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Comment by omilu | Hacker News Reader

Here is the same author in 2014 attempting to explain how basic income won't lead to massive inflation:

https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-...

>>>It would not be new money, just money shifted from one location to another. This means that the value of each dollar has not changed. The dollar itself has only changed hands.*

There is no sure fire way to reduce the value of a dollar then to redistribute it to people that didn't work for it. The fact that you have to work for the dollar is the thing that gives the dollar value.

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"The fact that you have to work for the dollar is the thing that gives the dollar value."

Wait, so then how does inheritance work? Like, your grandmother worked for it, but you just snowboard all year long. What am I missing here?

The fact that dollars are exchanged for work and vice versa.

The guy or gal snowboarding all year is renting a chalet, buying a ski pass, buying gear and food and generally spending money in the local economy.

Money can be thought of as a claim check on labor. You work doing something valuable and get money. You spend some and save some. What you have saved/invested and not spent and passed on to someone else still has value.

In the snowboarder's case, someone worked for that money and gifted it to them. Totally consistent if you don't overly focus on the "YOU have to work for it" but rather "SOMEONE has to work for it"

right. so i work, pay taxes and those get distributed to my neighbor's UBI. what i have passed on to someone else still has value.

> There is no sure fire way to reduce the value of a dollar then to redistribute it to people that didn't work for it. The fact that you have to work for the dollar is the thing that gives the dollar value.

Citation needed. The value of the dollar is actually determined by:

1) Foreign exchange markets

2) Debt markets

See Laffer curve. Redistribution will make people work less (i.e. less total output), so assuming the money supply doesn't change, inflation will occur.

Is the important part here labor or output? Automation means people working less with output increasing.

The Laffer curve deals with output from labor. When you tax someone you reduce the money they get per unit work, i.e. their wage. If the wage is too low they might not find it worth doing the work. If I'm a paid shill/some job and I'm taxed 99%, I might stop shilling because the effort outweighs my salary.

Regarding automation, see the lump of labour fallacy. Humans will just switch to tasks that aren't automated (this has always been happening and it's happening now). If humans are not needed at all, then we've reached utopia/post-scarcity society.

Humans don't work less because of the hedonistic treadmill. For example, most HNers have enough food and other things to survive which might be considered paradise by people 500 years ago (famines were common back then). Historically, poverty often meant death from starvation.

Our standards of living have been constantly going up, so even though there are productivity gains we end up working more. Of course, that's a voluntary choice so I don't see anything wrong with that.

Once we've reached utopia/post-scarcity society how will we make sure that poor people get fed?

In a post-scarcity society food/etc is very cheap and thus even poor people can afford sufficient food even if they don't work much (this is already true for developed countries).

Even a small amount of charity would provide anybody who can't work at all with sufficient food. Just like how today data storage in hard drives is dirt cheap; and we can provide billions of bytes of storage at nominal cost.

Looking at current society, starvation and mass famines have decreased greatly. Malnutrition is the next concern.

So, in some sense we may have reached post-scarcity for food for a large portion of human population. But there is still scarcity for quality and healthy food, such as fruits and vegetables.

But what happens when work it mostly worthless, because it's all automated?

Exactly this.

Im confused by your claim "There is no sure fire way to reduce the value of a dollar..."

The dollar has lost 97% of its value since the federal reserve was created. To me, having a federal reserve is a sure fire way to reduce the value of a dollar.

I would rather work today for pre-1965 quarters made of silver than a dollar today. The pre-1965 quarter will buy a gallon of gas. The dollar today will require three to buy that same gallon. Proof is in the pudding as they say. The currency is the problem.

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