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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.