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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

>> Guaranteed minimum income, reverse taxation, or merely a solid welfare program that provides solid housing, food, and medical care

The only problem with this is how this is impossible to scale to proper levels in the US.

This works great in smaller economies (like you're advocating) like Scandinavian countries where you have a much smaller population and it's easy to support a few million people. You also have to take into account the Scandinavian cultural norms as well.

When you have over 300 million? As we've seen in recent years, when you institute measures like this it actually creates more dependency and self reliance on the government - not something I would think you'd want to advocate on such a large scale.

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In the US, the banking and military sectors - and a large chunk of tech - are at least as dependent on government handouts.

So the problem isn't one of scale, which is already huge. It's one of distribution.

Money on its own is not the solution. You can only grow an economy when people are building useful things of all kinds, doing useful things for each other, and creating new businesses.

The big problem in the US isn't capitalism as such, it's the fact that there's a layer of old and new money privilege accreted around Wall St and Washington. It's such a resource sink it has literally locked out most of the rest of the population.

It's a networking and patronage problem. The money is just a symptom.

If you're on the right side of the social firewall you can be a complete failure and still get jobs at C-suite and board level. (See recent examples from any number of tech companies - which are the obvious symptoms of a much bigger issue.)

Prosperity only happens when an economy rewards ability much more than it rewards the benefits of in-caste relationships.

This isn't even considered an issue in most descriptions of economics, but it's a huge influence at every level of business. And with the partial exception of the startup/accelerator/incubator scene, the current situation in the US has been a tragic brake on real growth.

The best you'll get from throwing money at people is temporarily less crime, starvation, and homelessness. Those are big wins on their own, but they're a bandaid and the improvement isn't really sustainable. For a growth-oriented economy, more is needed.

Exactly right. The US Military (and Israel, for that matter) get a guaranteed minimum income from the US government. Why not the average person on the street?

b/c they aren't doing a job?

> In the US, the banking and military sectors - and a large chunk of tech - are at least as dependent on government handouts.

> So the problem isn't one of scale, which is already huge. It's one of distribution.

Ah, but those industries are concentrated interests. The individual value proposition is sufficient for people in these industries to lobby the government, because there's an enormous amount of wealth available to be transferred to a relatively small number of individuals.

On the other hand, the scenario you're proposing is that same enormous amount of wealth available to be transferred to an enormous number of individuals. The upside per individual is relatively small, and most individuals are better off spending their time and resources on things that can more directly improve their life (like going to work, getting an education, exercising, enjoying entertainment, etc.). Note that this isn't individuals making a mistake or being irrational. They're acting in their self-interest.

It's easy to say that "we" should just redistribute the subsidies on big industry to the entire population. But it is, as far as I can tell, not a remotely feasible goal.

> "The big problem in the US isn't capitalism as such, it's the fact that there's a layer of old and new money privilege accreted around Wall St and Washington. It's such a resource sink it has literally locked out most of the rest of the population."

Just thinking out loud about this, but could part of the fix for this be using a debt jubilee to reset debt after a set number of years?

EDIT: For anyone unfamiliar with debt jubilees:

http://theconversation.com/the-debt-jubilee-an-old-testament...

When the government decides that it's willing to do something as interventionist as bailing out literally everyone, that places a lot of political risk over the financial industry as a whole. One can't be sure that intervention will always be for the best, after all.

Safety will be more valuable than ever, so those with huge lump sums of existing Capital will have even more power. We could replace modern corporate finance with good old-fashioned robber-baron family-finance operations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Gould.

Okay, how about this: Ownership of any property or asset can only last a maximum of 50 years. After this point ownership will either revert back to the commons or can be repurchased at current market rates.

So in essence the government seizes all property and rents it back to us? Geez, man. Even medieval serfs could own property on better terms than that.

> "So in essence the government seizes all property and rents it back to us? Geez, man. Even medieval serfs could own property on better terms than that."

The ownership wouldn't transmit back to the government, it'd be converted into public property but with the option to renew ownership. Public property is not the same as government owned.

The idea is to get rid of accumulation of wealth beyond a single generation, i.e. in general you only own what you earned in your own lifetime (plus some extra from the generation that preceded you).

>So the problem isn't one of scale, which is already huge. It's one of distribution.

