A basic income will be necessary for capitalism to survive full automation of our society. It's really the only way the rich will be able to stay rich.
Why? If the means of production and warfare run without labour, what do you need population for? Ignore ethics for a second. The rich can be plenty rich buying and selling to and from each other, exclusively, if their guns and butter churn out without workers.
Once the rich dispose of the surplus to requirements workers they would turn on each other.
I think it's more likely we'll see a large expansion of existing welfare and food-stamp systems into a system of universal basic rationing. Probably they'll be some kind of parallel, digital pseudo-currency, in the form of spendable credits. They'll be limited to certain categories of goods, and luxury brands and most entertainment products will be banned.
I think you'll also see a requirement to do some form of "work", even artificial and meaningless tasks, in order to qualify. This is already how the system works in the UK, for example. In order to access the UK's welfare system, you are basically required to seek work, any work, no matter how menial or pointless. There is a "workfare" system whereby you work, unpaid, for commercial companies, doing things like stacking shelves for low-quality retailers, in order to get access to your welfare payments.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5168192/
I signed on once as I was between contracts and it seemed like it'd be stupid not to.
Soul destroying and utterly ridiculous bureaucracy that's feels like it's meant to humiliate you rather than get you a job.
And that was like 8 years ago, it's got worse.
Ultimately, as automation drives more people out of work, the voting base for a radical change for wealth distribution will grow and the social conservative base will shrink.
"Fairness" will be a sticking point. It's not reasonable that some people should have to work, so that others may voluntarily sit idle.
But my other reasons for opposing universal income are different than what you listed:
(1) I suspect universal income makes inaccurate assumptions about human nature. I think that without a need to work, a large fraction of people will choose not to. I doubt universal income could sustain that.
(2) Our population keeps on growing, but our planet stays the same size. Unless this changes, we'll see increasing competition for food and living space. The fraction of the economy spent on UBI would continue to increase due to inflation of those costs.
If I turn out to be mistaken about (1) and (2), then I'd be more open to UBI.
But it is, under the right circumstances.
If you have a mostly automated society, where only 1% of today's human work is required to design, build and service the robots that do the actual work. Now you could have each person working half an hour per week, but that would mean that you would have to pay to educate every person out there in robot design, construction or maintenance. In this scenario, it's wildly more efficient to just educate 1% of the potential workforce and have them work 40 hours per week (or maybe 2% at 20 hours). You get the same work done, but spend way less on education (and also on auxiliary costs like payroll and shift planning).
Note that I'm explicitly only arguing with economic concerns, not social ones. If you define "reasonable" in social rather than economic terms, my argument need not apply.
> I think that without a need to work, a large fraction of people will choose not to.
Why is it then, that most people who are rich enough to sustain themselves indefinitely without having to work, still choose to work?
> The fraction of the economy spent on UBI would continue to increase due to inflation of those costs.
That's a problem, but UBI doesn't change it AFAICS. You can just reword this as "The fraction of the economy spent on food and living space would continue to increase due to inflation of these costs", and it would hold true regardless of whether there's UBI or not.
What would motivate the 1% to work 40 hours a week when they could spend their time on things they enjoy instead?
When has this not been true? The only thing that changes are the amount of people that can be idle and that the people able to get education will be more pressed to work.
>I suspect universal income makes inaccurate assumptions about human nature. I think that without a need to work, a large fraction of people will choose not to. I doubt universal income could sustain that.
What percentage of the labor force do you think are motivated purely by survival now? It's basically the unskilled laborers, anyone else has other motivations.
>Our population keeps on growing, but our planet stays the same size. Unless this changes, we'll see increasing competition for food and living space. The fraction of the economy spent on UBI would continue to increase due to inflation of those costs
Drove through 500 miles of basically nothing today. We're fine on living space for quite some time, and a combination of better food production and waste limiting would handle food availability for quite some time.
Does it? I mean, I cannot imagine any desirable way in which welfare could be administered that cannot be misspent. If you give starving people money, they can technically buy something other than food. If you give them food stamps or actual food instead, they can trade that for money to spend on useless junk.
The only alternatives are to admit them to closed therapy, if the cause of their misspending is an addiction or other mental illness, or to force-feed them, which I would not want because it defies my concept of human dignity.
The theory is that increasing leverage continues to produce even more super-concentrated wealth, creating both the means and the political will (in the form of enlightened self-interest of the ultra-rich) to use surplus wealth to do things like Basic Income.
It's plausible, I guess. But I don't think that timeline is necessarily a lock.
'Other people' can vote in a democracy, but that may not be enough!
The mass of people used to have more convincing political/market power, due to the world needing them as 'wet robots' for labor. In the absence of real power for the mass of people, in the absence of the world actually 'needing' them for their output, I'm skeptical that mere democratic institutions are a good enough protection.
Democratic institutions, despite their relative benevolence, have historically have extended political power to people who are already de facto powerful (at least powerful enough to demand a seat at the table!), whether it be wealthy property owners in the age of the 'one-class' society, or the working heads-of-household during the heyday of human labor.
Power finds a way in any human system, is all I'm saying, and to the extent that increasing numbers of people lack power in the market, I'm skeptical that democratic institutions will guarantee benevolent social outcomes.
They might wonder the same about the owners. The French Revolution didn't work out well for the owners.
Wherein by "first", you mean "17th article" (or 30).
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Huma...
EDIT: Ah, I forgot about the context of the French Revolution, so I looked at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M... of August 1789. The right to property is actually the last article in that one, so the original point remains debunked.
In a actual human model, because the point of technology is to make human lives better, and not just to get more technology.
This seems to be a great pitch for convincing rich people to help introduce basic income. Basic income is in their best self-interest. If no one has money to buy their stuff, they’ll stop being rich!