Morally, that any one person, by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is judged a provider, at gunpoint if necessary, to others who, by virtue of their relative lack of wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance, is such an inversion of right and wrong as to warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward. Yes, poverty is a problem. Yes, there are institutional barriers to getting out of poverty. I don't see how doubling down on those problems does anything than ease the conscious of the haves.
That makes quite a few assumptions about the nature of money, the ownership of money, and how it is accumulated. Given, those assumptions are shared by most people in capitalistic systems, but that doesn't mean they are sacrosanct and we should reexamine them from time to time.
For example, one possible interpretation is that it's the system that allows this accumulation of wealth, and that the system favors certain people and starting conditions over others. If we accept that the system is responsible for quite a bit of the wealth (could the same be achieved in a drastically different system, say, North Korea?), then it can be viewed less as taking money from one and giving to another as much as fees and discounts, or incentives and disincentives built into the system in the hope of either making it more efficient in the end or better in some desired respect.
Note: I'm not necessarily pushing the above view, but instead using it to illuminate that perspective informs our opinions quite a bit, and that stepping back and reexamining our assumptions may have benefit or change how we think. At worst it will be a waste of time and we'll come away with the same opinion.
Basic human morality is that those who can help those who can't. Once we moved beyond the tribal village the whole question of how that works exploded in complexity and has never been satisfactorily answered, but that basic principle remains.
If Basic Income doesn't work, then obviously that's problematic. But I see no moral problem with the concept.
I've been talking about how minimum income can make the minimum wage obsolete and thus allow for the existence of a wider variety of jobs (and creation of wealth) that was previously unviable while also fixing the market inefficiencies created by putting an artificial price floor on labor.
> Morally, that any one person, by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is judged a provider, at gunpoint if necessary, to others who, by virtue of their relative lack of wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance, is such an inversion of right and wrong as to warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward.
No, completely wrong.
> by virtue of their relative wealth alone
Wealth exists only within an economy and thus is a social construct that makes it's owner intrinsically beholden to that society. Wealth thus increases the moral obligation to the society from which that wealth is derived.
> by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance
It is not their lack of wealth, but their mere existence that makes them 'worthy of substance'.
> warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward
Taxes on wealth are not a punishment, they are the cost of maintaining and improving the society and allows the wealth to exist.
Minimum income is not reward since it is given to everyone.
This notion pops up quite a bit in HN discussion of basic income. Can anybody provide some references to any sort of scholarly work on this concept? Presumably it has been described and discussed in depth and I'd like to be able to understand it better or even associate a name to the concept.
In any case, I'm not sure I follow the logic in this particular description. Why does wealth being a 'social construct' make the 'owner intrinsically beholden' to that society? What does 'intrinsically beholden' mean? These seem like arbitrary and poorly defined assertions to me.
> Minimum income is ... given to everyone.
Define minimum income. Do you imagine it enough to provide food, shelter, clothing? If so explain what other mechanisms would prevent the emergence of a large group of people who simply lived off the efforts of others as a choice. What mechanism would keep that sort of system in equilibrium rather than the consuming group growing and the producing group shrinking and the resulting tensions escalating? And don't we want to construct a system that moves towards a state that maximizes the number of self-sufficient people rather maximizing the number of dependent people?
A stab at it: 1) Money is a social construct, as are many other things necessary to make wealth valuable and meaningful; 2) Any person's wealth is due to the 'society' they live in, to a great degree. Consider the roads, laws, political system, safety, education (of the wealthy person, their employees, and customers), wealth of customers/vendors/investors, science, etc. Compare the prospects for wealth and the value of it (i.e., uses for it) for someone in Syria with someone in the Bay Area, for example.
I agree; I'd like to find something more authoritative bout the topic.
I didn't realize this concept wasn't self evident. If you have a million dollars, but the economy doesn't value dollars, you have no wealth. I don't have any scholarly references but I would guess you would find discussion of this in the philosophy of economics.
> What does 'intrinsically beholden' mean? These seem like arbitrary and poorly defined assertions to me.
