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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

"Take an IPhone - you find a variety of technologies - each one was created by some government grant... The collective production of wealth, which is then privately appropriated.. it's very easy to start thinking of basic income as a dividend that goes to the collective that was responsible for collectively producting the wealth."

"We need to create a system whereby society stakes a claim to the returns to aggregate capital, and this claim becomes an income stream that goes to everyone. I don't see why my children and your children have a right to a trust fund [or] why Paris Hilton has a right to a trust fund, when nobody else does, or very few people do.

Think of basic income as a trust fund for all our children - to be financed by dividends from our aggregate capital, which was after all, created collectively."

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Except "collectively" is very misleading when you're taking the capital gains from say, 20k employees of a tech company and re-distributing it to 300M / 6 Billion people.

Generally I agree that being fed and housed will remove constraints on labor allocation - but its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.

No, actually that's straight up hyperbolic. There is no upper bound on the 20k employees' income i.e. not communism (or socialism even).

Unless of course the governing body deems the massive revenue the 20k employees generate as "excess" and is confiscated for Basic Income in Africa - the company employing these people will have practical upper limits on what they can pay their employees as exists today - but with the additional caveat that governments can just take the money for "the common good."

It's globalism. It's socialism/communism.

So what happens in the (potentially short) period before the government deems that as excessive? Assume for a moment that they costed it out and it's sustainable.

What you've described is taxes.

so under your definition, all nations are today already globalist/communist/socialist.

Is this really that far from the truth?

yes, since communism has a defintion and isnt jsut some vague concept you can attach to any other system.

Do the means of production belong to the state? if not , it isnt communism.

> its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.

That's not correct. Communism is ownership of the means of production. Nobody has proposed that the technology company be owned or operated by the government.

What's being proposed is a reallocation of streams of income. While I understand there is some vague similarity, these are not at all the same things. The crucial difference being that market forces are still quite free to allocate capital.

In practice this doesn't actually work because the organization doesn't have freedom to re-invest. Once the government can come in and say "we deem all this money in excess, so we will confiscate it". What if that happened to Apple after the successful iMac in the early 2000's? We may have never seen the iPod or iPhone - as an example.

All the system needs to control resources is to define it as "excess capital or resources." You end up with a globally centralized economy, where the independent business owners are robbed when successful to feed the system.

Is anybody advocating arbitrary confiscation of private wealth? It seems more likely to me that BI would involve lawful taxation.

As someone on the for side for BI, I still see "lawful taxation" as an equivalent of armed robbery.

Try to dodge the tax man for enough money there will be gunmen at your door to take you to prison.

> Try to dodge the tax man for enough money there will be gunmen at your door to take you to prison.

Eventually, yes. That's also true if you try to dodge your local restaurant, after availing yourself of their services.

Of course the practical inability to refrain from "using" government is a big difference! But it needs to be included in the analysis - it is not as simple as "if you don't pay, there will eventually be force; ergo it is robbery".

I think you and I are on the same point for this so there isn't much point going further.

Probably not quite the same point - I think there's clearly some difference between paying for my meal and paying taxes, but I also think there's clearly some difference between paying taxes and paying a mugger (especially in a well-functioning society).

I just don't think the first difference is well expressed by pointing out that force is eventually involved.

That would entirely depend on how you feel about taxes and how you're government uses them.

As someone who's experienced both a muggings and police brutality I'm not really going to see much of a difference.

If it's simply a question of feelings, then I agree this isn't likely to wind up anywhere interesting. Best.

Without wishing to take sides on the controversial issue of whether taxation is morally permissable, I would like to add that what I call "lawful taxation" is different from arbitrary confiscation. I call taxation "lawful" if it is collected according to rules that are knowable at the time is incurred.

I think we're both aware, the lawful part wasn't up for debate, we're more discussing whether its moral/ethical than anything else.

I think it is a necessary evil for the most part but I still hold the opinion it isn't something you get a choice in.

In practice we have no idea if this will work. It has never been done before.

With that Apple example: For all we know, the industry could be in a much better position if it were not for the iPod/iPhone. The stuff Apple brought with the iPod/iPhone (DRM and the App Store model) have arguably set the software industry back. And an argument in favor of Apple: stuff like the RPi/VR wouldn't have been economically feasible since there was no pass production of ARM processors / high-density screens.

Point is, we don't know.

There's no way of telling if BI works without actually doing it. And that's what the point of this study is.

This sentiment appeals to the better angels of our nature while totally disregarding the little devils that sit on most of our other shoulders.

Maybe Paris Hilton doesn't deserve that trust fund, but lots of little devils on shoulders will convince her and especially politicians that she does.

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