Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

In the idle moments of any day my brainpower eventually leads to these sort of questions that we will have to ask ourselves about the future of societies. (this CS + Philosophy degree I "purchased" has been a very expensive anti-sleep aid...)

The anthropological world has gone through several ages as far as I can see it, from an Agricultural to Industrial to Mechanized (post WWII) to Digital (post 1990). I made up the names, but I'm sure the paradigms are obvious.

I want to make it clear that this "crisis of abundance" is not exactly a new question. Even moving to agrarian living had growing pains. The best example philosophically detailing this, I think, is the work by Thomas Paine called Agrarian Justice. (that's the same Paine as Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Age of Reason)

Agrarian Justice is a short pamphlet that I think everyone should read. It details in simple terms how civilized society is different from those who live off the land (such as some Native Americans of the time). Civilization clearly makes some people much better off, but others in civilization seem to be much worse off, condemned to lives of destitution, pollution, etc.

Land ownership and development is a clear plus, but in agrarian societies people "lose" their natural inheritance of the land because of this ownership, and land taxes should be levied to make up for the loss of a natural inheritance.

In effect Paine advocates for a guaranteed minimum income, way back in 1795. That, to him, restored justice to agrarian society.

Nothing was done in 1795, and little to the same effect is being done today, though ownership has become a lot more pronounced (we are no longer largely farmers after all). Unfortunately, I think society today would think the idea far more radical than those of Paine's generation, not least of which we owe to certain political elements.

A copy of the pamphlet is hosted on - where else - the official US Social Security website. I really do recommend you give it a read, it isn't long!

http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html

(If we want to discuss the pamplet itself in depth, we might want to do so on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5360056)

> In effect Paine advocates for a guaranteed minimum income, way back in 1795. That, to him, restored justice to agrarian society.

Another Marxist philosopher, eh?

Forced contribution backed up by violence of the state doesn't sound like justice to me, and is fundamentally incompatible with the liberty envisioned by America's founding fathers. If only we'd listen to them, we'd all be better off.

Edit: my delivery is either a bit too deadpan, or HN readers have encountered enough would-be libertarians who are completely unaware that Paine is arguably a founding father and Marx wasn't borne until 1818 that my attempt at satire has already been beaten by reality. I'll hope it's the former.

Oh bull.

Failure to pay taxes due is theft from the rest of society. And don't claim any ownership of founding fathers in your ideology - Old Ben Franklin has been sticking it to "all taxation is theft" Libertarians since 1783, in absolute and direct contradiction of your sentiment:

> "The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law.

> "All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."

That second quote is very interesting to read. Do you have the source for it?

http://books.google.com/books?id=45EEAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA171&...

I can't tell if you're serious or not...

Does Thomas Paine himself not qualify as a 'founding father'? "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” --John Adams [1]

Whenever I see arguments rooted in the founder's intent, I always wonder exactly which founding fathers the arguer will choose.

In truth the people who might qualify as 'founding fathers' had a wide variety of political opinions. Perhaps the only unifying trait was that they were able to compromise to get things done.

I'm hoping your comment was purposeful hyperbole...

[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books (via Wikipedia)

I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and say I think your sarcasm matrix is miscalibrated. You need to add a little more bite to the snark to make this batch correct.

I hope you're joking, I really can't tell. In case you're not, Marx wasn't even born until 1818. Marxism as an ideology wasn't really a thing until at least the very late 19th century. Thomas Paine was most definitely not a Marxist philosopher.

I agree. We must take into account, however, that changing zeitgeists often make it more difficult to go it alone; legally, its probably harder to be a subsistence farmer today than it was in 1750. Perhaps you want to grow some corn and sell the rest; but perhaps it is now required that all corn sold meet some minimum standard, requiring a certain fertilizer only sold in 1000-acre doses. This is fine for the agribusinesses that corn farms had become by the time the standards were set, but not so great for the guy who decides to become a small-time farmer 200 years too late.

