The problem in Keynes thinking on "social services" is that it's impossible to gather all of the knowledge necessary to ascertain what those would be. That knowledge is dispersed among ~320m citizens (in the U.S.) who each have particular wants and needs. And even if you could somehow attain that knowledge in one place, the likelihood of finding consensus on how a particular "social service" should be offered is next to zero. The end result? Nearly everyone disagrees with some of what government implements, which breeds resentment and causes gridlock much like we're seeing today in the U.S.
It doesn't have to be that way. By decentralizing decision making down to a level closer to the individual (if not the individual), more people get what they want. For example, right now there's a federal mandate for health insurance. Not everyone agrees with this mandate, so why not at least push it down a level to the states? California can still have a mandate for health insurance, and Alabama can decide not to. And then, why not push it to the city/county level? If you don't agree with San Francisco's mandate for health insurance, simply move to Oakland. You don't even have to move states, let alone countries.
Why do so many oppose such a solution where everyone can much more easily find a place where they agree with the "social services" offered (or not)?
> Why do so many oppose such a solution where everyone can much more easily find a place where they agree with the "social services" offered (or not)?
Because it creates collective action problems. Countries can exercise their sovereign powers to control commerce and the flow of people so as to reinforce their chosen social welfare systems. If they offer universal healthcare, for example, they can control immigration to manage the burden on their system (and keep out people who only move in when they get sick or to retire). U.S. states are precluded by the Constitution from doing that. Say Marylanders decide to pay higher taxes to support generous social services, and Virginians decide to stick to lower taxes and no service. There is nothing Maryland can do about free-loading Virginians who cross the border as soon as they get sick.[1] Likewise, say Virginia decides to reintroduce child labor, which gives Virginia a competitive advantage in producing cheap consumer goods. There is nothing Maryland can do to stop the flow of trinkets from Virginia undermining good Maryland companies whose prices are higher because they don't use child labor.
It's helpful to view the Constitution's Commerce Clause and Privileges and Immunities Clause as a two-pronged economic construct. One prong says that the U.S. is a totally free market internally for goods and labor. The other says that the federal government can intervene to address any collective problem actions that creates. To the extent that the provision of social services has knock-on economic effects (and it has major knock-on effects), it comports with the Constitution's design for those things to get kicked up to the Federal government.
One solution is to put a delay on eligibility. In your example, Maryland would provide free healthcare to anyone who has lived in Maryland as a permanent resident for 5+ years. Much like state universities. There's two different costs and in-state tuition is much cheaper. No more freeloading. Or less, anyway.
Whenever someone tells me, "It's too complicated!" I just think they're lazy. I usually don't say it though, to be polite. Instead I try to walk them through algorithmic thinking in a way that doesn't terrify them that I'll automate their jobs.
See the case I linked. Such laws are unconstitutional because they discriminate against new residents from other states. State universities are a weird special case in constitutional law.
An interesting read. However, there are many differences of regulation across state lines. For example, insurance is quite fractious (pun intended). I'll bet there's some way to innovate, even if politicians haven't stumbled across it yet. Perhaps the trick is to avoid calling it welfare, just as "credit default swaps" stayed unregulated because they pretended to not be insurance.
In your example of Maryland and Virginia and universal healthcare, Maryland will continually need to ensure they're collecting enough money (i.e., through taxes of some sort) to pay for universal healthcare. If an influx of unhealthy people enter the state, they'll have to increase taxes to pay for the higher healthcare bills, which will in turn make them less competitive with other states, and cause people to leave. There's no way Maryland adds universal healthcare and remains equal in all other categories.
In your example of child labor, it's arguably better for everyone if Virginia can produce cheaper goods. (Please don't think I'm in any way arguing for child labor.) Maryland benefits from the cheaper goods as well, and is able to free resources for other pursuits that are economically advantageous for them. We already see this to a degree in places that have an abundance of a natural resource – it's cheaper and more efficient for them to export the resource than it is for other places that don't have the resource.
In your example of child labor, it's arguably better for everyone if Virginia can produce cheaper goods. (Please don't think I'm in any way arguing for child labor.)
So is it arguably better for everyone or should there be protections for the children (who are presumably part of "everyone")?
I think if you immediately include a disclaimer about the children you probably don't believe there is much of an argument to be made.
Child labor is complex subject that we should avoid getting into here. The reason I added my disclaimer is because my argument is about cheaper goods, not any particular way they happen to be produced.
If I look at it strictly in terms of child labor, there's nothing stopping those opposed to child labor from leaving Virginia and/or discriminating against products made there. Just as we can today with products produced by brands that we know use child labor.
What? That's not what I said at all. In fact, as I initially said, "Please don't think I'm in any way arguing for child labor." How can I make it more clear?
My point is, in the hypothetical situation that a state did allow child labor – which I do not at all condone – people could choose not to buy products from that state, as people already do in not buying products from certain brands and countries that use child labor.
Universal healthcare works in various countries because everyone is forced to participate. Everyone pays into the system, everyone gets care when they get sick or are injured.
A US state can't do this on it's own because they can't force everyone to participate and they can't reject entrants from outside. In the Virginia/Maryland example Maryland would face an exodus of healthy and productive people who want lower taxes and an influx of sick people who want the free health care. It's not about "remaining equal in all other categories." It's that it wouldn't really work at all.
That's why you can't really have a system with massively different social services at the state level: the unbridled state to state migration.
They can't? How do they force everyone to pay state/local taxes? I doubt states would find it difficult to enforce participation.
On "unbridled state to state migration", I already covered that. Maryland would have to face the real cost of providing universal healthcare, and residents would have to decide whether it's still worth it to live there. Many sick people would decide that it's not, and choose to stay put in Virginia.
