So, I'm reading more of Van Parij's work on "real freedom", and it's really reminding me of why I dislike a lot of formal philosophy. While this stuff is, to some extent, the bedrock of modern society, a lot of philosophizing comes off as mental...well...you know. Like, people start out with assumptions, and then they build on those assumptions, and then they conclude things. This is all well and good, but I think with morality, many of these assumptions are...arbitrary. And that ultimately, most of these arguments come down to a framing of issues.
I mean, given my unique perspective, I'm assuming people know what framing is. Say you have an issue, a hot topic of the day, you can frame the issue in any which way. You can frame abortion as a matter of a woman's right to choose, or the life of a fetus. Virtually, all political argumentation comes down to framing, and as I say, I tend to view detailed political philosophies, like libertarianism, or marxism, or critical theory, to be lenses. Now, lenses are good, but you kind of have to agree with the framing the lens is going for in order to value it, and that's kind of why I tend to run into so many problems with ideologues of different political philosophies. They just see their worldview as objective truth, and they lack the ability to introspect about their chosen philosophy's weaknesses, and often argue with each other all of the time. This is why a lot of political argumentation is stale to me. It often doesn't solve anything. I can say work is slavery and someone with a different philosophy can just come in and say 'but nature is forcing you, not people", which is true from a certain perspective, but is unhelpful when I have a worldview based on the idea that just because something is natural doesn't make it right, or optimal.
The more I read into "real libertarianism", the more I see a lot of these issues with this particular take on the philosophy, despite my agreeing with the general idea of the philosophy. We saw this when I flat out rejected the idea that people of different abilities and preferences should perhaps be given different levels of UBI to optimize happiness and well being. I instead argue that no, people should just be given the same, and from there, it's up to them. The only exceptions being the disabled and elderly who should be compensated more on the fact that they literally can't work, so they should have a higher living standard to compensate for this, as the basic income living standard is kind of lean.
Now Van Parijs is looking at the dichotomy between the "lazies" and the "crazies", ie, the people who don't want to work, vs the people who do. He argues that his highest sustainable basic income is potentially unfair to the people who want to work, and that this has a bias toward leisure and laziness. My stance on this is unironically that maybe it does, but maybe this is a good thing. Maybe most other political philosophies have a bias toward work, and they do. Capitalism, socialism, and anything in between like social democracy. They all treat work, and a moral obligation to work, as a core part of their political ideologies. Capitalism, despite the protestant work ethic, is arguably the least firm on this, claiming no one has to work, but then yeah...they kinda do, because without property, you know, what's the other option? That said, capitalists instead demonize redistribution of wealth to resolve this, the same kinds of redistribution I'm for.
Here's the thing. We need a political ideology, IMO, a lens, if you will, that actively rejects work as an assumption about life. And due to my atheist phase, I was able to go full nihilist to do it. Without an authoritarian religion to dictate morality to me, I embraced the nihilistic perspective that comes along with atheism, and I kind of realized, you know what? Work is just a thing we do, to make the stuff we do. It doesn't have any inherent value beyond that. All that stuff about jobs being about dignity and blah blah blah is just what "the man" tells you to justify forced servitude. It's why I despise many mainstream democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden (well, one of the reasons). Our modern attitudes toward work are actually, weird in my opinion. People of the past never valorized this stuff like we do now. In the 19th century "wage slavery" was a common criticism of capitalism. In the ancient times, philosophers saw wage labor as just one step divorced from literal slavery. But nowadays, the pro work mindset has such a hegemony even left libertarian philosophers I otherwise agree with feel the need to dance around the subject. All of this stuff is just subjective framing. We can literally create any moral system we want, insofar as distribution of work and resources goes. And while I'm not totally against the "crazies", I am in favor of the "lazies", if you don't establish a basic income or other similar system to outright give people the ability to say no to forced labor, you end up falling into that pro work hegemonic trap, and that's far more oppressive. "Crazies" might ask "why should I have to pay you to sit around?", but if we're not assuming a hegemonic moral system everyone agrees with from the get go, I can also ask "why should I be forced to work, to justify a system that makes you feel good about work?"
Ideally, a moral system, at this present state of time, would try to do a balancing act between both. "Lazies" want a higher basic income and don't want to work. "Crazies" want to work hard, and want to earn higher living standards from their work. If you err too much on the side of the lazies, you will discourage the crazies from working via excessive taxation, and this will lead to a smaller economic pie for all of us. This is a huge reason I focus so much on laffer curves and acceptable rates of taxation while formulating my economic plans. I could just do "soak the rich" schemes like the progressive left wants to do, but often times those are just feel good measures based on bad economics that are just punitive toward the rich, without accomplishing much good. As you can tell, ultimately, what I deem to be the acceptable limits of taxation come from what people are willing to put up with and do. If people stop working because the UBI is too generous and there isn't enough financial reward, and this harms the economy, then the UBI is too high. But, if people are willing to work, then taxation isn't necessarily immoral, no? I mean, given my taxes are tied to labor, and I make labor voluntarily, aren't you signing up for that by deciding to work for what the basic income provides? Obviously, as Van parijs would argue, people would want lower tax rates keeping more of the pie for themselves, but if we lower the UBI, we also make the economic system more inherently coercive, forcing people into the work force when they otherwise would not want to be there. If we truly desire a just world where people are maximally free, then won't a sustainable basic income both 1) try to give people the most freedom possible not to work, while simultaneously 2) trying to give people the most freedom to work, if they want to? Isn't that the true perfect balance between the lazies and the crazies? If you make the UBI too low and people are forced to work to survive, that's coercive. If you make the UBI too high and people who otherwise would and want to are discouraged from working because there's no reward on it, then that's too high. The perfect balance between these two factions is, IMO, decided by the best balance of people being able to do what they want to do.
