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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

In that scenario, you’d still need to work. Basic income increases workers’ bargaining power because they can quit without losing their entire income.

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And their income will grow on trees.

It will fail unless the government gets easy money from eg producing oil like Emirates. Otherwise someone needs to produce stuff. We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working. Let's not make things even worse, please.

> We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working.

Do we have any sort of evidence for that claim?

Of course. Printing money inflates its supply. And increasing the demand for products (by providing easy money) without increasing the supply of products (and actually decreasing it by restricting work) will lead to higher prices. It is economics 101 and it was tested by many countries eg Germany before the WW or more recently Venezuela.

Sorry, yes, printing money leads to inflation. I was asking for evidence that "We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working." is the source of a large portion of inflation instead of the multitude of other reasons that money is printed. Of the recent $4 trillion coronavirus payout, only about a fifth of that went to workers or their families[1], and even that isn't all to people who aren't working.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/business/corona...

I'm not an economist, but I do listen to a bunch of them. My understanding is that printing money doesn't necessarily create inflation, and the real story is far more complicated than that. That it also depends on things like: the overall economy, how that money is being spent, demand pull, cost push, public fear of inflation (which causes ->), how much money is circulating vs how much is being pooled (investments/into banks/under the mattress), and more.

ometimes first order approximations (or "basic principles") lead you in the wrong direction. My understanding is that economics is full of pitfalls like this.

The conclusion is derived from the basic principles. Of course if even more money was given directly to non productive people the prices would increase even faster!

Do you think that inflation is worse than wage slavery?

I don't think this is a coherent question unless you specify how much inflation, and how much wage slavery, we are talking about.

We don't do the same for non-wage slavery, do we?

We do ask the general question of "what costs are we willing to bear to reduce the amount and human toll of actual slavery". Actual slavery is illegal, certainly, but there are still instances of it happening, even today[1,2,3]. We could spend more resources to further reduce the number of cases where this happens, and there are plenty of people saying we should. In theory, a complete enough surveillance state, where the movements of all people and all monetary transactions are tracked and analyzed, might even be able to get the number of such instances all the way down to zero, but that seems a lot less likely to be a good tradeoff.

So yes. We do the same for non-wage slavery. We do the same for any bad thing that trades off against a different bad thing.

[1] https://www.ajc.com/news/this-has-been-happening-for-a-long-...

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/migrant-worker-lured-to-...

[3] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/usadom/usadom0501-04.htm#P3...

Not only bad things, but also everything can be traded off against some other thing. That doesn't mean we should. There's an economic value assigned to human life, but we don't let someone kill another one by paying a markup.

We should get rid of wage slavery. We can then work on the economic consequences.

UBI incents more people to work compared to current policies, because it smooths out any disincentives that occur from clawing back existing subsidies. It's precisely because "someone needs to produce stuff" that we should be rewarding people for their increased productivity. The increased "bargaining power for workers" that results from UBI is entirely consistent with this goal.

> We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working.

We have inflation because of sustained fiscal and monetary stimulus through a period of sharp restrictions on economic activity being sustained after most of the restrictions ended; the fiscal stimulus has already been withdrawn, and monetary stimulus is slowly unwinding.

But that really doesn't have much bearing on a tax-funded UBI, which—unlike deficit-funded airdrops—is redistribution, not general stimulus.

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