And if it truly wouldn't work, then it begs the question: Does it really work on the federal level? Why are costs skyrocketing and providers leaving exchanges?
Maryland would have to face the real cost of providing universal healthcare
The point is that they would have to face much more than the real costs of providing universal health care because they would have to provide care to a lot of people that never paid into the system due to migration.
It would work this way if the supreme court hadn't killed federalism over time by ignoring the 10th ammendment.
People don't really oppose federalism, but national level politicians win elections by promising benefits to interest groups to justify their existence. Promising to sit on your hands will never win an election.
Because if you don't mandate insurance, then the entire system falls apart. Sick people need it, healthy people don't want to pay for it. You need everyone to pay to make it affordable.
You're confusing insurance with healthcare. Insurance is supposed to be for risk mitigation, rare but extremely damaging events. If everyone uses insurance for everything health related, like we all want to do now, it's impossible for insurance to be anything other than a premium you pay on top of your healthcare costs.
Insurance shouldn't be used for routine stuff, and people shouldn't be required to have it unless they want it.
"insurance" in this case is also a savings account. People need to be forced to put money into the system when young and/or healthy so that's there's enough money available when they are not.
If they're not forced to do this, then they won't and people are forced to stand by and watch as they fall ill and due which is bad for the economy and may already disease, even if you don't care about the moral aspects.
There's little benefit to seperating these things out and obvious downsides to them not being mandated.
The premium on top of aggregate cost complaint would also apply to "pure insurance". Or else no one would bother selling it.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure they were saying that insurance didn't work, which is manifestly untrue. If they are complaining that it makes healthcare more expensive, well fine, but that is probably more about the principal agent problem than the administrative costs and profits of insurers.
This idea, which lies behind a lot of American libertarianism, says that theft (as taxation is construed here) outranks most or all other moral values, but does not explain why.
Instead, it hopes dogmatically that other moral values will be met as a side effect of following this one.
Not just theft, but aggression of any sort, including the most serious offenses such as rape and murder. Is there not a more fundamental moral value that we can all agree on?
> I'm arguing against being forced to help others who I have no relationship with, live in far off places, hold different health standards than me, etc.
How is that any difference from defense, law enforcement, fire protection, or property rights standards?
You're assuming that if the government didn't mandate health insurance, nobody would step in to help those people, which I don't believe is true. Lots of different groups – religious, businesses, municipalities, etc. – could fill that role. Individuals could even give directly to strangers in need through something like https://donorsee.com/.
This is Dan Ariely describing "The public goods game" and the instability of 'cheating'. Cheating in scare quotes because the conclusion stands -- in fact is enhanced -- even when the 'defect' choice is regarded as a choice that members of society are free to take (in fact that is the case he discusses).
>You're assuming that if the government didn't mandate health insurance, nobody would step in to help those people
No, the assumption is that if government mandated dollars stopped coming in, voluntary contributions wouldn't make up the difference. And that seems pretty obvious to anyone who pays attention to the political dialogue. Look at the Republicans who believe Obamacare is too costly. Their sole goal is to have less of their own dollars subsidize the sick.
That's also assuming the costs would stay the same, which they wouldn't if government stopped intervening. With lower costs, more people could afford to pay for healthcare out-of-pocket, which would reduce the amount of voluntary money necessary to cover those who truly need it.
I try to keep an open mind. I don't believe things will just solve themselves, nor do I think the market is the perfect solution. I do believe, however, that it's a better solution than government intervention, and we haven't found a superior solution.
Look at health care costs pre- and post-1965. They began increasing in 1965 with the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, and have continued to increase as more and more government regulations have been added since.
So are you in favor of a law so they can't discriminate on who they help? As if you are, it's an optional tax played for by people who aren't fully aware of the need. And if you aren't, better not tell anyone about your differences, you might die if the coke distributor knows you drink Pepsi or if the church knows you're gay.
No, in fact, the ability for these institutions to choose who they help is key. A business being able to choose to help only its own workers makes it possible to even help them in the first place. If they had to help anyone, it wouldn't be feasible. Same for a church or any institution. Being able to discriminate is important; it's not a dirty word.
Now before you go and doomsay about all sorts of discrimination happening based on race, gender, sexuality, etc., I'd argue that lots of institutions wouldn't discriminate on those factors. Case in point: most of the major tech companies. And if one did, would you really want to be associated with them and/or have them paying for your healthcare?
The ones that have recently faced age discrimination suits, criticism for the lack of diversity in their employees, and a whole range of reports of terrible conditions in their manufacturing plants? For some bizarre reason, I'm sceptical.
>And if one did, would you really want to be associated with them and/or have them paying for your healthcare
When compared to dying or living with severe health problems, absolutely. This entire thing is about unexpected healthcare costs, I may not have the ability to shop around for the most ethical choice.
No, the myriad that say "we care deeply about diversity and inclusivity" in their job posts. The ones that come out against banning travelers from Muslim-majority countries. The ones that care about climate change and the effects it has on people of this planet.
So adding a line to your job postings and sending out press releases is a better indicator than their actual acts? As you're probably talking about the same companies as me.
I understand what you're saying with "the ability to discriminate is important," but free discrimination has led to the trampling of human rights repeatedly in history.
> How do you justify the healthy paying for the unhealthy?
Over the course of time, everyone falls into both categories; this idea that there are healthy people is silly, everyone's health fails eventually and often randomly. Healthy is a temporary state. Everyone should contribute so everyone is covered when they become the unhealthy, as they all will.
Better to pay a little bit all of the time than to pay nothing and be unable to afford a giant medical bill that hits you all at once. This is why everyone should pay all of the time, then there's enough money to cover the every changing subset of people, which will eventually include you, who are sick.
