The Dangers of a “Universal Basic Income”
mises.org
mises.org
The author makes matter-of-fact claims that are not backed by anything -- no data, no argument, no analysis, no citations, nothing. Even if I agreed with the author it's hard to believe him.
As the author progresses it's clear that he actually has a problem with all progressive taxation, social welfare, and most government regulations and actions. It's fine to take this position but it's completely useless in a discussion about regulatory policy. You wouldn't answer a public policy question like, "should we raise the federal minimum wage to $9.25/hr" with, "I deny the authority of the federal government".
Someone in support of UBI is likely fine with all of the listed 'downsides' in general -- arguments that would convince them would be an analysis or data showing that it would be ineffective. A lecture on econ 101 free market fanboyism is exactly the wrong approach to this discussion.
Its this philosophy that guaranteed the the information revolution dividends didn't go the people the same way they're trying to make sure the automation revolution dividends don't go to the people. I find it depressing that we will always be fighting this fight.
>Its this philosophy that guaranteed the the information revolution dividends didn't go the people the same way they're trying to make sure the automation revolution dividends don't go to the people.
What are you referring to? Vague, unscientific claims of class victimization, with no statistical support provided, is the bread and butter of socialist demagoguery.
When that something is a "think tank", adults understand that what it produces is intellectual ammunition for increased privatization and reduced protections for consumers, employees and neighbors of business. In this case, very low-grade ammunition.
>Vague, unscientific claims of class victimization, with no statistical support provided, is the bread and butter of socialist demagoguery
And the bread and butter of right-wing pro-business "think tanks" is the prompting of voluntary red-baiting such as you just offered.
Fact: on the basis of influence, there is no socialist or pro-cooperative-ownership analog to Mises or Manhattan Institute nor to any one of the dozens of pro-market / libertarian think tanks cranking out "science" that always finds in favor of capitalist boardrooms.
That indisputable fact alone means you have no business invoking science -- all you're doing is literally standing up to defend the world's most entrenched, powerful interests. Someone actually interested in science, unlike yourself, would, on principle, be skeptical toward purveyors of "science" that never comes to different conclusions no matter the problem domain.
> That indisputable fact alone means you have no business invoking science -- all you're doing is literally standing up to defend the world's most entrenched, powerful interests. Someone actually interested in science, unlike yourself, would, on principle, be skeptical toward purveyors of "science" that never comes to different conclusions no matter the problem domain.
I think you could have made your point without the ad hominem.
Fair enough. I hope that everybody involved will survive the encounter.
Only a mental child would believe in this caricature.
And authoritarian prohibitions against consenting adults engaging in voluntary interactions, like buying an experimental drug not approved by the FDA, or working a job that doesn't provide some mandated benefit like statutory holidays, do not "protect" consumers or workers. It restricts their rights and forces them to follow government preferences over their own.
Only a child would buy the socialist propaganda and believe that violating people's human rights by punishing those who don't abide by some intrusive mandate, is "protecting" them.
>Fact: on the basis of influence, there is no socialist or pro-cooperative-ownership analog to Mises or Manhattan Institute nor to any one of the dozens of pro-market / libertarian think tanks cranking out "science" that always finds in favor of capitalist boardrooms.
How delusional you are. There are a ton of statist and/or left wing think tanks and public policy research institutions.
The Economic Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are a few of many organizations that promote highly anti-libertarian policies.
The Hamilton Project, heavily funded by banks, supports a government backed central banking cartel that violates essential rights to free exchange, and numerous leftist programs designed to buy votes.
Massively funded academic institutions lean heavily leftist as well.
The problem is this adorable libertarian dedication to freedom and voluntary interactions naturally ends the second any employer or commercial neighbor says it ends. Such an arrangement produces freedom for the boardroom and nobody else.
No thanks - we can all see through this horseshit by now.
>How delusional you are. There are a ton of statist and/or left wing think tanks and public policy research institutions.
And on the basis of influence over public policy, your argument is that these think tanks you name are somehow responsible for the really existing world under late capitalism: its skyrocketing levels of privatization, plummeting protections for workers, employees and neighbors, all-time lows in union membership, increasing latitude for business interests, monumental struggles to merely obtain wages that match the heightened productivity of modern workers, etc.
