Basic Income Means Basic Freedom
thoughtinfection.com
thoughtinfection.com
1. Creating money from air, thus driving price inflation.
2. Redistributing income, where the top earners would have to pay for
the ones which choose to just enjoy their basic income.
And sociologically... how does it handle the race to the bottom after everyone realizes work sucks? Where does wealth come from if nobody works?
Many open source projects have paid contributors anyways.
And believe it or not, people do pay for open-source programs. It's just not necessarily the end user.
Robots, and higher wages for those who works.
One we make a few decades of progress on that front, I would expect the robots get so cheap that it's overall more efficient than we are today.
In other words it would be the kick we need to get out of this local maxima of enjoying the benefits of cheap labor, and would end at a much better/more efficient/less abusive system.
What if your work didn't have to suck? What if you could actually work, create something useful and enjoy it?
I don't understand why people think this is such an impossible concept.
Also: what about highly unrewarding jobs?
So it's obvious there is a feedback loop here. Basic income -> price hikes -> more basic income -> more price hikes ... The question is what multiplier we have between the steps. If that number is << 1 (much smaller than one) ... then no problem. If it's anywhere near 1, basic income will result in total devastation of the economy.
There are jobs that would be affected more than others. Elderly care, for example, is a very dirty, very unrewarding job. With basic income it'll become completely impossible to pay for. So that looks to me a very basic tradeoff : you can have one of these : elderly
And that is a consequence that's very unlikely to be appreciated by either rich or poor.
If you're in a world where you don't _have_to_ work for a living; you can take your time meeting your basic sustenance needs with real food. Fast food is actually a bad deal, and most of the people eating it are doing so because they are under time-pressure of one sort or another.
As to basic income vs. other forms of welfare it's more money directly but far lower overhead. Which means people that are capable of finding productive jobs are adding to the economy vs. varying unemployment information etc. On top of that some people will simply take more risks which has a huge upside vs. unemployment where you can't get the money if your starting up your working for your self so people watch TV vs building an App.
Socially, money is a huge motivator. Most collage educated people could get by working 1/2 what they do but the 20 hour work week or taking 6 months off a year did not take off instead people buy 5$ coffee at Starbucks etc.
PS: And yes the poor can be a lot more disruptive than you might think just look at say the french revolution or any of the communist revolutions.
If a basic income means that I can support myself without work and have a decent living then I'm probably not working-it's pretty simple. I suspect you'd have fewer apps being built, manual labor getting done, tough problems getting solved, etc. And if I can't then why are we bothering again?
The communist revolutions of the past tended to be largely nationalist in their roots. The poor ended up being terribly harmed by those revolutions (as did many other people I suppose).
Money is still a motivator when it comes to getting unrewarding work done, but basic income incentivizes work in a way that a welfare that only gets paid when you're unemployed does not.
Definitely not poor people.
You're saying the incentive is: your wallet or your life. That's an extraordinarily evil system for a society to live by. Gee, I wonder what kind of feelings it engenders between classes. All it does is turn rich people into slaves. It breeds a society of nothing but victims and parasites. As though the only option on this earth is to bribe poor people to keep them from attempting to kill the rich (because America didn't build the world's largest middle class and manage a free market system for 200 years without needing this crap).
If one were to take this theory seriously: well, rich people can afford a lot more guns, armed security, militias, bullet proof everything, and they can fund a lot of prisons.
It's a ridiculous position. The hyper violence in a lot of South American cities have more than demonstrated rich people are willing to deal with poor violence: they isolate themselves from the poverty and crime. This is also true of the US in many cities, eg Detroit, DC, Chicago, etc.
You're the only one who got on the boat with a backpack, and it's full of food. Your food.
Do you share it? It's in everyone's best interest (including yours) if you do. Not only will this keep them from throwing you overboard, but by establishing a basic level of survival, you can cooperate trustingly and row to safety.
This sounds like extortion. The majority of poor people can work. A small percentage are mentally or physically unable, and need to be taken care of.
Many (not all) made poor life decisions. We are free in the US..and freedom sometimes has consequences..like the ability to completely ruin your life. I shouldn't have to clean up everyone's mess..when I've taken the time to avoid these things.
