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Not sure where to ask this but some of you seem to know stuff about economics so I thought I'd ask.
What would be the pros and cons of a society where everyone is provided with their basic needs (food, water, shelter) by the government but for anything beyond that (consider these luxuries) they must pay for it out of their own pocket?
Basically you and your neighbour might both have a large enough house for your families, but the neighbours might have way nicer furniture.
I don't know much about economics but I figure that taxes would be pretty high, but whatever you keep can be spent solely on stuff you want rather than need.
Intriguing concept. Actually I belive in a Ressource based economy but sadly still most prefer the Monetary System. Anyway I support the Idea to provide for the basic needs. I can do that without any Taxes as you see in the Star Empire. Our luck is the greed of our Trading Partners wanting our produce for money. As the most important Corporations anyway belong to the "ruling Class" they know what's of value.
It depends on how much resources (and how efficiently) your economy produces. Basic needs are, by their nature of being, things that will inflate disproportionally under a more laissez-faire system. If your production can sustain it, spending would probably go up (even with higher taxes) as the lower end of your economic spectrum will suddenly have a lot more disposable income, assuming your government is capable of avoiding crippling wide-spread corruption.
Well firstly, it will never be as productive as a free market. Some people are content with just the basic necessities, and if these are provided then they will see no reason to do much other than leisure. This might produce good artists or philosophers, however.
Further, you would have, in my opinion, a large waste of manpower and resources establishing the agency that oversees the production, collection and distribution of these basic resources, as well as some very tricky legal work ahead establishing what is actually a need. For example, some might say they need disposable diapers for their children, others will say reusable cloth diapers are cheaper and more sustainable.
Deciding what is in fact a need will give a headache to bureaucrats, which will waste time and manpower deciding it. To keep on with the baby example, some women might not want to breastfeed, and will say formula is a basic need. Other mothers will have no qualms about breastfeeding, and say it isn't a need.
Now you could just say that those who feel they need disposable diapers and formula can have them, but then you have human nature to deal with. Those people are getting extra, so what do I get extra to make it even? Extra money equal to what formula and diapers would cost? All that does is start subsidising luxuries.
A valid point ...
Canada actually did a pilot with a minimum earnings-kind of deal. Instead of alotting people physical resources, they just gave them a whole wad of cash (iirc something like 33.000 [canadian]$/month) instead. It seemed to work fine, but the report was never published because the conservatives came to power and scrapped the whole thing. Doing it that way avoids bureaucratic shlock. then again, you might deliberately want to make bureaucratic shlock. My nation ICly LOVES bureaucracy. Endless red tape is the stuff of dreams to some of them. It also helps that a large bureaucracy does provide a lot of jobs in a setting where low-end (or even high-end) labour might not nessecarily be commercially viable due to automation. It is the future, after all.
Well as a Canadian, I can tell you it did not work fine. I personally know several people who have abused assistance programs, such as housing, welfare, EI. Not to mention that people are stupid when they're handed things. Everyone I've ever met who is "below or at" the poverty line has a 40" TV, closets full of nice clothes, goes drinking and eating out in copious amounts, and generally mismanage their funds, so I cannot agree at all that giving people a wad of cash and saying "have at it" is a responsible way to go.
It's like Attawapiskat, a First Nations reserve in Ontario that was the subject of media attention a couple years ago. These people were living in abject squalor; something you'd expect to see in a Save the African Children commercial. There was a lot of outcry from the bleeding hearts about how the government was clearly ignoring these poor souls. Then the government releases the statements that they've provided that single reserve with over 40 million dollars in five years. 40 million dollars in 5 years for a population of under 2000, and they are living in conditions fit for post-war Sierra Leone. The stupid part of the whole thing was that after this revelation that it wasn't a funding issue, but a mismanagement issue, the government took a bunch of flak for wanting to put the reserve under third-party management until they go back on their feet. No, giving wads of cash to people is incredibly irresponsible and borders on the criminally negligent, and Harper did good scraping the whole catastrophe before it became mainstream like so many other stupid projects of the Liberals.
However, on the IC side of things, you're perfectly right, 44th. Bureaucracy is ever so fun to RP, because if everything was hunky-dory there would be no stories. And your point about automation is entirely valid, but it still leaves the issue of scarcity and population control. Overpopulation is the largest problem any society can face, and from it stems every other woe. When you make it easy for people to live, they will live, and their progeny will live, and so on until you're left with everyone forced into a cubicle-sized house, eating processed food due to lack of farmlands. And then even if all this is fixed, you come to jobs. No low level jobs means everyone must be an engineer or doctor or something, and then these positions fill up and become so cheap that there's no incentive to go through the rigors of proper training, especially when the government allows a comfortable life for free. A.Is and advanced robotics will eventually eliminate the need for even these positions, so in reality you could have a nation whose populous needs only entertain themselves and will become landwhales sitting in floating chairs like in Wall-E, or join the armed forces in an ever expanding conquest of spatial resources, in which case you're basically a bunch of pricks and psychopaths.
