Hacker News Reader

Comment by gillesjacobs | Hacker News Reader

Pray tell, what enlightened incorruptible entity would enforce and organise UBI?

What enforcement is needed? Either you opt in to accepting the UBI currency, or you don't. If there's an enforcer involved then you've got government UBI.

As for issuing the tokens, there are a variety of UBI systems that handle that without a centralized authority. CirclesUBI and Idena come to mind. Admittedly some work is needed here, but the technical barriers are not the hard part.

The hard part is establishing the collective political will to build a culture around accepting them, otherwise it's just meaningless numbers.

Why would you even need or want "UBI currency" for UBI? Just give people money.

That sets up a problematic power dynamic. Whoever is doing the giving has power over whenever is doing the receiving.

And you'd want it as an alternative for cases where the other money is questionably legitimate. Like if the people who control its supply have stopped acting in the best interest of the people who use it.

If anything, that's an argument in favor of UBI - it reduces this power by making the giving unconditional. If every citizen is automatically entitled to their equal share, what power dynamic is there, exactly?

If some centralized entity is responsible for disseminating the income, they can threaten to stop, or they can threaten to cut people off.

So I agree, universal solves the problem, but you're not going to get universal from a bureaucracy. You've got to bake it into the design, similar to how backed-by-gold is baked into the design of the money we're currently using. It needs to be legitimate because it's universal, rather than being legitimate because you got it from somebody who has a lot of guns and has promised to behave themselves.

I'm very pro-UBI, I just don't think that saying pretty please to the government is the way to get it.

> backed-by-gold is baked into the design of the money we're currently

Where do you get that idea from? The Federal reserve flatly denies it: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12770.htm

The US came off the gold standard in 1933. I'm pretty sure no country uses it now.

Sure, we took the actual gold out of it--but we've still got bankers creating money by issuing loans, bankers who are restricted in doing so by notions of scarcity which are pretty much arbitrary, and who have no reason to care whether they're helping or hurting the rest of us so long as they turn a profit and don't break the law. It's the same design as we had in 1933.

It's a system that works, more or less, I just think it would work better if it had some alternatives to compete against. Alternatives would give the powerful a reason to care about non-monetary outcomes.

The government is not some random entity, though. If the bureaucrats don't actually follow the laws written for them, they can be fired (through courts if needed). If the legislators threaten to repeal the laws, they can be voted out.

Yeah, there is some selective pressure on the level of individual bureaucrats, but it's like a bee hive: the individual bees are only part of the story.

The whole thing has aggregate behavior, and we're going to be better off if we develop a way to shape that behavior independently of how we deal with individual bureaucrats.

If somebody offers you money that was issued by an organization that has been bombing your neighborhood or poisoning your water you should be able to reject it and still have other options, because to accept it is to contribute to the continued economic power of your enemy such that they can keep harming you. That's independent of whether you're in a position to have the relevant politicians fired.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com