[allannienhuis]

> I ain't giving people something for nothing but I suspect you do, or would do that for your children or immediate family.

I'm just some dude on the internet, so my opinions are worth exactly what you're paying for them (nothing). But when I try to understand this type of thinking, this is what I come up with:

In the old days of scarce resources (vast majority of civilization), children were expected to 'repay' their elders for the care they received by taking care of them in their old age. And the competition for resources made this idea of keeping those resources for your family only important for survival.

But with the resources available today, the dynamics a very different. Currently only about 25% of total employment is in agriculture, worldwide. In the rich countries this is very significantly less. Canada is 1%, USA is 2% [worldbank]

But we're living with the cultural baggage of generations of scarcity and tribalism, which still shape our policy in a time of incredible resources provided by technology. So instead of more sharing, we choose higher standard of living for ourselves. I know it will take time to change this culturally - generations - but I'm still disappointed it's not happening faster.

[worldbank]:https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS

[phil21]

I think it's hard for certain people with certain backgrounds to understand.

What I see as someone who grew up in a very working class family surrounded by those on benefits:

I see the janitor who busts their ass day in and day out to provide for their families totally lost in these conversations. They are expected to take money out of their check - doing a very difficult, thankless, and not all that well paying job - to even today help pay for a whole lot of people who are incredibly more privileged. I know quite a number of people who have college degrees but experienced "failure to launch" who see themselves as too good to go work in a kitchen, as a janitor, or what have you - but are quite happy to accept various form of public benefits due to their part time cushy employment.

I cannot square that circle. Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.

If you ask those taking said benefits who are working part time in a arts field or whatever, they will of course state that they are not the problem and "rich people" should pay more in taxes so the janitor also doesn't have to work. But now who is cleaning toilets or taking out trash? At some point the work has to be done and you run out of rich people to tax for wealth redistribution.

Considering how widespread this "condition" seems to be in my human experience, I cannot see a widescale implementation of "to each of their abilities, to each their need" ever working out simply due to how selfish humans appear to be. I love the idea - and I have often dream of starting my own commune of sorts of well-curated individuals who all have roles to play, but I just can't see it working out either in reality or in scale. The only reason such a limited scale commune might work is that you could rule with an iron fist and vote people off the island who start to take advantage of others and no longer pull their own weight.

I am quite convinced that if you implemented UBI or other means for the average person to never work you'd simply get a whole lot of people doing effectively nothing, if not outright destructive (for society) things with their time.

[allannienhuis]

> Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.

But isn't the real problem that the janitor isn't being paid enough to save for retirement _and_ pay a 'fair' share of taxes? I read about the fear and complaints of high taxes to pay for the lazy, but the actual tax load on countries with strong socialist policies is not really all that much higher than in the U.S.

This sort of thinking reminds me of the old cartoon with three people at a table, one obviously rich person with a whole pile of cookies on his side of the table, and two other ordinary-working-class people each with a couple of cookies, with the rich guy saying to one of the other guys - watch out, that guy wants to take away one of your cookies!'

There are so many working class people convinced that the problem is the other poor people around them, instead of the very small number of people with > 50% of the resources. Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.

I'm not some revolutionary; far from it. I've always hoped that technology would be the thing that allowed virtually everyone to rise up out of poverty (and it has to some degree), but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.