Modern Slavery
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As a general rule, the government does not bail out failing firms. Back in 2008, for instance, Lehmann Brothers was allowed to fall. However, its collapse also indicated why governments do sometimes bail out companies: where letting them collapse is likely to cause major widespread damage to the economy or otherwise contrary to strategic plans.
How governments bail out companies varies. Governments tend not to just give failing companies free money. They sometimes nationalise them. Sometimes they buy a chunk of the shares. Sometimes loans, or they grease the wheels of arranging the sale of the failing company to another company that can keep operations going. In many of these cases, the government might end up taking a loss (the loans are at very friendly interest rates, or there are subsidies added when arranging the sell-off to another company to sweeten the deal) in some form, but it's usually relatively modest.
The UK government still owns about half of NatWest group (previously RBS). However, the shares are only about half what the government paid for them back in 2008 or so: this might single-handedly explain the £23 billion loss. If so, should the share price increase further, this would then reduce the government's losses.
I've known desperate mothers abandoned by men who went on welfare for a time. There are programs to aid them. A majority move on after this set back. One in particular I'm thinking of, after being abandoned by her husband, went on welfare, got training to be a nurse and became one, raised his two kids without him, decided she wanted to do something else and became a successful caterer.
I use the term "career option" not to be unkind but because as Ag3ma notes, some chunk of the population are unemployable but further, understand that having children without a husband is a life style and consciously choose to do so intending to live off of the system and are specifically, the sort of people a lending institution should know to whom they should not be giving credit. That was the specific case to which I was referring. If I were referring to this sort of thing in general, I might have written of the guy that got the bank to issue a credit card to his cat.
Would a bank be negligent giving a card to the nurse/caterer I reference above while she was on welfare? Noting she was doing well in training and has excellent future prospects?
I think you do have to be able to make distinctions in two different cases such as these.
One of the things I find most incomprehensible about right-wing and populist politics is the complete lack of any understanding of what poverty, especially intergenerational poverty, does to the psychology and culture of individuals and communities.
As a rule, the reason poor people sometimes have children they can't support is the same reason they prioritise buying TVs, gaming consoles and alcohol over healthy eating, it isn't because they're too stupid to understand how money works or because they see having children without a husband as a "lifestyle", it's because they're bored, lonely and have nothing to lose anyway.
People who work like to imagine that their lives are hard and that everything would be easier if they could just lie around watching TV in their underwear, but the reality is that long term unemployment is soul-destroying. It's white torture. No-one who ends up in that position is there because they chose to be. They might pretend they did because it's easier than facing the reality of not having any choices at all.
Because most of the time, it's not just one person. Sometimes it is, sometimes the culprit is just poor mental health or disability or addiction or abuse, but more often than not it's something that happens to an entire communities. If your community is built around an industry which no longer exists, or is populated by people who are systematically discriminated against in the labour market, then there may well not be enough money in that community to support new jobs. You might say the solution is just to move, but how? How do you find somewhere to live if you have no income and no savings? What do you do if you have elderly or sick relatives who need care, or dependent children?
Then finally, you end up with generations of people who have lived in this state. People who grew up with parents in long term unemployment, who grew up surrounded by hopelessness and the expectation, from birth, that they would fail. Who are so culturally isolated that they can't even blend in with people outside their own culture of failure. How are those people just supposed to wake up one day and choose to do something they've spent their whole lives learning is impossible?
People always like to point to the people who did get out as if those methods of escaping poverty are always available to everyone, but there are always going to be people who get left behind. I agree that those people don't need credit because they're too vulnerable to exploitation. What they need is investment, not just personal investment in them but in their entire communities over several generations. They need more welfare, at least in the short term, not less. Welfare creates the conditions in which people can build up intergenerational wealth, pay for services that keep other people working and ultimately start to change the culture of despair that consumes the lives of people in long-term poverty.
This is not my experience, though I wonder how you would know. How would you know someone is only pretending rather than being truthful?
My dad told me when he was a young man, a girl wanted him to get her pregnant so she could live off the system. I don't think either of them were kidding themselves or lying.
You might call it "subprime lending". One wonders from that, precisely why financial institutions might engage in the practice and what they do with debt they know will go bad, as a hedge against losses.
