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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> you live in a place where it's not used as a weapon at all.

The question is whether you'd continue to do what you do if you didn't have to. I love my work - I find it challenging and engaging, I have great colleagues, furiously creative and smart, who also love what they do, but how much of our work is only accounting for overhead? At which point keeping track of all money flowing through the economy becomes the objective of the economy?

Let's think about means-tested financial assistance: seems reasonable to make sure money doesn't go to people who actually don't need it, but we also need to be careful not to invest too much in fraud detection that we spend more on it than we would covering for fraud. Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?

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> The question is whether you'd continue to do what you do if you didn't have to.

Most people wouldn't. People prefer leisure. While I like programming, most of the work I do is tedious. I would rather spend my time riding my mountain bike, working on my Land Rover, or programming a video game.

> Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?

No. The vast majority of people don't just want the bare basics in life. Thinking otherwise is simply naive.

>The question is whether you'd continue to do what you do if you didn't have to. I

It's a dumb question. Would I want to continue to eat, to be warm in the winter, and have the basic tools needed to live? Your question sounds like juvenile fantasy.

>I love my work - I find it challenging and engaging,

My work is a paycheck. I don't have to love it. I don't need it as a lifestyle, or a hobby, or a religion. It's mildly lucrative, long-term, and they seem to get something out of the deal too. If I wanted a family, I've got one at home and those are the people I love.

>Let's think about means-tested financial assistance: seems reasonable to make sure money doesn't go to people who actually don't need it,

Half the people in this thread don't even know what money is. It's been abstracted away beyond their monkey brained ability to understand it's nature. They think billionaires have billions.

>Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?

Never ceases to amaze me that those who grew up comfortably in middle class homes are in such a hurry to go on welfare. "Please, give me the Medicare for everyone". No, I have no great desire to ever be on welfare, and I say in all seriousness that I would prefer to starve to death, slowly and in great pain.

I don't need money for its own sake, but being fungible, it is virtually everything I do need. It is food, it is clothing, it is heat, fuel, tools, household furnishings, shelter, insurance against disaster, security, etc. To hear people talk about "money they don't need" sounds like mental illness. I suspect it actually is.

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