Hacker News Reader

Comment by orbifold | Hacker News Reader

There is basically no way that a self respecting first world country will allow this to happen. The national federal reserves in Europe are still responsible for international settlements, that gives a tremendous amount of power and oversight, they won’t allow a third party to take that away from them.

Facebook may be able to buy off US regulators, but they won’t be able to convince the EU.

View on HN

Wouldn't be so sure that Uncle Sam isn't going to crack down even harder than the EU. Financial control is a big part of US power abroad and I can't imagine that the US government is going to tolerate a private entity taking that control away, and that's probably for the better. This entire Facebook currency thing sounds like something out of Shadowrun.

I think it is likely that this is backed by a substantial set of US political interests. People that want to experiment with UBI might want to see a Facebook sanctioned UBI. This is basically any libertarians pipe dream.

On the other hand I think you are right. I expect any US based opposition to move swiftly. Regulations should probably be the least of their concern given how the US has treated entire Nation States trying to move away from US dollar denominated Oil trade. It will be interesting to see what the equivalent of a no-flight zone, arming militants and sending “advisors” will be.

"I owe my soul to the Facebook / Amazon store"

I wonder if some of the big companies would like to bring back the company store system - with the rise of populist politicians and the rolling back of existing protections I am a little worried about this.

> This is basically any libertarians pipe dream.

Are you sure about this? I thought libertarians were against all institutions such as the state with power over people.

UBI is a socialist policy. It seems in total contradiction with libertarian principles to me. How is that possible?

UBI is similar to negative income tax, which was proposed by (among others) Friedman.

That just shifts the question to whether Friedman was a libertarian. This is certainly not a consensual opinion in that camp.

Point taken, but I was thinking more about the "it's a socialist policy" part, and he certainly wasn't a socialist.

Libertarians believe in the government staying out of your business and letting free markets do their thing.

With UBI everyone gets an automatic safety net and the ideal is that if all markets were free of government intervention people would buy what they want, and competition would down the costs of healthcare / education / food etc. So that those with UBI can have the basic necessities of life, without the government needing to do anything (other than dealing with tragedy of the commons type problems.)

Well I am not a libertarian myself but as far as I understood people pushing for UBI are also pushing for a drastically smaller administration which is currently administering social benefits. This would be achieved by basically eliminating most other form of benefits, similar to how they propose to hand out vouchers for services like education instead of operating schools.

You have misunderstood libertarianism, just because it wants to see small to none state does not mean it would support UBI or other forms of socialism.

This is a drastic oversimplification. From my experience, libertarians are usually against UBI. There is certainly a large enough current that you can't make this generalization.

I think libertarians mostly view UBI the same way leftists view things like laws enforcing collective bargaining. Some support it as an improvement of the status quo, others oppose it because it gets us no closer to their actual goal.

You could ask Mr. Kim Dot Com...

One can hope

Shadowrun is exactly what this reminded me of. We are careening towards that dystopia with zero brakes in sight.

>Wouldn't be so sure that Uncle Sam isn't going to crack down even harder than the EU...

I wouldn't be so sure that Uncle Sam wasn't in on it in the first place. The potential military, economic, and intelligence value of this thing should be self evident.

Thats assuming the EU isnt easy to buy off - looking at a couple of regulations in the pesticide industry its easy to see they're very accommodative. Lobbying is big business in Brussels.

You can buy them off, but successful lobbying probably takes years of relationship building to make it look like marriage, not prostitution, to those corruptees that think of themselves as ethical people. You can't just arrive and buy some legislation.

In October last year, Facebook hired Nick Clegg, former UK Deputy Prime Minister and well-known Europhile, as head of Global Affairs and Communications.

So that's your years of relationship building, acquired in one go.

Nick Clegg isn't exactly well thought of. They goofed hiring him, which is great because the more Facebook fucks up the better the world becomes.

And let's be honest, being a British politician isn't super helpful in Post-Brexit EU either

The Farming Lobby is huge you mean

The great thing about bitcoin is theres no central actor for the state to target. Libra's biggest weakness is its connection to facebook.

If only that were true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockstream

The US to get brought off to allow this is same as treason, it can fuk up the country

Reply on news.ycombinator.com