That's a, uh, novel argument you've got there. Might even be delusional.
First, your little "adorable" quip:
It's so adorable that I don't want people's human rights to be violated, and them to be imprisoned for engaging in a voluntary interaction with another consenting adult, or refusing to hand over a share of the currency they received in private trade!
So adorable that you've justified brute authoritarian infringements of other people's human rights!
Second the substance of your counterargument:
Nothing "ends" when the employer wants to end the relationship. A voluntary relationship means either party is free at any time to end that relationship. A free society doesn't mean you get whatever you want, even a relationship with someone who doesn't want to be in one with you.
The problem is emotionally fragile mental children can't accept this fact, and consequently appeal to government for authoritarian mandates to violate others human rights and force them to give into their illegitimate demands.
>And on the basis of influence over public policy, your argument is that these think tanks you name are somehow responsible for the really existing world under late capitalism: its skyrocketing levels of privatization, plummeting protections for workers, employees and neighbors, all-time lows in union membership, increasing latitude for business interests, monumental struggles to merely obtain wages that match the heightened productivity of modern workers, etc.
What "late stage capitalism"?
Social welfare spending has massively increased over the last 40 years. The last 40 years have seen the largest experiment in social democracy in human history.
Here are the raw statistics for all of the edgy teenagers who think we're in "late stage capitalism":
https://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is...
Annual inflation-adjusted spending growth on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):
>Pensions and retirement: 4.4%
>Healthcare: 5.7%
>Welfare: 4.1%
Annual inflation-adjusted economic growth over the time frame:
>2.7%
By every broad-based objective measure, the scale of forcible income redistribution has massively increased in relative and absolute terms. The only thing the US has to show for it is slower productivity growth, lower wage growth, huge trade deficits, and I would argue, an explosion in single parenthood:
http://pinetreewatchdog.org/500-rise-in-single-parenthood-fu...
But thanks to the mass delusion that afflicts people like you, the popular wisdom says that we've increasingly adopted capitalism, and this is the source of all economic maladies, and that the solution is the ever elusive social democracy that we've allegedly been starved of.
>plummeting protections for workers, employees and neighbors, all-time lows in union membership, increasing latitude for business interests, monumental struggles to merely obtain wages that match the heightened productivity of modern workers, etc.
Again with the socialist double speak about authoritarian prohibitions that limit contracting rights being "protections".
There has been no reduction in the scope of laws that restrict the right of workers and employers to freely enter into contracts.
Unions succeeded in getting the public on their side, and the result was a vast number of new laws being passed that restrict the right of the majority of workers and employers, for the benefit of the lucky few in unions.
Unions still exist, but thanks to the laws they passed, and their exorbitant demands, they bankrupted or severely damaged all of the American manufacturers who didn't outsource to countries that still have a free market in employment (e.g. countries where an employer is allowed to fire workers who unionize or strike, and workers need to actually compete and perform to get and maintain a job), so you don't have many large private sector unions anymore, but unions in the government-sector are larger than ever, and sucking from the public teat like there's no tomorrow.
As for the supposed decoupling between wages and productivity, this is not true, and claims to the contrary are an artefact of misleading statistics. The following article explains both the problem with the statistics, and the source of the real problem, which is growing income disparity (hint: it has nothing to do with an over abundance of liberty):
https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t...
...except when the boardroom does it, and boardrooms do it all day every day, in far, far greater measure than the governments in our business-run society. That reality is what makes the word "freedom" in your mouth SO adorable.
For example, here's a very small sampling of daily, real authoritarian tyranny that libertarians are perfectly fine with, along with the commonly given justifications: employers drug testing employees (just get another job!), making and selling military equipment for cops to use (herp derp markets!), private profit in markets with inelastic demand such as health insurance (all people are islands with no interest in the health of neighbors nor in their bankruptcies!), industrial pollution (just move somewhere else!), racial, gender or age discrimination at a place of business (freedom of association!), heightened tax burden for communities thanks to tax dodging by the communities' businesses (taxation is theft!) and on and on and on.
>Nothing "ends" when the employer wants to end the relationship.