"ome people will simply take more risks"
I've taken the most risks (with business), when I had no other choice. IE: I have no other form of income..and a month of money left in the bank. Basic income is the opposite of that. You are not taking any risks, because you know you will have money in the bank.
Since most people are not interested in starting a business, I don't see your scenario playing out.
" And yes the poor can be a lot more disruptive than you might think just look at say the french revolution or any of the communist revolutions"
Why do you think I will support basic income based on threats?
Now, the question is: why should the rich do what the majority wants? Not because the majority will otherwise kill the rich. The majority doesn't protect the rich minority from itself. The majority protects the rich minority from the strong minority. In other words, it's social order, underwritten by the majoritarian mass, that allows bankers and programmers to get rich instead of warlords. In a world where the majority isn't underwriting social order and the rule of law, there remains a ruling minority class, but they're different people than the ones that are rich under the existing system. Think feudal lords, rather than Silicon Valley nerds. That's why the rich go along with the majority. The majority protects them from the men of war that would otherwise dominate society.
2. is unlikely because no one wants to pay for anything.
This whole idea is a very naive scheme to try to solve the obvious problem with welfare that there are large groups of productive people who pay for those who are not. It creates a great deal of anger in the productive group so if you can mitigate that anger then maybe you can continue your welfare schemes. I'm going to guess that this basic income would not entirely replace welfare programs.
I find it so interesting that there are so many things being proposed by people entirely ignorant of political economy and contradictory to the most basic understanding of the profession. Between this and this recent minimum wage increase nonsense it seems like we're hell bent on just saying "To hell with what econ 101 says, this sounds good to me!"
I keep hoping that the adults show up and just start ignoring all this and letting everyone know they're being ignored. I suspect that will not happen in this case. It never has before.
There's a reason why economics goes beyond 101. It's a complex issue. The minimum wage should be increased. It should be tied to inflation.
Will those who previously made e.g. $20/h get a $10 raise or will their employer outsource/automate?
Econ 101 is a misnomer of course because economic understanding developed over thousands of years starting with Plato really (however misguided he was on the topic). There is much to learn still but it sounds like you are just looking in the wrong directions.
I think this is not based on evidence. Not all minimun wage laws are bad. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Wage_Act_1998...
I'm sure the minimum wage could be set to a level where it would do damage, but I don't believe that is necessarily so.
That's needlessly provocative, and one of the more absurd uses of "no offense" I've seen in recent times...
"If you think minimum wage laws don't harm anyone you're terribly mistaken."
I don't think the parent said that (at least anywhere I can find it up this thread). One can believe that a policy hurts some of those it intends to help, and still believe that it does on balance substantially more good than harm. You seem to be engaging in precisely the sort of black and white thinking that the parent was cautioning against.
With regards to minimum wage in particular, in isolation it clearly hurts those it excludes from the workforce in the short term. However, when assistence is frequently tied to "looking for work" and not turning down job offers, then things potentially change. I'm not at all sure that a general minimum wage is a better solution then saying "jobs below $X don't count toward assistance", but I'm not at all sure of the opposite, either.
The argument against the minimum wage is in the realm of deductive reason and not something you look around for proof of or proof against. It's basically the economics equivalent of 1+2=3. If there are problems with that equation we need to analyze it in its' space and not look around for cases when we think 1+2 != 3. The problem with verifying laws of economics is that we don't know what we're seeing the effects of in reality. Cultural, weather, moods, government policies, etc. could impact what we're seeing in data without it being clear why or how. Empiricism can inform our analysis or can give us new routes to inquiry on but it can't be used to argue for or against the laws of economics as we understand them. I'd avoid reading economic studies of anything for this very reason.
Regarding the second half of your comment, it's certainly true that there can be confounding variables, but I think avoiding empiricism does far more harm to reasoning than relying upon it. There is an infinity of internally consistent models. Most of these will have nothing to do with reality. In order to tell which actually represent the world we're living in, we need to look at the world. Intuition alone has proven a poor guide in most other sciences.
Actually, the opposite is true.
1. There are many economists who support the idea of a basic income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Origins
2. Many supporters of basic income are empiricists. Me, for example. I think it's an intriguing idea and that the trials so far have all shown good points.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-new-approach-to-...
