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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

The default state is that there is land you can use to get your own food.

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.

The default state is 'all the land is being used to make food already'. That is the normal steady state in Europe throughout history. UBI is equivalent to the feudal aristocracy in getting paid based on land without doing any work. Except the aristocracy was expected to risk their lives on occasion.

Are you describing "everyone is a very minor aristocrat" as an inherently bad thing?

I notice none of these worthies are proposing to force the idle rich into some form of national service.

Most generational wealth dissolves pretty quickly unless the heirs are industrious. It's a problem that solves itself naturally.

That's not the point though, is it? The complaint above was that some people are getting paid without doing any work. Justifying this on the basis that 'they'll probably gamble it away' doesn't address the complaint at all.

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.

This may have been true in the past, when people tended to have lots of children. But with families having fewer children, it is probably less likely to be true in the future. Just as a personal example, I have 2 siblings and over 10 cousins. My daughter has 0 siblings and 1 cousin. Those numbers are going to go up by one or two but not much more than that as the window for kids is quickly closing. My family is solidly middle class, but it is entirely possible that that my daughters generation of the family ends up as "trust fund kids" simply due to the lack of dilution between siblings and cousins. Also, it helps that estate planning is significantly more accessible than it used to be.

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.

It's not just trading control. You need to consider that hunters still needed to go out and hunt. Gatherers needed to gather. They built their own shelter, made their clothes, etc.

Curious, what is the minimum requirement for UBI? A pulse?

I think I was unclear. When I said "UBI in this form" I was talking about what the article advocates for modern times. People get to use land for their own purposes, but they have to pay the population.

The sinister euphemism of claiming that productive people have to "pay the population" manifests itself in weird ways, and it's not at all clear what you mean by that.

??? What sounds sinister?

A tax, but where the tax money goes directly to everyone instead of being allocated by a government.

First of all, the most evil institutions that have existed over the last 120 years or so have been doing it in the name of "the people."

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.

The government is doing it. But the government is not making decisions. It's just giving everyone their share.

Please see the Alaska example. Alaska isn't authoritarian.

Sir, the Alaska fund is run by a government corporation governed by government employees and government appointees. The government decides how it's funded. The government decides how the money is spent. It's all government, and it's completely authoritarian because there's nothing voluntary about it.

I'm not sure how I can word this better. There's a difference between paying out the same amount to every person, versus picking specific things to put money into. I'm sure you can figure out what I mean.

> 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.

That sounds like property taxes, which already exist.

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.

> That sounds like property taxes, which already exist.

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.

> The default state is that there is land you can use to get your own food.

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.

But if you try to do this now, there is a pretty decent chance thAt you will wind up in legal trouble because there's no conception of a free wilderness in modern law.

Let's not pretend that this is what UBI advocates want to do or could do. That's a disingenuous argument.

I'm responding only to the content of your previous comment, not commenting on UBI advocacy in general (on which I do not have a strong opinion at present).

Hi,

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.

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