So I agree that the state mandating your charity is a bad thing, but the yearning for freedom from such must be coupled with an alternative.

Small solar, small-garden farming techniques: we figure these out, and no one will be mad at the computer guys for automating their backyard garden.

Perfectly hit the sweet spot. 9/10.

It's not so much that you're too deadpan, it's just that it's Poe's Law for anything Marx related around here.

Unfortunately, you invoked Poe's Law:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of ~~Fundamentalism~~ Proprietarianism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.

Milton Friedman also advocated a universal minimum income.

The thing is, he advocates a minimum income, not a minimum set of social services. There's a huge difference in the economics between goods or services that are (ideally) competitively purchased on an open market and good and services that are delivered by a monopoly (whether the monopoly is in the market or is government itself) or monopsony (in the case of some govn't welfare programs, which can be thought of as single entities that negotiate pricing for arrays of goods and services).

A hybrid between Milton Friedman-style minimum income and more socialist notions of welfare is something like the US food stamps program, where you have to spend the money on food-related goods, but where you can shop at a larger set of providers and still deliver the benefits of competitive purchasing to the food market.

I think you'd need a combination of both minimum income and minimum services that goes beyond your food stamps example to be successful. If you only have a minimum income, then monopoly/oligopoly providers will raise their prices to absorb the entire minimum income. This is already happening in the form of healthcare prices rising significantly faster than inflation.

You're quite correct about them raising their prices, but then again, healthcare is competitively purchased only the loosest and least meaningful way. There really aren't strong competitive forces emanating from the demand side - it's more like a demand-side oligopoly of buyers setting prices. In healthcare, we are arguably seeing the expected outcome of a lack of meaningful price competition.

The government could take action to enable competitive individual purchasing of care instead of monopsony or group buying. It could provide cash incentives for people who shop around for basic, easy-to-understand care. It could fund patient education for more complex care. And if this model proves successful, it could be expanded to harder-to-understand care gradually and with caution to see how consumers react.

In other words, competition can only work if it's allowed to. Today, food prices are raised for various reasons, but I am not aware of a school of economics that faults this on a demand-side government-funded competitive individual purchasing program (not that you said that either).

> If you only have a minimum income, then monopoly/oligopoly providers will raise their prices to absorb the entire minimum income.

Uncompetitive markets are a different animal. Even if you had the government making the purchasing decisions, non-competing suppliers could still just charge monopoly prices that increase as additional dollars become available. The only real solution to that is to make the market more competitive, e.g. busting up the cartels and adopting policies that inhibit them from forming.

But you're almost onto something. The issue is that when your goal is to increase the number of transactions in a market (e.g. the number of people who can buy a home), increasing the demand by increasing the cash in peoples' pockets is only an indirect method to accomplish that. In order for more people to be able to own a home, there have to actually be more homes. If you give people money then they bid up housing prices, which causes new home construction to be more profitable and so more new homes are constructed. The trouble is that the large bulk of the money doesn't make it to the people constructing new homes, it goes primarily to the sellers of existing homes (who comprise the bulk of the market), and so only a small fraction of the tax dollars expended go toward promoting new home construction and therefore to increasing the number of people who can buy a home. Directly subsidizing supply is a much more effective way to accomplish specific goals like that, e.g. by providing money when a newly constructed home is purchased. Then the subsidy is distributed between the buyers (making the purchase more affordable) and the new home builders (increasing the incentive to build more new homes) and cuts the existing home owners you didn't intend to subsidize out of the subsidy.

This is basic supply side economics. The key is to recognize how this sort of thing has been corrupted into not accomplishing its goals in the past: If the market being subsidized is uncompetitive then the suppliers can fix prices so as to take most or all of the subsidy as profit and cause little or no increase in supply at all. In other words, you should never, ever subsidize a cartel. Subsidies for oil exploration come to mind as a good example of this sort of preposterous stupidity. But again, the solution in those cases is to make the market competitive. Either bust them up or, if you can't (e.g. because OPEC is outside your jurisdiction), promote new competition like alternative energy.

