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Comment by JAFTEM | Hacker News Reader

Bezos is an advocate for basic income, but I question his motives. Is it because he is genuinely concerned for others and society, or does he want to avoid the pitchforks at his doorstep when Amazon gets blamed for mass unemployment? Coupled with the fact that he's the richest man on earth, it's very apparent he will have a target on his back if he doesn't already.

Maybe his motives don't matter. Maybe we just need to focus on getting basic income as jobs are wiped away by Big N.

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I'm not sure why his motivation matters? Both of those are good reasons to advocate for a universal basic income. We should want people to be aware of the consequences of their successes and to try and alleviate any pain they caused. It's when people don't do this that all the "rich is poor" problems occur.

>I'm not sure why his motivation matters?

I recognized this idea in in the last two sentences of my post. The biggest issue with this line of thinking is the diversion of scrutiny towards Bezos in the process. As another poster stated, Bezos is a beneficiary of basic income via Amazon. As an aside, we know why Zuckerberg is more focused on free Internet drones over Africa than basic income.

UBI is an enormous boon to anyone who's business is directly sensitive to consumer's disposable/discretionary income. Bezos is the textbook definition of such an actor.

> when Amazon gets blamed for mass unemployment

That mass unemployment isn't going to happen. The US is going to have an immense labor shortgage over the next 20 years in fact, no matter what AI + robotics do. It's extremely simple math: low population growth (that will get worse) + modest immigration rate (that will get worse) + modest economic growth + large number of retiring workers = labor shortgage for decades to come.

Besides, Amazon is hiring hundreds of thousands of workers, while its chief labor competitor, Walmart, is simultaneously not slashing its 2.3 million employee base.

Where UBI provides a lower-bound on income, and preliminary experiments are showing that it has no detrimental effect on the economy, perhaps we should think about the opposite.

It may sound like a bad idea that might put us in a communistic economic order, but just like UBI, we can perform experiments to see if a universal income-limit, UIL, has any negative impact.

But okay, Bezos will probably not be a proponent of that idea.

It seems better to just have an actually progressive tax system. Effective tax rates on the rich are really low in the US right now. If there is an income limit there really is no incentive to make any more money so a progressive tax will probably give you a lot more taxes.

> If there is an income limit there really is no incentive to make any more money

Yeah, but for long people were convinced that UBI does not stimulate people to work, but that is just not how it works (experiments show). If the incentive is there at the lower end, why not at the higher end? Why don't we run that experiment as well?

We might find out that if somebody is focused only on money, he or she does not make a good CEO. So the impact may be even better than just a financial one.

Perhaps the reason is that he can win some sympathy, while thinking it will never happen anyway.

What is big N?

Big 4, Big 5, or however many big tech co’s you want to include. Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft

Basic income is a way to recapture federal taxes into Amazon revenue.

Realistically, BI won’t save him, or his progeny when/if it comes down to “pitchforks” any more than the French aristocracy could throw potatoes at starving peasants and hope to live. I can’t imagine how much good someone would have to do to justify concentrating a hundred thousand million dollars in their person. When so much of that probably wasn’t fairly subjected to taxation... well... maybe he deserves some “pitchforks” at his door, or st least some angry government accountants and lawyers.

This is just crazy to me. Every purchase at Amazon is made because it makes the purchaser better off. Amazon out-competes by serving the customer better. If Bezos also benefits, that's great - he's made the world a better place. I'd love to richly reward millions of people for making the world better like Amazon has.

Save the pitchforks for negative-sum beneficiaries - companies and individuals who benefit by leeching/destroying value (e.g., most financial "innovation", big pharma using legal tactics to avoid competition, etc.)

Nothing you said in any way justifies not paying tax.

Nor pitchforks.

If the law doesn't require paying taxes, change the law. If people evade taxes they are legally required to pay, punish appropriately.

Don't demonize success doing beneficial things and obeying the law.

I’m demonizing robber barony and tax evasion.

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