What the idea needs now is more testing in the field.
If I might suggest, this is actually the problem with most of the arguments against basic income. People appear to have very strong beliefs about how the universe works and how economics works that are grounded in philosophic principles of fairness. Phrases like:
> This whole idea is a very naive scheme
> ... proposed by people entirely ignorant of political economy
> ... contradictory to the most basic understanding of the profession
> I keep hoping that the adults show up
... are all emotional reactions not supported by evidence.
Economics is, sadly, able to support lots of opinions, many contradictory. The only solution has to be based on real-world evidence from real-world trials. Either we'll find this idea will work or it won't, but I don't think your phrases above are currently strongly evidenced.
The traditional income redistribution systems in the US are social security (from the young to the old), welfare (from the employed to the unemployed), and medicare (from the healthy to the unhealthy). The cost of these systems is $X + $Y + $Z. Costs are inflated by large bureaucracies put in place to enforce social mores as punitive measures against the poor ("piss in this cup or you don't get EBT this month"; "EBT is for buying cheez-puffs, not condoms").
If giving $X + $Y + $Z to everyone in the US would provide them with a better quality of life, then it makes sense to do that instead of managing separate programs.
Two significant additional benefits to a basic income are:
1. It fixes the problem of going from unemployed to employed-at-minimum-wage resulting in a net decrease in household income. It's a simple observation that punishing people for getting a job will decrease the total number of employed adults.
2. It enables the minimum wage to be much lower than the poverty line. The nation has collectively decided that an adult working full time should be entitled to to the basic necessities of life, and the cost of that decision is that jobs which are worth less than $7.25 simply aren't offered (or are only offered illegally). If everyone already makes enough to get by, then there's far fewer ethical problems with paying someone $3 an hour to sweep some floors or pick up garbage from a sidewalk.
Life becomes a lot simpler when we just eliminate all these schemes and just let people solve problems for themselves. This expectation that you can disrupt the economy in a major way and have the rest of the society stay static around me is a very serious reasoning error.
> Inflation is a redistribution scheme of the poor to the
> rich and from savings to spenders.
The reason that inflation is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich is that the poor do have small savings and that gets robbed from them as the newly inflated money makes it way through the bank accounts of those with influence first and don't ever the poor in any positive way.
Can't voluntarily funded charities replace all of those functions?
To use an example, in my parents home country of Bangladesh there is no social welfare. The capital city is full of beggars, homeless children, people with missing limbs hassling you for a few taka. Social welfare is a non-excludable public good. That is to say, if you clean per sol this up, you couldn't limit the benefits just to those who paid, as you can with most goods. Therefore, people would have a strong incentive to avoid paying, because they would count on someone else paying and free-rising on that.
Collective action problems are real, they're important, and they are a major impetus for the existence of government. In a sense, welfare programs are voluntary. Generations of Americans have voted in majorities to continue to support these programs. It's not right to reject the voluntary nature of programs that exist by the majoritarian consensus.
Therefore I have the right to hire a bodyguard to use force in my defense. (In fact it is the same right - delegated.)
Therefore we have the right to elect a sheriff to use force in our defense.
...But I do NOT have the right to beat and rob people.
Therefore, neither do I have any right to hire a bodyguard to beat and rob people.
Therefore, neither does our sheriff have any right to beat and rob people -- even if we voted for him to do so! Because you cannot delegate powers you never had.
Therefore the question isn't whether society should provide social welfare for the needy. Rather, the question is whether we have a moral right to use VIOLENCE to FORCE people to provide social welfare for the needy. (We don't.)
The reason you see poverty in various nations is because they do not have economic freedom and secure property rights. The nations with the worst poverty are the ones with the worst protections of rights. The nations with the lowest poverty are the nations with the best protections of rights. And note: those are also the nations who donate the most money to charity.
Government can never fix poverty by using violence to forcefully redistribute wealth. All that will do is cause worse poverty.
The best a government can do is strongly protect rights and economic freedoms -- then you will have a rich nation, which will not have poverty problems in the first place, and which will easily be able to cover the rest through private charity.
Unfortunately we do not see any governments today that respect rights and freedoms in this way, although some are better than others. But proposed solutions based on "social welfare" will only make those problems worse, not better.
