Subject:
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Re: e-commerce (was Technic shuttle etc)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 3 Dec 1999 06:24:06 GMT
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Viewed:
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1546 times
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Mike Stanley wrote in message ...
> > My view is that we live in a society where not everyone works with • computers
> > and makes silly amounts of money(3) - we have nurses, bus-drivers,
> > road-workers, teachers, receptionists, quality-controllers at tooth-pick
> > factories (4).
> >
> > Most of these people will have ability and will work hard and will perform
> > services vital to the community, but don't get paid as much. In *real*
> > emotional terms they may want a Lego set as much as anyone else, but are
> > somehow less deserving?
One problem here is that there are two mostly separate issues. The first
issue is given people have money and good have prices, is the distribution
of those goods fair. The second issue is whether or not people are getting
fair wages.
In this second issue, I have some thoughts:
- I think that some of these groups of people would get better wages if we
didn't have all the tangles of government we have. While I do see a place
possibly still for government run schools, the fact that they are currently
almost exclusively government run is a lot of the reason teachers are paid
so little. Nurses and the like are somewhat similarly affected in that there
is a lot of regulation of the health care industry.
- There is also a problem that certain jobs which currently require a person
to do them, don't really seem to pay the true cost of that person. If you
want a real person there, it seems to me that you should have to pay for it.
Just like if you want to have gold plated doors, you need to pay the going
rate for gold.
- There certainly are people who for reasons of health, family, or obsolete
training, are unable to work to their full potential. Again, I think I still
see a place for a minimal government safety net, but I would rather see most
of the assistance to these people come from charity which can set
expectations of the people so that the freeloaders can be weeded out. The
justification I could see for a government safety net is that it is probably
cheaper to provide some kind of safety net, rather than have someone become
desperate and become a criminal. I don't see a problem though with that
safety net being a work camp (so long as the person is totally free to leave
if they think they can make it on their own, and is not a "debtors prison"
with a vicious cycle of creating debt that the person can never get out of -
like "paying" them the value of their work, but charging them the cost of
their housing and food, with the cost being higher than the pay, and you
can't leave unless you pay off your debt). If someone is totally unwilling
to do productive work, and is unable to convince a charity to help them,
they can sleep under a bridge and pull scraps out of the garbage bins, and
if they resort to crime, well, they'll find themselves in prison where they
DON'T have the choice to leave, and WILL be forced to do work. I think if
this is all done with as complete a world view as possible, that there won't
be very many people sleeping under bridges, a lot more people will be doing
something at least mildly productive, and there would probably be a lot
fewer people in prison.
I would expect that the government services which are paid for by "taxes"
(as opposed to use fees directly tied to the cost of the service, or shared
risk insurance type fees) would be a small set of services that society
agrees is necessary in order for that society to prosper. I think these
things would all be pretty directly tied to "security". Most countries today
have a certain level of security from invasion by another country based on
the fact that the country has a presence as a whole. If the country was just
a bunch of very small entities, it would be easy to pick off the ones whose
security arrangements were weak (to some extent this is what is happening in
most of the countries which are under strife today - those undergoing civil
wars don't think of themselves as a single entity, and some which are
perceived as being weak are being invaded by their neighbors). The
government safety nets I've described above, I see as being security issues
(because it's probably cheaper to prevent people from being desperate enough
to resort to crime, than to deal with them after a crime has occurred).
Frank
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: e-commerce (was Technic shuttle etc)
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| (...) *sigh* I really wrote: -- My personal view is that it's nicer to give 20 people 1 thing, than give 1 person 20 things (related specifically to Lego deals in this example). That doesn't logically extend to saying that the one person who has the (...) (25 years ago, 2-Dec-99, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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