The flip side is that the people being relied upon are performing uncompensated labor or providing other unpaid services, which is not a healthy state of things. This very dynamic can end up trapping these people in poverty and hinder their access to more productive arrangements.
The issue of "which jobs should exist" should be left to the market only. If typical low-end jobs throughout the country pay wages that do not guarantee a minimum living income, the government should simply make up the difference for everyone in a fair way (subject to clawback rates as earned income increases, in order to keep the overall arrangement viable).
(Lowering the cost of essential goods and services is also something that can be done by leveraging the open market. It doesn't take yet another wasteful government program, which is the typical approach in socialist and social-democrat countries.)
Spain and Portugal were in pretty much the same boat not too long ago and they've started to reform of their own accord. The French will come around once the bond vigilantes start taking a serious look at that whole government deficit+debt situation and unsustainable retirement ages. Of course it will be painful and involve severe austerity measures, but that's what it takes.
This is an underappreciated argument for basic income/UBI: you need a lot less of it since its very existence enables recipients to move to lower cost of living locations.
(Which in turn opens up opportunities for others to move in to the higher-cost places and boost their own productivity.)
Did you fairly compensate your friends and family members for that "help"? Systematic reliance on wholly unpaid labor is not exactly something to be proud of.
I help my kids, but I don't expect them to help me. I want them to save their money to help their kids, otherwise I'm just taking from my grandkids.
Same when I help my siblings. If they pay me back, now I'm taking away from my nieces and nephews. Within friends/family, I think it's completely reasonably if the money flows "downhill".
This is the fundamental concept of the vast majority of taxes, including those that feed the poor/unemployed: that money is gone, somewhere between little and no personal return, but that usually makes sense, increasingly so with income.
Um, sometimes people help each other because they want to, or because they understand that those less fortunate than them need it, or because they understand that they may need help someday and so it doesn't make sense to make a big deal of "compensation" now. It's called community, and I think it is something to be proud of.
> Why can't one live in a comparable manner today and bank the difference?
You can do this. Just move to a sparsely populated area and work remote. Rural and semi-rural areas are basically the "poor", lower productivity areas within any given country, if you can arbitrage the incomes difference via remote work you stand to gain quite a bit.
> But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
Ireland is often cited as one such place, thanks to early Christian monasteries. The Carolingian Renaissance was significant in Central Europe, and there were important cultural developments in Slavic lands, though perhaps not involving 'science' as such.
And that someone is mostly government, which is a growing and increasingly wasteful fraction of GDP. We really need to start reining in the national debt and government spending. Drain the swamp.
No, it's rentiers. The government takes about a quarter but the rentiers easily take 2 times as much in interest, monthly fees, and other costs that I have to pay in perpetuity. You just don't consider that because you think those people are necessary for living a good life. In reality their purpose is to extract as much money from you for as little work as possible.
As long as collusion exists, I don't see this changing. Manhattan is more expensive than it was a 100 years ago but less people actually live there now. Not a little less either - 700,000 people less. We've built way more housing at the same time. And yes, people have more square footage per person now but the housing doubled and the population went down dramatically.
Rent is always going to go up there even if they build more. Same in other places. As long as rent setting tools exist to collude - we will see the rent not go down. You're not gonna dump $100m in new buildings and not maximize your return.
Rent isn't high because of collusion. It's simple supply and demand.
There may be fewer people in manhattan, but that's mostly because fewer people live in each living unit. The same number of living units is being demanded by the market because of evolving living preferences.
If you allow sufficient living units to be built, it doesn't matter how much landlord try to collude, they won't be able to keep rent high. Someone will break when the vacancy rate reaches 15%.
Rent is high due to supply and demand, but collusion lowers supply. Ironically enough, "affordable housing" arrangements and rent-control, which is common in NYC, are examples of such collusion and end up raising rents over time compared to the alternative where the collusion isn't there.
vacancy rates are extremely low in most cities. That clearly implies supply and demand and not collusion. In new york units are often empty because they are illegal to rent unless massively expensive repairs are made while under rent control. That's not collusion, that is regulatory failure
Reminder that the Republicans' policy has been to starve the beast. That is push up government costs while passing huge tax cuts (like the big beautiful bill Republicans just passed that is greatly increasing the debt) in order to sabotage government's ability to function, then blast from every rooftop that we need to cut government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
"The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism."
The so-called "Dark Ages" were not solely engendered by Christianity, and even the arguably negative characteristics of Christianity in late antiquity were ultimately shaped by prevalent outside factors and not inherent to the religion itself. It literally took many centuries for Roman civilization to collapse, and the root cause was that (like many ancient societies) it was basically predicated on plunder and conquest, so the whole arrangement began to collapse like a slow-motion trainwreck when they could not effectively plunder anymore.
There might have been some hope that it could gradually transition to a somewhat more modern style of economic development, but this was hindered by the Barbarian invasions especially of the Huns, so this whole dynamic only really took hold much later, in the Middle Ages.
The Roman state was arguably much more modern than the medieval kingdom. It was highly centralized and funded through taxation (most of the plundering was already done by the early imperial period).
Not sure the Huns were the biggest direct threat either (unless we think that they are directly responsible for the Gothic migrations/invasions who were the ones who took over significant parts of the empire).
The "taxation" point is arguable since so much of it occurred in the provinces and basically amounted to plunder. Also, centralization is not much of a marker of modernity: the Ancient Near East had large centralized empires, but they were also similarly vulnerable to collapse for practically the same structural reasons; we just know a lot less about those times and places because the sources are so much more sparse and understudied.
Paradoxically we do know a lot more about some of the ancient Near Eastern societies than most states that preceded or succeeded them. There are still thousands of clay tablets which nobody really had time to read, while pretty much all Roman and Greek texts (and effectively all administrative documents) that weren’t copied during the middle ages are lost.
> provinces and basically amounted to plunder.
Also redistribution. The mid/late Roman state spent had huge taxes and spent almost all of it paying for its professional army almost all of which was stationed in the provinces.
As a consequence the Roman economy was highly monetized, long distance trade was widespread and different regions economically interdependent which again seems rather modern.
Also when talking about “plunder” in the ancient world it's almost entirely slaves not gold/silver or moveable goods. That had mostly dried up during the imperial period.
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