[Mathgod]

Originally Posted by GGG

Edit: I watched your video. You could have just mentioned the MIT study. It entirely supports what I am saying. Once you take away people’s need to work they will focus on mastery. And many will focus on mastering things that add no value. Tinkering with automobiles, learning to play instruments, learning a language, hiking, etc. Mastering hobbies that produce no goods for society. A few will produce great things, many will not.

It sounds like you cherrypicked what you wanted to pay attention to, and ignored the rest of the video.

The video said autonomy, mastery, and purpose... not just mastery. It also talked about how people tend to operate at their best when they aren't thinking about money and stressing out over their finances.

What's more, a person spending all their days on hobbies is actually doing more good for society than a person who is getting involved in criminal activities. Like Carlin said, "You show me a lazy prick who's lying in bed all day, watching TV, only occasionally getting up to piss, and I'll show you a guy who's not causing any trouble."

The key take away the video misses is there is a threshold of reward that produces optimal work. That threshold is above zero

UBI is capitalism that doesn't start at zero. People are still free to interact in the marketplace, to exchange their services for monetary rewards.

Originally Posted by bizaro86

If we are just going to wave our hands and say we can cut 75%+ of government spending then with that stipulated I agree its possible. I took specific line items out of the federal budget that I think could be cut. Which other ones do you think? Because you mention infrastructure, health, education, and the military as the things you'd keep, and those cost way more than what you have allowed for.

I probably wouldn't have made the crack about the Panama papers if I had known that was your video. But there was a lot of going on about how rich people can pay more and we can find efficiencies. Those are (somewhat ironically) the well intentioned but impractical go-to plans of the left and right respectively. It seems unlikely to me that we'd be able to get both to work.

We'd keep a slimmed down version of all of those. For example, I think it would be a good idea to introduce some component of partial user payment to bring down public health care costs. We need a complete overhaul and rethink regarding education, because it's very wasteful in its current form, and doesn't accomplish its purported goals very well. Infrastructure spending can be severely reduced from its current levels.