(Hint: same reason those same financial institutions push back against student loan forgiveness, even though forgiveness is equivalent to giving those institutions free money for which student debtors would bear the tax burden.)
Because that kind of poverty is not a life anyone would choose if they believed they had other choices.
Rich kids squatting in some absolute shithole and claiming benefits for a while, sure, that's cool and exciting and if it ever gets too real the trust fund you're lying about having is always there to bail you out. At that point, it's the kind of boredom and misery that gets you laid or encourages trying interesting drugs, not the kind that eats away at you until there's nothing left.
Being there and knowing there's a good chance you will never get out is different. It means you have lost control somewhere, and the world at large hates you for it.
Did she have any other choices?
Like, I imagine this was a long time ago, before the welfare system of most developed countries was hollowed out into the absolutely cruel farce it is now by neoliberalism, but even then.. you do realise what an absolutely fucking terrible idea that would actually be, and how miserable your life would be if you did it.
The only way having a child is going to make you money from the welfare system is if you literally don't feed your children, and that is not a thing any emotionally healthy person is likely to be able to live with. In fact, people are generally willing to tolerate significant malnutrition if it means their children get to eat.
I've heard similar accounts, people thinking they sohuld have a kid to get the baby bonus. Though, not surprised that out of a population of umpteen million, some individuals consider a really stupid option that would present them with a reality far different from what they imagined. One hopes they were forced to wise up, if they did go ahead with it.
It's self-reinforcing. Lots of people complain about people having kids to scam the system, living the life of Riley on benefits or what the fuck ever, which sends the message that such a thing is actually possible. Therefore someone who's been failed by the education (and various other) systems might think 'That sounds worth a go'. It never works out, they just now have even fewer options to get out of a shitty situation, and the people who were complaining in the first place have the person to hate that they wanted all along. It's misery, all the way down.
It has been literally decades since I worked in the system, so things may have changed a lot since then, but there will always be people that think there should be neo-slavery with others providing them a lifestyle for free. Example @ about 20 seconds is a kid complaining that it is "sick and twisted" that he has to work 40 hours a week just for the basics of food and housing which is all he says he wants and at 5 min. or so, Matt expresses his belief that the guy is actually asking for slaves.
Ok, not watching the whole rant, but the person on tiktok is complaining about having to spend his life working in order to not die. That's not asking for slaves, that can just be asking for his boss not to buy a third yacht.
There's enough wealth to go around for people to be comfortable on 30 hours of work if they want, or 40 hours or less demanding and damaging work. It's not the poor people, as a rule, calling for various forms of slavery.
There's enough wealth to go around for people to be comfortable on 30 hours of work if they want, or 40 hours or less demanding and damaging work. It's not the poor people, as a rule, calling for various forms of slavery.
He expressly states his disdain for the lack of free basics like housing. Housing comes from somewhere. It isn't free. So someone else is providing it.
I suspect the number of people who genuinely want to do nothing but live on benefits is very, very small. I suspect a larger number of people (like the woman your father talked about) potentially don't see any particular future working, because the work they see themselves doing is extremely poorly paid and insecure: work is a lot of slog with no real hope of anything better than scraping by, for... 40-50 years. Scraping by on welfare instead and saving themselves the slog is potentially quite attractive. This perhaps reflects partly their underdevelopment and lack of prospects, both of which could theoretically be tackled societally (with a great deal of effort that society is mostly not interested in, as Terminal Blue notes). But it also reflects how shit work is at the bottom of the scale, and how it fails to provide for people. One might note that society gives more in benefits to the working poor than it does to the unemployed.
But then, who does want to work 40 hours a week just to spend everything on accommodation, bills and food? Why shouldn't people complain about that, when they see loads of other people with mansions, yachts, etc.? Just about everyone with a yacht would still have a yacht even if they were taxed enough money to provide all the poor with basic social housing. Providing people with basic food and housing is actually quite cheap in the greater scheme of things.
I think it's quite difficult for people with decent jobs and/or good prospects to imagine what it is like to be someone who sees a future of nothing but grinding away to never achieve anything more than getting through the next month. That's the problem with a lot of commentary around in the media, social media etc.: they just have no conception whatsoever of what it is to come from and be in that position. That's almost certainly all of us on these forums: we're all people who, as adolescents, saw a world where we had opportunities for a decent-good life.
