Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the optimism around UBI. UBI is a band-aid and a sign that a system is actually failing. I get why some people, especially intellectuals, want UBI, but they seem to believe that UBI is free of consequence. If society "needs" UBI, that means that not enough people can build wealth or that the welfare system isn't effective. Handing people money isn't going to change the fact that too much of the economy is bolstered by massive amounts of debt. UBI may just perpetuate the problem and encourage more debt to be taken out. One argument for UBI I've heard is that places like Alaska give their residents a "dividend" of something between a few hundred to a few thousand bucks. But the reason Alaska can do this is because they effectively own their oil industry, and their GDP far exceeds their debt, whereas the United States federal government(as well as many states) have debt that exceeds their GDP.

UBI will be needed when automation actually destroys enough jobs where it makes sense. I don't know that we're quite there yet, but it will happen soon. Wanting UBI before its time seems like an admission of failure oh the system.

The optimism comes from a desperate desire not to confront the need for universal healthcare or land reform.

As long as real estate is an investment and health care has a middle man, UBI is just a subsidy for those sectors.

Yep UBI is more guaranteed money into the hands of rent seeking landlords and co.

Much like how government backed student loans turned into guaranteed money for tuition seeking educational institutions.

People don't take into account that the value of money largely comes from the confidence that said money will have value in the future. If cash flow becomes guaranteed, the confidence that the business can demand more money from its customers goes up, ultimately lowering the value of said money for the customer while allowing the business to have greater investment opportunities.

There's a bit of irony in that, since the value of the US dollar largely comes from the confidence in the guarantee that the government will honor the value of treasury notes. The Chinese Yuan is comparatively worth much less than the US dollar, not just because of the dominance of the US, but because the perception of China is that it is far more corrupt and not as reliable than the US in terms of paying back its lenders, lowering the confidence that exists for its currency.

So I guess it comes down to this:

Business confidence > Customer confidence = monetary value decreases

Customer confidence > Business confidence = monetary value increases

People can afford healthier food with more money.

Real estate doesn't matter post C19 once office and schools are decentralized further each year.

Real estate can either be affordable or it can be an investment, but it can't be both.

I think something similar applies with healthcare.

> because they effectively own their oil industry

Why can't we, as a society, come together and take ownership of our data, and sell it back to the companies using our data for profit?

It's not really your data though, how can you control / monetize it?

Are Google, Amazon and Facebook selling ads to robots?

I'm pretty sure we are the product, not the customer.

Think about what that means... advertisers spend money to get in front of people based on the data they think is important for their business, right?

It's derived from all of our data, which we are not getting paid for. Do you think these companies would be worth trillions if they weren't profiting off data we give them for free?

Or at the very least consider taxing those collecting it. Data for services is bartering.

The companies that own our data subsidize their collection of it. In other words, we get to use Facebook, Google, etc for free, and we pay them with our data instead of with money.

When you own land with oil, you need to buy/rent the equipment to drill it and deliver it. With data, all that is free for the end user.

Now the real scam are companies that both charge you to use their product and then make money off the data they collect as a result.

I don't think the argument is that society "needs" it, it's that it's a better system than the one we have now.

I don't know much about the current proposals. In my head, it's an adjustment of the current economic system. Pay everyone money, provide jobs for anyone who wants more money, collect more taxes, remove redundant social services, etc. It seems like it could work better than what we have now so it sounds worthy of serious consideration.

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