The Spaceballs Argument for Unconditional Basic Income
scottsantens.com
scottsantens.com
How about:
"You're gonna want something that other people make or do or do to you. If they're not your parents or lovers or partners, you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want. Otherwise, why would they give it to you ? Making something others want is work."
Also, the following statement is based on a false premise: “ Let's just recognize that Earth actually does belong to all of us, everyone in the present and future, and that those who own pieces of it, and who create things out of it, owe compensation to the rest of us for removing our access to what would otherwise have been common property.”
This implies that creation itself is some kind of theft. The actual theft is taking something from a creative, productive person and giving it to an idle one.
At least that's the economic theory. If we were to raise taxes on dividends, no one can really predict how much that would reduce the long-term economic growth rate.
Is short-term investment that much less useful than long-term? Especially when the stock market is so big and smooths out short-term investments so much? We're effectively paying a lot of money for that bias, and I'm not convinced that's better than a tiny bias or no bias.
I could certainly be persuaded by that and maybe about short vs long term investment. Do we have data from other markets to compare?
Above I'm just explaining the reasoning behind the status quo. Reaction to that seems negative. I can't tell if I'm wrong about the reasoning, or people are signaling that the reasoning is wrong.
For example, consider the 10% federal luxury tax imposed in 1991 to reduce the budget deficit. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it devastated several domestic manufacturing industries and destroyed many jobs. Whoops.
At this point, I think the system has failed.
Buying stock is investing cash into a business. The investment has more risk of going down in value compared to cash in the bank. Government created a tax advantage to partially offset the risk, and thus encourage investment. This tends to move capital to places it can be used for creating new things, instead of sitting in a vault.
No it doesn't. Helping yourself to resources and then asserting property rights thereon to prevent others from doing the same is a kind of theft.
It's how national borders work.
It's how national borders work.
A distinct negative, as far as I am concerned. Passports only became a thing around World War 1. Artificial restrictions on movement by labor is a massive economic distortion that essentially treats labor as a captive resource by mutual agreement between states. Would-be economic migrants whose goal is to work are equated with marauding armies.
Get rid of welfare states, and you can get rid of borders. But you can't maintain a welfare state with generous welfare subsidies and have open borders.
Thanks for your reply.
"Productive" - we have people making livings selling farts in jars, but we value a stay at home parent at $0. Clearly we're abusing the word "productive".
One example, intellectual property constraints are perpetually expanding due to an increasing number of patents, copyrights and trademarks. If you are a creative person, you are legally required to navigate this intellectual property minefield in order to make a living. Why shouldn't you get some sort of token compensation for the loss of creative rights?
Another example, I like to fish. But I am required by government regulation to pay for a permit and to limit my fishing activity to comply with regulations. The regulations are burdensome enough where it would be prohibitive to sustain my family solely on my fishing labor. This was not the case about a hundred years ago (roughly). One could sustain a family through fishing alone. I could try and go the commercial route, but that requires an investment of upwards of $100k and that industry is notoriously hostile to new entrants and extremely volatile (read up on snow crabs for example). So for all intents and purposes, this natural resource is no longer available to me to use as a primary source of sustenance. Why shouldn't I expect some sort of compensation for that?
And of course the big one, land rights. We give landowners perpetual rights to use a piece a land as long as they pay their taxes and comply with local zoning regulations. That land is not theirs. It existed long before they were born, and will continue to exist long after they are gone. But while they "own" that land, I am forbidden from using it. And there are fewer and fewer places in the world where land is free/cheap, and also somewhat economically useful. At some point in the future (if not already) we should expect that type of land to disappear entirely as capitalism continues gobble up all available opportunities. UBI feels like a natural way to compensate individuals for the loss of rights to this land.
Historically, citizens of modern well functioning democracies have considered the right to vote as sufficient "compensation" for the loss of certain natural rights. The right to vote is certainly a powerful and necessary right. But I think UBI is a more natural compensation for the increasing economic constraints that modern society imposes on its citizens. Fishing regulations help prevent fish stocks from collapsing, intellectual property rights allow creators to profit from their work, etc..., but these restrictions also narrow the legal space in which current and future citizens can make a living. Do we really need more and more people releasing shit coins and NFTs in order to squeak out a living? Do we really need more people optimizing facebook ad conversions? Maybe we just acknowledge that the vast majority of work being done in modern societies is not essential, and forcing more people to compete in that landscape is not making the world a better place. A small UBI isn't going to dramatically change peoples motivations. Freeloaders already find ways to skate by, UBI might make it a little easier. But maybe it is better if the freeloaders just take their UBI and chill rather than try their hand at another scammy NFT project. Even with UBI, the vast majority of people will continue to work as UBI would be too small to provide a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Maybe a few people might downshift a little bit and use UBI as an opportunity to focus on things that they consider important, i.e. family, hobbies, volunteer work, etc.. But is that really so bad?
Should half the population starve in such a society?
or a different model, if 1% need to work 40 years to sustain us, then 10% can do the same while working only 4 years, or everyone only works one year. (ok, it doesn't scale like that because it takes more time to get experience for certain tasks, but even then, with such an abundance of available labor, every worker can spend half of their work time to teach others about their work)
all it takes is an understanding that the best thing to do with those not needed for work is to educate them to do something else that is useful for us.
A job doesn't entitle you to power.
If they think they are underpaid, they can ask for more money.
If the wages of that sector go up a lot, watch as half the world applies for those jobs.
It's not specifically what was written, but it's what I see between the lines.
And if 99% of the population is too dumb to do it, then it probably doesn't need to be done.
This is very hard to believe. That's basically conceding that we will never cure cancer/colonize mars/solve productive nuclear fusion etc.
The country with the highest percentage of PhDs is Slovenia, at 3.8% of 25-64 year-olds.
I know academic performance doesn't perfectly equate to IQ, especially at this level because right now smart people have many other options, but on the other hand that's the highest percentage and the OECD average is just short of 1.1%.
OECD PhD percentages: https://doi.org/10.1787/888933978645
China I'm not sure about, but seems to be about 500k/year, so if I estimate population of 1.5e9 and 80 year life expectancy, that's a steady-state level of 3.75% of the entire population.
So the minimum for those things being above IQ 125 seems at least plausible. May not be correct, but it is plausible.
As for "why should they get significant power?" — well, 'should' is a question of values. Do you believe in democracy and self-determination? Or is it fine to treat them all like animals, by which I mean spay, neuter, euthanise without asking their opinions, and/or selectively breed to be decorative and fit into handbags? Because the worst horrors that Charlie Stross and Ian Banks and Harlan Ellison have imagined are all as easy as Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism if you have an AI which can automate almost everything, regardless of whether anything remains purely in the domain of a tiny elite.