"The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it." -Sitting Bull

> The only problem with this is how this is impossible to scale to proper levels in the US.

I've yet to see a coherent argument for this claim.

> This works great in smaller economies (like you're advocating) like Scandinavian countries where you have a much smaller population and it's easy to support a few million people.

Why would this work better in a smaller economy? Why would it be easier for an economy of 30 million people to support N needy people than for an economy of 300 million people to support 10N?

> When you have over 300 million? As we've seen in recent years, when you institute measures like this it actually creates more dependency and self reliance on the government

How have we seen this? I don't see any evidence that "measures like this" have actually been instituted, much less that they have been instituted and observed to produce the results you suggest.

It's the favourite argument against anything and everything the US isn't doing. It has the benefit that it pretty much only falls flat when China or India is doing something successfully.

Of course, the problem is that almost everything it gets applied to can be decomposed neatly into, independently operated geographic regions - whether states, or counties or groups of such - if the scale becomes a challenge.

Arguably scale rather creates great opportunities. Subdivision coupled with looser coordination and knowledge exchange means systemic failure at the top of each system can be contained by leaning on the others. E.g. the UK National Health Service is split into many "trusts" and failing trusts are often either put under the control - temporarily or long term - of successful ones, or given more focused support from surrounding trusts to get back on track. Any number of trusts can be badly mismanaged without creating existential threats to the health service as a whole.

The larger the overall system, the more such trusts can be run at whatever the ideal scale is for optimizing system cost rather than having to scale them down to spread the risk; and the more such trusts, the easier it becomes to absorb individual failures without too big effects on surrounding ones.

The "the US is too big" argument gets dragged out for all kinds of things, and it is total nonsense. You have more people to pay, but you have equivalently more jobs. And conveniently, you have administrative subdivisions: States. And not that many of them have more people than the Scandinavian countries.

Furthermore, none of them have more people than Germany (~80 million), the country where the modern welfare state was born (Bismark put in place the first welfare reforms as a means to try to stop the growth of the socialist groups that were becoming a threat to the political stability of Prussia; though while he gave with one hand, he outlawed dozens of them with the other).

Of course, even the Scandinavian countries subdivides provisioning of these services further, down to the county level for many types of services.

In other words: This is a problem that decomposes very nicely, and that scales up accordingly. Just threat it as a suitable number of independent systems. They still have the economies of scale to make it reasonably efficient. You have some added complications, but also the benefit of being able to study differences in the various implementations and copy the most effective practices. Scale is opportunity here, first and foremost, not a problem.

> You also have to take into account the Scandinavian cultural norms as well.

As a Scandinavian, I'm very curious about what Scandinavian cultural norms you believe makes this easier that isn't present elsewhere. Besides, it's not just Scandinavia that has a comprehensive welfare system. Most Western-European countries do.

> As we've seen in recent years, when you institute measures like this it actually creates more dependency and self reliance on the government

This is only a "problem" when you don't consider that the alternative is that these people starve, live in substandard housing or go without important medical care. Nobody wants people to be dependent on welfare, but I prefer "welfare dependence" to having people grow up destitute.

If/when there are jobs that pay enough, fine, put strict conditions in place to push people to take them or lose benefits. But when there aren't enough jobs, or the ones that are available doesn't cover housing or food nothing good is achieved by not providing support for the basics.

> Germany (~80 million), the country where the modern welfare state was born

When discussing social services, it's also important to discuss borders, because of the real-or-imagined threat of people doing all their tax-paying years in one jurisdiction and all their benefit-drawing years in another.

The various US states have been dealing with tenuous internal boundaries for 200 years, and it has affected the evolution of their various tax/benefit systems.

In contrast, Germany--as part of the EU--has done the same for only about 20 years, and is even now poised to break/bend the agreement to deter an influx of migrants.

TLDR: It much easier to maintain a high-welfare state when you have strong border-controls or are geographically remote from waves of immigration.

>In contrast, Germany--as part of the EU--has done the same for only about 20 years, and is even now poised to break/bend the agreement to deter an influx of migrants.

Wait a minute.

1) It's not just Germany. The Schengen area inside and partly outside the EU is playing catch-up with the consequences of increased work migration. We can even say the whole EU has tried to come up with solutions since the Eastern European states joined.

