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If I join a union that negotiated a pension for me, let's say I agree with you for the sake of argument that the union used "corrupt" tactics to get that pension. Does that make me a parasite because I shouldn't have joined a union, or I should refuse the pension? As as a follow-up question, is there any union or pension scheme that @The_Nybbler does not think is "corrupt"?
Did I say don't do anything about transfer payments? So what do you want to do about transfer payments?
Maybe we should also look at what the biggest problems are and consider how to allocate efforts accordingly.
"Bigger but more nebulous problems" are indeed harder to "do" something about than raging at welfare moms on TikTok. I don't fault people for taking the ragebait and going for the low-hanging fruit per se. You don't want to fix transfer payments because you have a rational economic plan to do so and you want to make things better for anyone else. You want to fix transfer payments so you can laugh as Laquisha is kicked onto the street. And I'm not even completely faulting you for that! I have not become as blackpilled as you, though my heart is increasingly bitter, but I have started to accept that schadenfreude is one of the few satisfactions left to us.
But don't lie to yourself about your motives. Tell me you want to fix some other stuff that doesn't warm your culture warring heart and maybe I'll believe there is some principle involved.
You can join the union, just don't expect any portion of the contract that says something like "the guys we largely helped get elected have promised to let you enslave future generations" to be honored by future generations. You should have the same recourse as a southern slave owner when slavery was abolished, be glad we only take from you the future fruits of your corruption.
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You shouldn't have joined a corrupt union. The payment is not somehow cleansed of its corruption by the fact that it goes to you and not the union.
Cut them off or reduce them very significantly.
Or maybe we should look at transfer payments.
You didn't answer my question about whether any union would meet your criteria for being non-corrupt. And do you expect everyone who joins the union to do an investigation of its corruption and come to the same conclusions as you? Should we just take it as given that you think no one with a union pension should be able to collect on that pension because they're guilty of complicity in "union corruption"?
Okay. I say that glibly: at one time I would have been willing to take a personal hit in the form of reduced or no Social Security for myself if it would "fix" SS. Now I am too jaded to believe that's being anything other than a chump. But sure, at some point transfer payments are definitely going to have to be cut/reduced, and I bitterly hope it's not until after I'm dead.
Or we could look at both and not just go for your low-hanging emotionally satisfying culture war targets.
I don't know if any union would meet my criteria for being non-corrupt. Nor do I care if those who join the union do an investigation. These questions are irrelevant; if the pension was obtained corruptly, it does not become non-corrupt through either the honest or willful ignorance of the beneficiaries.
You can certainly start a thread talking about Afghanistan or peso-buying. But when transfer payments are brought up and you want to talk about Afghanistan and Argentina instead, it sure looks like a distraction away from transfer payments.
That's a fully generalizable statement. People can argue any benefit you receive is because of some form of upstream corruption. The point is not to whatabout the point about union corruption and whether or not any pension would meet your standards for legitimacy. The point is you can't just abdicate on legal obligations because you don't like how they were created.
Or rather, you can, but you will sometimes be the whom and not the who.
But I'm taking to the wind. We're now burning down anything and everything if it hurts people we don't like. This will end well.
That people can argue something doesn't make it fully generalizable; it's if the argument "works" regardless of the underlying facts which makes it fully generalizable.
Eh, I can't, but the government certainly can. The contracts clause is dead.
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