But not everyone is (or becomes) healthy or unhealthy to the same degree. If I have no family history of health issues, or I simply want to take a chance that I'll remain healthy, why should anyone else tell me how much I should value my health?
It's really about double jeopardy. For a second put yourself behind the veil of ignorance. You are prebirth, you have no control over any factor of your birth other than one. That factor is that you get to pick whether you are born into a country with universal healthcare or one with non-mandated insurance where companies are able to discriminate on pre-existing conditions. Anyone who is risk averse is going to pick the universal healthcare one, otherwise you are risking a life where you are both sick but also bankrupted by medical costs.
That some people in society look at the circumstances of their birth and post-hoc reason that they don't want universal healthcare because it wouldn't have benefitted them is not the point really.
Even if you consider death a state of health – which is odd, who says "yeah, they're really unhealthy: they're dead" – the path to that state differs. Some people get sick very quickly right before death, while others are sick their whole life before death. Their required medical care vastly differs.
This is true, but it's not predictable which one you'll be. This line of reasoning is akin to claiming your car insurance should be cheaper because you'll never get into an accident. It's simply not logical. You cannot know if you're going to be someone who doesn't put a drain on the medical system or not, the future is not knowable.
You could be the healthiest person in the world and get punched by someone who gives you an expensive disease through blood contact; you could randomly get cancer at any age no matter how healthy you think you are. So this notion that you think you should pay less is based on a naive understanding of how health actually works; you cannot predict the future. You could be disabled tomorrow through no fault of your own. As such, the system must be designed to consider that everyone will be sick at some point and most people will be healthy most of the time, everyone pays and the sick are covered, problem solved for everyone. Social medicine works better than any other approach, this is a fact proven around the world. Those objecting to it are doing so on ideological grounds, not on rational ones.
I don't. I think paying for firefighters should be voluntary. Either I pay for it individually, or as part of my neighborhood, or at some other level that's much closer to me.
If I don't want to protect against my house burning down, why should I pay for it? And before you go and say, "because your neighbor's house could burn down too", they could choose to pay for firefighters and have them come out to douse my house in defense of their own.
There are already solutions available when there's no counter-party or the counter-party is unfit. i.e., uninsured motorist insurance, life insurance, etc.
And who's to say the extended family or community wouldn't step up to cover their expenses?
Or, instead of depending on utopic ideals and discredited economic theories, we can just make people buy liability insurance if they want to drive a car.
We obviously have different ideas about what's utopian and what's not. I think it's utopian to believe a centralized, federal government has all of the necessary knowledge and best intentions to make blanket decisions for hundreds of millions of people.
This really goes to prove my initial point in all of this: Why can't we get to a place where you can live somewhere more aligned with your utopian vision, and I can likewise live somewhere more aligned with mine? Why must either of us force our vision on the other?
If that's what you believe my utopia leads to, then you're completely misunderstanding my worldview. The principal of non-aggression means no one would be allowed to enslave or suppress anyone else. Period. Everyone has equal rights: black, female, gay, whatever.
No, sorry, you're confused with our current system of centralized power in the hands of a few who doll out rewards to their crony friends.
Who gets the money printed by the Federal Reserve first? Banks, where wealthy bankers then loan the money to others who are wealthy enough to be accepted for the loans. By the time the money reaches the poor and needy, inflation has already taken hold.
The party at fault may not have assets nor a job, your solution is is not a solution and doesn't help the person harmed when they actually need it, at the time of the accident.
> Financial responsibility is something to be enforced by courts, not mandated by congress.
> Nearly everyone disagrees with some of what government implements, which breeds resentment and causes gridlock much like we're seeing today in the U.S.
No, that's the electoral system; it's been empirically studied and established democracies with more proportional representation have much higher satisfaction with government than those like the US with poor proportionality, even though many of them also have much greater levels of public social support.
How is it more regressive than the status quo where you have to move to a different country? Moving states is less difficult, moving counties is even less difficult, moving cities is even less difficult, etc. The smaller you go, the less difficult it becomes.
There's a significant part of the U.S. population that wants to roll back gay marriage. What if that happened? As it is, you'd have to move out of the country.
You're relying on the right people being in office/power making the right decisions in your opinion. But of course, at any point the wrong people can get into office and make the wrong decision in your opinion. For nearly half the country, that happened when Obama entered office, and then again when Trump entered office.
> There's a significant part of the U.S. population that wants to roll back gay marriage.
Oppressing others isn't something that should be allowed to happen, period; those people are simply wrong, the position is immoral and indefensible. These things belong at the federal level, states should not be allowed to say oppression is OK because a majority of our citizens want to oppress gays.
To be clear, I am not one who is in favor of rolling back gay marriage. But you cannot logically say
> Oppressing others isn't something that should be allowed to happen, period
while in the same breath calling for the oppression of those you disagree with. It's an inconsistent position using the same argument you're railing against.
Good thing the paradox of tolerance has been solved for over a century! Now if only we could get the message out to people like you that seem to delight in ignoring centuries of philosophical discussion on this topic.
I'm not ignoring it, I just don't think it makes sense. "I'm tolerant of everyone except those I view as intolerant." In other words, you're intolerant of those you disagree with.
I believe true tolerance is respecting that everyone can have their own opinion/worldview. We can certainly disagree and have a good discussion about it, but nobody should be forcing their opinion/worldview on others who don't agree.
> but nobody should be forcing their opinion/worldview on others who don't agree.
And where in this thread has me or anyone forced our world view on you? Not allowing you to force your view on others isn't forcing our view on you. Frankly I don't think you understand what oppression or tolerance actually is.
Nowhere. I haven't claimed that. We're having a (mostly) thoughtful discussion with different opinions, which is great.