So that said, isn't the maximum sustainable UBI, by definition, the optimum level of UBI? Because if a UBI isn't sustainable, then people would quit their jobs and no one would work because there's no financial incentive to do so. But if a UBI is sustainable, and we cut it, aren't we just forcing the "lazies" back into the workplace and being coerced to deal with the world of the "crazies"? That's just how I see it.
Another possible way to view it is to make the UBI just high enough to not be coercive. This will be enough to solve the coercion problem for the lazies, but also ensure that the crazies get rewarded for work. And in a society still highly dependent on labor, perhaps it would be a good thing to incentivize people who want to work for more than just the minimum to work. For our modern economy, this could work, the potential is the future.
Honestly, I think right now, we can settle for just solving the coercion issue. Once we get the minimum UBI to attain that, I think we can settle for not raising it higher, even if arguably sustainable. It's a political compromise, given these jobist times, and one that is advantageous to make, given a poverty line level UBI is close to my estimated maximum anyway. And if we can't even get the minimum required to free everyone from coerced labor, the highest sustainable is obviously going to be the standard anyway, because, well, I'd rather have a partial implementation than no implementation. But what about the future? By aiming for that poverty line level UBI, I might be roughly satisfying both standards of mine, as a UBI set at or just above the poverty level is arguably the "highest sustainable UBI" based on math I previously done ($13k-16k or so). And from there, I leave it up in the air. I assume that from there, jobs that no one wants to do will either be eliminated, or have to adjust to a new market in which they pay more and treat workers better.
But what if, over time, jobs disappear, and the labor force plummets, as automation replaces many jobs today, and new jobs don't really pop up because no one really wants to do them. That said, the balance of power tilts from the crazies to the lazies over the course of the 21st century. And imagine it's now 2104, 83 years from now, in keeping with the fact that 1938 was 83 years ago and I constantly rip those standards for being dated. Say that these morals that I espouse now, in 2021, become dated. Imagine that now most wealth is held by a handful of people, and most people are stuck at a poverty level UBI, told if they want more they can work, but no jobs exist, or really deserve to exist, and we just end up with extreme inequality based on inherited wealth, with only 10-20% of people working scarce jobs that need to be done?
Well, just as I'm arguing for a new social contract that breaks from "jobism" today, I totally would understand if people took the compromises I take for today's economy and say, you know what? outofplatoscave2012 had it right in 2021, but it's now 2104 and the standards of the 21st century no longer apply to the 22nd, we need to do something different. Maybe you'll choose to tax people at a higher rate, potentially pissing off the fewer crazies that still exist. Maybe you'll support some form of socialism. Or maybe due to climate change and resource scarcity, you'll find yourself in an age where work is more necessary than ever, because our entire economy as it exists today has collapsed and is racked with massive shortages, leading to a new dark age. I don't know. That's the thing about all of these philosophies, they're lenses written for specific snapshots in time, to solve a problem of that era. And I hate the idea of the present being haunted by old ideologies that have long expired. And that applies to what I'm arguing about now in 2021 being applied to the 22nd century's political economy.
And that's the problem I have with Van Parijs worrying about the whims of the workaholic "crazies". We have enough ideologies that favor them and glorify them. We live in a country based on insane inequalities and excesses, in which we literally venerate the crazies and their culture, and demonize the lazies. Let the lazies have an ideology that validates their chosen lifestyle for once. If people want to worship the crazies, there's always capitalism, social democracy, and even socialism, etc. I'd rather not cede ideological ground to them more than necessary. That's not to say I can't make compromises in the face of economic or political necessity, as I recognize the dominance of their current ideas, but their ideas aren't sacred, and their sacred cows can and should be tipped.
I'm not trying to make a perfect world where everyone is perfectly happy, including the right of people to make tons of money from work to the point it enslaves the rest of the human race to behave just as they do. The way I see it, everyone who wants to work can, and everyone who doesn't, doesn't have to, then that is my ideal as of right now. If you aren't perfectly happy with that, then tough. We can't raise a basic income higher than that's sustainable because it kills the goose that lays the golden eggs, and we can't lower it because that is a tacit endorsement of slavery in my opinion. Find your own happiness from there. I'm giving you all the freedom and the tools to do so. It might not always be exactly as you want it, but that's the grand compromise between the two groups in my opinion. Everyone gets what they want.
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