivation is all very well if you have the intelligence to back it up. But the motivated who fail in school end up being demotivated by school and they end up in dead end jobs. There will always be exceptions to this rule of thumb, but they are exceptions. There are also other states of mind - fear and depression caused by being born into poverty for example. Some people never rise out of this. Perhaps they are weak, perhaps they have every excuse to feel demotivated - take your pick.
"When I started my first minimum wage job, with no college education, I obtained a motivated state of mind because I didn't want to be poor."
Good for you - I'm glad you made it. But there are very many factors about you and/or your circumstances that permitted you to rise above your starting level. It may simply have been aspects of an innate "character" that had the right aspects to fit in well with the world of work and the competition that goes with it. Others without your genetic make up would inevitably fair less well in the world of work.
"If the taxpayers had supported me THEN at some level of comfort, my motivation wouldn't have been sufficient to encourage me to wash windows and eat beans & rice, while learning ohm's law."
Again, good for you if that is what you wanted. You beat the odds. I just wonder about those who can never beat the odds. How are we, who have beaten the odds, expected to treat them? If we don't give them some level of comfort and instead, we urge them to "get motivated", and then they do get motivated but fail to succeed because they are not fitted for big material success in the working world, what then?
"I'm not sure what your specific recommendations are. As Earth Tsar, what system would you impose? Would that system create more innovation, motivation, wealth and longevity of life? Or would mediocrity and stagnation be result?"
I don't believe any society that has ever existed has tackled this successfully. I am beginning to think that no society ever will. You presuppose that I have specific recommendations. I have none to make. I simply made some observations. I will conclude by saying, making it less comfortable on government benefits will not somehow make the poor become motivated to succeed. There are too many other factors at work, some of which are outlined above, that militate against this.