If you read back through the hierarchy to my comment here[1], you'll see that I ask the hypothetical question, What if gay marriage were rolled back in the U.S.?, to make the point that currently you'd have to move out of the country to escape the law. I do not believe in rolling it back! I used it as an example of a law/idea where there's a difference of opinion among worldviews.
We're actually on the same page here, gnaritas. People should have equal rights, regardless of their race, gender, sexual identity, etc. Nobody should be forcing their worldview on others. But that's exactly what the federal government does by making decisions that affect everyone. Every decision they make is made from a specific worldview. It's impossible for them to make a decision that complies with every unique worldview out there.
> while in the same breath calling for the oppression of those you disagree with.
You accused me of calling for the oppression of those I disagree with, so please do show me where I did that.
> But that's exactly what the federal government does by making decisions that affect everyone.
No, when the thing they're doing is providing equal rights, that isn't forcing anyone's world view on anyone else. Those who don't want gays to have rights aren't being imposed upon, they're still free to think whatever they like and they're free not to be gay; they have not suffered at all even though the law is in conflict with their world view.
> Every decision they make is made from a specific worldview.
While that is true, that doesn't imply said decision is imposing that view on anyone. Stopping group A from oppressing group
B is not imposing a worldview on group A.
> It's impossible for them to make a decision that complies with every unique worldview out there.
Of course, but it's not impossible for those decisions not to impose that view on anyone else. Protecting minority rights imposes nothing on anyone. If someone doesn't believe in gay marriage, the federal protection of it might be against their worldview, but nothing has been imposed upon them; they are not losing anything by someone else being treated equally.
You're failing to draw the necessary line between having different points of view, and having those points of view imposed upon you. Just because the feds do something at the federal level that may be the result of a world view in no way implies that thing they're doing imposes that view on anyone else.
Now certainly, many things they do "do" impose a worldview, but I'm only defending the protection of minority rights to have equal protection under the law, and that doesn't impose anything upon anyone.
You're very confused, I haven't called for the oppression of anyone. Disagreeing with people isn't oppressing them, stopping them from oppressing others isn't oppressing them. Stopping a bully from picking on someone isn't oppressing the bully, so yes, I can logically say what I said and you can't logically disagree with it. So please do show me, since you've accused me of it, where I've called to oppress anyone.
> it's impossible to gather all of the knowledge necessary to ascertain what those would be. That knowledge is dispersed among ~320m citizens (in the U.S.)
Enough said. All our problems are caused by trying to fight against this simple fact.
The further those services get pushed down, the less effective they become. With smaller groups to front costs, prices go up and less services are offered.
What supports that conclusion? There are lots of services – most actually, even insurance services – that thrive with voluntary participation. And the prices are driven down by lots of different companies competing for those customers.
Health insurance is not like other insurance. As best I know, no other insurance has the feature that an identifiable subset of people will need more than they can reasonably pay in the future. If we somehow knew my house was going to fall down in the next ten years, I couldn't feasibly insure it, and there are people who'll need much more healthcare than my house costs.
Arguably that militates against treating it as insurance as opposed to a straight-up single payer system or Singapore
style system (http://theweek.com/articles/684952/republicans-should-blow-e...), but it does mean you can't argue from the success of existing insurance markets.
I agree that the existing system is completely out of balance in terms of supply and demand. Why is that? I believe it's because government has intervened in the healthcare market, and removing them will lead to a market that's much more aligned with consumer demand.
Even now, there are places like https://surgerycenterok.com/ that prove high quality healthcare can be provided at affordable prices (they even list them on their website!).
Article is a summary of others' thoughts (mostly Keynes) without a clear thesis.
Would have been nice to read, say, an analysis of why privatizing air traffic control is a bad idea despite the fact that the tech the gov't uses in that space is super antiquated, which in terms drives a bunch of inefficiencies and safety hazards in that particular sector.
I mean, I think it's self-evident as a general point...but in this specific case they don't have any satellite data driving their weather analysis because the government bureaucracy is mired in an ongoing process to upgrade. Anyone who has done gov't software contracting has probably seen cases like this.
Why a private company would invest on better technology if it doesn't have competitors? It's not profitable for a service provider to invest, and even if there are competitors, most of the time, like with cellphone carriers, they agree not provide a better service so they can all take their portion of the cake without expending a dime.
Things like universal health care will become non issues when the country evolves from being a collective of economic interests with identity rooted purely in individual wealth and status to a country with a sense of collective identity that sees no conflict in having everyone's back and building a healthy educated society.
Individual excellence is as important as common structures and a collective sense of purpose and direction, no one achieves anything in a vacuum and one can't simply negate the other.
Collectivism is not about getting everyone down but raising everyone up at least to a basic acceptable standard and level of opportunities, so that anyone with the skills and talent can soar and not just those with privileged upbringing and backgrounds.
I wonder if they worry about their Climate Change denial impacting their credibility in other areas. If they'll happily take money from fossil fuel interests to try to undermine the scienctific community, who won't they attack for pay?
There are many defensible arguments against government programs from across the social and political spectrums, but they don't come from the Heritage Foundation. They have a severe beyond reason bias against government.
While it does cover a lot of interesting points the few things that I think it misses are research/innovation and unions/long term employment contracts of government employees. Not that there are easy answer, but those two things can effect whether a private company could get a job done cheaper.
Also, doesn't talk about software infrastructure. Take Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook. Customer acquisition costs for lots of fledgling businesses are high because of the ad auctions paid for by consumer attention and net neutrality keeping bandwidth costs down for those companies.
Getting rid of unions will increase income inequality. Just compare for profit higher education with public higher education. The wages/benefits for workers former very much lag those of the latter. Private prisons pay way less too. But the people at the top get outsized pay. The cost savings to taxpayers are not sufficient to justify this inequity.
Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology?