I'm going to support democracy. That's why I think an unemployable 99% should have, in a reasonable sense, 99% of the power.
As for why the 1% may have much more than 1% of the power in practice… that's kinda where I was going with the Hyper-Dystopia vs. Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism example: whoever controls the AI gets to play as Gods to a much larger degree than mere billionaires get to act like real life is a Civilization/KSP/SimCity game, and the default for who controls the AI is whoever has skills such that they can't be replaced with an AI. Or the current rich, if everyone can be displaced by AI.
Imagine there was an AI which was normal compared to a human mind — as in, you can reasonably assign it an IQ score the same way you would a biological human, and the score wouldn't be biased by it doing the maths and memory puzzles a million times faster even as it fails a simple word game or is unable to either count or subitize a small number of objects in an image.
IQ scores are normally only valid in the "+/- 2 standard deviations" range, which by definition is IQ 70 to 130.
(IQ tests are just a direct mapping onto standard deviations, not at all a linear scale, so while I'm very impressed with ChatGPT, I don't know if it would always outperform an IQ 70 human or not, even though it can definitely sometimes outperform IQ 130 human).
Assume this AI's electricity bill is equal to Example Everyperson's wages.
If the AI has an IQ of 70, then 2.3% of the population are permanently uneconomical through no fault of their own; 85, then 15.9%; 100, then 50%; 115, then 84.9%, 130, then 97.7%.
What is the likely IQ of the first human-like AI whose electricity cost matches an average salary? And how fast is it likely to go up?
~~~~
From the other direction: I don't know for sure how much ChatGPT costs to run, though I think it's in the order of cents per response. What I do have is an upper bound for Stable Diffusion of $0.0001 per image, less than half of the $0.00022 it takes to keep a human (on the $1.90 per day UN abject poverty threshold) alive for 10 seconds to type in the prompt[0].
I don't know what the future of AI will be, but I suspect that it will be so cheap that that won't need to be a superior intelligence to all humans in all domains, to cause literally all humans in all domains to be uneconomical.
[0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...
The military found that people with lower scores were not even up to correctly sweeping the floors consistently.
The actual test is not an IQ test but the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, which has rough equivalents to IQ scoring.
and the things that people actually value (lots of creative ventures) tend to be greatly undervalued to the point its hard to support ones self unless your and elite few
People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do. Who would have guessed when the Earth's population was 1 million people that'd we eventually have billions of jobs.
So there is really no reason for there to not be enough work to do. If each person consumes enough in life to equal once person's work output, then every additional person will work enough to get enough to consume for themselves by trading with others.
As long as people can trade the result of their effort for the efforts of others, there is no reason we will ever run out of jobs. In fact, there's likely now and always will be things we could do except we simply don't have enough workers to do it. Each big technological change in the past freed workers from previous drudgery and opened up large swaths of working people to provide labor for the next wave of innovation. There's no need innovation ever ends.
This scaling has always worked, from societies of a few people to countries with a billion people. And there's no shortage of work still to be done.
Ah yes thank god we have more paper pushers in hospitals than doctors. Otherwise who would push the paper?
It's the modern equivalent of tribespeople throwing rocks at the moon.
A good place to learn in life is when you don't understand why something exists or how it works, instead of immediately writing it off with intellectually lazy hatred and dismissiveness, spend some time understanding what came before, what problems the current solution solves, and why things are as they are. You'll be amazed and the nuance and insights generations of clever people solving problems have passed on for situations you currently don't see or understand.
You'll end up happier and have a better understanding of the world.
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jo...
And a large amount of people believing a thing are not the same thing as truth, as evidenced by countless mass misconceptions from the trivial to the insane.
The problem with ideas like this, just like any number of wild ideas, is that they're easier to manufacture than accurate explanations, so there's more of them, and people with itchy brains love to latch onto them, but they pass by over and over without people actually realizing they're all the same nonsense - wishful simple explanations for complex phenomena.
And then people regurgitate it over and over on the internet because it sounds nice to them, but they cannot be bothered to see what follow-up actual scholars did to debunk it.
For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources...
But that has happened exactly zero times. And will happen zero times more. Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense?
I believe reality.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067
Awesome to see a person in real life who thinks all markets are perfectly competitive and that there’s no such thing as anticompetitive behavior or fixed costs.
Awesome to see a person in real life given the chance to jump on a land mine just do it full heartedly :)
This is precisely why I asked "Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense?".
And you jumped right in on cue.
None of your excuses stop thousands of companies from starting and succeeding every year. Yet none have removed the bullshit jobs claimed, making them even better, more efficient companies.
So your bogeymen are pulled out by you to justify a worldview mismatched from reality to sustain the belief (discredited as I pointed out above by ample academic empirical research) that so many jobs are bullshit, despite such easy evidence to the contrary, and, like all conspiracy Illuminati beliefs, self contradictory with even the evidence that companies start all the time.
Congrats.
It's easy to start a company - there are literally millions of them in the US, with thousands starting weekly. Nearly all have fixed costs, face the same marketplaces, and yet every year 100's of them get so big they float public IPOs. Most of the Forbes 400 richest people are first gen company founders, facing all your bogeymen that, I guess by your logic, would make it impossible to make successful companies.
So why are none of them smart enough to remove all these bullshit jobs and become even more efficient? Maybe because they are all actually smart enough to realize where the actual bullshit is in these claims.
The reason I expect employment to eventually be much less than 50% is automation not population growth. In the past when one industry gets automated people move to another industry, but I don't see how that happens when/if we have human level AI.
But if we make it to a sci-fi future where robofarms produce foods with little involvement, robotrucks transport goods with little human involvement, housing is built by mobile 3D-printer-bots, using materials mined by robots, etc... it's easy to see where the basics could be so easily provided that it would seem (to me) morally repugnant not to provide them to everyone.
I don't believe we've reached a point where UBI makes sense, but it's interesting to me that even if we were in this sci-fi everything-is-plentiful-and-automated future, some folks still think only the people that happened to be born at the right time and into the right circumstances to own and/or operate these robots should reap the rewards. The unlucky who didn't happen to own shares of RoboInc or land one of the scarce jobs ought to subsist as a member of a wretched underclass?
Whilst I agree, the definition of basics keeps expanding in scope. Once it was food and water, then it was nutritious food and clean water, then we tack on shelter and medical care and electricity and internet and education and clothing and transport. So this point where we can easily provide the basics to everyone seems somewhat mythical. Our poorest people live in comparative luxury compared to the people of 500 years ago but we still call it poverty.
Where most of us disagree is on what should be done about it, and whether the problem is severe enough to warrant government action at all.