You mean, like expecting everyone to research politicians and political issues and vote responsibly?
A government (or, at least a democratic/republican government) is also a public good, and is at least as susceptible to those problems as government roles like welfare and public defense.
Even so, voted up for introducing an important point to the discussion.
e.g. war on drugs, wars, abortion, gay marriage, etc.
1) You're looking at amount of damage, not susceptibility.
2) You're assuming problems of government couldn't be for reasons other than those being discussed.
3) You're looking at the margin in one case, and the total effect in the other.
[1] There is an argument that unconstrained government is responsible for this. This is not completely without merit: it is certainly true that it can exacerbate the problem, as money corrupts politics and politics wields the force politics wields. However, it can be the case with a minimalist government too; denying that just seems silly. At the extreme, consider paying directly for use of force (open or secret); but subtler things like market power also come into play.
$X makes a difference of F_me(X) in solving whatever problem it is we're caring about.
F_me(X) is valued by me at something less than $X, so I would prefer to unilaterally withhold my contribution.
However, SUM(F_k($X_k)) over everyone may still be valued by me more than $X, so I would prefer to give if everyone else giving is contingent upon it.
If we agree voluntarily to force ourselves to play by the rules, we can all benefit.
I'll add that many free-market economists are strong supporters of the basic income, especially vs. a minimum wage (Milton Friedman supported a negative income tax). The advantage of the basic income is that it's very simple and there are no mathematical gymnastics needed to neither discourage work or produce a very high marginal income tax rate as you leave the NIT. Lastly, the basic income makes it easier to abandon the income tax entirely and move to consumption based taxation.
How so?
There is little evidence that property prices of high value homes in areas with high income inequality suffer.
>>If giving $X + $Y + $Z to everyone in the US would provide them with a better quality of life, then it makes sense to do that instead of managing separate programs.
Except either 1) benefits to the elderly and the poor must decrease (by more than half if medicare, ss and income security are replaced with a flat basic income) or 2) or taxes on the middle class must increase dramatically. 2) comes about because increasing the top tax rate from ~58%(all ss and medicare with income) to 70% raises about 1.5% of additional gdp in taxes as per the IMF; which even isn't enough to finance a neutral level of basic income for poor, unemployed and elderly.
If you don't increase taxes then millions of americans will enter poverty immediately under a basic income (dramatic quality of life reductions )while large tax increases have a far larger economic impact than the relatively small administrative costs of running social programs. It is just basic math that instead of giving $X dollars to Y number of people doubling Y doesn't let you keep X constant. Some people will be big losers(the most vulnerable).
>> It enables the minimum wage to be much lower than the poverty line. The nation has collectively decided that an adult working full time should be entitled to to the basic necessities of life, and the cost of that decision is that jobs which are worth less than $7.25 simply aren't offered (or are only offered illegally). If everyone already makes enough to get by, then there's far fewer ethical problems with paying someone $3 an hour to sweep some floors or pick up garbage from a sidewalk.
The elderly already receive income assistance that is as least as generous as what you are proposing for everyone and many of them still work. Do you expect them to work for significantly less?
The question is not whether to redistribute income, but whether it is acceptable to force people to do so through threat of violence.
The idea is to remove the current welfare system and replace it with basic income.
Read:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
Most people I've talked to about BI begin and end that part of the discussion with something that boils down to "somewhere, but not me"
If you didn't have to work for money, what would you do?
Would you spend more time with your kids? Would you take your parents out of the nursing home and care for them yourself? Would you spend more time with your signifiant other?
Would you return to music or painting, which you abandoned when you had to enter the "real world" and earn a living? Would you go back to school, to pursue the academic interests you earlier had to set aside to focus on something that had good job prospects? Would you volunteer more often, or get politically involved trying to fix issues you don't have time to worry about right now?
Would you exercise more, and play sports more often? Would you spend more time cooking, and cut back on prepared, unhealthy foods? Would you sleep seven hours a day, instead of five?
Would you quit your job and start the company that you always wanted to, and steer it in the direction you wanted, working with the people that you wanted to, without thinking twice about what potential investors might think? Would you move into the career that you always dreamed of as a kid, but that just didn't pay enough? Would you take more risks? Would you worry less about failure, and work harder on those things that you are passionate about?
Or would you just laze around on the couch in your cramped apartment watching TV and eating ice-cream all day?
Of course, it must be this last option, because what else would anyone ever do if they had the choice not to work? Of course, without the fear of abject deprivation as a motivator, no one would ever do any work, and no one ever has.
The current welfare programs are already funding those people, so let's replace it with one that covers everyone instead of those who enrolled.
Also, how can you give without first taking?
BI is supposed to cover food and simple housing, people that want to travel, have a large house, or have hobbies will probably need at least part-time jobs to cover that, their incomes will be taxed.
The problem is getting over the idea that some people would be freeloaders, but again, if the total cost is less than the current cost of welfare, it's in our best interests to switch.
I'm not certain that it will work or that it is a good idea, but the counter-arguments seem to be 1. people irritated that they'd be forced to pay for the lazy and would rather lazy people have a shitty life than have less welfare expenses for the state, 2. people who assert without a scientific study that the majority of other people in absence of a job wish to do nothing but watch TV all day every day, and 3. people who just flat-out construct strawman arguments about lazy people having parties all day every day at the expense of the state.
People think that company profits on a per-employee basis are something like a factor 10. In practice, for the best companies in existence (think google) it's a factor of 3 or so. For most companies it's much lower 10% would be a lot (hiring is already very expensive, just try it). This number is called efficiency of the economy and it's an upper bound on how much more money you can give any significant group of people (assuming labor costs dominate, which is currently true). Of course you could give them more by law, but it would simply result in massive price hikes for everything until we're back in the current situation.
Or, as I think will soon be happening, robots will do it.
High performers like to believe that they're entitled to the vast majority of the country's income because they're responsible for the vast majority of the wealth creation. Thus they see high taxes as "punishment" for success. But if that's true, why does it matter if say the bottom 40% of income earners just stop working. They account for only about 10% of the nations income, and presumably if the market compensates people fairly production would decrease by only 10% or less if these people stopped working.
Work still needs to be done. BI means that you can get rid of the minimum wage and labor becomes worth what it takes to get someone to do it knowing that their life and the lives of their families doesn't depend on it.
Maybe that shitty job at McDonalds now takes $20 an hour to fill? Maybe that increases automation, making the economy more efficient. It might also increase the cost of crappy food, pushing more people to just prepare their own food; but now they have the time to do it, so no big deal.
We don't have a problem in this country with laziness. We don't have enough jobs for everyone who wants to work to work. We've set a requirement of 40-hours a week just to live, and then we don't actually have that much work available. We need to find a way to remove that 40-hour requirement. The economy is just too efficient.
Maybe. But for an alternative view, see "Four Reasons a Guaranteed Annual Income Won't Work" (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-04/four-reasons-a-guar...) and, although not strictly an alternative view, "What are some of the biggest problems with a guaranteed annual income?" (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...).
As so often happens, the devil is in the implementation and incentive details.
Based on my reading I think a guaranteed annual income is a good idea, but I'm agnostic on the question of whether a guaranteed annual income would work in practice.
The [basis minimum income] scheme proposed by the Welfare
Working Group is a significant policy change with large
economic consequences. The scheme is fiscally very costly
and would not necessarily achieve its main goal of
reducing poverty. The high personal tax rates required to
fund the scheme are highly distortionary to the labour
market and to savings and investment decisions, and would
be likely to induce a significant behavioural response.
This has damaging effects on the tax system and economic
growth.
Although the Gini coefficient improves under all models,
many beneficiaries (including the disabled, carers and
sole parents) currently receive more than $300 per week
and would be made financially worse off under a GMI
scheme.
[0] http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...
Edit: formatting.
That's actually a really interesting point. The feasibility of BI is going to be tied to GDP per capita, as well as cost of living. In a country where GDP-per-capita is several times cost of living, BI would be relatively easy, whereas a country where GDP-per-capita is barely above cost of living, BI would be very difficult (because where do you come up with the money?)
US GDP per capita is about $50k. I'm not sure what cost of living is, but that definitely isn't a whole lot higher than what is usually accepted as the threshold to living somewhat comfortably (somewhere around $40k)
Norway, on the other hand, has a USD GDP per capita of ~$100k, so unless cost of living is much higher, BI may be much more feasible there.
