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Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

Minimum wage is barely (in many cases not even barely) enough to live on. Raising minimum wage is a herculean task that rarely succeeds. Federal minimum wage hasn't been raised in 16 years. But we'll have not only a livable UBI in 20 years, but one that's enough to "retire to a life of leisure"?

Doubt.

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Minimum wage isn't directly comparable, because that's the government setting a rule on what two private parties can agree to. It's not the government but the employer who pays it.

UBI is distributed by the government directly, so it's basically a question of what gets taxed, how much inflation results, and whether that inflation and taxation proves more unpopular than the UBI is popular.

This is silly. To a first approximation, zero percent of the opposition to minimum wage increases comes from a principled stance of "I support taxation, even high taxation, but I am opposed to the government interfering in private labor market contracts"; 100% of it is from "they're taking my money!". There is no reason to expect any less opposition from the much, much larger amount of wealth redistribution which would be required by UBI.

What does minimum wage have to do with taxation? It's not the government paying those wages, it's McDonald's, and the opposition to it comes from people who say it will result in McDonalds closing stores or replacing cashiers with touchscreens rather than paying more for employees; ie, low-value labor simply becoming unemployable rather than getting a pay boost.

There are a lot of counterarguments to a high minimum wage, some even from UBI proponents, but none of them are "they're taking my money" because that doesn't make sense in the context of a minimum wage.

You can frame the opposition to a minimum wage that way, e.g. if you raise the minimum wage then the cost of a Big Mac goes up and you're the one paying it. Or, suppose you're a small business owner who employs three people and you pay them each $20,000, and then after paying them you're left with $50,000/year for your own salary. If you were required to pay them each $30,000 then you'd be left with $20,000 yourself, and that might make you pretty unhappy. More to the point, it might make you close the business and go get a job doing something else, and then those three people lose their jobs instead of getting a raise, which is precisely the argument against a minimum wage.

But that still doesn't apply to a UBI, because a UBI is universal. The person buying the Big Mac or running the small business gets it too, and the breakeven point would be around the average income, so you don't have the problem the minimum wage has where the people paying the cost are often the people who weren't making that much money to begin with.

There's plenty of reasons to doubt, but you could reframe it as "lower pension age to zero".

In optimistic scenarios, if AI can do so much that nobody's even getting paid to make robots, then AI are making robots that also makes the cost of living lower.

In practice, I think that the path from here to there is unstable.

We already have UBI. You’re just not in the club.

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