If more people are homeless when the economy is bad... fix the economy. If more people are jobless when the economy is bad fix the economy.
Saying "people are homeless, we have to fix homelessness" does not have a logical follow on that the way to fix it is to make everyone poor. It doesn't even follow that throwing money at the homeless would fix homelessness, especially when other prerequisites to having a home still fail to be met (like the ability to care for a home, or the self-control not to spend the money on things other than housing).
That doesn't mean don't try, but we need evidence and data to recommend policies not idealized fantasies of UBI.
Just like we don't let people who come to the Emergency Room die because they can't pay, we, as a society, can take care of the few people who, for reasons like mental health, or physical ailment, can't work.
Not all of them of course - we have social systems. But those are far from a silver bullet.
currently those that can't find work (even if they are capable) are getting social welfare.
all UBI is doing is that this welfare is given to everyone unconditionally. so the benefit does not go to those that can't find work but also to those that do find work. who then have the freedom to take breaks (when they have kids for example) because they are covered by UBI. and at the same time free up space for someone else who wants to work but can't find work.
This also has the benefit being true. The first version is jut false. Life doesn't require work. Life requires resources or the money to buy them. A lot of people are born with those resources or the money to buy them, and therefore don't need to work.
IMO, expecting something for nothing is somewhat immoral (except in cases where you don't have anything to give for reasons such as disability, age, and so on), but spending productive years clipping coupons or collecting dividends without contributing to society is pretty close to the root of all evil.
You didn't actually disprove that life requires work. Quite the opposite. You instead seem to be saying that society is structured in such a way that some people can live off the fruits of the labor of others. No one has access to any resources without someone having done work to create/acquire those resources.
> IMO, expecting something for nothing is somewhat immoral
I can definitely agree on this, though. I am generally against the notion of "positive rights". I have yet to see a good argument for why any should exist universally. I do believe in what I think is a related concept of responsibilities. Parents, for instance, are responsible for the well-being of their own children. We can argue that society is responsible for its own poor and needy as well, but that is not the same as saying those people have a particular right to anything or that society can best fulfill its responsibilities through government programs like wealth redistribution or UBI.
That's exactly what it means, though...
No. I don't think so. As an example: A starving person does not have an inherent right to food. On the other hand, if someone has enough to feed his own self, family and then some, one can argue he has a responsibility to assist others who do not have enough.
I do not see one to be the same as the other. Positive rights force other people to give you something. Responsibilities, on the other hand, direct you to give to others. Giving is not the same as taking.
Responsibilities are also hierarchical and some take precedence over others, and it is up to the person's discretion to decide how and when to fulfill them. Rights, on the other hand, are generally not seen as hierarchical but all-or-nothing. From https://www.unfpa.org/resources/human-rights-principles: "Consequently, all human rights have equal status, and cannot be positioned in a hierarchical order. Denial of one right invariably impedes enjoyment of other rights. Thus, the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living cannot be compromised at the expense of other rights, such as the right to health or the right to education."
I can say I probably agree with nothing from the above link, but it at least provides evidence that people do not view positive rights as either hierarchical or at the discretion of the giver.
I lastly think it can't be undervalued that giving viewed as a responsibility is more likely to inspire gratitude in the receiver, whereas taking viewed as a right tends to inculcate a demanding and ungrateful spirit in the taker.
What kind of psychotic reasoning is this? Of course people have an inherent right to food.
I'm not a fan of positive rights either - when it comes to code (I avoid GPL stuff whenever possible). But we aren't all on this planet together so we can deny others food, that's just crazy.
You surely don't have a right to food. You go out and get it yourself! I, on the other hand, have a moral responsibility to share my extra food with those who lack. I base my morality on my belief in God and what he expects of me. I am curious what you base your morality off of.
> But we aren't all on this planet together so we can deny others food
Speaking of psychotic, How did "I have a responsibility for the poor and needy" get converted in your head to "I am on this planet so I can deny food to others"?
People absolutely have a right to food. A positive right, no less, that can't be denied.
People used to get it from "the commons" - since we've enclosed them all to shift to our current modes of...well, everything, we have to replace what people would have gotten from the commons previously and provide it free of charge, as a right to things on this earth that people would have had.
Like food. Currently what we do is burn the excess to keep the prices up. We've long since been able to make the food free; we don't and it is immoral (like a good number of our social constructs, imo).
No, no religion on my end. I just think it's obvious people have a right to food, like they have a right to clean air, water and shelter.
I am definitely not surprised. Atheists seem to be the loudest about proclaiming positive rights. And, yet, it is within atheist governments where people are least likely to experience these "rights", or even the right to life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism
That is no accident.
> I just think it's obvious people have a right to food, like they have a right to clean air, water and shelter.
That's neat. I can't help but notice you declined to justify this belief. And that's part of the problem. Secular humanism has no foundation. Instead, it relies on the foundations Christianity built. As that erodes, so too will human flourishing in general!
What’s not possible in ungoverned society is gathering more resources than you can personally protect.
I don't know that that is true or really what it's supposed to mean, so I'm going to challenge it.
> It only gains its legitimacy when it’s preferable to an ungoverned society and other achievable alternatives.
I have a feeling there's a lot of suppositions or beliefs one must have prior to making statements like these that I don't share.
> it’s rather trivial to build yourself a decent shelter and gather food (if you’re able-bodied).
Is it? I've watched a few episodes of "Alone" on Netflix and it sure doesn't look easy to me. Some seasons seem to devolve into "fattest man wins" because he starves last.
> What’s not possible in ungoverned society is gathering more resources than you can personally protect.
Why is that true? Could I not ask others to help me protect these resources? I don't need a government to do that.
Do you agree that you can choose to not follow the law? Would you also agree that if enough people chose to not follow the law, government would cease to exist?
> Is it? I've watched a few episodes of "Alone" on Netflix and it sure doesn't look easy to me. Some seasons seem to devolve into "fattest man wins" because he starves last.
Natural law doesn't really preclude you from cooperating, unlike reality shows. Also, in the natural world you generally migrate to places where resources are not scarce.
> Why is that true? Could I not ask others to help me protect these resources? I don't need a government to do that.
Why would they protect these resources rather than take them? Perhaps if you knew them personally and rewarded them generously, they'd do it, but then I'd say you're personally involved in protecting them. That doesn't scale to the extremes we have right now. There are no billionaire equivalents without government violence.
Not only can you do not follow a law, but people in power do it successfully today. Immigration law is the obvious example. Those in power flout the law so blatantly that the law might as well not exist. Deportation virtually doesn't happen anymore. When there are no consequences for disobeying a law, it is the same as if the law didn't exist.
