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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.

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Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.

I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.

I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?

The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.

I’m not sure what the solution is.

who will redistribute stuff?

You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.

Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time

This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.

That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.

At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.

Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.

The fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation.

So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.

I don’t think that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and that statement is doing a lot of load-bearing in your argument. You’re going to need to back it up somehow.

> it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power

> taking power away from the capitalist class

An obvious and apparently irresolvable contradiction.

Capitalist power is inherently anarchic and isn't power at all. It's simply order emerging from the anarchy of the market. But the ability to take that power away from them, no matter how you measure it, itself falls into the category of "too much power" with wide margin. And with this amount of power there will be no change of hands that hold it.

You may be confusing some abstract unachievable ideal with the reality of the world we live in.

In reality, being superwealthy absolutely comes with a tremendous amount of power.

It is also pretty much the opposite of anarchic, given effects like regulatory capture and politicians pandering to the desires of the wealthy.

we had this UBI experiment during COVID lockdown and PPP loans, and what happened??

People splurged all government given money on luxury items and unnecessary stuff, or just gambled it way on stock market or betting.

UBI does NOT work in the US and will never work. More sensible approach is what China does: low prices.

Just massively lower prices for basic cost of living items, so that even Uber driver could live normal life

Standard of life for avg uber driver is much higher in us compared with china.

My impression is that China has a pretty high standard of living. They have been extremely successful in reducing poverty over the last few decades. You should see how shiny even some of the third tier cities are.

Shiny bits in some cities do not prove anything. Lots of countries have bits with a high standard of living despite a low national average.

UBI has been tried experimentally around the world many places including the US and did not have that effect "the money people had received was not squandered on frivolous products such as drugs and luxury goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots

Which experiments were successful depends on what your desired outcomes were, but none were as bad a you suggest, I would say many succeeded.

I do not know how COVID support worked in the US, but one of the things you refer to seems to be loans to businesses, which is very different from UBI. Were people given a fixed and guaranteed income stream not linked to earnings during COVID?

I wouldn't use the COVID economy to understand anything except "What happens to an economy during a pandemic?" People had more money, but there was a lot less to spend on for a while. Not to mention the psychological effects of lockdowns, restrictions, or quarantining.

If you follow UBI out a few generations, there will be nobody left to tax, which funds it.

The end result is total system collapse or forcing people to work through total government control, which is where all communist systems end up.

UBI creates a slave class. It's just a dressed up and renamed system that's been tried many times before, and failed.

I'm not sure why every new generation thinks they discovered something new.

You fundamentally misunderstand UBI. it does not stop anyone working, and where it has been tried people continue working because they want more than a minimal income. its not a universal high income, its a universal BASIC inome.

Funnily enough, Asimov tackles this in his short stories. The power goes to...the robots ( AI basically )

All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.

It is still extremely common today, if you look at the demographics along the Atlantic Coast of the US. The richest zip codes always have poor ones nearby.

By the standards of underdeveloped countries today or historical poverty in general, these "poor" people are nonetheless living in outright opulence: their genuine plight is mostly one of social marginalization, that can't really be solved by purely economic means. That's partly the effect of new technology (developed by capitalism) but partly redistribution in action.

All that wealth people are bitchin about is ephemeral, its mostly unrealized gains on stocks that balloned.

People want to overtax Elon, but he doesn't sell his stocks. Its all imaginary numbers propped up by the federal reserve.

Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.

ask yourself why did US not become like Norway, despite having new deal until 1970s?

is there something structural that prevents it from becoming Norway ??

Unwillingness to embrace socialism?

Unwillingness to engage with social policy for fear of reds under the bed (ginned up by cynical self serving robber barons).

US did embrace socialism with New Deal, but went bankrupt in 1970s and had to get rid of the gold standard

It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.

No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.

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