And with this awesome nugget of sterling wrongness, we learn that the bubble in which you live apparently excludes the hundreds and hundreds of towns across this country that have become chained-shut, fentanyl-addicted hellholes precisely because the town's main employer and tax base ended the relationship -- usually in order to hire overseas children for pennies instead.
Imagine living in a bubble so tiny that anyone could miss that.
>Unions succeeded in getting the public on their side, and the result was a vast number of new laws being passed that restrict the right of the majority of workers and employers, for the benefit of the lucky few in unions. Unions still exist, but thanks to the laws they passed
Yes, yes, we know the weekend, the eight-hour day, overtime, workplace safety and the end of child labor infringe on your freedom. That's exactly the point of the laws: to stop tyranny from people like you whose tiny bubble-worlds enable you to overlook the roasted corpses of workers trapped in fires engulfing factories run as shoddily as your freedom has allowed. Unlimited freedom for you means limited freedom for me, and you can bet we won't allow it.
A boardroom firing someone is not violating anyone's rights. You apparently don't understand the principle of people being free and being allowed to enter into voluntary contracts with each other, where they do not assume any responsibilities that they do not consent to, and do not become indebted to provide for that person for the remainder of their life.
Shame on you and your inhuman demagoguery.
Which is why "firing someone" doesn't appear on my very lengthly list of everyday tyranny that libertarians endorse.
>Shame on you and your inhuman demagoguery.
Good luck with your selective literacy problem.
>And with this awesome nugget of sterling wrongness, we learn that the bubble in which you live apparently excludes the hundreds and hundreds of towns across this country that have become chained-shut, fentanyl-addicted hellholes precisely because the town's main employer and tax base ended the relationship -- usually in order to hire overseas children for pennies instead.
Typical inflammatory emotional-button-pressing demagoguery that appeals to narcissistic and emotionally fragile children who want to be edgy.
More edgy garbage touted by angsty teenagers:
>For example, here's a very small sampling of daily, real authoritarian tyranny that libertarians are perfectly fine with, along with the commonly given justifications: employers drug testing employees (just get another job!), making and selling military equipment for cops to use (herp derp markets!), private profit in markets with inelastic demand such as health insurance (all people are islands with no interest in the health of neighbors nor in their bankruptcies!), industrial pollution (just move somewhere else!), racial, gender or age discrimination at a place of business (freedom of association!), heightened tax burden for communities thanks to tax dodging by the communities' businesses (taxation is theft!) and on and on and on.
I'll just address the first one as I don't have time to deconstruct the entire idiotic spiel.
Employers drug testing employees violates no one's rights. I offer you a job and say that one condition of you keeping the job is being drug tested, and you in your childish arrogance think that you have a right to punish me for making that offer, based on the lie that the OFFER somehow violates your rights.
Again: your ideology is for emotionally fragile children who can't take responsibility for themselves and think they are entitled to work for another party under terms that the other party does not agree to, and moreover you think you're entitled to be safe from "tyrranical" OFFERS, because you lack the autonomy to simply turn offers that are not in your interest down. In other words you think you're entitled to other people's wealth and not capable of making choices for yourself. Typical selfish thoughtless socialist garbage that tries to cloak your desire to plunder others under a cloak of you being a helpless victim.
We can all read what you typed. In the real, existing world, unrestricted capital flight is in no way equivalent to merely "firing someone".
>Employers drug testing employees violates no one's rights.
It violates the right to privacy, as bona fide advocates for the right to privacy understand very well.
Thank you for perfectly proving exactly what I wrote a while ago: libertarians will not defend freedoms -- such as the right to privacy -- the instant an employer says a freedom is disallowed.
It's doing it on a larger scale. You're implying the people of the town somehow gain a right to the capital on account of the owners of the capital having been invested in that town for an extended period of time.
Again, you're resorting to appeals to emotion to distract from the fact that what you're really implying is that people get rights to the capital of others without others contractually agreeing to transfer any capital to them, which is a nonvoluntary transfer of capital that violates the capital owner's rights.
>It violates the right to privacy, as bona fide advocates for the right to privacy understand very well.
It in no way violates a right to privacy. If I offer you $1,000 for you to let me film in your home for a year, and you agree, your privacy rights have not been violated. If I sneak into your home and record you, then your rights have been violated.
