Posted: Dec 28, 2016 11:25 am
Beatsong wrote:Macdoc wrote:Control housing costs
Aye. I do wonder whether a lot of this stuff is better handled as direct provision of necessities than as provision of money to buy those necessities. Give someone a house and they have a house. They can go inside, the rain can't fall on them, they have an address to give potential employers etc. etc. Give them a certain amount of money each month and that MAY be enough to rent a house, or it may not. It may be when you come up with the idea, and then not when implementing the idea (or just some other factor) sends inflation through the roof. It may not if they go and spend all that money on gambling, drugs or a bad business deal, and then you're left with the thorny question of which people "deserve" social security.
The problem is that you potentially create a very 2-tier society, with the dependent underclass marked out as dependent and deepened in their dependency culture by not having the facility to make choices about what to do with what you give them. But you can't have it both ways. If you want to create a situation where nobody goes without the basic necessities of life, you need to make some centralised judgment about what those are and administer the money to pay for them efficiently.
People are already being provided things. Health care, education, law and order, highways and the like. We are so deep in this "dependency culture" and have been for centuries. Having these things enables people rather than stultifies them.
Those people who cannot utilize the platform that this infrastructure provides, can indeed enter a poverty trap.
As to inflation, in the NL we are talking about re-distributing existing wealth and not printing more money. I think the global basic wage movement is built along this line.