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Comment by cladopa | Hacker News Reader

All this simulations and experiments always have the same problem: They simulate giving people free money, but you are not simulating the other side of the coin: extracting the money from other people to pay for it(a.k.a stealing or "redistributing" euphemis)

The "surprising results" are so surprising to me because I talk to people in Germany and most people believe they pay too much taxes, specially young people. The difference is that middle class Germans are actually paying for the system. No free lunch there.

If robots take over human labor, you can always own robots(privately owning distributed means of production) instead of having a central planning system that never worked but interested people are hell bent designing so they benefit.

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> people in Germany and most people believe they pay too much taxes

100% this. The average worker pays too much indeed. Mega-corporations and the super-rich do not pay anymore their share. It is a shame.

I'm not sure about which taxes you're talking about, but employees pay about 50% of the taxes for any of their workers' income. I think this is the same for Germany as a lot of other countries in the EU.

> but employees pay about 50% of the taxes for any of their workers' income

That is wrong. Employers pay a small fraction of taxes per each one of their employees.

I think that there is a big problem with education and the tax system. When people thinks that the "employer part of the salary tax" is 50% of the employee tax we are failing to provide education to our own citizens. And I think that HN readers are more informed that the average person.

But this is by design. Misinformed citizens have a more difficult time realizing how much money big corporations and the rich are stealing.

Sure, go ahead and insult me instead of providing any actual facts.

Now, I've searched for the actual contributions, and indeed the actual income tax is not covered by the employer at all. The only parts of the full levied amount that are shared 50% are: pension, unemployment, health and long-term care insurance, (plus some other things that the employee doesn't have to pay).

So in the end it's about 1/3 (or under that based on tax class) of the total levied amount that gets covered by the employer. (PS. All of this for Germany, cribbed from one of those tax calculator websites)

Well, money is just a coordination tool for tracking who is "owed" what. What people are actually consuming is labor and natural resources.

From that point of view, getting "free money" (which in effect may mean for example getting someone else to deliver food to you without you working) is not much different from all kinds of other rent-seeking behaviors.

This experiment, like all similar UBI proposals, is not serious because indeed they are impossible: it is not possible for the state to fund giving €1,200 a month to every adult "for free".

The scary bit is that this seems not to be immediately obvious to many people.

Central planning targets what is good, but inefficiently. Private enterprise targets what is profitable very efficiently. There's a combination of the two that is a happy medium.

Depends who's doing the owning. Do you own Uber? "You will own nothing and be happy."

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