Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree. The wealthy and politically powerful would fight tooth and nail FOR this to consolidate their position of power, by grabbing subsidies for whatever products they provide, which they will fight to classify as "basic needs" and overbill the government for it, or bail them out when their product goes into downturn.

For example: In such a future, farmers might claim that food is a "basic need" and fight to get subsidies, and when their food crop goes out of style, they may get the politicians to subsidize their land to go fallow. Or even to the point where their unhealthy crop would be overproduced relative to demand and sold to the public as a a part of a "healthy diet", leading to obesity and widespread medical problem.

In such a future, doctors may claim that all of their medical procedures are a "basic need", and fight for a billing system that bills by procedure - to the point of requiring people to purchase coverage for procedures they will likely not need, and leading to unnecessary and risky medical procedures being performed on patients, with an untransparent pricing structure, leading to cost overruns that are an albatross on society.

In such a future, bankers may claim that access to financial systems is a "basic need", and when their malfeasance results in systemic economic collapse, they fight for a rescue package that soaks them in money forcibly taken from the public.

And in this future, sadly, the truly needy will always find a way to be unhelped by the wealthy and politically powerful (even some who are well-intentioned) who have captured the machinery and redefined "basic need" to their benefit.

I doubt any person in power would advocate such a radical shift that could possibly alter their favorable status quo. As the Citigroup papers says, the current political and social environment almost solely serves the the interests of wealthy, and for that they are elated. They fear that a social movement that shifts the focus of the national narrative towards any kind of reduction in inequality would drastically alter the ecosystem in which they are the apex predator. To extrapolate, if it becomes politically viable to advocate a basic income for the people, then the narrative has shifted towards reducing inequality and that is a direct threat to the plutonomy they enjoy. Why risk the narrative when you can already suck on the government teat through contracting, subsidies, and political donations? Shuffling wealth around introduces too much uncertainty.

If you give government the control over everyone's pursestrings, then you are giving the opportunity or advantage to someone. Shuffling wealth around does introduce uncertainty - when it is the many-headed public that is doing the shuffling it via individual and group transactions, sometimes for-profit, sometimes charitably. When you are contracting out through a single entity (the government) that is when you create certainty that the already-privileged will find far easier to get an advantageous audience with and therefore, far easier to capture.

Why not shuffle and give advantage to the government? Make the someone being the collective people?

We do this shuffling already, "in the name of the people". How's that working out?

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat...Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." - John Maynard Keynes

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