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Comment by sologoub | Hacker News Reader

That argument about UBI may be true ceteris paribus (all else being equal), though even then it may not. The assumption seems to be that all other money flows and incomes remain the same and demand grows while supply remains the same. UBI (there are many proposals/variants) would likely require taxes that will make it basically zero beyond a certain level of income and negative further up (increase in tax on upper brackets). UBI will also incentivize some people to stop working and rely on UBI, so net effects won’t be a uniform increase in buying power. Rents are not uniform geographically and area usually related to how desirable a place is and how much work there is in the areas. With UBI consumers can choose to move away from jobs centers.

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Like I said, this is only the most straightforward problem with UBI. The most damning problem with UBI is that it's still capitalism, i.e. the capitalists will remain in control. As a result, UBI recipients, like the poor in developed countries today, will remain what Karl Marx called a "reserve army of labor." The UBI will always fall short of what is necessary for a healthy or dignified existence. This instrumentalized suffering, just like the permanent unemployed class in the US today, is a crucial component of industrial capitalism. Effectively, under UBI, nothing will fundamentally change.

I do support UBI because it will probably prevent some number of deaths of despair, but capitalists will never let UBI happen for this reason. The reserve army of labor must be trimmed and maintained to prevent a worker uprising, which is the primary function of the opioid crisis.

Sadly, communism worked out even worse. When communists realized that NEP worked too well and peasants started to get out of poverty, they instituted terror to “prune” the population and “remind them why they need” those said communists (a reference to V for Vendetta movie line). Just the best known example, there were also 1920s razkulachivanie and such, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge

Communism != Socialism

Greed, seemingly fundamental human nature, causes corruption and suffering. I don't think we've yet developed a society or tool that is immune from such issues, though competition among providers does seem to help.

Your narration is so nonsensical and unserious that even the link you yourself shared undermines it, and of course it does. Wikipedia is a well-known liberal anti-communist institution, but at least they do some diligence.

Sounds like a recipe for increase in demand for goods/services, coupled with a simultaneous reduction in productivity. Won't this just make the country as a whole poorer?

This redistribution already happens with progressive income tax brackets and tax refunds that don’t depend on amounts paid in. This is US tax code today. Might as well have a better safety net in case things go south.

> simultaneous reduction in productivity

Hasn't productivity been on the rise the past X years? Shouldn't we have a little slack by this point?

And maybe some profit sharing too.

First-order, yes: Redistributive policies don't have the sum of the country's wealth as their primary optimization objective. Arguably, their goal is closer (but not quite) to the sum of national utility, which follows from diminishing marginal utility.

That being said, there are also claimed and real second-order effects of policies whose first-order economic effect is deadweight-loss. The entirety of government fits this description! To use the most trite and least controversial example, confiscating resources to build roads is redistribution from heavier taxpayers to heavier road users (incl downstream beneficiaries), but the second-order effects of a functional transportation are enough that we don't consider it to "make the country as a whole poorer"

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