Universal Basic Income and the threat of tyranny

Is there some reason to think otherwise? This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states.

However I do think their is a non-trivial risk that a Basic Income depending on how it is implemented can result in a sever limiting or loss of liberty. We have already seen that with the welfare system today, and in other segments of the legal system where basic human rights are under continual assault to the point that most people do not even recognize properly the level of oppression that exisits in the world as it is today. They have assimilated the general rules and laws into their lives to the point they no longer "miss" the freedom they lost, or the freedom was lost so long ago no one alive even remembers a time where the law or regulation was not in place. The most common manifestation of these can be found in things like Airport Security, Drug Raids, Police Checkpoints, and about 1000 other things I can list.

I would assume the burden of proof to be on you (and supporters of UBI) to prove that opposite will happen and people won't just slack off once their basic necessities are covered.

Indeed not.

> It is /basic/, which is to say, it will cover the basic necessities.

Honestly, I think this is one of the fundamental mistakes UBI proponents make: proposing the idea that there is some particular level that UBI should reach.

UBI is much more coherent of an idea if the "basic" is recast as representing simply a baseline, rather than targeting basic necessities, which are, critically, not a fixed target anyhow, but a moving baseline determined by social expectations, which UBI itself will affect.

> The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity.

Which is pretty silly for a number of reasons. Mostly, ignores a lot of basic observations of human behavior and the difference between UBI and the systems it displaces:

(1) People strive for more material wealth, so long as that provides perceived marginal utility (there's some evidence that beyond certain very high incomes -- IIRC, studies ~10-20 years ago had this in the neigborhood of $200K/yr in then-current dollars in the US -- but even so people strive for more when they have that much because of perceived utility.)

(2) People's expectations and self-perceived "basic needs" are strongly influenced by comparison to others visible in their society, not merely absolute conditions; UBI improves the absolute condition of those without capital or labor income, but it doesn't remove the incentive to strive for more (in fact, compared to a system with a means-tested safety net, it increases it.)

(3) Capital income is still a thing with UBI: this is perhaps them most significant oversight in UBI criticism. Its true that UBI is often posed as a protection against a world in which an ever increasing share of the population is unable to find work with significant value, reducing (at least, in a relative sense) the income of workers, it is not intended for a situation where there is no opportunity to strive for more. Between UBI and what people can make from work, there are opportunities to acquire capital, which is the route to development which remains open even if labor opportunities become scarce.

(4) But labor opportunities won't disappear in the near term, though many may pay less per hour (especially at the entry level.) But UBI makes lower-pay labor both viable (by providing support which isn't removed with additional labor income) and legal (as it is usually posed as replacing minimum wage -- I personally prefer a phase-out where minimum wage is reduced as UBI ramps up), which increases rather than decreasing work opportunities.

> We're not going to turn into a banana republic where only the economically elite and the political class keep each other happy and everyone else are kept just happy enough to avoid revolution.

Well, UBI won't drive that, at any rate, and largely opposes it. There's a very good argument that the first part is largely true, and you could argue that the one thing that's been happening in recent years is the fine tuning of just how little is necessary to hit just the point where the second half is true, too.

For example, it's a 'universal' income right? Do people still get it when they're in prison for rape/murder? How about in jail for a few weeks on shoplifting? What if a citizen is living in another country? What if they're here illegally? Do you get one for each kid the moment they're born? What if the kid is born in the US and parents are illegal immigrants? And just how much UBI should everyone get? Your answers to these questions will not agree with your neighbor's answers.

A UBI would become more corrupt than anything else we've seen because there will be even more power in it. The power hungry will seek it and corrupt it because we will never agree on who has a right to that giant pile of money.

Looking at what's already happened, one can only say it's the most probable outcome.

Look at what happened in USSR.

Or what happens right now in Switzerland where pay checks are so high that almost nobody works at 100%, they all have some kind part time job.

Any other assumption is, well, an assumption, and a risky one.

Any form of UBI will just be used as a wealth transfer to landlords that rent.

The highest the Alaska oil royalty has ever been was $2,072 in 2015. I think they are now capping it at $1000.

The median household income in 2015 was $73,355, the third highest in the country. Certainly the royalty was enough to move it from number 5 to number 3.

I suspect the royalty does not have much to do with this high income. And this is EXTRA money, not money taken from the populace and then given back to them as UBI would be.

Interestingly, "Alaska has more residents on welfare, per capita, than any other state in the nation" according to the Alaska Dispatch News.

And, yes, not many rich people live in Alaska. Maybe the climate is a reason. Maybe it's the lack of big cities.

TFA's author bio: "Shai Shapira is a computer programmer and writer."

Poli-sci academics usually don't construct their premises so obviously poorly and proceed to build a castle on sand like this article does. Typically they're at least good enough that any, "wait, what?"s aren't apparent at first glance.

