sperrico87 said:
And I think the idea of a job guarantee will have the opposite effect you're suggesting it will have. If everyone is guaranteed work no matter what, then there is no incentive for anyone to improve or better themselves. It would lead to people being forced into a professions they make not like, but because the government has them take a test, they are in that profession from 22-retirement. I can see that going very badly, and it draws some pretty horrible parallels with Communism, among other things. Next thing you know we'll all be wearing matching gray uniforms and sleeping in bunk houses. I think it would literally destroy our society. No joke. Social safety nets create a moral hazard, and the ultimate impact they have is that certain people will purposefully underperform in order to qualify for benefits. We already have a lot of that in our society. It breeds crime, resentment, and poverty cycles itself from generation to generation, rather than only occuring once and being over and done with. I'm not against taxes or excises, per se. I am opposed to an income tax, however. Because the income tax implies that it is the government that earns our money, and they simply allow us to keep a certain percentage. That to me is immoral. We work for a living, it's our money. I think taxes should be relegated to only products or services that we use, as we go, rather than scraping off the top everything society brings in. Taxes for gas or tolls on roads is totally fine. Because, if you use gas or drive on a road, you should pay for your use of it. Same with the Post office. |
That would only make sense as taxation to use things that the government has provided, gas not being one of them. The issue being that the government provides generally only public goods (aside from the little matter of the post office) that are more difficult to monetize. Sure roads have tolls, but how do you monetize, say, environmental cleanliness?
Just because some abuse social safety nets does not mean that the system itself is inherently flawed. There will be people who abuse all things, and no mechanism is perfect for solving all ills, but such social safety nets mean that society will provide for its own, to make sure that they have the dignity that they are morally entitled to. The need for government employment is to correct against those who want to work but cannot, because most people want to work on the whole, and this underlies the need for government intervention. It's not about "unilateral decisionmaking" it's about accounting for things that the free market cannot grasp, public goods like the health and education of the people, the cleanliness of the environment, industries that need a push before they can become self-sufficiently competitive, or large-scale mass transit systems. The ideal balance of Social Democracy is for the free market to work where the free market works (which is still the vast majority of commerce), and for the government to pick up the slack everywhere else. Much like too much democracy is a bad thing, verifiably, so a too-liberated market is also verifiably bad.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.