Beholden means "owing thanks or having a duty to someone". 'Intrinsic' (like 'Natural') is a rather empty word, but I was intending it to express that the beholdenment to society arises from the wealth's reliance on society for its existence.
Since the value and existence of your wealth is due to your presence within an economy and society, you are beholden for your wealth to that economy and society in that your wealth would not exist without that economy and society.
> Do you imagine it enough to provide food, shelter, clothing?
Eventually? Yes. I would personally slowly phase in the minimum income as I phased out the minimum wage. Ideally this would cover basic needs and then it would be up to society to determine how much past basic needs would be covered.
> If so explain what other mechanisms would prevent the emergence of a large group of people who simply lived off the efforts of others as a choice.
We all 'live off the efforts of others'. I do not farm the food that I eat, nor do I enforce the laws that allow me to live in safety.
I think what you mean instead, is probably more along the lines of 'live without working'.
Our current model of being dependent on perpetual growth is unsustainable. We already do not have enough low skill jobs for our low skill population. As automation and machine learning take more and more jobs, this problem will only become worse. The new jobs that are being added, tend to be higher skilled knowledge economy jobs.
Thus, we are left with two choices:
1) don't allow people who don't work to live
2) allow people who live without working.
Since I don't support genocide, I feel we have to go with option 2), and the best way of doing that is providing a Minimum Income.
I would also point out, that there is a great deal of work that gets done without expectation of financial reward. This ranges from volunteering time working on open source software, to creating art, to caring for sick friends and relatives. Thus I don't buy into the "work only happens when people are paid" and I think plenty of value will be produced by people who rely on minimum income.
Besides money: Boredom, Social Status, Altruism and Passion can all be strong motivations to work.
A final point here is that by replacing the minimum wage with a minimum income, we greatly increase the number of jobs that can be profitably created. I may not be able to afford to pay the current minimum wage to have a gardener take care of my yard, but with a lower minimum wage I might.
> What mechanism would keep that sort of system in equilibrium rather than the consuming group growing and the producing group shrinking and the resulting tensions escalating?
This is not an easy problem, but I would point out that we have a similar problem with wealth distribution currently.
As far as reducing tensions, I think we need to make an effort to keep classes from segregating themselves socially.
As far as maintaining equilibirium, I don't have any easy answers but I do believe they exist and probably involve some clever use of markets to maintain the equilibirium.
A slow initial introduction of the minimum income helps find tools to maintain the equilibrium as we go.
> And don't we want to construct a system that moves towards a state that maximizes the number of self-sufficient people rather maximizing the number of dependent people?
Like I said before, we are almost all dependent on each other and very few of us are truly self-sufficient.
I don't want to maximize the number of self-sufficient people. I want to maximize the number of people who have the opportunity to do what they love. I want to maximize the amount of enjoyable work that is accomplished.
Further, if you tax a company at 10% or 20% the same investments are going to profitable. So, for the most part they behave the same which makes corporate tax breaks a very poor investment.
PS: More generally, people with a safety net are far more likely to invest in things like a home.
Appeals to fairness as an argument for or against various wealth redistribution schemes always strike me as odd for this reason. Neither side gets an exclusive claim to fairness. Both situations can end up equally unfair for equally reasonable definitions of fairness. No society-level policy -- especially doing nothing -- can possibly hope to be remotely fair in at least an infinitely of possible senses of the word.
If an economic system exclusively rewards the lucky and the corrupt, like ours, then it deserves its destruction. Wealth has no virtue if its source is exclusively non virtuous. Or rephrased, where did the virtue come from that wealth supposedly has? Certainly not from honest labor and skill, not in this economic system, not in the future we're headed toward.
> The fatal flaw in all of this...who is going to pay for it?
Well, the simple, possibly simplistic answer is "the same people that pay for wellfare". Which is everyone not receiving it. To be sure, it would need quite a lot of work on the details to even be possible in an economically viable way.
Edit: Added more references.
1: http://www.businessinsider.com/this-dutch-city-is-giving-bas...
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273482 (Alaska)
3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273482 (Ontario)
It actually has been "field tested" - and in the US of A, no less.
The entire state of Alaska has a guaranteed minimum income.
Granted, it isn't much - on average it's been about $1,000 per anum.