I think 10-20 is hyperbole but the inverse relationship between GDP and birth rates is well documented -- a chief argument being unemployed people have time to make babies.

> With that said, I only see those changes as more possible through UBI because people with their basic needs met have more time and mental space to engage in being more informed and more involved as citizens.

This is where UBI loses me. So many of it's advocates are convinced people freed from labor will become scholar poets. Proles will be proles whether you call it Marxism or UBI.

The numbers are overblown, but I see this as a real issue with utopian interpretations of UBI. I.e. those where, to quote the article, proponents expect "a majority of non-workers to live off the fruits of the labour of a small minority", as opposed to a more realistic UBI where the working poor use that free money to maybe cut one or two of their multiple jobs from their tight schedule.

But in the "utopian" version, a huge group would be left without anything to strive for. If the payout would be too generous, adding an entry level work income would not make a noticeable difference. When people are depraved of all other kinds of achievement, they are likely to use breeding as a substitute. If you can't climb or defend any ranks, you can still move up one level by spawning "subordinates". Instant status.

I feel bad just for thinking thoughts that cynical, but I can't help expecting that kind of outcome if it isn't openly addressed. A "nonutopian UBI" that just creates a smooth, regulation-free ramp (I almost want to say "interpolation") between welfare and full self-support would leave the cynic in me much more at ease.

(Edited: my writing is terrible)

http://fortune.com/2014/06/10/most-corrupt-states-in-america...

> I also see a population who comes out to vote, especially when anything dividend related is voted on.

that's exactly part of the point of the aricle.

Religious extremists.

In the early days of the State of Israel, the largest secular party needed the support of the parties of religious extremists, in order to form a majority in parliament and create a government. Those parties set a price: they would support the government, but only if the government exempted their young men from military service, and pay them a living stipend, so that they could spend their days engrossed in religious studies. All told, about 400 men would be granted such an exemption and stipend.

At the time, the secular party's leader thought that religiosity in Israel was going the way of the dodo anyway. He didn't have a problem with setting up a kind of living museum for religious study, so he accepted.

The official birthrate for those religious-extremist families is around eight, but it is not uncommon to find families with a dozen or even more children. Because of how Israeli parliamentary politics works, the religious extremist parties often served as kingmakers for parties which sought to form governments, and they kept that price as the price for support. Today there are more than 10,000 such people receiving such exemptions and stipends, and more than 25% of all children in Israeli elementary schools come from ultra-religious families, in spite of such measures being almost universally unpopular outside that sector and continually struck down by the Israeli Supreme Court every few years.

To finally answer your question: it's not just theoretically possible, it's a guarantee. And demography is one hell of a time bomb.

That's what they already do where children are subsidized by the state welfare, imagine what they would do if it would mean another salary in the house.

It's only basic logic.

His point, as I understand it, is if you participate economically in a social structure, your vote represents economic activity in that structure. So if the nation was full of fast-food workers, the democratic structure that would come out of it would be something that favored fast-food workers and took their economic needs into account. In your example of retired people, a world full of retired people would create a governmental structure that understood and favored the economic activity of retired folks, which is basic consumption.

In a world where most people simply consume, such as those retired people, either you wouldn't get participation at all or you'd get participation that was structured economically around what retired folks do. In either case, it's a tyrannical and dysfunctional government. The only way to "fix" it is to have a de facto oligarchy where a small number of rich people control everything and deliver it to the masses. And that's as bad or worse than the other scenarios.

From time to time, governing elites have asked themselves a question: is now the time to overthrow democracy?

When the wealth of a nation comes from the productivity of its citizens, you can't overthrow a stable democracy without destroying the wealth you intended to capture. But when the wealth of a nation comes from its natural resources, say gold or oil, the calculus changes. You can run a gold mine with dying slaves and still extract great wealth.

We see this worldwide as the resource curse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

"The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty, refers to the paradox that countries with an abundance of natural resources (like fossil fuels and certain minerals), tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources."

Some economists refer to human labor as "the ultimate resource," a resource of value beyond gold, beyond oil. As automation becomes more and more useful, as the value of capital relative to human labor increases, the more we're cursing ourselves with the ultimate resource curse.

I recommend this video to every one (watch it at double speed; he talks slowly). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

The political system isn't structured around them, they just manage to get their way a lot of the time.

Political systems tend to center around who has economic power (where to quote Dune "power over a thing is the power to destroy it").

I think this explains the principle he was trying to get across better than he did: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/how-coal-brought-us-...

I can't imagine how you would arrive at this idea.

Unemployment benefits create a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people.

Basic Income creates a continuum. You can have BI + leisure, BI + freelance, BI + 10 hr workweek, BI + regular load, BI + burning out. Whatever works for you.

> Work, but work less (adjust according to demand as needed, adjust compensation as necessary).

