Quote from: FredericBastiat on May 13, 2014, 06:40:24 PM

Given: A base wage for every "citizen" is good.

Premise 1: A society with a base wage will be more productive.
Premise 2: Society will have fewer poor individuals.
Premise 3: A base wage will raise the standard of living.

What you're really saying...

It's okay to use violence to take the property of another. Or do you expect people to do this in a charitable fashion? In which case, I'd likely go along with it.

What will actually happen:

1. Society will become more violent by nature and theft more prevalent due to the fact you're encouraging that type of behavior. This is what we call the "entitlement" attitude. It's a fancy word for "justifiable thievery".

2. A temporary shift of property will transfer into the hands of the poorer class (base wage earner). It's likely this money/assets/property will be squandered which would have happened anyway without the entitlement program in the first place.

3. The poor will eventually become poor again, unless they try to change their lot in life by providing a service or product other's will desire (getting an education might help, maybe???). Just having stuff doesn't necessarily make you resourceful or productive.

4. The purchasing power of all individuals as a whole, over a period of time, will stabilize back to where it was previously, or go down, benefiting the poor over the short term. If you increase the money stock (inflation), you aren't creating anything. It's just numbers in a computer, or ink on paper. Altering raw materials into things/items which are desirable to another person is what improves the condition of the individual, and society as a whole. Money is nothing more than an accounting method. Although it can serve some other intrinsic purpose from time to time.

5. It doesn't matter if the base wage is 1 unit of money or 1,000,000 units of money, the purchasing power will eventually stabilize, unless we're talking about hard currencies, in which case, you will create a civil war. Nobody will tolerate stealing for too long (they tend to take it personal when they worked hard for their livelihood to only have it taken away from them to give it to somebody else who didn't earn it).

6. And as we're already aware, wars are not profitable. In fact, they're purely destructive. It's a lose-lose for everybody.

TL;DR: Don't steal, don't inflate. It isn't nice, and it tends to lead to violent behavior.

I agree with this concept, but this would also mean that we would be working for a common good, for society as a whole, for the good of people and sadly that is utopic because we can only think about ourselves and not about others.