The impact on progress should not be discounted as an externality. Imagine if taxicabs or any livery service of any kind had to have a union member associated with it. Would autonomous cars make the same progress (for example, we can have autonomous subways/trains but they have to be "personned" due to pressure from unions). Or, imagine if we had them in research (drugs discovery) --the added bureaucracy researchers would have to manage and devote valuable time to.
I am not saying unionization is absolutely bad --they have brought good things about to workplace improvement, but they also have externalities we need to acknowledge.
>Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology?
I'm not sure this is really a compelling point. Tech companies have made some cool stuff, but technology is also heavily driven by FOSS, which is not really driven by the same factors business are. Union or no union isn't really a question with FOSS, as these projects, many of which drive modern technology, were developed without traditional business incentives. Yes they're are businesses built around supporting open technology, but techs huge advances aren't driven only by companies. I think unionization would have less of an impact on tech advances than is being suggested.
I could argue that if unions were strong and everyone had to belong to a union to participate in an economy the unions could see an advantage to controlling how you contribute to FOSS because your "free" contribution to FOSS impinges on the rights to another unionized worker's right to work. The FOSS developer would theoretically be undermining the union worker.
Well, you certainly could, but that wasn't the argument presented or responded to. The argument you put forth was Technology's advancement was due to IT businesses, and what would the world be like if there were more Unions; but this is not really a sensible proposition because major technological advances, indeed the majority of which are driving the backbone of the world economy and technology as we know it, were developed without any of the incentives provided by a business structure. Union or not is irrelevant to such forces because they operate outside the realm of business.
The idea that FOSS would be quashed under a mandatory unionized economy is not what was being discussed, and I'm not sure of the relevance of such a theoretical world in the context of what was said. It's tangential at best.
What was being discussed, the advancement of technology as we've seen it, has happened independent of how employees are organized and employed. As long as there are inventive persons looking to try something new, there will be technological advancements.
When unions are huge and cover large swathes of the workforce, they tend to be more focused on the long-term health of the industry/economy.
It’s when they’re small and parochial that they get really zealous about incumbency protection at the expense of everything else because they don’t have to balance competing interests the way you do when you have a bigger picture to worry about.
I think there's an ordering problem. IT jobs have never faced union pressure because, in part, of massive, ongoing change and high wages.
Private prisons are not labs of innovation. "Innovation" in this context means maximining prison labor and cutting healthcare costs. Schools are similar - we don't know how to make them work better, but bullshit standardized testing and cutting wages isn't it.
I absolutely agree - not every work force should be unionized. I just wish folks would acknowledge that the titan-CEO/interchangeable wage-slave model is also leads to terrible outcomes in a number of industries.
>> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology?
We are a long way off from being able to say high technology has truly caused progress. Right now, it seems to do more harm than good. People in the tech industry are slowly coming to terms with their impact on the world outside their sphere of awareness, but that newfound conscientiousness hasn't translated into much change.
I imagine the progress in microprocessors, photolithography, search, education, power generation, drugs discovery, communications, etc., etc., do have a measurable impact on progress of the species.
Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability).
> Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability).
Where tech directly touches my life, I wouldn't say today's tech makes me any happier or substantially improves my wellbeing over what 1999-level tech did. Worse in some ways. I do different stuff with 2017 tech than I would without it, but I doubt it's actually improving my life more than 1999 tech. I do have to remain up-to-date and immersed in it because it's an expectation of modern life and you'll drop out of what remains of shared culture and expectations of availability, et c if you don't (especially being a developer) but it's not per se especially appealing.
Self-driving cars (though I expect their benefit to largely be eaten up by race-to-the-bottom behavior or some form of rents capture, same as wide availability of personal automobiles mostly destroyed their time-saving benefits) and (even better) affordable, highly capable general-purpose housework robots would be a big deal for my quality of life, but we don't have those yet.
I'm sure industry and R&D applications of post-1999 tech improvements have been important, of course.
The canonical counterexample to "who needs progress?" is medicine. I wouldn't want to be limited to the medical care from 1999 if all else is equal. Who needs to live with hepatitis C now that there's a cure?
These things are good, but have so far been applied carelessly and unevenly. This is where my comment about conscientiousness comes in.
We need to start asking "For what purpose?" and "Who could this hurt?" more often. Packing more transistors into a CPU and working magic with algorithms to squeeze more out of them is not so good if it goes into a machine intended for surveillance and violating privacy, or to wipe out a million jobs because it can all be done by a few people now.
We can keep packing the transistors and working the magic, but it's going to keep doing a lot of damage if the people responsible don't think about the human impact.
What are you talking about. Wiping out millions of jobs is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing.
I'd argue that it literally the entire point of technology.
"Destroying jobs" means that those people are freed up to do some else that is valuable and aren't wasting their time doing stuff that isn't worth anything to anybody.
Creating "jobs" is easy. Just implement a tax, and pay a bunch of people to dig holes and fill them up again.
Or do the modern equivalent of that and pay people to mess around with spreadsheets in an office and then throw away the spreadsheet.
At least that method of "job creation" is being honest.
I wholeheartedly agree we spend much of our technology on both frivolous stuff and dangerous stuff (things that are detrimental to the wellbeing of people in general) -but the good offsets the negatives, I think.
Anything can be used for good or evil. Its the wrong place to attack the problem - we can't live in the stone age because "somebody might misuse fire".
Someone did invent the fire extinguisher and come up with Stop, Drop, and Roll, though. I'm not saying don't do new things. For example, Bandcamp giving me a way to download a list of people who've bought my music is like a fire extinguisher. If Bandcamp burns, I don't lose everything with it. That's conscientious of them. Most places that sell music don't offer that.
Your pay would be pegged to seniority, not ability to contribute. Better pay your dues, newbie. You don't deserve as much money as I do, solely because of your age.
