Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

What if I want a better home than other people? What if I don't want to eat the food that's provided to me? What if I disagree with the education system? You're trading one system of benefits and downsides for another, in your case you're trading freedom and risk for autocracy and stability. Mind you I'm well aware of the problems with Capitalism, I don't think having a good boss in the same system who can make you a better person, help you learn, etc is antagonistic to your goals of Chinese communism.


If you want a better home than other people, take a job and buy a better one. If you want better food, take a job and buy better food. If your employer at that job pressures you to do something that makes you uncomfortable or is immoral, you then don't need to do the calculus of "Do I compromise my morals, or get kicked out on the street with no health insurance?" because, as a floor, you have the community-provided essentials to tie you over while you find a morally acceptable job that will allow you to continue living in a big house and eating organic lobster.


Ok, that sounds reasonable. But how do you find this model? Do you not suspect that a lot of people would be happy to tell their boss to stick it as the state will take care of them - then who is funding the cost of all the state programs?


In general, I don't think that most people will choose to live "on the dole" forever. As you've identified, we are driven by status, and having to move into state housing will probably be looked down on, and seen as a "failure" similar to how moving back in with one's parents is seen in middle class families. People will want to work because, whatever the floor is, they will want more, and more importantly they will want not to be seen as failures.

In fact the example of moving back in with one's parents is rather instructive in that middle class young people essentially already have a half-assed privatized version of this reality: their social safety net is their parents and other relatives. Decommodifying healthcare, housing, and food would have essentially extend the same kind of safety net to people who aren't lucky enough to have well-off relatives who can help them in such times.

At the very least, we should decommodify healthcare. One can make theoretical arguments that doing so for housing and food would have huge, negative knock-on effects because the last major experiment with this model were the Soviet-modeled socialist states, which obviously were a disaster. That isn't the case with healthcare. Plenty of other countries have decommodified healthcare, and nothing bad happened: nobody is meaningfully disinclined to work, health outcomes are generally better, and overall healthcare costs are generally lower.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: