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1490 sats \ 0 replies \ @scampy 24 Jul 2022 freebie
It's interesting to map this study onto my own experiences.
Back in 2020 I took on a new job with some giant multinational corp. As my country was in peak lockdown at this point, the position was WFH.
Shortly after I joined, the project I'd specifically been hired for got canned and they didn't know what to do with me. I was doing virtually no work, from home, on full pay. I'd average perhaps 5 hours of easy work per week. For all intents and purposes, I was on pretty lucrative stimmies.
You'd think this would be the dream, and for the first few weeks I certainly thought so too. You'd think hey, I now have all this time to chase my passions! Learn new skills! And the company knows my situation, they know I'm just sitting here twiddling my thumbs. It's not immoral at all.
But there's something incredibly corrosive about receiving money you didn't truly earn. Especially against a backdrop where families, small businesses and entrepreneurs were struggling mightily with the lockdown nonsense. I felt like a parasite. I had no drive. Got fat. Listened to 1000s of hours of Bitcoin podcasts probably.
This went on for almost a year. I got shuttled from project to project, but never did I need work for a solid week. Eventually I gave up and handed in my notice.
Now I work for a start-up, in the office, and put in around 50 hours / week. Similar pay. I'm far, far happier this way. I really do think humans are beasts of burden and need a purpose, something to struggle against.
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228 sats \ 1 reply \ @sb 24 Jul 2022
The study they describe in the article is astounding. They assigned a few thousand people each to a cash condition (economic handouts of $500 or $2000) and a control condition (no economic handout).
Quote: "Handout recipients fared worse on most survey outcomes. They reported less earned income and liquidity, lower work performance and satisfaction, more financial stress, sleep quality and physical health, and higher levels of loneliness and anxiety than the control group. "
That's absolutely bonkers. Free money with no strings attached is purely debilitating to the population.
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @zuspotirko 24 Jul 2022
It's amazing but it does not surprise me.
Something like 1/4 of people earning 250k a year are living paycheck to paycheck (so called HENRYs).
Saying that millenials are wasting everything on "Starbucks and Avocados" has become kind of a punchline. But in my personal experience there absolutely is a correlation between more left leaning friends and earning 50k a year but having nothing in savings/investments and blowing it all.
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138 sats \ 4 replies \ @TheBTCManual 24 Jul 2022
If the studies say free money does more harm than good, and we can see how it's rolled out on a greater scale, why do people think free health care, free education, free everything is any better that's just free money with extra steps and drives the same incentives.
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125 sats \ 1 reply \ @CheezeGrater 24 Jul 2022
Taking your argument to the extreme, should fire-fighting and other existing public services also not be free?
I'm all for the free market determining survival of the fittest, so giving people an allowance for specific needs like health care and education would still drive competition but would potentially uplift all of society (yes at the cost of those paying taxes) and create a better future.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the above is in my mind an example of a low time preference society.
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161 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 24 Jul 2022
I don't think there is a right or wrong answer, I think the debate we having sucks because neither of us can prove the case, governments have a monopoly on money, and where the money goes until we have competition for setups. So I could make the greatest case for no free services but its all pie in the sky since we can't run it in practice, the fact that we don't have that optionality to me is already an issue, and limiting of freedoms
Nothing is free, you're either paying for it through taxes or inflation, and I think that governments don't NEED to be the distributor of income, it can be done better by people now that we have better money.
I would love to see different countries, states/provinces, regions, and even towns having variations of this and see what works best for different scales. For example a small town, people could have a monthly payment for IE firefighting services, whereas a big city taxes are a better option
Small towns can have treasuries, from bonds issued on a local level to pay for certain things the town needs like roads, since the money is managed and collected locally, you know whose house you need to knock on if funds aren't going where they should.
Once your towns infrastructure is based on the towns ability to generate income, there will be far less mooching and you'll see how cheap these services should actually be
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @BlokchainB 24 Jul 2022
It blows my mind when people say this “tangible good/ service” is a human right and everyone should have access to it. I used to believe this but then I saw how people who expect water to be free but don’t recognize all the labor energy and costs it takes to deliver clean water plus when it’s free people will use the water with recklessness. Everything that is worth anything takes the coordination time and energy from some other human. Expecting things to be free is ridiculous.
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200 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 24 Jul 2022
Me too, I think it's a case of people not understanding everything has a cost. If it's free you're either taking the time and labour of someone else, or you're skimming small amounts from everyone to cover the cost, and feeling like stealing in negligible amounts is a human right.
I've lived without 24 hour electricty, with water rationing, my family have had their homes taken from the government, so I know rights mean nothing. It's really just an idea people hold who are afraid to give up modern comforts.
Once you learn to live without these things and see you're not made of glass and won't shatter because you can't access this or that, then you realise holding onto those dreams cost society more than it provides
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15 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin OP 23 Jul 2022
The link for this post is using an archive for the article on The WSJ's website. An archive has no paywall, no subscription requirement, and can be easier to read. The original article, on The WSJ's website is:
The High Cost of Free Money
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-cost-of-free-money-harvard-exeter-study-stimulus-handout-low-income-well-being-health-personal-agency-poverty-covid-11658166372
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20 sats \ 2 replies \ @frostdragon 24 Jul 2022
“One lesson for Congress seems clear: Never again send out cash with no strings attached.”
Rather ominous.
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20 sats \ 1 reply \ @zuspotirko 24 Jul 2022
Well, what would have been good strings attached? Because no many handouts would not have been a compromise that 50% of congress would have accepted. And limiting it only to food/rent/utilities would have had an even bigger puchback.
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @frostdragon 24 Jul 2022
CBDC would make strings pretty easy. Who knows if it’ll actually catch on, but I bet it’s looking pretty attractive to some of our politicians. And now that they can point to the failure of covid measures, they might try to use that to make more of a case for it.
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 24 Jul 2022
One can argue the downfall of America began once we started to become a welfare state.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryptocoin OP 23 Jul 2022
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryptocoin OP 23 Jul 2022
There's also a post on ZeroHedge with additional information on the topic:
New Study Sledgehammers Universal Basic Income Arguments
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/new-study-sledgehammers-universal-basic-income-arguments
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