TL;DR: You don't have to have the government supply the services, you just have to have the government make sure the market stays competitive.

The problem being that services are never competitively purchased in current society. Just look at healthcare.

lolo Marx railed against the commodification of labor and the implications of making it a commodity (one of which happened to be how a wage was no longer just a worker's time put into something he could just 'do')

Bertrand Russell is another person who's written on that subject. His question was more or less: if we reach the point where our basic needs can be taken care of by robots, will that mean everyone starts with their basic needs taken care of... or will it instead mean that whoever owns the robots, and claims their labor, will be in a very strong position?

I think our concept of basic needs is highly flawed. The moment some of our basic needs get taken care of, the new ones replace them.

In general any thing given away for free, will always be perceived as worthless. That is how it works!

I disagree. I believe that among the things given for free some would be missed less or more than others, like free water compared to free tv if one happened to live in the sahara. Things we are dependent on for daily subsistance are more basic than the ones we easily get used to their absence.

> The moment some of our basic needs get taken care of, the new ones replace them.

No, the new ones add up to them. The basic needs are still there and it is a priority to take care of them first and before the "new ones".

And what would be wrong with a society that would be able to provide basic sustenance to every citizens AND a free internet/tv/car etc. ?

It depends on whether the people without robots can kill the people who own the robots.

They can't, because the people who own the robots also own a robotic police force.

Two years ago when Mubarak told the Egyptian army to spray protestors with bullets, and the soldiers refused. That's because he didn't have a robotic force. The future is probably going to be horrible.

You think a robotic police force is going to help a dictator? Maybe for a couple of days, until someone with a conscience and a brain realizes that Robocop is running a vulnerable version of Java and suddenly "your" robotic police force is my robotic police force.

There's no reason though that the person who pays for the vulnerability to be exploited, or performs the exploit, can't be a [malevolent] dictator though.

Except that most people are good, especially among hackers. If this wasn't the case the world would already have exploded -- you don't think those drones they fly around with missiles attached to them have exactly zero vulnerabilities, do you?

The most dangerous thing for the future is the opaque systems and "dangerous information" prohibitions that deprive the public of the knowledge necessary to fight the bad guys. Reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/504/

Or you can take natural law thinkers like Grotius - in essence, their thinking derived from religion thus: you are owned by God -> you cannot kill yourself -> in times of hardship (an in extremis condition) you must take what you need in order to live. Very interesting, as he also defined property in terms of his religious beliefs...

I guess what I'm getting at is either you have the people breaking into the grain stores (in Grotius' day, anyway) or you provide some means of subsistence.

You may be aware, but for the edification of others I would point out that these ideas find their roots much earlier than Grotius. For example Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica, "In cases of need all things are common property." [1]

[1] http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3066.htm#article7

In the USA as of 2013, everyone already has their basic needs taken care of--or at least what Bertrand Russel would consider the basic needs, of course we have redefined them since to mean things which in his time would have been considered luxuries.

Here is a more modern argument for a guaranteed basic income. http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-Forum/dp/0...

Paine's 10% tax rate would be welcomed by even the most ardent Tea Partier.

Isn't his tax rate on all wealth, so 10% of the value of your home and possessions too? Or was it only on income?

What you have written looks really interesting... but I am curious as to why you think this is not already in effect? Just thinking about Ireland, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia... the minimum income concept is firmly ingrained in unemployment benefits and means-tested social welfare. It needs a lot more to really restore equality, because equality of opportunity requires investment in education and rules against monopoly and nepotism/cronyism, but they are there too!

As a german who grew up in Eastern Germany i can tell you that the only thing stopping a full base income is influence from american politics. I say full, because we do have a de-facto base income with the unemployment payments labeled "Arbeitslosengeld II". Read up on it. :)

Certainly in the UK there is no base benefit, no right to an amount to support continued life.

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