Comment by gen220 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gen220 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

An interesting bit of trivia, but this idea is very old, and geographically close to the Pope (though the practice predates state sponsored Christianity).

In antiquity, the Roman Empire practiced a flavor of UBI, in that the city of Rome provided free wheat (later, bread) to its poorer citizens. This was no trivial matter, as importing and distributing (to 200k citizens, at its zenith) were complicated and expensive. This was a stable arrangement for centuries. After the loss of North Africa, the wheat stopped flowing so regularly, and it grew increasingly expensive to support this benefit, but giving it up was politically impossible. Rome collapsed, and the experiment ended.

Across the world, Lao Tzu said the wise lead by emptying hearts and filling bellies. There’s also some famous saying “Civilization is always four square meals away from collapse”.

What can we learn from this? UBI makes sense when times are good, when there is surplus and trade. But it’s very hard to revoke what a people are used to receiving for free. It might be more efficient to teach a human to fish, than to feed him fish “for free” every day.

I think you are missing the point of the Left - that owners of capital tend to put up fences, set guards so that other people cannot fish in "their" water.

And additionally knowing how to fish is SOL when we over fish our resources because market signals are ineffective at large scale directed action.

And I get itchy each time someone says if only we were all free it would be such a better world because soon someone says I shall make them free.

We need "The State" as a form of insurance for risks that don't occur often enough for actuaries to profitably price, or occur too often and actuaries cannot change all of our behaviour all at once

I pretty much agree with everything you're saying.

IMO, the role of the government is to make it safe to be fishers and teachers of fishers. That means shutting down the people who would murder you for your fish, and shutting down the companies that would monopolize the bodies of water.

But, should the government catch your fish for you? It seems that we feel like the answer to that question is "it depends", since not everyone can fish. But then again, this is why we have division of labor, and geographic mobility. If you can't fish in Arkansas, maybe you can farm in Montana.

Some people are in need of special help, but should that come from the government? In the past, it's come from communities. What about the people shunned from communities? It's a rabbit hole.

My point is, it's hard to draw a line that doesn't lead to "let the government do it". But the government isn't particularly effective at most things it has attempted to do: I generally feel like, for most problems we turn to the government for, there's usually a better way (and by that, I do not simply "if we were all freer"), but it does seems to be found more often an emergent property of liberal societies than a prescriptive form to fill out.

In case it isn't clear, I don't hold very strong views here, I'm sorry if that they might have itched you, just thinking out loud :)

I worry when I hear "community" as a support mechanism. Community can "rally round" in times of crisis - that's great. but mostly they are terrible. Communities have abused minorities, locked away the different and the challenging, starved, beaten, exiled and ignored.

Governments do this too - but the thing about democratic governments is we can find out and force corrections. And governments can afford to employ experts to do the daily boring work of looking after those in need - community interest tends to wane as well.

It's not perfect- and I disagree with "feeding people for the rest of their lives". I, without any good evidence, feel the Chesterton style Distrubitism cited downthread is most likely to have good community outcomes and still allow government to fill in the gaps.

Overall - in my view, how governments assist the needy is a policy choice. Whether they assist is a fundamental duty.

Edit: I understand you are agreeing, I am not trying to spark a fight, just want to be careful about the idea that community can solve much these days.

(Mafia: Organised Crime, Government: Organised Community)?

That's an interesting bit of history, but bread for the poor is welfare, not UBI.

It's not universal, and it's not really income in the sense of something that the holder can easily exchange as they see fit. That limits how much we can learn from societies having traditional welfare when it comes to UBI.

I agree that this isn't UBI. I still think that it holds lessons that carry weight in a UBI discussion.

To be clear, the point I was trying to make was that the "free $STUFF", where peoples' lives depended on $STUFF, worked great while the times were great. But it didn't work so well when times were not so great, and $STUFF was hard to come by. I think that, even with STUFF=money, we would face similar challenges, and need to be prepared for those challenges, with answers.

I think that the "I" part makes it better, since at least that gives us monetary tools, and we might be mature enough at this point to be able to manipulate to our advantage. It's much easier to make money grow in Washington than it is to make wheat grow in climates it wasn't built for.

Rome needed continual conquests to fund this benefit for its citizens. Margaret Thatcher said it well for governments that try to do this, "eventually you run out of other people's money."

You got it! :)

The difference is that we're dealing here with something that's more abstract than material goods (dollar signs and zeroes). In my view, this makes it possible, though exceedingly difficult, and I'm not sure how sustainable it would be over long periods of time. However, if the Romans could pull it off with grain over several centuries, who's to say we can't do it with money (which, in spite of its complexities, is much less fickle than grain)?

With that, the only addendum I'd propose is "unless you're very clever."

I'm not sure if we're clever enough, yet. But the Federal Reserve and the global financial system have come very far within our lifetimes, so it's not unfeasible to imagine us getting there one day.

Rome was also before the industrial revolution turned farming into a 1% of the population thing.

Whether we're before or after the point every human could be supported such they are happy and healthy, with more or less organization and/or equality, I don't know.

But I think it's a tremendous error to think that that point can not exist (is technologically and societally infeasible on a planet we'd recognize).

Welfare is not UBI. UBI is for everyone (universal).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com