You wouldn't be allowed to do anything outside your extremely limited job description. That's someone else's job, don't take it away from them! No more wearing many hats.
Unless you literally kill someone, you are immune from being fired. Irregardless if you suck and are holding the team back.
Find a good way to make your job more efficient? Sorry, you can't use that. It is not in your contract. And for that matter, doing things more efficiently means that there is less work to go around! Got to save jobs, by creating useless work!
Don't work too hard. You are making everyone else look bad! The contract says that we are only supposed to solve 1 bug a day.
You'd have to get some sort of union sponsored certification/significant barriers to entry, Because the union does not care about NEW workers. They want to keep them out so that they don't compete on wages with them. No more being a self taught engineer! No more switching to a different part of tech. You need a certification for that.
Collective bargaining means that you won't be able to negotiate on an individual basis. No matter how good at negotiating you are or if you could get 2-3X the pay, or if you think the union contract sucks.
Don't like the union? Too bad! You are forced to join it. Fuck you, you free rider! It doesn't matter if you believe that the union provides significant negatives, is corrupt, is destroying your industry and you shouldn't exist. Free rider! Free rider! Free rider!
>Your pay would be pegged to seniority, not ability to contribute
That's pretty much how it works now. I've never had a boss who was able to accurately (or even non-accurately) gauge my productivity and I'll bet that unless your job is mind-numbing, you haven't either.
I've had bosses who have counted SLOC though and stupidly tried to use that to gauge my productivity.
Unions usually agree to formalize the existing peg to seniority so that the company doesn't use pay/promotion structure as a means to punish active union members.
>You wouldn't be allowed to do anything outside your extremely limited job description. That's someone else's job, don't take it away from them!
I'm strangely ok with my bosses not firing my coworker and then dumping all his work on me, which has happened to me.
>Find a good way to make your job more efficient? Sorry, you can't use that. It is not in your contract
This idea makes no sense to me. Furthermore, at a lot of the companies I've worked at, middle managers haven't given a damn about efficiency and they often purposefully reduced it so that they could increase their headcount (read: their power).
>Don't work too hard.
Am I supposed to be terrified of a company that makes me go home at a reasonable hour rather than implicitly pressuring me to stay at work until 10pm every night?
>The contract says that we are only supposed to solve 1 bug a day.
No it doesn't.
>You'd have to get some sort of union sponsored certification/significant barriers to entry, Because the union does not care about NEW workers.
Which may help separate some of the wheat from the chaff as it does with doctors. Are you in favor of this type of thing or would you prefer it was prevented?
>Collective bargaining means that you won't be able to negotiate on an individual basis.
Yes, and that means higher pay overall. Divide and conquer isn't good for you as an individual.
>No matter how good at negotiating you are
Didn't you just say that you thought pay should be linked to your ability to contribute? Why now are you so keen on "ability to negotiate"? Are you morally opposed to seeing my equally skilled friends earn as much as me because they don't drive a bargain quite as hard as I do?
>Don't like the union? Too bad! You are forced to join it. Fuck you, you free rider!
So are you pro-free rider?
You seem to be saying that individual agreements with the company are "good" but collective agreements with the company (which are used to eliminate said free riders) are "bad". Why are collective agreements intrinsically bad?
>It doesn't matter if you believe that the union provides significant negatives
It does, which is why unions are run on a democratic basis. On the other hand, did you vote for your boss? Thought not.
Unions serve as the only really reliable check on corrupt corporate power running roughshod over workers. Sometimes they are corrupt. That does not mean that eliminating them will improve your situation.
And, of course, if you really don't want to work for a unionized workplace you can go and work at a non-unionized workplace.
" Why are collective agreements intrinsically bad?"
Because I should be able to do what I want, instead of being forced to go along with whatever stupid ideas the union chooses to do. It is called freedom of choice.
What if I want to negotiate for myself?
What if I want to wear multiple hats?
What if I want to work without getting a BS certification?
If I negotiate, and convince someone to hire me, then I can get all of these things.
We can agree and disagree about what makes a work environment good or bad. And thats fine. Just you do your thing, and I will do mine. If you don't like these things, then you can try to get a job that doesn't make you do them.
My relationship should be between me and my employer. I will negotiate all the things that I mentioned, and if the situation doesn't work out then I will vote with my feet and go somewhere else. Do not take away my right to free association.
Sure, fine, if you don't like doing those things, then you are free to join your own private organization and decide for yourself on how to do collective bargaining, and all that.
The problem with pro-union people is that they assume that their needs are the same as everyone else's needs. Different people want different things, and this whole "fight for the people" BS gets thrown out the window the moment you try and force me to join your org and force me to go along with stuff I don't agree with.
"And, of course, if you really don't want to work for a unionized workplace you can go and work at a non-unionized workplace."
Well, instead of doing this thing, I could just use the law to protect me. Forcing people to join unions is, thankfully, illegal in many states.
And, thankfully, unions are very unpopular among techies. So I am doing precisely that, and I will continue to fight against them in tech, precisely because I do not want our industry to be turned into one that does not value freedom of choice among employees, and forces different people into associations that they don't agree with.
>Sure, fine, if you don't like doing those things, then you are free to join your own private organization and decide for yourself on how to do collective bargaining, and all that.
I'm struggling to see what your problem is. If you don't like the idea of democratic control over your workplace and the commensurately higher pay that goes with it you've always been free to go and work somewhere else where they let you "wear many hats".
It seems more like that you want to prevent others from doing it:
>Forcing people to join unions is, thankfully, illegal in many states.
i.e. you're thankful groups of people who negotiate with other groups of people and form voluntary agreements are prevented from doing so.
They can get together with their groups of friends and bargain collectively. They just shouldn't be able to force me to bargain collectively along with them.