> Would you also agree that if enough people chose to not follow the law, government would cease to exist?
I think it might be better to word this as "enough people choose to rebel against their government." When that happens, there is usually some fighting that goes on and the government either wins or gets replaced. There is never a point with no government, however. The reason for this is because just about every government, no matter how tyrannical, is still preferable to anarchy.
> Natural law doesn't really preclude you from cooperating, unlike reality shows
If you think it's that much easier to feed yourself as a group via hunting and gathering, then I don't know what else to say: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/hunter-gat...
> Why would they protect these resources rather than take them?
Probably for cooperative reasons! It doesn't matter, though. These are hypothetical situations that I don't think there is much value in considering. I'm totally in the "anarchy is so bad I'd prefer tyranny to it" camp.
>>> "You're gonna want something that other people make or do or do to you. If they're not your parents or lovers or partners, you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want. Otherwise, why would they give it to you ? Making something others want is work."
With respect to my presumption; yes, I'm responding to the status quo, my point may not be universally true but it also is in no way hypothetical.
Societies institute those practices. Societies can decide to change them.
Note that this precise wording is likely to be used both by people who insist that you have no right to someone else's profits and by people who insist that you have no right to profit without working.
The argument is that civilization and property rights robbed individuals of a natural inheritance; a claim to richness of the natural world, an ability to sustain oneself without entering a patronage relationship.
It does not engage with whether anybody needs to make any effort for survival.
The authors argue that UBI is a way to compensate for this loss of rights.
There was no such magical right. You have more right to land than animals, or worms, or the soil itself? When someone uses the words 'natural' or 'fair' or 'just' it is to invoke some emotional response, but generally has zero solid justification free from contradiction and conflicts.
Mankind made up the concept of 'natural rights' which feels good, but does not scale to populations of billions, limited actual resources, etc. Me being born does not give me rights to anything other than that which society has agreed to. If society has agreed that I work to provide my own way, so be it - it's the price I pay for the benefits of society.
You were born with zero, you actually have zero. Claiming rights to 'natural things' (which, by the same argument, actually were someone else's before you laid claim to them) is simply asking for the value of others to be handed to you for free.
By following social order, populations trade natural rights for the rights of their society. Collectively, the population can choose to stop doing that if they think they’re on the wrong end of the bargain. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be that they’re worse off, but that other parties receive much more of the surplus. This is how deals work in business and it’s the same thing here.
Beating the state of the world under natural law is the lower bound for a legitimate government, and as automation increases, a capitalist system without UBI starts to lose to natural law and lose it’s legitimacy.
Governments don't have a monopoly on violence. There's plenty of that without governments, even in civilized places. Governments help lower the incidence of violence by banding the people together against as much of the violence that not having a government allows.
And under your form of 'natural law', there is no law except that which you can take. You have no rights, only force.
I prefer governments and civilization.
Yes they do. Any violence not conducted or sanctioned by the government is illegal and is theoretically punished. When you say there exists violence with no government, you’re agreeing with me.
How about the people who have no home. Do they prefer governments and civilization? Would they not be better off if they could take your things?
Why do you assume that in order for a government to be legitimate, it must only satisfy you? I don’t really care about you or me or any one person. The question is whether the order we operate under is legitimate. In order for it to be legitimate, it must, at the very least, beat disorder for most people.
Would they be better off if idiots could beat them without fear of police?
If they don't prefer civilization, why do they go where civilization exists? Why don't they wander off into some deep national forest land and build their own place?
Because they prefer civilization.
>Why do you assume
Why do you put assumptions in my writing that are not there? Need a strawman?
> In order for it to be legitimate, it must, at the very least, beat disorder for most people.
It does by the simple proof that most people don't just wander out of civilization and create chaos in some wasteland. In fact, only a tiny, tiny minority of people actually do that, so it must be working pretty well for nearly all people.
There’s really nowhere in the lower 48 that fits this description at this point. I’m currently living in MT, and there are plenty of people trying to make this work with trailers, tents, etc. They all get kicked out eventually and often their belongings get taken. If they were growing food, they lose access to it.
> Why do you put assumptions in my writing that are not there? Need a strawman?
You said “I prefer civilization”, implying it’s relevant to the conversation. If it’s not relevant, why say it?
> It does by the simple proof that most people don't just wander out of civilization
People are constantly trying to do this. They can’t without being disrupted by government forces. It’s possible there’s somewhere in the world where you could make a life for yourself without having police called on you, but it’s not easy to find, and the reason it’s uninhabited is probably because it lacks food, habitable weather etc.
I did write that. Why did you then reply with "Why do you assume that in order for a government to be legitimate, it must only satisfy you? " which is not what I wrote? You needed a strawman.
If you want to read into what I actually wrote things you want me to have written, why bother any discussion? Just argue with yourself.
>There’s really nowhere in the lower 48 that fits this description at this point.
Nonsense. If they're going some place with a trailer, they are not remote at all. There's places in the Pahsimeroi area (near Salmon ID) where I've camped often a month at a time over the past 50 years (and my father did this since the 1960s) where you can go a month and not see a soul. In ALL the years I've done this, I've not one ran into a Ranger or law enforcement person.
1/10th of all the area of the US is BLM land, and lots of it is so remote that rangers NEVER go there. 240+ million acres. Lots of it so remote humans so rarely go there.
I have a lot of relatives in the MT and ID regions, so I get that a lot of people out there believe they want yo do this, but I've yet to meet one that will do it completely.
The problem with the people that want to live in a trailer (i.e., near civilization) or live in a tent (not really tenable long term) is they stay close to civilization, so they can access the fruits of civilization. If someone really wanted to be out for good, there's plenty of crazy remote area you can wander into.
And, if someone really wanted to be remote from society, there's plenty of Canada you can simply wander into, no problem (done that too).
Every so often someone comes out of the woods after 20-30 years remote and tells the story. So it's certainly doable. Most people want to think they're remote yet have the ability to access fruits of civilization, like medicine, food, gadgets. So again, they actually prefer civilization, or they could move out.
>People are constantly trying to do this.
Yes, out of 330,000,000 Americans, perhaps 1 in 10,000 do it. As I said - most people prefer civilization.
>They can’t without being disrupted by government forces.
Except for the plenty of people whose story gets reported rarely who actually did it, then gave up.
Another angle is: plenty of people own enough land out west to simply go into the center of their property and never return to civilization. How many do it? Pretty much none.
Because nearly all people prefer civilization.
When you write "People are constantly trying to do this" - what fraction do you think this is?
1/1000? 1/100,000?
