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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

A basic income is a massive threat to the liberal welfare state. It would totally deflate the left's institutional agenda so expect them to fight back hard. The premise of the current welfare state is that the people, too stupid to manage their own lives, are better off under the paternal care of enlightened government bureaucracies. It's gonna be entertaining in ten years to watch Republicans support the basic income and Democrats oppose it.

The debate will be about whether people should be in control of their own lives or whether they need a paternal state to protect them from themselves.

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I guess to believe this you have to believe that all so-called liberals and leftists are actually just authoritarians who use the promise of "free shit", as the saying goes, merely as a means to secure power for themselves rather than as a legitimate policy goal. Because otherwise, UBI is basically the end-game of the "liberal welfare state".

At any rate, I don't see liberals and leftists taking a unanimous stand against UBI. Opinions are divided, almost as though they are each separate individuals with their own thoughts.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on this. The "free shit" is a sales tactic but also a genuine belief that the best way to ensure prosperity for all is through a planned society.

"Planned society" is so vague as to be meaningless anyway. "Planned society" certainly can include UBI, though you appear to suppose it doesn't. It can mean basically anything where you have a government that enforces laws, really, including laissez-faire capitalism.

For the sake of argument I guess you mean "planned economy" but you don't have to support that to support a welfare state, either. Sounds to me like you're strawmanning the hell out of liberals.

Fair enough. "Planned society" was indeed too broad here. I think "paternalistic state" is more accurate.

I think that, almost by definition, if you support a traditional welfare state over a UBI, you want a paternalistic state. OR you think that industries like health care are best directly run by the state (because otherwise, a UBI would allow everyone to buy coverage in the private market, if they choose to). That's a planned economy there. And "the economy" is such an overwhelming portion of what we call a society, that a planned economy is effectively a planned society in my eyes.

> A basic income is a massive threat to the liberal welfare state.

You are confused. Basic income is the "liberal welfare state." The people who want UBI are the same people who want a higher minimum wage and universal medical coverage.

They are totally different approaches to achieving some of the same goals. A lot of support for the UBI is coming from libertarian-minded folks like Charles Murray. The idea is replace all or almost all welfare programs with the UBI.

Read more of history. It could go a way towards non-cartoonifying your philosophical opposition and making flawless (in your mind) your position. And for the record, I lean libertarian.

>Read more of history. It could go a way towards non-cartoonifying your philosophical opposition and making flawless (in your mind) your position. And for the record, I lean libertarian.

Arguments that consist of telling people to "read more history", "educate yourself", or similar are totally worthless. You might as well not post. If you have an argument to make, then make it. Otherwise, spare me the snark.

Oh you're the person who called me "too dumb to post here" in another comment in this thread. For someone who is apparently so much more intelligent than me, you seem to have very little of substance to contribute.

Apologies. That was an asshole comment on my part.

Some Republicans undoubtedly support principled, market based, small-l liberal solutions to social problems. But a lot of others just seem to want lower taxes. I would expect them to oppose basic income as just another "big government" initiative. These are folks that think taxation is the moral equivalent of theft after all.

I think that even among that crowd there's an increasing acceptance that redistribution is a fait accompli and that now the next best thing is to dismantle the bureaucracy. Give it a few more years.

You sound like a Sarah Palin speech. Instead of using meaningless buzzwords like "elite" maybe be specific about who exactly you are referring to.

That aside I don't know where you get the idea that the Republican party would be for a universal basic income. Their current position (under Trump at least) is to abolish the minimum wage in order to encourage everyone to work. And they have always favoured individual responsibility and opposed government handouts.

That didn't sound like a Sarah Palin speech, not even remotely. What it sounded to me like was Richard Nixon, who proposed a similar thing for similar reasons, but couldn't get the proposal past the Senate:

http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-richard-nixon-almost-gav...

Why didn't it happen, in the words of Canadian Professor Eveyln Forget (of the University of Manitoba, Canada) “The political right is afraid people will stop working and the left doesn't trust them to make their own choices.”

I edited my comment to remove that bit but I'll clarify who I'm talking about: the people who see their project as bringing more and more of our lives under the direction of the state, because they know better than you and me how we should live our lives. They've convinced the rank and file that this is the best way to achieve across the board prosperity. The prospect of a hundred years of progress toward this slow takeover being wiped out by a basic income is the biggest threat to their project.

Also, I'm pretty sure that Trump's and probably most Republicans' position on the minimum wage is that it's ideally set by the individual states in accordance with the realities of their economies. A $15 federal minimum wage would devastate vast swaths of America by effectively banning work. The economy in much of America simply can't sustain that.

But yes, if we adopted a UBI we should most certainly eliminate the minimum wage, since it accomplishes the same goal much more comprehensively (i.e. for everyone as opposed to just those who have a job).

You are making generalisations so broad that it is impossible to understand what you are even talking about. Rank and file means how many tens of millions of people exactly ? And since when did they all speak with one voice ?

Hope there's enough popcorn for both of us.

'the left'. Come on man, I've had enough with this bs reductionist rhetoric on fb. If you're dumb enough to think there are only two political categories, you're too dumb to post here. Stop, do a 'right' or 'left' turn...straight to reddit or your fb/twitter timeline. Leave us alone.

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