2) Currently Germany is one of the few countries /not/ trying to deter migrants. That does not only apply to refugees but also migrants from South and East Europe. It's a couple of other countries bending rules here.

3) Stop conflating intra-EU migration with the refugees.

The idea of basic income is that it provides the basic human rights in a more libertarian manner (instead of the government providing services, the government gives you money). So, if someone doesn't have enough money to buy food, they won't starve to death and the facilitation of this human right is done via the market in basic income. I don't think a basic income set to provide basic human rights is going to create any sort of drug-user like dependency on the government.

Regarding population, when you have more people you get more money.

> You also have to take into account the Scandinavian cultural norms as well.

What are these Scandinavian cultural norms?

Relatively strong nudging.

Having awesome oil revenues probably helps.

We are all dependent on government in at least some ways. Unless you don't drive on public roads, don't send your kids to public schools, and don't use US Mail.

It would be nice if we could have ... global understanding of public goods.

Here's a great opportunity for a little informal HN poll. When was the last time you used the postal service to send a letter? Sure, I've got a box that gets junk mail every day, but the only time I send anything are one-off bills where they don't have an option for on-line payments.

I post mail about twice a week.

So, if you're looking at .gov as a service provider, why give it a monopoly on providing those services if that makes its users dependent on it? Roads may be a little tricky, of course, but some services like US Mail could surely do with a few competitors to bring prices down and service up.

UPS and FedEx. They don't do individual letters, of course, but they compete with the US Mail on packages, and compete by offering better service, not on price.

Could you be specific about which programs you're referring to? I'd also appreciate specific figures about expenditures, and what percentage of people are dependent on public welfare programs.

The figures I've seen suggest that in the US, 50% of welfare beneficiaries are long-term dependents, but they have bouts of it, going in and out of welfare over the course of (on average) 12 years.

If you dig into specific programs, I think generally you find that programs fail because they aren't giving people enough resources to become self-sufficient, and are expecting results on too short a time frame.

I tend to agree with you when it comes to Guaranteed Minimum Income. Reverse taxation is a bit more murky. And I absolutely think a solid welfare program is possible -- we are within a stone's throw of that as things stand now we'd just need to streamline things a bit.

Also, your concern is why I'd advocate for a small pop to large pop experimental approach.

I don't think government dependence is a prima facie bad thing. If we assume that people are mostly rational and can make decisions that are best for themselves the government dependence problem would work itself out. We have a problem with it, now, because it is in a persons best interest to step out of the zero sum and negative sum games that the poor are forced into for, sometimes, decades or lifetimes. But if we ensure people have just enough guaranteed assistance to not starve, go homeless, or die from lack of medical care we can ensure that the vast majority of transactions -- including trading one's time to create value for an employer -- are positive sum transactions. People will tend to make the most of that if we assume a basic level of self interest and rationality. Government assistance would be a steady state of mere survival while the market would offer positive growth and an improvement of one's condition.

>The only problem with this is how this is impossible to scale to proper levels in the US.

This is obviously false when you consider the simple fact that there already exists a renewable surplus of food water and shelter in the US. There are more than 5 empty houses for every homeless person in the US. This is a distribution problem, not a production problem.

The size of a country has nothing to do with this. A larger country has more people to support, sure, but it also has a larger economy.

We also have a bigger tax base.

But yes, we have to be careful not to foster dependency.

Yes, it would be terrible if people started depending on government for the safety of the air traffic system, the maintenance of clean air and water, or the existence of a stable and universally accepted currency.

I mean, can you imagine? Just...total horror. If only there was a word to describe this nightmarish dependence on government.

Wait, what's that? There is a word? Oh, right, civilization.

Which part of being snotty do you think helps sell your point of view?

Unfortunately, your partisan blinders made you read an innocent comment about how to provide a safety net without fostering dependency as an anti-government screed that you had to blast a bunch of liberal talking points to counter.

What you could have done was instead read it for what it is.

Sorry, what? Acknowledgemetns of basic reality are now "liberal talking points"?

Um, ok.

More the point, negative forms of dependency are fostered by reducing people's options, not increasing them. If you're really worried about dependency (and not, say, maintaining a status quo that features a cheap, easily exploited, and largely disposable labor pool) worry less about making life's basic necessities a reward and more about the kind of society that can develop when basic security is a baseline.

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