It's so tiny that as I wrote: the vast majority of people prefer civilization, and those that do try what you write routinely return to civilization when they get sick, break an arm, face their first hard winter, or get old.
So - what fraction of people do you claim would prefer to live withdrawn from civilization?
> So - what fraction of people do you claim would prefer to live withdrawn from civilization?
I think there are a fair number of people that would be happy to start a new civilization (using civilization loosely here - a commune, whatever). Once this gets big enough, it's shut down by the government, particularly if members don't operate within US law.
There are plenty of things that you'd want to do to survive (clearing trees to farm, etc) that are illegal and would eventually land you in prison, even if you can get away with it for a month at a time. You're taking a very tight definition of being alone in nature, but there are other options that are not available to you including starting your own social order that are preferable to anyone who can't afford food and shelter.
This is probably getting too complicated to discuss over a text-based forum, and we also seem to be reiterating about 400 years of philosophy.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
To refuse the social contract is to accept natural law (law without an organized government with a monopoly on violence). If too many people decide the social contract is not in their favor, they will do this by noncooperation or overthrowing the government. Under natural law, people are not prevented from building shelter, freely gathering food, etc. This is why people believe it is unjust and illegitimate to hold property rights above basic needs. Property (or at least more property than you can personally protect) is essentially a construction of the government, and freedom to gather and grow food is included in natural law. People who are deprived of important natural freedoms are likely to refuse the contract.
No, the "govt has a monopoly on violence" is repeated by the same people that don't read the entirety of links they post, and who use the word "literally" when it is not literally.
https://www.google.com/search?q=definition+of+government
The word "violence" appears in zero actual definitions of government among the first 200 on google (at which point I stopped searching).
Weber's popular phrase has been vastly superseded by political philosophy in the century following his phrase. Read more.
Oh, you're one of those people. Rather than giving a substantive response, you're going to dismiss me because I used the word "literally" in a way not to your liking, despite the fact that the usage of "literally" to mean "figuratively" has been common in English idiomatic practice since at least the 1700s.
And as far as the monopoly on violence goes, by all means, if you're going to go through the effort to condescend to me, enlighten me as well.
Yes, I am aware of the history of literally. I am also aware that when you want to have a "substantive" response, then using hyperbole and claiming things have a definition that simply is not true is no way to have such responses.
If you read your link, including criticism, and realized that the phrase you hang your hat on is not at all where the field that coined it has evolved to over the past 100 years, you'd understand why arguing for antiquated ideas doesn't hold up well.
I find when someone clearly does not care to absorb new facts, and they jump to catch phrases and hyperbole, they don't care to learn, and often taunting them gets them mad enough to learn something, when simply presenting the ideas will not suffice.
You fall into that camp. If you want to present Weber's phrase as "literally the definition" of anything, spend some time reading criticisms and Weber's ideas and the evolution of mankind's thought on the topic.
You’re absolutely avoiding the substance of the argument using the semantics of what the guy said, instead of addressing the point that the government decides who can and cannot commit violence and who is and is not subject to violence.
Peace. That's what poor people stop giving once they feel too poor compared to non-poor. No, this is not a value statement, but an objective observation about human nature. I do not expect anyone to like it (I do not like it), but not accepting it as a fact is... delusional might be a proper word?
After you accept that it is good for you to keep poor not too poor, you likely start wondering how to be efficient about keeping the poor not too poor, and afger that you end up somewhere very close to UBI.
Indeed. But I think the point of the article is that in addition to that, the actions of people have removed some of the options you would have otherwise had to acquire things. Or even more specifically, some valuable things have (for all practical purposes) a finite supply, and the amount of those things that gets distributed to you is not entirely (and in some cases not at all) dependent on your actions.
The problem of universal basic income strategies is that they only work when the earth is far below its human population carrying capacity for the current technology level.
If we were at carrying capacity the idea would be ludicrous because you not working would result in one of us starving to death.
Pre-civilization there was a very strict limit on human populations based on the natural resources they could extract via labor. Anybody who didn't work starved in short order.
Universal basic income is basically inventing a new right to tax other people for your sustenance (much like feudal aristocrats) in times when we have food surpluses.
That doesn't make sense to me.
You seem to think that if we hit carrying capacity, that means everyone is working full time to sustain that? Why?
Let's say all the farms in the world could sustain 100 billion people. Can't we run those farms with only 1 billion people? Why would non-workers cause starvation?
Why should the non-workers steal the surplus value created by those who work via taxation? Or is it only theft when filthy business owners do it via contractual agreements to trade labor for wages?
But I don't think either one of those is theft. I don't think the article was calling anything like that that theft either. It was complaining about how land ownership works.
You would starve because at carrying capacity nearly all of your income would go to food. There wouldn't be any slack.
Admittedly, you'd have to be one of the 'farmers' to have a non-marginal effect on food production.
Why would 1% of the population that creates all the food allow you to have 'free' stuff if them working 1% less meant millions of people would die? They could make you do anything.
A reasonable operation would have enough workers to cover sick days and the fact that people don't put in 100% every day. If they start running low on labor, they will hire more people.
And those nightmares of food supply shrinking by 1% are going to be there whether or not you have UBI. Like, I agree that we shouldn't get close to the planet's carrying capacity! That's not the subject at hand.
You are saying we can't have UBI because UBI is unsustainable. But our current system isn't sustainable either, and actually is putting us deeper into destruction year after year as we come up with new ways to extract more from the planet (and faster) and further pollute the planet.
If our current economic system was gradually pushing our technological level towards sustainability, then push on! But all evidence points to the opposite.
The haber process made ammonium from the atmospheric and made fertilizer, and allowed WW1 to have all it's explosives and shells.
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-soaring-fertilizer-prices-mill...
This is where it feels like your argument falls apart to me.
Suppose in 200 years the Earth is able to support a population of 10B humans, and has 10B humans occupying the earth. Suppose the labor to support those 10B humans is nearly entirely automated, such that we only need 100M people to work to reach the carrying capacity of earth.
You have an underlying assumption that each person's labor increases the carrying capacity of the overall population. That we're limited by the total production capacity of the human race, rather than the carrying capacity of the earth. And that was true in the past, but is less true in the present, and may become wildly disconnected in the future.
Labor is a product of civilization. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle was much less labor intensive than the agrarian lifestyle that followed. Instead of doing the hard work of making the land produce more than it naturally did, hunter-gatherers harvested whatever was naturally available.
In a sense, a hunter-gatherer tribe was like a pre-industrial army. Its size was primarily limited by the amount of food it could steal from the surrounding lands.
No, you shouldn't. The space station should have a plan to provide air to all its residents even if some portion of the people can't/won't work. Just like how our society should work even if some portion of the people can't/won't work. You'll never be able to have everyone working. Some people just aren't capable.
