It misses the fact that work is fulfilling for (most) people.
I've heard talk of the government being the employer of last resort, which has its own problems. But just paying people to breath has problems as well.
I've heard talk of the government being the employer of last resort, which has its own problems. But just paying people to breath has problems as well.
I'd just like to avoid having the government pay people to, say, drink and party. I think there does need to be some external social pressure / structure to motivate people. Otherwise, you wind up with the same political problems what current welfare programs have.
The best solution I can think of is that the government hires and trains people to do some form of public service if they can't find anything else they would rather do. Limit it to 20 hours per week. If people are really useless, give them a disability wavier. If not, have them plant free or clean up parks.
I've seen the impact of people living on the dole in Britain. It's not good for them or the society. It just abandoning them to lead a mediocre life.
Your proposal would create a poverty trap in exactly the same way as the dole (in fact this is how the dole currently works in Britain -- you've just described something quite akin to the Workfare program, aka slavery for the wageless). Unconditional basic income is not like this at all. It isn't paying people to be idle: it's paying people no matter how much they earn. Because you can never lose your basic income, you are never disincentivised from working. Thus people can volunteer, raise children, care for elderly parents -- or work part-time, or full-time, or in whatever situation they prefer -- without ever losing their safety net. This allows for nire diverse forms of value-creation to be created than in the kind of micro-managed nanny-state that you describe.
It really comes down to how much you trust people to find their own path.
That clearly depends on how old they are. Below 18, you are required to be in school and you are not allowed to work. After 65, you get to live off our national pension plan and get free health care.
The other thing that makes me cautious about the unconditional income approach is the handful of rich kids that I knew in High School in Austin, TX. They had everything they could possible want handed to them and were miserable. It was puzzling as hell.
FDR had a really big internal debate over this during the Great Depression. Read a little of the history of that era -- it is not an easy tradeoff.
Basically, I think that people are really good at finding their own paths. It's what people naturally do, providing that they aren't structurally prevented or disincentivised from doing so.
And yes, I've seen the miserable rich-kid phenomena first-hand, and agree with you that too much privilege can be a real handicap. That's why I think it's quite important that an unconditional basic income be genuinely basic: enough to survive on without any privation, but not enough to be decadent on.
I've found a neat mechanism for appropriately setting the level of a basic income: 50% of the mean individual income. Here in the UK, that would produce a basic income of roughly £12k/year -- a bit less than working a full-time job at minimum wage. Enough to live a fairly decent life in a (now) impoverished Welsh ex-mining village, or enough to barely scrape by with a bunch of flatmates in London. But not enough to be extravagant on, in either case.
The nice thing about pegging the amount of Unconditional Basic Income to the mean earned income is that it builds in an automatic self-correction mechanism. If too many people exit the workforce, the mean earned income would fall, and the UBI would fall exactly in sync with it. As the UBI falls, people would be increasingly incentivised to re-enter the workforce. As people re-enter the workforce and the mean income rises, UBI would increase along with the inevitable increases in inflation.
Basic income is not against working, it's point is to let people work in all kinds of situations. Old-fashion social security usually makes the tax rate for certain part-time / freelancing work 100% (e.g. $100 increase in pay can reduce benefits $100, therefore the actual marginal tax rate is 100% and most people won't do that work).
> But just paying people to breath has problems as well.
You can do that in most Nordic countries, and it has many more benefits than disadvantages. For example, you can walk safely everywhere because everyone has sufficient social security. Street robberies and whatnot are practically non-existent.
To me that sounds like an argument against BI. You're basically saying that we can have the social safety benefits of BI for only 10% of the cost by using means-tested programs . Since that's what the Nordic countries are doing, and according to you it works really well.
No, BI can cost the same amount as Nordic social security, while increasing motivation to work and helping people more. (Source in Finnish: http://www.vihreat.fi/files/liitto/Perustulolinjapaperi.pdf ).
Nordic social security works better than American social security, that's fore sure, but it can be improved on. The main problem currently is that social security assumes that people are either unemployed or employed full-time. This assumption is increasingly false. There's more and more part-time (and 'part-period', e.g. full-time for 3 days only etc.) and freelancing work.
Basic income really means social security without that assumption. If you work 0h/month, you get 100% social security. If you work 120h/month, you don't get anything (because you'll pay for the basic income through taxes). If you work 60h, you'll get someting in-between.
And there's no paper work or bureaucracy.
2) About the "Nordic countries". WTF ? Have you looked at the crime stats for Malmo ?
Please note that the nordic countries are in a somewhat special situation just because of their location. They also have very few homeless. Of course, homelessness is a death penalty there, merely because of the weather. That means that in Nordic countries everybody has a house, and not made from wood, double glazing, brick, generally solid and everybody's inside before the sun is down. Breaking and entering after dark is insane.
How is this a problem, when all the essencial work is done by machines and people who do like to do those particular types of work?
"Work is fulfilling" is one of many illusions the society created to shield itself from the fact that we are still, as we have been for the entire history, slaves who can only either work or starve. We are used to this state of the world so much that we've invented many cultural memes so that we can feel good about it.
It is very similar to how people invent 1001 reasons why death is good and gives meaning for life. It doesn't. It's just we can't bear the sadness of our situation, so we invent excuses and stockholm-syndrome ourselves to avoid the pain.
Yeah, well immigration can create major problems with crime.
>They also have very few homeless. Of course, homelessness is a death penalty there, merely because of the weather. That means that in Nordic countries everybody has a house, and not made from wood, double glazing, brick, generally solid and everybody's inside before the sun is down. Breaking and entering after dark is insane.
Yeah, because we have a good social security and everyone can get an apartment.
There are all kinds of work that people undertake today that are not paid for or economically rewarded. Providing a basic income allows those people to continue to do that work or explore new kinds of work that aren't paid for at this time.
No, it doesn't, instead, it leverages it. Basic income increases labor mobility and increases the ability of people to find the most fulfilling work (which may not be the most financially rewarding, especially in short term analysis.)