The fact that you think someone providing private information as part of an exchange where they receive compensation, like submitting to drug tests as part of an employment contract where they receive compensation, shows that you have no integrity when it comes to politics, and don't bother to fact-check your own beliefs before aggressively promoting them. You simply don't care if what you're promoting is the truth or not.
You want a society where everyone in the world has to unanimously agree with every decision you make for it to be consensual, which makes for a totally unworkable world model, which describes socialism in a nutshell.
Yes, I am aware that the seizure from natives of the trillions worth of real estate the US is built on is not considered any infringement by libertarians. Their liberty is not worth considering nor defending -- and that comes with the territory of a toy political philosophy that loudly pretends it isn't built utterly upon coercion.
>"The progressive taxation that is necessary to finance a UBI means that the more a person earns, the higher percentage of their wealth will be taken from them. The work disincentives are therefore still very much present in the tax system."
I don't know if Finland does it as well, but this completely ignores how US tax brackets work. There's never a point where going up a tax bracket means you'd take home less money than you would have before your raise.
>"The struggling entrepreneurs and artists mentioned earlier are struggling for a reason. For whatever reason, the market has deemed the goods they are providing to be insufficiently valuable. Their work simply isn’t productive according to those who would potentially consume the goods or services in question."
What a huge leap to make from struggling to struggling because nobody wants to buy their product. They could easily be struggling purely because they left their old job to pursue this and now have no steady income. The article even suggests this initially, so I have no idea how they just ignored it.
>"The universal basic income, however, allows them to continue their less-valued endeavors with the money of those who have actually produced value, which gets to the ultimate problem of all government welfare programs."
Not everything needs to be about generating more wealth for yourself.
This article also completely ignored the idea that eventually there just aren't going to be any jobs left for the vast majority of people to take. What do we do then? The UBI is the solution to that. I wonder why they did not discuss that:
>"Accordingly, we seek a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order."
Oh, that's why. This is just about generating wealth and screwing over everyone in the process for them
False. Capital gains rate, many tax credits phased out, etc.
I'm not sure if that's true, but I think the real issue is the loss of government support, particularly in terms of direct welfare. For instance, going up in salary by $10k a year wouldn't result in a lower paycheck due to taxes, but it might result in a loss of government supported child care, and might disqualify a family from government subsidized housing, either in direct benefits or access to a required set aside of "below market rents" (common in SF). Because those benefits may be worth well over 10k a year, you might experience a net loss by working.
As a result, even if the tax rate is progressive, there is a transitional period for relatively low income people where the marginal "tax", if you include the loss of subsidies, is 100% or higher. As a result, there could be a powerful disincentive to work.
I think this is part of the appeal of the UBI - it's "universal". Everyone gets it. You get your money regardless of whether you work. Yes, that could deter people from working, since they already get their money. But it might also encourage people to work more, since they will no longer lose those benefits at low salary levels that make working a losing proposition relative to direct government welfare.
One thing that this also does not discuss, I do not consider this a bad thing at all. In fact, I think it is great. If someone is purely content with living on their UBI paycheck, more power to them. They are now spending money on things to contribute to the economy whereas before they were not.
And that's not what the article says.
Here, read it again:
>the more a person earns, the higher percentage of their wealth will be taken from them
It goes on to say:
>The work disincentives are therefore still very much present in the tax system."
Which is true. In fact, any forcible income redistribution, even with a flat tax, disincentives work.
>What a huge leap to make from struggling to struggling because nobody wants to buy their product. They could easily be struggling purely because they left their old job to pursue this and now have no steady income. The article even suggests this initially, so I have no idea how they just ignored it.
But you're ignoring the fact that "they have no steady income" because no one (or very few people) want to buy their products.
>Not everything needs to be about generating more wealth for yourself.
And in a free society, you are free to pursue less economically rewarding endeavors. What you can't do is get the state to force other people to subsidize you.
>This is just about generating wealth and screwing over everyone in the process for them
They said nothing about "screwing over everyone in the process". Keeping the income you earn is not screwing anyone else over. You do not owe anyone your income and no one owes you income. You're promoting a dysfunctional and incoherent moral system.