Our systems need to be designed with that in mind. And that's exactly what a UBI does. Redistributes a portion of the wealth that all of society creates back to everyone so that those who can't work won't die.
This is silly. First of all, only wealth can be created or destroyed, not poverty, which is the absence of wealth. My ape ancestor swinging from a tree without easy access to food, clothing, shelter or medicine is poorer than I am, full stop.
Second of all, there has never been a paradise where resources are communally owned without clear limitations on the use and distribution of those resources, usually at the behest of corrupt, tyrannical or murderous leaders.
Third of all, the existence of a monetary cost or private property is moot when it comes to defining ownership. An eagle doesn't use money or property laws to own his nest, but it's not like any other eagle can use it without cost.
Edit: To elaborate, "civilization" the way I see it has simply put the guardrails of due process around these things. We're still nakedly competing with each other, and in-groups are often bent on the destruction of out-groups. We just have laws and courts to make sure things don't get too far out of hand. It's peaceful coexistence not mass cooperation.
This is plain false. Your ape ancestor was born with free access to trees, fruits etc. Take away that and you created poverty.
> there has never been a paradise where resources are communally owned
Wrong again. The ape is a good example.
EDIT: Added /s in case it wasn't obvious...
Property rights, money, and rent are a strictly superior solution, especially among billions of apes.
Defending a territory with your life might be stressful and I never claimed it's good life but it something any animal can do without having to go against some other animal that inherited vast land from their ancestor.
TFA is pretty clear and yes some people here are trying very hard not to see the point.
“Things are better for me than they were before humankind literally existed” is such a hilariously meaningless thing to say. Why not go back further? Things are better now than they were before the earth’s surface cooled and formed a crust.
It would be utterly meaningless cruft to point out that things are better for humans than they were before the big bang.
The article wasn't arguing that a paradise of communal resource sharing with out limitations has ever existed. It was arguing that property wasn't the limitation and that people had access to the basics they needed to survive. And there are many, many examples of societies that existed where resources were communally shared and every one had access to the things they needed. Many of which involved various methods of communal decision making as well.
This idea that humanity's state of nature is barbarous, brutal competition is an a historical myth that has been used to justify some of the worst abuses of the powerful.
right up until their neighbors waltzed over and took it from them. Talk about rose colored glasses!
My point isn't that the past was some rose colored time. Only that false assumptions about human nature are frequently used justify deeply harmful policies and institutions. And that many people speak about how humans behaved in "that past" with very little actual anthropological or historical knowledge.
It is, in fact, much safer to be alive today than any other point in history. And a much lower chance of dying from violence due to other humans.
In fact there's a whole book about this if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...
This is an ahistorical understanding, that misinterprets economics, history, and sociology.
Or, you couldn't do anything to access certain land, because the people who controlled it thought you said shibboleth the wrong way and would kill you if you tried to use that land.
Yeah, the "natural way" of things was that you and your tribe fought off and killed competing tribes trying to access your resources. This isn't particularly desirable, which is why monopolization of violence by larger entities was established.
What are you even arguing against? The post isn't anti-government, and it's not advocating we go back to those times.
Most contemporary evidence on hunter gatherer societies indicates the opposite: it was highly violent with intense competition between groups.
No, that's an enormous strawman. It's saying one particular thing was better.
I reject the Hobbesian premise that other social forms should be dismissed as nasty, brutish, and short, and it's not for lack of familiarity with the anthropology of prehistorical conflict.
[citation needed]
You really think that contemporary Pygmies of the Congo, the uncontacted people of the Amazon, the 19th century Australian Aborigines, Cheyenne, Inuit, and Shawnee, along with the prehistoric of Central Europe and East Asia, are culturally indistinguishable beyond silly hats?
This is laughable.
Of course they have different languages, religious practices, etc. But that's not particularly important relative to the point I'm making: none of the societies you listed were examples of the idyllic noble-savage kind of society that popular culture tends to portray hunter gatherers to be.
Literally no one is making that point. What people (or at least I am) saying is believing all hunter gatherer societies are dominated strong man violence is pure fantasy that is informed by they’re own biases and wishes rather than actual data.
I disagree. It's stressful and dangerous, to be sure, but monopolization of violence by larger entities is fundamentally totalitarian. If I'm outnumbered and outfought by you, I have other strategic options. Under a state, merely expressing opposition to the way things are can be a criminal offense.
What humans created (to varying degrees, of course) is PROSPERITY, which is a surprising and remarkable achievement, and seems unique to humans.
I'm open to new/creative ideas for how to build a society that guarantees everyone a "fair" shot at acquiring more abundance for themselves, if that's what they want. I'm sure there are better arguments for UBI, and it's unfortunate this terribly flawed one is getting so much attention.
All land / resources were staked out by small tribes of humans who might kill you for using it?
Small tribes of humans defending hunting/foraging grounds is a state of pre-civilization. Life required work then too, and things were worse. His premise is that things used to be better and we've made it worse. Hard disagree.
Do you think the risk of death from other tribes is inextricably tied to community-owned land?
As far as UBI is concerned, I'm just sceptical that it will transform the system. More likely it will be just absorbed by the system, e.g. my rent will just get more expensive and I will not actually be able to work less. Not saying I think it can never work, but I am not sure.
I share your worries, it does seem like it will have to be in some way tied to cost-of-living. Done right, where you can actually have the honest threat of being able to quit your job without worries, I think it would give a lot of leverage to workers.
Poverty is the default state. It's there by default. Do nothing, have nothing. Do nothing as a hunter/gather, you're poor relative to your peers and you die.
Whatever cult UBI arises from is attempting to ameliorate the default by giving people something for nothing. Fine. That's honest.
So people claiming all the land in the world is a problem.
UBI in this form is not "something for nothing". It's trading control of land for a share of that land's bounty.
In any case, it's a lot easier to seem industrious if you start out with a huge pile of cash than without. If you park it all in t-bills and live within the coupon income you won't earn any prizes but you won't suffer any real economic anxiety or accusations of impropriety either.
Regardless, the OP was not necessarily talking about the generational wealthy, they quite literally said the "idle rich". And there will always be a fair number of those folks, regardless of whether it was multi-generational or not.
You have to do a lot of work to extract food from the land, which is in the point. If there was no economy, just you and a fertile wilderness, you'd need to work your ass off to survive. But more likely you'd die from eating a poisonous berry, starve, contract a fatal illness, or get eaten by a predator.
I grew up in the Kimberley region of Western Australia alongside many people who still lived as traditional hunter gathers, in the 1980s I met and spoke with the Pintupi Nine (who had had no prior contact with "modern western culture") as I have some minor grasp of some western desert languages.
