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Comment by ahoy | Hacker News Reader

An odd assertion - "having more money makes you poorer".

Well, the argument in the article is that basic necessities are priced based on what people can afford. So, if everyone is getting UBI, in theory they could all afford more, and so prices would just go up; bringing everyone back to where they used to be before UBI, but now without the non-UBI based benefits (food stamps, welfare, etc).

But, the article does not provide any evidence (simulations or studies) to back up that claim and, in my opinion, it is not very convincing.

In regions where housing supply is constrained it seems very likely those costs would increase in line with any increase in incomes from UBI.

This makes me think the state getting involved in housing provision would have a much greater impact than UBI.

Yes, it does provide evidence, by citing Minksy: http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm_archive/429/

Fiat currency is printed by taxing you via inflation. So, yeah, receiving fake money makes you poorer. And if you think it works, ask a venezuelan how that plan is working or not.

"The worst possible implementation of this idea is going poorly, therefore it shouldn't be done in any capacity anywhere."

That's kind of like giving up on grilling because you burned your hamburgers once.

We're talking about piles and piles of burnt meat though.

Once? Once?! So.. Germany 1924, Hungary 1946, Yugoslavia 1994, Argentina 1989 and then again in 2001, Zimbabwe 2008, Venezuela today all using this blueprint together with other populist recipes and you want to pretend it was tried once? How can you be so generous with politicians and state bureaucrats that wants to tax you every piece of you in the name of some BS narrative?

There's more to wealth than money. I don't even mean that as some sort of hippy "all you need is love" sort of thing, I mean it's true in real life. A person who has multiple options to make $30,000/yr is better off that a person who has only one, who is still better off than someone who is getting $30,000/yr from the government, and is thus completely subject to their whims and bureaucracy. There's also significant differences between these when scaled to the societal level, between a robust society, a fragile society, and a society where the government is now master of the people rather than the other way around. For the fragile case, for instance, consider the automotive industry in Michigan, where a lot of people saw their one good option drop to zero.

Money is only one component of wealth. Unless you have the "fuck you" money (in local parlance), it's not enough on its own to be "wealthy". I think even trained economists can forget this sometimes.

When I see this claim, I usually take it to mean something like "handouts make people poorer in the long run because they inculcate learned helplessness and remove people's incentive to take control of their own financial destiny".

Which is also an odd assertion, considering that the more free money a person gets from their family in the form of adequate housing, nutritious food, tuition fees, etc., the more likely they are to become an entrepreneur or a highly-paid professional.

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