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Comment by hexane360 | Hacker News Reader

But the argument is it benefits the poorer more than it hurts the rich.

A society should search to maximize utility. Let's make some numbers up. One starving person has a utility of 1. One not starving person has a utility of 10. One mega-ultra-rich person has a utility of 100. One ultra-rich person has a utility of 99.

If you take money from 1 mega-ultra-rich person and give it to 2 starving persons:

    99-100   = -1
    2*(10-1) = 18
             +___
              +17

So the society gains 17 units of utility from the change. Are you claiming that 1 unit of utility for the rich is more valuable than 18 units of utility for the poor? Because the rich person agreed to society's contract, and figured out that they gain much more utility from roads, labor, police, laws than they lost from UBI. A rich American wouldn't be rich if they didn't receive any benefits from society.

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> But the argument is it benefits the poorer more than it hurts the rich.

This is a really hard point to prove.

> A society should search to maximize utility.

"Society" doesn't do anything. There is no hivemind. We are each individuals pursuing our own self interest. It is up to the individual to help those who need it, not a small group of people who think they know what we should all be doing.

> One starving person has a utility of 1. One not starving person has a utility of 10. One mega-ultra-rich person has a utility of 100. One ultra-rich person has a utility of 99.

If you take money from 1 mega-ultra-rich person and give it to 2 starving persons: 99-100 = -1 2*(10-1) = 18 +___ +17

You are going to have to clear that up for me because I am frankly not understanding it.

> A rich American wouldn't be rich if they didn't receive any benefits from society.

Yes and society benefits from having rich people with capital invest in companies that produce things we want. It's not a fixed pie.

The main issue I see with this line of thinking is that you simply cannot speak for "society" and whenever we as a species tried to organize everything to our personal standards it has failed miserably.

Sorry, the formatting was off. It's fixed now.

>Yes and society benefits from having rich people with capital invest in companies that produce things we want. It's not a fixed pie.

That's my entire point. It isn't a fixed pie. The whole concept that a person "owns" part of the pie is dubious, because they relied on everyone else to get that part of the pie.

>you simply cannot speak for "society"

I'm not speaking for society. Society is speaking for society by voting.

>whenever we as a species tried to organize everything to our personal standards it has failed miserably.

What are you referring to? Because I see:

-public services

-public education

-firefighters

-single payer healthcare

-law & order

-criminal justice

-Software standards (you're talking to me over a "personal standard" called TCP/IP)

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