Regarding:
> If there was no economy, just you and a fertile wilderness, you'd need to work your ass off to survive.
Normally, Aboriginal groups were easily able to find enough food for their entire clan in three or four hours of hunting and gathering each day.
If you're in a fertile wilderness that you can read like a book and are familiar with then you need to go shopping for a few hours a day.
I have no idea where you got your "work your arse off" notion from - can you cite a source?
I'll concede that many people without a clue would spend a great deal of time thrashing about ineffectively wasting time and energy and then dying .. but we're talking about multi generational hunter gathers on the land they have occupied and shaped through land and plant management over 50+ thousand years.
Curious, what is the minimum requirement for UBI? A pulse?
A tax, but where the tax money goes directly to everyone instead of being allocated by a government.
Secondly, if a government isn't both confiscating and redistributing the money, who are the group of robbers that you would designate doing this instead? UBI requires authoritarianism.
Please see the Alaska example. Alaska isn't authoritarian.
> it's completely authoritarian because there's nothing voluntary about it
Yeah okay. It's exactly as authoritarian as every other tax. I thought you were using normal person language; I'm not going to argue semantics.
On the flip side, I wonder how much can be taxed? Is there a maximum? Currently, I work for the government through June.
Maybe I'm conflating UBI with increased taxes. The money has to come from somewhere, right? I'm in Southern California, where we enjoy some of the highest taxes and most expensive property in the world, so I'm a bit sensitive.
Also, he seems to correlate breathing air to being fed, which is wrong. There are plenty of places to get food for free, stuff that is about to expire gets donated. Just reach out to your local government or community college. It's a lot easier than hunting for it.
Last thing, here in California, about half the state is federal or state parkland and wilderness... The state itself blocks development and adds so much red tape to make housing much more expensive.
Yes, the part about acquiring funds is the same as what we already do.
UBI is an additional way for funds to be distributed.
> On the flip side, I wonder how much can be taxed? Is there a maximum? Currently, I work for the government through June.
That depends so much on the details of the system.
People on the lower end will gain more UBI than taxes increase. People on the upper end will get less UBI than taxes increase. The tipping point could be anywhere in a large range.
One version of UBI is simply a system where your income tax starts at a negative amount of dollars.
I don't have to imagine anything because I live in area engulfed by smog every winter. I literally have to pay to breathe fresh air (from a filter). What's worse the ones responsible for this just want to not have to suffer the cold.
It sucks, it truly does.
> but it's a common occurrence to tell people going hungry that they should just get a job to buy food.
Unrelated: how often do people actually go hungry in the US? I thought homelessness is a much more immediate problem when you're out of money.
Since the end of WW2, we've torn down at least a million SROs* in the US and not really replaced them with anything comparable. In their absdnce, people have turned to living in RVs, the Tiny House movement has been born and there are too many chronic homeless, many of whom eventually end up in California which seems to take the heat for the failed policies of an entire nation.
The Tiny House movement began as an idea for how to live with less and when it ran up against the fact that it's not legal to build a house that small, rather than fight city hall, they slapped wheels on them as a hack to get around the rules.
The reality is that the US has made it illegal to build a lot of the housing that we once had in abundance and which worked well: small residential spaces in walkable, mixed use neighborhoods where life without car ownership was quite feasible and even the norm.
Cars have only been in vogue for around a hundred years. In that short time, we've whored out our urban planning processes to the worship of the car and we tell anyone for whom that doesn't work for any reason to quit their bitching and stop bothering people. If you can't drive for any reason, you are a second class citizen and how dare you get all uppity and act like you should have some reasonable quality of life without needing to either be able to drive or so rich you can hire a chauffeur to do it for you.
UBI won't fix our problems anymore than student loans fixed our problems. Student loans didn't level the playing field for the less privileged. It made them slaves to paying their debts, often while unable to get the kind of good job their degree supposedly guaranteed them.
Throwing money at this problem won't fix it. UBI won't buy poor people a basic, decent life. The kinds of goods and services needed to provide such largely do not exist in much of America and it's a fevered pitch uphill battle to try to establish any of them in far too many cases.
UBI won't magically create inexpensive housing where you can reasonably live without a car. Most likely, it just causes landlords to jack up rent and get richer while doing liitle or nothing for the poorest of the poor.
Citation needed here, massively! At least in Australia, university was something only rich kids did back before free education and HECS.
Student loans are problematic because they put the student in lifelong debt, before that state schools were just, state subsidized and students were given scholarships, both of which are much closer to UBI. And even so, they're still better than nothing imo, though free-school-for-all Germany style would be better still.
I share your worry about landlords jacking up prices. In a "free market" you'd expect them to compete on price but obviously that isn't the case since they have all the power and are able to set their prices as high as the renters are able to pay. That's a problem and would affect people on UBI, but could be solved by additional regulation as well, which essentially every UBI supporter is in favor of.
I spent years homeless. I've had a college class in Homelessness and Public Policy. I've written about homelessness for years.
The poorest of the poor sometimes have no ID, thus no means to access a lot of welfare benefits.
I agree that getting benefits to people without an ID is a problem, but it seems very tangential to the UBI vs Status Quo debate.
What policy would you prefer?
I can go foraging / hunting right now and find food, not enough to live off, but in a time before land ownership and mass population explosions, there would have been enough... Which... is the entire point of the article. So are you arguing for the premise of the article then?
In some sense most of our very lives are due to the systems the author believes makes us "a planet full of assholes".
We live in an era where for most people if the government runs out of foreign exchange you end up with a famine.
That's certainly not true in the sense that modern agriculture allows for population densities that foraging/hunting lifestyles couldn't even dream of supporting. Also, tribes were very territorial about land and fought over it frequently. And people of the time were far more susceptible to changes in the environment: https://qr.ae/pr2Ah3https://qr.ae/pr2Ah3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQxEuXM_0eY&t=110s North American tribes were much smaller in number because they could support far less people per square mile. The Cherokee tribe, one of the largest east of the Mississippi, for instance, numbered around 20,000 in 1690, a paltry number compared to the size of the Aztecs or Maya, which numbered in the millions.
From the article: The thing is though, this isn't that far from what we actually did here on Earth centuries ago. Land used to exist without a monetary cost to access it. That was the natural way of things prior to the private property system and monetary system. We created poverty as we know it
this has to be the most disingenuous take on poverty I've ever heard. Most of human existence has been a struggle just to not die of hunger or exposure to the elements. Poverty in western nations today is worlds apart from that.