They can get together and form voluntary agreements. They just can't make me join their voluntary agreements or stop me from making my own agreements with anyone.
I recommend looking up the union/labour movement model of Sweden. It's a three-way between unions, employers and government to get into agreements, doesn't seem to be hurting Swedish economy (nor its IT industry).
> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology?
I imagine less bullshit businesses selling air castles built on top of an exploitative operation. I imagine better democratic processes inside companies. I imagine using collective power to protect underrepresented groups instead of fighting against each other. A net benefit to society.
I don't have to imagine, I'm a unionized programmer. I've worked in private industry too and switching out an individual vs collective contract hasn't degraded my skills one iota.
I will say that Government is bureaucratic, but no more than any comparably sized corporation. Our only problem is that our shareholders are fucking morons.
I think most groundbreaking research is government sponsored. A lot of it at universities which are unionized.
Instead of unions substitute the phrase "sane worker protections, pay, and rights". The U.S. is badly in need of better labor laws and much greater enforcement of those laws.
>I think most groundbreaking research is government sponsored
And I think many of the researchers are the oft exploited grad students and the like who are not typically bound by union agreements --some staff and contractors may be unionized, but not most of the people doing the drudgery work that goes into research, at least in the US.
> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology?
Unions would've collectively bargained and agreed not to work for companies that abuse H1-B visa farms. And this whole issue would've been resolved ages ago.
I'll grant you that --but while that protects domestic workers it may hurt domestic industry in that some things would be cheaper to develop in locales with less unionization or simply lower labor costs.
It's important to apply context to this. A minimum wage, among other things, forces businesses to prejudice against lower skilled workers. If the minimum wage is negotiated by the union to $18/hr but you only produce $10/hr due to lack of experience, disability, below average IQ, or you went to a failing public school then you're simply unemployed. If we remove this contractual minimum wage, you're right, it would likely have some minimal impact for the people on the margins of having productivity sufficient to justify hiring them on the union's minimum wage. However, everyone below that level of productivity now has the potential for new jobs, and with those jobs comes skills training and economic mobility. Unions do marginally help their members, but they harm everyone below them on the economic ladder.
The incorrect assumption here is that people earn what value they produce. People actually earn (value_produced - profit + bargaining power). The reason for upping the minimum wage is all minimum wage worker unions have disappeared and an increase in the low skill labor market supply (mostly due to the loss of manufacturing in the US) have decimated bargaining power across the board. Plus, due to automation, a single say, McDonalds worker, "produces" much more value than his counterpart 20 years ago without commiserate increase in salary even accounting for a loss in bargaining power (i.e. the profit variable has shot up, meaning an unequal share in the benefits of the labor).
Of course, that's just the high level theory... using just common sense those same workers are going to be automated away entirely, if the wage is 20 cents or 20 dollars it doesn't matter. So we might as well force companies to compensate them in the short term for their impending unemployment.
Two key things occurred during the time period you're talking about where wages stagnated in spite of massive increases in productivity growth. The first is that we actually started letting women get jobs. We increased the labor supply by nearly 40%. It's amazing that wages are not even lower than they are. The second thing that happened is that millions upon millions of unskilled immigrants crossed the border. This also, obviously significantly increased the pool of labor at the bottom of the economic ladder further suppressing wages.
What exactly do you think is "broken" when a worker gets higher pay?
In the Broken Window Fallacy story, the total wealth in the system is decreased when the window is destroyed. In this example, no wealth is destroyed, it is just distributed differently. If you believe that wealth has a decreasing marginal utility as you become more wealthy, the more even distribution where the worker is paid more has a higher overall utility even though the total wealth is exactly the same.
I know I'm bastardizing the meaning but it got me thinking about Elon Musk versus "prototypical lotto winner that loses everything" you could certainly argue that he is using his wealth(as well as others) to benefit society, ie. mars, electrification of transportation, etc.
But if you count that then you also have to count the billionaires spending money lobbying to be allowed to continue pumping carbon into the atmosphere or for more bombs to be built. If you start using that method of calculating utility, I wouldn't be surprised if the marginal utility is actually negative at some point.
Look, I actually argue for social safety nets. I believe government's role can be defined simply as "ensure that the minimum expectations of society are met", with the full understanding that these expectations (running potable water, medical advances, etc.) increase over time and vary from place to place. I am totally fine with decentralizing government functions to the point of neighborhoods – many of you know that I'm in favor of more decentralization in general.
However, even someone like me can say this article falls far short of supporting its audacious title. It's mostly a paean to Keynes and his concepts. In addition, it contains some fallacies:
But, if the government covers the costs of the service, why not provide it itself? Why spend the time and money forming the partnership, and monitoring its outcomes, if it is going to pay for what is done anyway.
Because when providers compete, quality goes up and costs go down. (On the other hand, when buyers compete, costs go up, which is why single payer systems lower costs.)
The answers to these questions center on the greater efficiency of private enterprise and the consequent cost savings of public-private partnerships. Yet, studies of their use in infrastructure investment provide little support for this presumed cost saving
Compare the VA to Medicare.
Yet, many besides the users of a road benefit from it – the businesses on its route to name just a few. These would be hurt along with its users if its tolls reduced traffic flows, so that while tolls can be charged, and the maintenance expense of the road depends on its use, fees for its use must not impede its use.
Well, as Hayek argued, everyone setting their own prices is a far superior system than central planning to set the price of a toll. And whoever would maintain a road would obviously want maximize their wealth by maximizing the number of cars that go through without a slowdown. They would not likely ignore the long tail of cars any more than, say, mobile phone companies ignore consumers who can "only" pay $20 a month.
