Many associate Marxism with an abolition of private property and normalization of compensation. Soviets confiscating mansions and giving a room to every family. Paying doctors the same as ditch diggers. I catch heat here for associating myself with Marx and not rejecting that rhetoric out-of-hand, but I do not and have not advocated for any of that.
What I advocate for is simply a floor and a ceiling. Most advanced nations on earth have a social safety net floor to support those who fall through the cracks. It varies from country to country, but it is a generally agreed upon economic benefit to support the least fortunate so that they can have a stable platform to use to become more productive. America does it. The issue with ours is that there are many bureaucratic hoops to jump through to qualify, which just wastes time for the person involved managing their benefits instead of improving their skill set for working. Combine that with the loss of benefits when you pass a certain income threshold and it means you actually do worse for more effort, creating a ‘welfare trap’.
I believe the answer to this is normalization of benefits. Give everyone a basic minimal sum. No hoops to jump through and so no giant government bureaucracies to monitor them. Everyone has enough for basic low-income housing and potatoes. Now people have no excuse. If they squander that all of society knows they did and they have no one to blame but themselves. But the real working poor don’t have to worry as much about putting food on the table or navigating complicated government programs. They can put time into improving their skill set for society and their personal lives for themselves.
How do we pay for that? Well that’s always the rub, but the short answer is two ways. The first being the massive cutting in unelected government workers that currently administer all these disparate programs. We piss away so much money and time monitoring compliance for no benefit. I mean in most countries you don’t even have to file your stupid taxes, it’s done automatically.
The second source of funding being the aforementioned ceiling. The median net worth in America is about 120k. If you have a million dollars in personal wealth you’re doing pretty well. Not struggling. A million dollars is a lot of money. Now compare that to Bill Gates. He has around 100 billion roughly. The Staircase Analogy:
We’re on step one. A millionaire is on step ten less than halfway to the second floor. Bill Gates is on the 47,600th floor. Everyone should agree that is completely absurd and not an efficient distribution of resources. That money should be reinvested in society to allow others to prosper like he did. No one person, regardless of what they do or make, is worth that much more than another.
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