Also, from the article: We all would have inherited land, or at least free access to it, but in the process of creating civilization as we know it, we became dispossessed of our natural inheritance
Our natural inheritance is subsistence living amidst the constant threat of war, conquest, slavery, and the capricious whims of mother nature and lady fortune. Basically, the strongest survive and might makes right.
Never in our history has anyone ever cornered and monopolized an industry worldwide. Even bringing it down to country level, the exceptions, government formed monopolies. Of which in the last 40 years or so has been incrementally reducing. Nobody is talking about going back to public workers for roads. How about we break every single government monopoly? Problem solved.
What if someone owned all the air. You pay their toll until you build a biosphere and seal in your atmosphere with loads of plants. Then you stop paying and stop receiving their bottles of air.
You start producing your own air and compete against the giant space robot.
https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/wp-content/uploads/...
"In 14 states, a family of four with two unemployed workers can receive unemployment insurance benefits and ACA subsidies equivalent to a job that pays $80,000 a year in wages and health benefits – or more. In another 10 states, a family can receive the equivalent of a $70,000-a-year job. For these families, work may literally not pay."
An example of this is already found in Colorado, where cans of supplemental oxygen can be found in gas stations and grocery stores.
UBI proposals in practice means that an exclusive in-group gets gets the wages the comfortable middle class wages for free and outsource all their work to an out-group that doesn't qualify for UBI. Working conditions for the out-group are slow to improve because they have very little political power. Meanwhile, the in-group stagnates and becomes completely dependent foreign work paid for by free money. This is exactly is what happens in the Gulf oil nations.
Everyone gets it, those that make money pay extra in taxes such that it nets out to $0 beyond a certain income level.
Is that difficult to conceptualize?
If you get money/free stuff from the gov't, perhaps the gov't should require something in return, though not a job in the strict sense. I.e., it wouldn't require 40h per week. Perhaps it's 1 day per week, 1-2h per day, or something even more flexible, but it's not so much that it would prevent you from improving your situation by other means.
Even if it's "picking up trash around your neighborhood", you'd be helping make things better.
Prices will go up. More cash is available in the system. Therefore, the end result will be very little gained but a tremendous amount of money wasted
If UBI is going to exist without solving the problem of rent seeking it might be better to do it as multiple scrips or coupons, each good for only a particular thing (e.g. rent, food stamps, etcetera). This adds a layer of bureaucracy, but at least a person would be guaranteed a minimum amount of funds for each life necessity, instead of having it all taken by one thing.
And I know that this analysis of mine is missing quite a bit. E.g. Good Luck with implementing a UBI over the long-term, and for everyone.
-------------
>"The thing is though, this isn't that far from what we actually did here on Earth centuries ago. Land used to exist without a monetary cost to access it. That was the natural way of things prior to the private property system and monetary system. We created poverty as we know it."
Taxation and indenturing existed before money. Taxes have previously included a certain amount of raw goods or labor. Even in non-agricultural tribal systems I assume people would be expected to contribute to the common weal as best they could.
>"It is a position not to be controverted, that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be, the COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property."
I agree. But anyone who takes a look at squirrels or birds know that they fight over territory. Humans simply "civilized" the fight by attaching it to documents and currency.
>"If it's wrong to choke or starve someone to death unless they do what you want, then it's wrong to withhold air or food from someone unless they do what you want."
This is universally wrong. However taxes, and any other cost to living, is not forcing someone to do what you want. It's forcing someone to do something, anything which generates a cash income. It's an incentive to labor of some sort, though unfortunately, in our current system, it's also an incentive to become a rentier. The rentier is the problem, not the incentive to work. Though yes, no one should starve or be homeless, even if they can't labor.
>"Let's just recognize that Earth actually does belong to all of us, everyone in the present and future, and that those who own pieces of it, and who create things out of it, owe compensation to the rest of us for removing our access to what would otherwise have been common property."
I agree with the sentiment stated by Thomas Paine and this article. I just don't know that a universal UBI will be the way to do it. At least not without solving the rentier problem.
None of that scheming makes any sense until violence has been factored out of the negotiation by a government. None of it is applicable to dealing with a foreign power.
Until you have secured X (the atmosphere in this example) you aren't in a position to talk about how to divide up X. The problem for the citizens of Druidia isn't that they haven't discovered Marxism or UBI. It's that they can't protect their atmosphere from a giant vacuum cleaner.
“These politicians, eh? They’re so stupid! Why don’t they just make essential goods free? After all, we were better off as hunter gatherers! Also Spaceballs lol amirite?”
I say this as someone who supports some aspects of land reform and UBI. These sophomoric snipes at “conservatives” are just echo-chamber noise.
[0] https://gist.github.com/freakboy3742/c699f293c9b5e77ef289
There's enough food to keep everyone well fed. There's enough homes to keep everyone housed and safe. There's enough health care resources to keep most people reasonably healthy.
But we choose that some should starve, some should be homeless, and some should die prematurely because it allows some others to live a slightly more decadent lifestyle. Some, an obscenely lavish lifestyle. And yes, it is a choice we make as a society.
I'm not advocated for communism. We don't need a Gini Coefficient of 1. But maybe we could take some steps in the direction of sharing a bit more rather than continuing to rush in the other direction, and claiming that it's the fault of the poor that they aren't wealthy.
UBI isn't impossible or unreasonable. It just would mean that some folks- and probably a lot of the people on HN given software developer compensation lately- would need to do with a slightly less decadent lifestyle.
What would motivate someone from going to medical school and busting their ass to help and care for lazy bums mooching off the free stuff from the government? They'd just want to stay in their free housing, enjoying the free food and entertainment too...
This utopia won't be possible until we produce self-sustainable machines that can execute all jobs that humans can today.
In all seriousness, it's possible right now in most developed countries to live off of welfare long-term, without working a day in your life.
And yet, most people don't want to do it. You're looked down upon, poor and the lack of a regular occupation basically breeds mental health issues.
I think a lot of people really overestimate the economic motivators, while down-playing the social/internal ones.
What motivates them today, when they could get a fast food job?
UBI isn't supposed to be cushy (with current technology), it's supposed to be minimal food and shelter.
Then again some people don't feel they are doing well unless they see someone else doing worse.
I'm sure there are a few (1:million) saints among us that just selflessly give their all, but why would anyone else take any shit from their boss or customers?
I like fantasies too but really consider it for a bit; most people volunteer at animal shelters to play with the cute puppies and kittens.
The fraction of people who volunteer by default is about 15%; ~20% pursue win-win economic outcomes, a similar portion are risk minimizers, and ~30% prefer a zero or negative-sum outcome as long as they come out on top. The remaining fraction don't adhere to any consistent pattern, whether due to stupidity or selectivity.