In short, this is a terrible reason not to have private ownership . In fact, by being a smaller, private organization, they might have moved faster to install EZPass - like solutions, as AT&T predicted back in the 1990s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA)
Much better reasons include simply the guarantee I stated above: people expect to be able to access lots of roads, so they have to be public as a matter of policy. Another reason is standardization: they can expect roughly the same road rules on all roads. And so on.
Perhaps as technology improves, more things can be decentralized and privatized. Self-driving cars can perfectly adapt to local road rules. Communities will be able to install their own wordpress-like government systems that would handle voting, taxation, safety nets, single payer systems etc.
Governments are just management teams of organizations. That's all. Parks in a mall open to all visitors are not much different than public parks. Same goes for community rooms in a co-op.
Recessions can be most easily fixed by giving money to the consumers, to spend on what they need, thereby "voting with their wallet". This is basically "single payer systems" or UBI.
>Because when providers compete, quality goes up and costs go down.
Public Private Partnerships are not creating competition and that was never their intention. The legal set up of such agreements is set up, in fact, in order to purposely exclude competition.
In the NHS it tends to both drive up costs and filter out money to companies run by the friends of politicians. It's simple parasitism.
In general, if there isn't a chance to leech off a monopoly of some kind there is no political impetus to actually privatize. The railway system in the UK wasn't privatized in order to create competition. That was patently impossible. It was privatized precisely because it was so well insulated from competition.
>Well, as Hayek argued, everyone setting their own prices is a far superior system than central planning to set the price of a toll.
Hayek made the same typical tired old assumptions that never hold - perfect competition, perfect information, etc.
The problem with privatization is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation--look at Russia after the USSR caved in and how oligarchs came to own factories and all kinds of infrastructure simply because of the gold rush moment where they could get away with it. Privatization in the US works the same way--the insiders get the deals, the rest of us get nothing. If there was a way to randomize it, we might be able to make it work.
I don't like the current situation in DC where there is a permanent government workforce that is mostly unionized. It is bloated and out of touch and that's where the calls for accountability are coming from. Right-size that government workforce, make the employees actually work (I know many do, so don't downvote me--I was a state employee for awhile once upon a time, I damn well know how many people worked and how many read newspapers and napped all day).
I bet if we were to perform some simple reforms of the federal workforce that the calls for privatization would cease. It's about creating better outcomes, and the last Administration was more about creating a huge dependent class everywhere possible of people who would reliably vote their interests.
"I bet if we were to perform some simple reforms of the federal workforce that the calls for privatization would cease."
They would not. The calls certainly use any dissatisfaction with government services, but they originate from a desire to profit off the resulting privatisation. If there was no dissatisfaction, the calls would be coached in ideological grounds ("government should not be picking winners and losers"..), or the relevant departments would get underfunded until dissatisfaction reappears ("get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.").
Note how rarely, when a market fails (telecoms, banks...), are calls for nationalisation heeded, while the opposite does not hold.
A lot of them work hard, but there is nothing to ensure that they are working on useful things and governments are veeery slow to shift workforces around.
I'm a lobbyist in Washington DC and it is appalling The work ethic of federal employees. The governments hands are tied, they can't fire anyone, and if there's no work, they just sit around and do whatever they want. The federal bureaucracy is absolutely bloated, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. They get amazing pay, amazing benefits, amazing retirement, and if they screw up, there is really nothing you can do to them.
A good starting point would be if the political "leaders" would start to lead government instead of fighting each other all the time. When I lived in DC I knew some government workers and they all told me that their agency's top leadership doesn't seem to be interested in managing the agency but just wants to score political points and hand out contracts to preferred providers. Priorities change every few years when a new president comes in.
In the end I think Americans need to stop talking about "government" as something that's separate from them but instead work on the institutions to make them better. You can't expect good performance without good leadership.
Who gets amazing pay? How much are we talking about? I don't know about the USA, but usually public employees don't earn that much (in exchange for high job security).
Fair point, the pay you can get elsewhere might be higher. I tend to think anything over $60k a year to be pretty good, which a GSA scale employee can get to in just a few years. Pay raises are almost guaranteed unless there is a budget issue, but even then you get it all eventually. They do max out at about $140k, though. The magic is to retire after 20 years, get the pension, and then get another job in the private sector and double dip. That's the real brass ring.
In DC/NOVA area $60k a year qualifies you for rent subsidy and other welfare benefits. That said $60k is not what federal employees in the DC area start at, nor is $140k what they normally end at. It's more around $80k - $155k ($180k-$190k if you hit management).
The pension has been slowly getting worse and worse though. With the newest version of FERS we are at 1% per year at service annuity partially financed with a 4.8% employee paycheck deduction.
>And if you work in Congress you often get an accelerated schedule so one year there counts for several years toward your pension.
That's true, but the only real people who benefit is the Member and maybe their CoS. Congress staffers make joke salaries in general. The reason people take those jobs is either a sense of duty or as the requisite training program to become a lobbyist.
That's possible but it's still a great deal compared to saving for retirement yourself. And if you work in Congress you often get an accelerated schedule so one year there counts for several years toward your pension.
The absolute highest paid government workers make on par with what is typically claimed on HN to be average for an entry-level developer in SV. A typical mid-level government employee makes much, much less.
It doesn't have to be that way. By decentralizing decision making down to a level closer to the individual (if not the individual), more people get what they want. For example, right now there's a federal mandate for health insurance. Not everyone agrees with this mandate, so why not at least push it down a level to the states? California can still have a mandate for health insurance, and Alabama can decide not to. And then, why not push it to the city/county level? If you don't agree with San Francisco's mandate for health insurance, simply move to Oakland. You don't even have to move states, let alone countries.
Why do so many oppose such a solution where everyone can much more easily find a place where they agree with the "social services" offered (or not)?