"Basic income" will suffer the same problem. There are things which must get done, and which nobody will do short of earning money doing it. Give people that money outright, and nobody will do those jobs for it. Oh, a few people might pitch in, but nowhere on the scale needed.
BI romanticized the notion that most people will be productive contributors to society given free coverage of necessities. This is never objectively quantified in favor of the notion ... which history records various attempts at, with a great many people suffering horribly in the process of forcing it to work. Oh, these are always excused as "did it wrong, we'll do it right" with no objective reason to believe the optimism. Sure, some people will do good with their free money - but who's gonna do those dirty jobs? not you, you don't have time for it as you pursue more productive occupations, paying others to do so you don't have to.
Basic income does not mean everybody does their jobs for free.
This unsubstantiated assumption is the problem with your argument.
Basic income doesn't stop people from earning money doing things.
In fact, if it replaces minimum wage (which it is usually, though not always, proposed to do), it reduces the minimum value a task has to have to be worth paying someone to do it.
> Give people that money outright, and nobody will do those jobs for it.
Giving people some basic level of income outright doesn't prevent them from wanting more money, and doing whatever work they are qualified to do to get it.
People who are making $150,000 are not content, and are working 60-hour weeks to get that raise up to $160,000. And the same thing is happening with people making $500,000 or $50,000.
All of those salaries produce MORE than enough to live comfortably on. And many people with a good salary could -- if they so chose -- live on $40,000 and save like crazy, and retire very early (as preached by Mr. Money Mustache among others).
But ALMOST NO ONE DOES THAT. So what logical basis is there to assume that Basic Income would change this? Many people already have Basic Income plus a whole lot more, but they don't pursue a basic secure position. Rather, they spend all they make (and often more), and they work slavishly to get more income.
(Is Basic Income meant to help the poor and unemployed ... who don't have the "good salary" I mention above? If so, I'm all for it, but it seems to me that if the price of a slum apartment is $300/month before Basic Income, it will merely be $600/month -- or whatever scale factor it takes to soak up that extra income -- after it.)
"Health is important. Doctors should be free, right?" - Yes.
"But what about housing?! People can't just freeze to death. So housing should be universally free for everyone, right?" - Yes.
"Clothing is just as important as housing. Clothing?" - Yes.
"And food? You can't live without food. Universal free food?" - Yes.
"And without access to technology, you can't get a job, so surely the government should provide computers and phones. Otherwise people have no chance of rising out of poverty. Universal technology?" - Yes.
I'm pretty sure no one has ever gotten the point, and I've only turned half-hearted socialists into full-blown socialists. Oh well.
It has never been the role of government in a capitalist society to hand out money, nor should it be. Government's role is to create a legislative structure that incentivizes behavior that leads to a healthy economy and society. If we have a problem with the stockpiling of wealth, then we need to craft new laws that disincentivize that behavior. Something needs to change, but it doesn't involve firing up the money presses.
Secondly, I'd much rather be working a job than be on disability, but I wasn't given a choice because my doctors had ordered it. I wasn't given a choice because employers discriminated against me for my disability/mental illness and either called me 'overqualified' or refused to hire me or only hired me to fix things and then fire me when the things are fixed.
I've been trying to do my own startup since 2002 when I lost my last job. No money for me anywhere. I would have less stress with my own small business and small circle of clients than in a large greedy megacorpration that cares more about profits at any cost than people or anything else.
I think instead of basic income, we should give money to the small business administration to give people lessons in business management and programming or whatever to do their own startups. The SBA has a lot of volunteers who can mentor people into starting up a successful business. The real problem for people down on their luck like me is finding the money to do a startup while on disability or little or no income.
I read articles about giving some random homeless guy money and programming training, and then he has an app in the app store for iPhones. Why don't we just do that for all of the poor people out there? Everyone can write their own app, get training and support, and get some startup funding and see if it works out they can have their own small business. If not, well at least you tried.