"Hey Kek you are a programmer right?"

"I am indeed"

"We need you to work 80 hour weeks because we don't have many programmers, don't worry though we will give you another half ration to make up for it"

"No, i'm only going to work 20 hours like the street cleaners"

What does this fictional UBI government do then? Put a gun to my head and force me to work seems to be the most common solution to this problem historically. The problem is all human work can't be divided evenly among all humans, we need doctors more than we need fast food workers thus doctors typically work longer hours. For the system to be "fair" we can't pay doctors all that much more than fast food workers, maybe 10% - 15% or even 100% more but not the 1000% more they see currently. What if doctors decide that isn't enough and all become fast food workers instead? What do we do then? That is the problem UBI and Communism has yet to solve.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" - Karl Marx

I think UBI is meant to be "universal", with no prerequisites.

I think this is a pretty good point. It's possible that UBI basically just delays the inevitable, if you believe that there really is a possible future in which most people are just economically irrelevant due to mechanization, etc. With UBI, you get a few more years before the small number of people at the levers of power harden their attitudes enough to stop the handouts; without UBI you just starve immediately. Either way, it doesn't look good.

Personally I don't think that the premise, of large-scale, structural unemployment due to automation, is really likely -- I think that "work" can expand to fill the available labor pool, with some amount of incentivizing, and a large pool of unemployed workers is threatening enough to most governments that they'll pursue economic policies to employ people, even if it's WPA-type projects, rather than endue the destabilization of having them just sit around.

As various others have pointed out, if you look at "work" today, it would be largely unrecognizable to someone from the mid-19th century. The amount of modern labor necessary to live a reasonable lifestyle by mid-19th century standards is quite low (it's hard to do this on an individual basis, but if you were to take a bunch of people and modern technology, particularly agricultural machines, but reduce expectations for standards of living to that of the 19th century, you end up with a whole lot of spare time). But yet few people do this. In fact the only people I know of living 19th century lifestyles by choice are people who actively reject modern labor-saving technology (e.g. Amish and other orthodox Mennonite traditions).

Someone from that era might justifiably question why people are still working 40 hours per week, rather than just working, say, 10, and adjusting their needs downwards accordingly. It's a fair question (and there are a lot of barriers to doing it, e.g. provisioning of health insurance). I do know a few people who have done that, in fact, and they seem to like it. But I have doubts that it will ever be an especially popular choice.

So my guess is that while automation will be disruptive, and if not managed correctly it may result in some (perhaps many) people finding that what they've spent a lifetime training themselves to do is no longer necessary -- an outcome that I think government should work to avoid, the economy will figure out ways to use the surplus human capacity freed up by automation as it always has.

There are lots of automation-resistant fields where people can essentially pay each other for services, sloshing money around and keeping everyone employed, even as a smaller and smaller fraction of people actually work in "primary industry", extracting resources from the environment or growing food. That's a transition that's ongoing already in many developed countries, and it doesn't seem grossly unsustainable except where it runs up against opportunities for arbitrage against less-developed economies at the expense of both sets of workers.

Yes, instead of living in large urban centers, unemployed poor people would have to move to smaller places with low costs of living. This is a good thing, really.

And without price supports through unlimited government loans, schools will have to become cheaper. Those associate professors of English lit who are so abused by the current system can live on BI plus cheap tuition in addition to online classes.

But of course it's all politics and I'm sure it will be impossible to pass a reasonable, cost neutral plan. Instead people will find ways to pile on the bureaucracy until it is less annoying to just go to work and get paid than it is to fill out all of the BI paperwork and file it with six different agencies.

The easy idea of just creating a virtual bank account at birth linked to a SS number or equivalent is so simple it's just a non-starter. And I've tried to convince people that means-testing and such is a waste of money and time but no, plenty of people see BI as welfare and want drug testing and means testing for it. Bah! Give Bill Gates his $20K per year. Who cares if he doesn't need it!?

The savings involved in dismantling the corpulent bureaucracy currently managing and adjudicating benefits will actually go a significant way towards paying for UBI.

IMHO, ideally, UBI would be sacrosanct, and could not be legally garnished to service any debt. This would prevent if from being used as collateral, and ensure that it would remain available to support the individual - people would not be able to ever get themselves into such debt that they became a burden on society, since they could never borrow against it.

Moreover, it may be better method for managing inflation than our current setup of anointed central banks making themselves money out of thin air: Instead of passing out money to the banks, in order to generate velocity, deliver it to the citizens in the form of a deposit into some form of money market account, thereby immediately putting it into circulation in the economy.

There's already a myriad of government programs and safety nets that provide all of these and more.

Because that traps people in he bare minimum, since improvements are often necessarily replacements rather than supplements.

UBI lets small amounts of outside income provide tangible improvement.