Free universal X?

How about socializing the housing industry? Food or clothing? Why or why not?

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

Already done.

Thanks for noticing.

Why how nice and informative you are. No, poor people are helped (rather inadequately) with these things but none of them are full blown socialized, not even close.

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

Depends which country you live in surely?

By the powers invested in me by tabloid-reading imbeciles, I pronounce you guilty of paedophilia!

The USSR tried it, but it didn't work out very well.

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Catalonia tried it, and it worked very well.

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

The USSR actually collapsed due to excess military spending.

If they'd spent more on their domestic side, they'd probably still be around.

I don't see "universal clothing" happening. It's just unnecessary. You can get perfectly good clothes dirt cheap at places like Goodwill, and even homeless people pretty much always have clothes.

Belief or disbelief rests with you.

"It's just unnecessary"

Nope just few more clothed people would be worth it. Besides, globally I'm sure there's tons of people with inadequate clothing, despite the fact we have more than good clothing for everyone. A far as the homeless and clothes, I lack knowledge of that but I would think clothing really would be more of an issue at least somewhat. Just one more person not in need would be enough though.

edited 10th May '11 2:29:48 PM by LoveHappiness

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

You'd remove the freedom of dress from everybody in the country just to provide clothing for one person?

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LH often says odd things but that's really not something he has said.

Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. Unrelated ME1 Fanfic

"You'd remove the freedom of dress from everybody in the country"

Huh? No, I'm not saying we should steal clothes from people using them. Produce and give to those who need it.

I prefer gender-neutral pronouns.

edited 10th May '11 2:37:32 PM by LoveHappiness

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

I was actually only referring to the US in my above statement. Other countries might have more of an issue with that problem, but I don't really know enough about them to talk about it.

However, while I'm not so sure "even one person" would make it all worth it, I'm also not sure that one person even exists. In a country of over 300 million people, that's a bold statement to make. Nevertheless, I think that the number of people in the US with insufficient clothing may well be zero.

er, that's all well and good, but English is lacking in that department.

Belief or disbelief rests with you.

I guess you confused me with the word "socialized". I usually take that to mean "run collectively by the people (which, in any sufficiently large country, actually means the government) under the from each, to each principle".

What your describing sounds more like what I would call clothing welfare, which already exists.

edited 10th May '11 2:48:14 PM by EdwardsGrizzly

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That would be socialised/nationalised - but even in such a system there would not be an infringement on the freedom of clothing. Not necessarily, anyway, not as part of the process.

Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. Unrelated ME1 Fanfic

OK, I didn't care about the clothes so much as the food and housing (added for sake of completeness...). How about those?

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

I think the housing was tried, and failed. Called the projects.

That's only one example.

Try the various homesteader and landgrant acts. Try the affordable home requirements.

Try all the co-ops and housing authorities around today.

In my experience, homeless people almost always have clothes. Sometimes they don't have the right clothes, particularly in winter.

I think maybe part of it is that if you're wandering around sleeping under bridges and in parks, you don't tend to carry much stuff with you that isn't immediately useful. They get given a warm blanket or something by a charity, but by the time they need it again they've left it behind somewhere.

Be not afraid...

Or it's been stolen by somebody else.

There's a reason why the homeless dress in layers.

"The USSR actually collapsed due to excess military spending." - blueharp

I believe the point was referring to BEFORE the collapse of the Soviet Union, as in, "when Josef Stalin had to kill people to scare everyone else into working because human nature tends not to provide much incentive to work for the common good."

That was Josef Stalin's hang-up. Being a murderous bastard, he didn't even need an excuse.

That said, they managed to survive him, and even recover, but then they went the wrong direction in terms of internal development.

edited 10th May '11 4:50:02 PM by blueharp

Here's a few things:

You want to socialise housing?

• Get a clearer census picture. This sometimes require somewhat more intrusive questions. You can also use income tax returns for this. Basically we need to know the economic makeup and population (age/density) composition of each area. This allows us to shove a home here, a home there, which is subsidised. Afterall, we don't need to provide housing for everyone, just those who can't afford it.
• Don't clump up poor people. Whatever we do, make sure you don't place all your social housing in the same place.
• Equalise revenue between neighbourhoods to ensure equal service in terms of schooling, roads and so on. Policing you can make different depending on crime rate.

You want to socialise food?

• We'll have to change our subsidy system for food production. Currently North America focuses on quotas and Europe usually focuses on subsidies. In both cases, the system is meant to create a price floor for food. Instead, we could simply making farming a government job with a definite government salary and then for farmers, it doesn't matter how much they produce they get paid the same livable wage. That changes the subsidy system for foods.
• Now we can let our food prices be the actual market price (ridiculously cheap), how that might affect foreign goods, I'm not sure. This one I have to take a closer look at but it might price foreign food out of the market because domestic food would be so much cheaper.
• I don't think we need complicated food stamp systems or anything. If our baseline welfare system is working fine, everyone should have enough money to buy food. They squander it on booze and shit, that's their problem. If there's any problem, we fix the baseline welfare system, we don't complicate it with extra bureaucracy over food stamps.

The current food stamp system is not complicated. You get a debit card. You swipe it. The food items are paid for, you cover the rest.

The reason why next to nobody talks about "free universal X" in terms of food, clothing or even housing is that markets and competition work fairly well for those things. The reason people talk about those things (or to be more precise, making them into a sort of government-run operation) in terms of health care, energy, and communications is the feeling that the markets and competition are not working well for these things.

Now that might be right or wrong. (I personally think that in health care and energy it's clear that competition simply isn't working as well as we'd like, and for communications I think that we're actually still on the fence about it) But that's what the debates are about, and not about "free stuff".

Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserve