it is true at heart I can think of dozens of libertarians I like but none that have nuanced views.
one doesn't have to delve into a deep philosophical discussion of the ethical problems inherent to the axioms of capitalist libertarianism and the practical problems that arise from them every time it is mentioned in passing. that topic has been done to death and this article is intended for an audience that has moved beyond that particular issue.
This crab mentality is the ultimate coup of the capitalist class. They have managed to turn every struggling worker into their own internalized oppressor.I’m sorry but you are a selfish, whiny leach. I can say this because I a middle-aged woman and have been trying to find work for two years without success though I have a masters degree in a fairly desirable field.
I am conflicted about this. I have had some experience with what they would refer to as "hispter's on food stamps". The most recent was a friend's partner who quit his job, spend three months traveling southeast Asia and then came back to the US and got on food stamps. I was annoyed when I first heard about this my gut reaction was "this isn't meant for him, he doesn't really need this". In the back of my head I thought that by doing this he legitimizes the arguments from the right that the welfare state just means people will be lazy.
After giving this article a little more thought it is striking a chord. Particularly this tone that is being repeated lately. Its that people deserve something just because. Modern society is enormous. It might seem easy to give out a basic living wage to everyone because we already have so much abundance. This abundance has come from years of compounding labor and creativity. Take the example of food stamps. There may be a massive farm somewhere that at the moment could provide some excess, but massive farms are new to society. They are a product of the laborers that run the roam the fields and work the machines. They are a product of the tractor, pesticides, fertilizer. The energy to run the machines and deliver the food. The ingenuity that it took to take the energy out of the ground. We need to keep moving in a direction that compounds on this hard work we have already achieved. We need geniuses and hard workers to create new and more ingenious ways to harvest energy and use it more efficiently. We can not take a step back and say we have enough now, its time to just give it out.
regarding food in particular, we do have enough now. we have too much, in fact: http://hubski.com/pub?id=57950
I was on board and thought the author was making a different point until this section. I thought the author was arguing for a greater tie of wages to value. Instead he said, everyone deserves a basic living wage just because.If it is increasingly impossible to disentangle the productive and unproductive parts of human activity, then we can reconstruct the old producerist dogma in a new way: everyone deserves to be provided with the means to live a decent life, because we are all already contributing to the production and reproduction of society itself.
The author certainly does support that, it's not mutually exclusive to the next point. Is access to food, water, shelter, &c not a human right? In our current situation where literally every bit of land is someone's property, the class of people who have no property are absolutely dependent on a receiving a wage to survive. Employment will never reach 100%, so if you reject the policy of a universal wage, you are condemning the unemployed segment of the population to homelessness, starvation, and death. Also, many people do significant work, but are unpaid for it due to the way our society treats the social mode of production. A universal wage would partially resolve this.I thought the author was arguing for a greater tie of wages to value.
Instead he said, everyone deserves a basic living wage just because.