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There's another layer to that, which is the whole cultural/philosophical deconstruction at the roots of "basic income" movements, and the realization that we are drifting away from a situation where full employment is required by society (on the opposite, less and less is required, less paid opportunities are offered, and yet, on its momentum, our culture still punishes harshly those who don't "contribute"). We're living absurd times, that try to compensate for that with absurd productivism/consumerism, and with global catastrophic results in additon to the merely ridiculous ones (such as the development of "bullshit jobs").
And the progressive realization that our concept of "work" and "labor" are limited (it doesn't take in account the vastness of productive activities that aren't labelled as such because they aren't "paid", the immense everyday workforce of those who do things simply because they have time for it or simply because they must be done), that these concepts are culturally situated, just like the "earn your life through sufficient pain and be thankful" morality (which is actually all the more of a myth in the social spheres that promote it the most).
There is a lot to question, about our work/wage/earn/deserve social constructions, and these questions run deep. But they are blasphematory and frightening for a lot of people who benefit from our current system, so raising them outside academic circles often elicits knee-jerk stigmatization. Yet, I doubt our society can sustain itself very long if it keeps avoiding them...
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In which case, Matt is a moron.
Uh-huh, but not slaves. The very basics can be provided through taxation, which could comfortably include a redistributive tax affecting only those who rake in hundreds of millions. No need whatsoever for anyone to be forced to work against their will.
Taxation is not slavery.
If that is how slavery works, then anyone whose income comes from labour instead of capital investment or property ownership is already a slave. If you rent accomodation, you're a slave. If you work in a business you don't own, you're a slave.
Food and housing isn't really a "lifestyle", it's a necessity. If you stop eating, your body will run out of energy and you will get sick and die within a few months. The average life expectancy of a person sleeping rough is around half that of the general population. In many parts of the world you you can die of exposure in a few hours at certain times of year, and without access to clean water and a clean environment you will get sick and eventually die.
By arguing that things like food and housing should have an associated cost, what you are essentially saying is that you are okay with people not having these things. But think about the implications of what that actually means for those people.
It can be exploitation, which is adjacent to slavery.
Scary thing is there will always be more consumers of a thing than providers. More patients than doctors. More clients than lawyers. More tenants than land lords.
Democracy can be 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner. That is a reason that 1st principals are so important. Theft actions are wrong. Even if the numbers are on your side.
And as I note above, what happens when , to paraphrase Jonah Goldberg, 51% of the people vote that they can pee in the corn flakes of the other 49%? Can voting that you just get free $hit come to be exploitation of others? I think so, and we should fear this.
'Exploitation' is a value judgement, and one that I would 100% not apply to taxing the rich a bit more to pay for necessities. Slavery, meanwhile, is not just a value judgement-- it has a specific meaning, which is inapplicable here. Matt is categorically wrong.
Taxation is not theft, despite what sovereign citizens would like to claim.
There are more consumers of any given specific thing, which is unavoidable. And yet, almost everybody is a producer of value in some respect, whether through what they create at work, or through the taxes they pay. You can focus if you like on closing the gap for those who take more value than they put in. But if you'd like to do that, then your targets should not be graduates or students like the guy in that video, who are receiving relatively little, and will end up contributing far more in work and tax. Your targets should be the uber-wealthy, management, owners, CEOs, shareholders and inheritors. It is they that 'take' so much more value than they contribute.
On a side note, I find it extremely funny that you would cast the 'tenant' as the wolf in that relationship, considering how the balance of power is overwhelmingly in favour of the landlords.
You should read The Excluded Americans or something similar to help you understand the issues that landlord/tenant conflicts create.
The complexity of renting is not nearly as simple as you make it out. Not even close.
Taxation could absolutely fit into a definition of exploitation, which is akin to slavery.
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I don't recall that "graduate" lamenting that he has to work for basic necessities volunteering an intention to work at all.
Might be the type of person AOC was referencing: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) tabled a Resolution on the United States ... New Deal would take care of people who are “unwilling to work””. "
Ocasio-Cortez paying those “unwilling to work” in Green New Deal FAQs was an admission, not a mistake
Those FAQs put progressive meat on the bare bones of the legislative Resolution, and was an admission of the policy goals of those behind the GND.
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Sure sounds like a form of forced indenture of unwilling people.