,> There is actually a moral aspect here. Morals in society is that you work to earn your own living and that you don't abuse kindness.
That is true, but it leaves out the question of who's morals we are discussing. If the recipient is not under any obligation, and yet gets a job, that morality is played out in them.
If the person is under obligation and gets a job as a result, their moral position is unknown but likely unchanged
Or perhaps we are talking about wanting other people to live out our morality?
Sure, in a world where you can effortlessly make that work without waste or moral lossage through faceless bureaucracy on the enforcing side, that seems like a great model. E.g. a parent setting some rules around a large monthly stipend for a child: the humanity remains, it’s efficient, the morality of “if you want money you have to do something for it” can be preserved without incurring larger moral costs like “you don’t understand the circumstances”, and maybe/probably efficiency can actually be improved.
as far as I understand this entire conversation around ubi, that ideal isn’t the issue. Proponents rather hold that you cannot scale this to a society without the cost exceeding the benefit. The bureaucratic machine to sustain these rules inevitably becomes soulless, expensive, inefficient, and counter productive. Is the argument.
It’s not that we shouldn’t, it’s that, at scale, we can’t. Is the argument :)
I don’t think your statement on morals is necessarily incompatible with the practical considerations offered by others. It’s a different conversation.
You keep claiming there is a moral problem with giving people enough of a basic stipend to actually live out of the gutter.
In the richest most affluent society in the history of the planet.
In a society where it is organized so a handful of people control more than 50% of the society's wealth, and it is also organized so the minimum wage has stripped is no longer even sufficient to work FULL TIME and get above the poverty line. In a society where a family owns the largest employer in the country and sits on $Billions of wealth while they pay so little that a substantial number of their employees qualify for food assistance.
Who is freeloading, the billionaire owners taking massive tax breaks and paying less than their office workers, or the minimum-wage laborer who must "take" government assistance in addition to his pay merely in order to not starve?
A society can rightly be judged by how it treats it's lowest members.
A moral affluent society would organize itself so every single person has a minimum of food, housing, healthcare, and education, even if a few were freeloading.
Instead, you attempt to justify refusing to feed and house people because a few might freeload. Or, if not refusing, to implement massive government bureaucracies, which 1) are both costly and 2) are proven to make worse outcomes and 3) are even more easily defrauded, merely to make sure all the lowly workers who cannot get a leg up are suitably shamed and monitored, lest they receive just a little too much.
And do not start on how some will waste UBI it on alcohol or drugs. The rich also waste their lives in the same way.
While you stand on your moral high-horse, you argue for the most immoral actions.
They’re absolutely right, and you’re wrong. In the moral sense.
You’re treating it as a moral imperative that (to be charitable) all able-bodied adults in a society must be somehow self-supporting, and using that as justification to either browbeat the recipients of minimum-quality-of-life benefits in order to continue receiving them, or to deny such benefits entirely after some point.
Given the relative wealth of our society, it’s immoral to cut off minimum-quality-or-life benefits when doing so would result in people becoming homeless, hungry, or sick. Even from a strictly utilitarian perspective, that will in the end impose higher costs on society than just distributing benefits.
Similarly, if what you actually care about is the cost to society in a utilitarian sense, the cost of the administrative overhead of browbeating benefits recipients and doing the necessary tracking to ensure benefits are cut off when they reach their endpoint and stay that way will be higher than just distributing them.
So what is your actual moral argument? It comes down to “everyone should have to work.” And, well, why? Some people can’t work and I hope you don’t begrudge them being cared for by society. Similarly there are the young and elderly who society should care for, rather than rely just on family to care for. So why is an able-bodied adult different to you?
If the argument is that you have to work so others should too, well, under the proposed scheme you actually don’t! If you want to just hang out all day every day on minimum benefits, I wouldn’t begrudge you that. Sooner or later you’ll probably work anyway just to get more than is possible at the very bottom. Or maybe you’ll create art and contribute to society that way. Or maybe you’d avoid being a drag on a workplace that’d be a bad fit for you, and contribute in that way. Or maybe you’d be able to devote your time to raising a child so they can contribute much better than if you weren’t there because you were working.
A morality that treats work as virtuous for its own sake is too simplistic to survive contact with the real world.
Oh, can you reframe? Maybe I'm reading wrong too (sorry if I did).
Meanwhile, I noticed a slight detail which both sides may have missed? : Job-finding rates were equal with the treatment and control group. Which makes sense in a high-trust society actually.
> Editor’s note: the King William’s College quiz has appeared in the Guardian since 1951. The quiz is no longer sat formally; it is sent to the schoolchildren and their families to tackle over the Christmas holiday. So yes, you are allowed to Google – however, the questions are constructed to make that less than straightforward. Answers will appear on the Guardian website on 15 January 2025. Good luck!
"Charles Edward Biffen was a notable British figure, particularly in the realms of politics, education, and military service during the early 20th century. However, there seems to be some confusion or lack of widespread historical records regarding the exact case of amnesia in 1925 associated with him. It is possible that you're referring to a different individual, as Charles Edward Biffen doesn't have a documented history of public amnesia in 1925"
But otherwise it's a great idea.
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