This basic income is not freedom, it is slavery to force one out of the market and no longer be productive or do anything for society. I can just see people dropping out of high school in large numbers to stay at home with their parents, avoid taking a job, just apply for basic income and get that low income AT&T DSL Internet for $15/month and play video games on a cheap PC or used Playstation or used XBox for the rest of their lives and never contribute anything for the betterment their lives and help out others.
Altruism is great, but most of it is fake altruism for attention or good PR or to pay for past sins of getting rich at the expense of others and make a foundation that does charitable things that buys products from their businesses and provides a tax shelter and then gives them awards. True altruism is doing things to help out others, and mentor them, and teach them to become better and also help out others and keep passing it on, with no personal rewards and no good PR and no attention, just doing it for the empathy and compassion. But so few people do true altruism these days, only the fake altruism.
I think that it takes more than to just give someone money as a basic income, you need to give them an education, train them, mentor them, help them reach a level of success so they can become independent and then in turn help out others to do the same as people once helped them.
While I wouldn't put it in such strong terms, I agree that is a horrible thing. I don't think it's at all what a basic income would do - especially a modest one. Doubly so in contrast to our current welfare (including disability) system.
Basic Income is not contingent on you not working. If you can find some clients that are willing to pay you a little in exchange for some work you're happy to do, you take home the money they pay you on top of the Basic Income.
"I can just see people dropping out of high school in large numbers to stay at home with their parents, avoid taking a job, just apply for basic income and get that low income AT&T DSL Internet for $15/month and play video games on a cheap PC or used Playstation or used XBox for the rest of their lives and never contribute anything for the betterment their lives and help out others."
If their parents will stand for it, I'm sure that will happen some. But most people do like to feel productive, and most parents prefer to see their children doing something useful, and them doing something useful - for pay or otherwise - does not decrease the Basic Income stipend.
I don't think this basic income (while it does sound nice) has not been properly thought through. Do you have any peer reviewed sources on it that I can learn more about it? Apparently this is a 'hot issue' as my parent post was downvoted into oblivion for raising doubts about it.
I dispute the notion that fear of significant poverty is the only thing that can motivate people to do such things (or the best way to do it).
"What if basic income makes a majority of people not learn anything and just never learn from their mistakes and failures, and always have that basic income safety net to rely on even if all they do is play video games, get drunk every day, get stoned every day, abuse people every day, and just become a jerk to everyone because they have no responsibilities at all?"
I don't see how our current system prevents abusing people in any way that our system plus basic income would not. Regarding the others, I think escapist overindulgence in these things (and anything else on offer) is a problem we need better mechanisms for confronting. I don't think limiting people's resources is a necessary, sufficient, effective, or appropriate approach. Oftentimes people fall into these habits because they feel there is nothing they can do to improve their situation.
"I don't think this basic income (while it does sound nice) has not been properly thought through. Do you have any peer reviewed sources on it that I can learn more about it?"
I'm sure there've been plenty of economics papers in journals through the years, given that Milton Friedman was an avid proponent. Regarding an actual experiment with Basic Income:
Because it makes the already super competitive field of app writing artificially even more super competitive, and probably doesn't add as much good to the world as the same people could elsewhere, and probably doesn't actually make these people enough money to do much (plausibly not even survive, absent other supports).
Another approach is to ask people in less need of paid work to make room - a low Basic Income has that effect: as some people leave the workforce to focus on unpaid activities (child rearing, volunteering, art, educating themselves), this leaves more jobs available for those who need them.
Because it is the 21st century, so freedom is free. Done.
Eventually AI will surpass human capabilities in every domain where any sort of intelligence matters. It's inevitable, given exponential progress. Whether that "eventually" is next decade or next century is irrelevant(or whether it's a tailored weak AI or an universal true strong AI) -- what is relevant is that aforementioned "big enough" proportition of people, and AI(and automation) will surpass them well enough to be competitive against humans far sooner.
Somebody has to deal with this, somehow. Basic income guarante could be a solution -- automation can produce enough for people to live off well enough.
Socialism and Communism fail every time they are tried. Every time.
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3095028/posts
Read Bradford’s description (in the article linked above) about what socialism did to the Pilgrims: it created poverty, envy, and slothfulness. Many of them died as a result. Prosperity only returned when they re-introduced private property.
I suspect the author is well meaning, but he is ignorant. His "solution" will create misery. I hope he educates himself, then changes his mind.