Admittedly, you could go the post-scarcity route, but I've always found that to be cheap and stupid due to the ease with which it makes everything. Good stories revolve around conflict and struggle, and there's none of that when colonizing a new planet gives no threat of new diseases or terraforming challenges, or even staying on one planet is no problem because you can replicate everything you could ever want. It's boring, it's easy, and it's not creative. It's the equivalent of playing games with cheat codes: sure, you don't win immediately, but there's no challenge except for how fast you can type in the next code when you need something.
Post-scarcity is potentially interesting, but in my personal opinion only if you limit the post-scarcityness in some way, which is guess doesn't make it psot-scarcity?
To give a concrete example, my nation has, through black hole mining, a frankly stupendous amount of raw resources at their disposal. However, they are limited in how quickly they can mine it (there's currently only one mining facility active within their borders, for example) and they can't just make stuff from it willy-nilly. The matter converters are picky and ONLY work with neutronium as raw input and will have a pre-defined kind of output matter and work at constricted rates. In that way there's a relative scarcity of some resources in palces to keep things interesting, while still having all the stuff you need for the big fancy works like space elevators and what have you not that require obscene amounts of construction materials.
So it's kind of like a pseudo-post-scarcity? I guess? Either way, the second resources are never a problem biology-wise, you're going to have something to control your population or everything will just buckle and break due to overpopulation. (as explained in greater detail above). There are of course different ways to go about this. The most commonly seen ones are less or more evil versions of China's reproductive legislature and/or perpeptual war (of either the orwellian or expansionist kind).
That's an interesting concept, and I'm not sure if I'd classify it pre or post scarcity myself. It basically makes the common currency time, does it not? It takes X amount of time to harvest the resources needed for something desired, so people could be paid in time allotments. For every hour you work you get thirty minutes of harvest into your account, or something like that.
At least that's how I'd do it. How have you organised it?
The matter converters/factories are actually the biggest bottleneck. Production is a strong limiting factor, but maximum neutronium mining capacity (and shipping, which has it's own unique set of challenges) exceeds the maximum production intake for the factories. In the Home Territories (which for the sake of fun and balance are as far away from threads as possible) the inverse is the case, so the Paraxian Exosector actually exports neutronium to them.
The matter converters come in three rough types: sub-ferrous (atomic number < 26), super-ferrous (atomic number > 26) and hyper-ferrous (island-of-stability style fictional super-heavy elements). Elemental iron is effectively a "waste product" in these nucleosynthesisers (for real-world quantum mechanical reasons) so that's easily the most-produced element. Sub-ferrous elements are the next most abundant and heavier elements are available in large-but-limited quantities. Hyper-ferrites, essential for many things, are the most limited in production. So much so that the economy is split up between Civil Credits (for anything not made with hyperferrites) and War Credits for the stuff that takes up production time on the much more limited factories. Exchange between them is usually not allowed, but the estimated converted value for a single hyper-ferrite atom is 10 Civil Credits (compared to a monthly net income of between 2500 - 7500 CC), though values fluctuate significantly, this is obviously so great by comparison that free trade in them would crash the economy. (or even if not so, that's what everyone believes) The War Credit itself is defined by the "gun standard". With the standard production model pennygun (the mainstay assault rifle) being valued, by definition, at 0.10 War Credits. War Credits are mainly useful to gauge and compare the (military) value of a thing or person. E.g. a tank costs 200-450 war credits and typically has a crew of 2. A properly trained and fit tank pilot or co-pilot is valued at roughly 700 each, which allows them to clearly and efficiently prioritise. Similarly, citizens buy up resources essential for warfare unless they have earned War Credits by contributing to the war effort, in some way or another.
There is also another separate currency for food, eponymously called Food Credits, which can be bought and sold on the exchange for Civil Credits (or in very dire circumstances, War Credits) or used to buy food. The food Credits are distributed on a weekly basis and can be used like any other currency, except that it may not be moved off-world. This is mainly to prevent depletion of the nutrient cycle on a planet-per-planet basis, which is a very real concern to the ecologically burdened planets of the 44th.
As you can see sticking to defined standards is a well-liked thing to do in the 44th, though not necessarily the wisest. As a side note I'd like to add the organic resources (i.e. non-synthetic cloths and many kinds of dyes and the like) is often of limited availability due to restrictions on export, the scarcity (and therefore price) of which varies from planet to planet.
Now! Cake.
Also of note is that the 44th has banned many forms of AI, so the cost of (particularly logistical and bureaucratic) labour is still quite significant.
Also they probably have forgotton how to build their big fancy automated matter converting factories.
Also they may or may not have slightly forgotten how they even work in the first place.
And Cacao.
Such argument, much strife, get over it. :P
Nonsense, old sport. If political conversation cannot exist on a political simulator of all places, then society has really gone over the hill. I encourage more people to voice their opinions on matters.
Hello! !!
Hi there and welcome
We'll drive those bloody Frenchmen back, righto chaps?
A warm welcome to you, Bkeril.
And quite so, Miyager, quite so. But after tea and biscuits, of course.
When in doubt, nuke it. Especially if it speaks French.
Oh no, by all means, speak, and often.
Why waste the nukes? Just roll in the army and they'll either celebrate, or surrender! XD
you obviously have never played europa universalis ;p
God France is a powerhouse in that game. And if allied to Castile, they have 40+ stacks wandering everywhere.
France hasn't been anything of significance since the fall of Napoleon... :\
Also, only a few hours... ;)
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