Comment by pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online on Beautiful

“I don’t understand sociology or economics and expect everything to be provided for free”

What was the last book on economics you read?

Progress and Poverty, and you still can’t just have everything for free even in a better system.

I’ll have to add that to my list, always looking to learn more.

It’s a good read, makes you realize how swindled we got, and what we might have had if they’d adopted these ideas in the late 1800’s.

Wouldn’t the LVT+UBI that Henry George proposes effectively cancel rent and then some? We’d be getting paid 100% of the surplus from land use, not just a safety net.

It’s been a few years since my economics minor, but likely more recently than you.

Considering you cant name a book, i doubt it. I’m currently reading The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato and Yurugu by Marimba Ani. I cant recommend both of them enough. Its about culture as much as it is about economics.

I mean, no. I’m not going to go dig up the syllabus for my econ classes just to prove a point.

You clearly don’t understand economics if you think paying for housing for 335,000,000 citizens is even remotely feasible without a major tax increases on everyone.

Communism is a nice thought experiment, but it’ll never actually work because humans are awful.

So you haven’t read a book on economics since you graduated, got it.

“Humans are awful” is why they call econ the dismal science; did they actually present that as a reason why communism wouldn’t work when your classes covered it?

I would imagine that the primary reason anyone thinks communism will fail is that greed is too rampant amongst many people these days. I happen to agree, communism is nice to think about but I have worked for the state of California. I’ve seen what having a job that you do next to nothing at, get paid a liveable wage on, and basically can’t be fired from has done to state govt. It’s a fucking mess. These are people who, right now, are complaining about homeless people despite the only thing separating them is the fact that they were lucky enough to know someone who worked for the state. I mean it when I say they quite literally do nothing and get paid for it.

Cali state govt is socialist as fuck, and the outcome is things like millions of peoples information being leaked. We’re talking social security numbers, drivers license, where you live, etc. If you can’t tell me how you avoid the equivalent of things like this happening in a communist govt (because the outcome with communist govt corruption is worse by a large margin) then I just turn my brain off and stop reading.

This is some hard hexbear vibes. Asking for titles of books read is unbearably cringe.

Anti-intellectualism at its finest folks

Thanks for chiming in

If one is a student if economics, naming a book on economics to confirm your bonafides is as low a bar to jump over as humanly possible. Books aren’t cringe, you are just basic.

What idiot thinks anyone wants “stuff for free.” What the fuck do you think taxes are? We aren’t expecting people to shit houses out of their asses. We’re expecting our government WHICH WE PAY to provide us with basic dignity

Did you not read the comic?

Also, I’m not sure why you think the government owes every citizen a house.

I’m not arguing against social safety nets, but straight up paying for housing for every citizen is how you end up with everyone living in shoebox apartments.

I’m sure that you haven’t even considered the numbers at all on this. If you think the current taxes will pay for it, you’re mistaken.

Even if we took the entire military budget, that would be less than $2,500 per citizen per year.

So far the people advocating for communism ITT are not even sly about shifting goalposts with the wind.

Specifically OP, OP responded to a comment about free housing being unrealistic with “single income families should be allowed to exist” followed by something else that wasn’t relevant to free housing being unrealistic.

At this point I just think they’re big communism shills. (I shouldn’t have to say this is a joke, but I know that I do.)

They’re just children who expect everything to be hand fed to them by the government and have no sense of nuance. They look at the utopia that communism promises without realizing that humans are selfish and greedy animals, so it’ll never work.

These people are a good example of why echo chambers are a bad thing. They don’t stop to think about why their beliefs might be wrong.

Humans are shaped by their material conditions

Also if humans were naturally greedy it would make sense for 99 percent of humanity to overthrow the 1 percent and distribute the benefits of society more equally.

Also if humans are naturally greedy it would make even less sense to stick with a capitalist system

“it took me three seconds to come up with a BAD implementation, which not a single person in this thread asked for, which doesn’t work! Therefore ALL implementations are bad! Ha!”

Really makes you THINK.

There’s a huge gulf between what this comic says (essentially housing, a basic human necessity) should be free, and what you’re attacking (everything is free). One of those is ABSOLUTELY doable. We live in a world of gross excess, if we stop arguing over how to kill people more efficiently, stop worrying about printing more money, we could give people a small home. Of course someone still has to pay/work for it, no one’s stupid lol.

Even if it’s a “shoebox apartment” it’s better than streets. It’s one of the basic requirements for life. And who’s to say that provided home has to be your only option?

Honestly, even if we replaced current employment with a 10-year indentured servitude contract with a guaranteed 1000 sq. ft. home and free utilities and maintenance for the rest of your life, that’d still be better than what we have now in a lot of ways.

People only like the system we’re in because it provides the illusion of choice, not actual choices.

“Hey wait a second why isn’t the state enforcing my property relations for free? The peasants aren’t paying rent, someone shoot them!”

There’s an entire corpus of books and documents critiquing the current system and on how a society based on mutual aid would work. None of them “expect everything to be provided for free”.

I am not aware of a way to have coercion free society. But I am very sure we can massively reduce the amount of coercion necessary to keep our current society running well.

Not disagreeing, but the message of “cancel all rent and mortgages,” is silly and shows a clear lack of understanding on how the world works.

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