Whether Basic Income is Socialism depends on your definition of Socialism. If you go by the definition found on wikipedia, which I think is pretty standard, BI is not Socialism either. [1]
Basic Income is redistributive, but so is the US tax system, as it has been for nearly 100 years. It is a more aggressive and explicit redistribution scheme, but it is not of an entirely dissimilar nature, nor is it incompatible with free-market capitalism.
So regardless of one's opinion of Socialism and Communism, whether or not socialism and communism typically fail has no bearing on whether a basic income would be successful, because they are different things.
However, when you say:
> Socialism and Communism fail every time they are tried. Every time.
You should consider that the vast majority of the world's large economies are described as "mixed economies" that combine elements of socialism and laissez faire capitalism. Many, if not most of these have been mixed--combining Socialist and Capitalist policies in one way or another--for decades, if not for more than a century. So, unless you are going to assert that the modern economic order is a "failure", I think you should rethink this sentiment.
> The author is an economic idiot.
Strong words probably not best used in this situation.
If "redistribution" of economic surplus (i.e. profit/income) is a feature of Communism and Socialism, it is not the most important feature of these ideologies, which concern themselves with limiting or eliminating private property.
In fact, I would assert that redistribution is a specifically Capitalist response to the Socialist critique of private property and markets: it is a way to reduce economic injustice by focusing entirely on the distribution of surplus, while leaving private property at the core of the economic system, and while also relying on markets to determine prices and the appropriate allocation of investment.
[1] "Socialism is an economic system characterised by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
This explains nicely why the world economy is collapsing in a heap of failed Keynesian (aka Socialist) policies and endless mountains of debt that can't be repaid under any circumstances. From Japan's rapidly collapsing economy (so bankrupt all they have left is to print their currency to oblivion), to America's bankruptcy (doesn't even need explanation), to China's bankruptcy (endless rounds of stimulus, requiring ever more stimulus to get the same fake GDP growth, corporate debt larger than GDP, and several times their sovereign fund, and 40% of their GDP going to just paying against debt), to the implosion of countries such as Greece / Spain / Portugal / France / Italy, all of which are being propped up temporarily by a central banking printing bonanza that is destroying standards of living.
I'm not aware of major mixed economies that possess any meaningful amounts of laissez-faire Capitalism. Japan, US, China, Britain, India, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Australia, South Korea, Russia (aka the largest economies in the world) possess approximately zero laissez-faire Capitalism in their respective economies. I'd challenge someone to produce a major industry in any one of those countries that is actually completely unregulated by the state and untaxed (both of which are requirements of hands-off Capitalism); or even examples of zero regulation with very little taxation, as the US had in the 19th century.
Internet, steel, building, manufacturing, energy in general, oil, nuclear, automobiles, railroads, telecom, commodities, housing, banking / finance --- where's the laissez-faire, aka completely unregulated, again? Doesn't exist.
I was not asserting that the way that mixed economies work today is ideal or even desirable. However, I was asserting that these economies have been largely successful, which it seems you disagree with. However, that's really beside the point.
I used the term "laissez-faire Capitalism" to describe Capitalism in its pure form, not to say that it is found in mixed economies per se. Maybe I should have just said "Capitalism." Again, I don't think it makes a difference.
Capitalism is a system whereby "capitalists" (people with capital) use their capital as investments in business ventures. The person who risks the capital (the capitalist) has control over the outcomes of the business. You can have free markets without capitalism, and capitalism without free markets.
"Economic injustice" has nothing to do with anything. If you don't have capital you can't be a capitalist.
Encourage charity for the truly needy; everyone else is a competent capable adult and can provide his own needs.
The fact is that your opposition is a moral one, as your last statement shows.
Price controls are inevitable because as more people live on free money (no need to work if you just opt for frugality), basic prices will rise because demand rises against supply, causing political pressures to keep those prices down by fiat.
Try understanding someone's reasoning before insulting it.
That way, if "supply-and-demand [...] render BI too low" because too many dollars are chasing too few goods, more people are motivated to move into the market and help produce. On the flip-side, when we hit a deflationary period real BI will rise, and people will pursue other interests rather than scrap for jobs that don't exist.