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Comment by kaoD | Hacker News Reader

The money for basic income must come from somewhere, right? I can think of two choices:

  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.

I haven't really dug into basic income proponents' argument and the article misses the point (which IMHO is the real important point, of course basic income would be awesome). How does it hold economically? Inflation or punishing top performers seem like a really bad idea.

And sociologically... how does it handle the race to the bottom after everyone realizes work sucks? Where does wealth come from if nobody works?

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Top earners have a strong vested interest in the lowest possible income not being too low, because starving homeless masses have a negative impact on property values. The question is not whether to redistribute income, but how much and by which mechanism. Inflation is income redistribution also, remember.

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.

Inflation is a redistribution scheme of the poor to the rich and from savings to spenders.

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.

Technically, from those with monetary savings to those with non-monetary savings. Inflation will strike someone with $1,000,000 in the bank much harder than someone with a stash of precious metal, large property holdings, or industrial equipment. The hardest hit are individuals who have accumulated wealth but are not skilled enough at managing it (e.g. retirees living on an immediate annuity). Inflation doesn't have much effect on the poor, because income tends to increase along with the cost of consumer goods.

Income does not rise with the cost of consumer goods. Why is it that people feel so much poorer now than they did 30 years ago?

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.

People feel poorer now than 30 years ago because of rising income inequality. People's viewpoints are relative, like all human thinking. By nearly any measure, people's ability to afford consumption is higher now than it was 30 years ago.

Should we eliminate taxes, welfare, and universal access to health care too? Let people starve or suffer if they can't find work?

The first sentence, yes. The second sentence, no.

How exactly does that work?

You might do well by reading http://www.raikoth.net/libertarian.html

It's a rather popular anti-libertarian piece, and I have read it (although it's been a while).

There was a time before welfare, and men and women didn't fall dead in the streets of hunger in droves.

Oh I like this logical exercise. How about, "there used to be a feudal system, and men and women didn't fall dead in the streets of hunger in droves." Did I do that right?

Why do you think it's either/or?

Can't voluntarily funded charities replace all of those functions?

Google "collective action problem" and "free rider problem."

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.

Why assume the economic problems in Bangladesh are caused by lack of social welfare, versus being caused by a lack of protection of property rights and economic freedom?

I didn't say anything about what causes Bangladesh's economic problems. I used Bangladesh as an example because it's a particularly stark illustration of the social costs of unaddressed poverty. Speaking from first-hand experience: it's a place where you can be rich, live in the most exclusive enclave in the capital city, yet still be panhandled by orphan kids with missing hands when you walk out your door. There's a dollar value you can place on alleviating that state of affairs, even based on purely selfish reasons like your own quality of life. The problem with private charities is that, for very basic economic reasons, they cannot be expected to fully capture the dollar value of alleviating poverty in the society.

I have a right to use force in self-defense.

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.

> Google "collective action problem" and "free rider problem."

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.

It's true and important that these problems apply to democratic decision making. It is not given (without evidence and/or argument) that it is "at least as susceptible". In general, I'd think it less susceptible, because poor decisions from my lack-of-involvement are more likely to disadvantage me than to disadvantage any other specific individual; this is not the case when neglecting to contribute fungible resources toward welfare or defense.

Even so, voted up for introducing an important point to the discussion.

Not donating $10 to your local homeless shelter meaning that 2 people won't get food is worse than a government policy affecting millions?

e.g. war on drugs, wars, abortion, gay marriage, etc.

No, nothing said implies that. Immediately, I see the following problems:

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.

In addition to the "collective action problem" issue, there's also the fact that amassed wealth can often translate into significant power[1], and if "anyone who isn't a huge jerk gives what's needed to charity" that amounts to a transfer of power toward huge jerks, which is not really an ideal outcome.

[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.

Jobs with horrible bosses and shitty work environments are less likely to exist as well. The health benefits and productivity increase from less stress from this alone will be fairly big.

If they are that strongly vested, why do they need to be forced?

I choose to give or not give $X.

$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.

Great reply. I'm reminded of a recent New Yorker article about the poverty bureaucracy in NYC. Can't remember the exact details, but one of the recipients talks about how much they could do with the amount the city spends on them per month to put their family in some gov't run hell-hole.

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.

>Lastly, the basic income makes it easier to abandon the income tax entirely and move to consumption based taxation.

How so?

While I wouldn't make the claim, one argument I see is that it balances the regressiveness that a sales tax typically exhibits.

>>Top earners have a strong vested interest in the lowest possible income not being too low, because starving homeless masses have a negative impact on property values.

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 how much and by which mechanism.

The question is not whether to redistribute income, but whether it is acceptable to force people to do so through threat of violence.

There's an interesting conceptual tension in your post:

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.

Also related to the hilarity of "going Galt". Nice post.

Incredible post.

Bottom 40% are responsible for maintenance - without them there can be no production (i.e. they're vital). It's not easy to write code or work on 3D printers when your toilet is clogged and there are no people unloading trucks at the local stores :-)

The incentives for wealth redistribution are vary simple. You hand over a fixed percentage of money to the poor and they don't steal from you or end up in prison. The idea being while many poor people will not steal the overhead from those that do is high enough that it's worth a lot.

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.

That's basically all nonsense. If I have money and really feel like the poor are going to take it then I can buy security or just move far out into the country. Rich people were far less secretive in the past than they are now (for a variety of reasons).

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 not a powerful motivator when it comes to innovation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Abo...

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.

How do you arrive at that conclusion ? That seems to be a pretty heavy claim ... so what is it based on ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Business

The french revolution was carried out by the merchant class because they wanted political power to match their economic power.

Definitely not poor people.

"The incentives for wealth redistribution are vary simple. You hand over a fixed percentage of money to the poor and they don't steal from you or end up in prison."

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.

There's another way to frame this. You're in a lifeboat with 10 other people. None of you chose to be here, but fate made it happen.

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.

"The incentives for wealth redistribution are vary simple. You hand over a fixed percentage of money to the poor and they don't steal from you or end up in prison"

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?

I think the "give poor people money or they'll take it" is a bit too simplistic. The basic reason we should give welfare is because that's what the majority has decided it wants to do. And in a democracy we do what the majority wants.

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.

I don't think poor people steal from rich people, they seem to steal from other poor people.

> how does it handle the race to the bottom after everyone realizes work sucks? Where does wealth come from if nobody works?

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.

> Where does wealth come from if nobody works?

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.

You underestimate how lazy humans get if they don't have discipline and/or pressure.

For a given number of them, yes. Who cares?

Those people are already not working. So, instead of spending more on officials and offices and paperwork determining if they can have welfare or not, let's just give them the money directly.

In essence:

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?

If the cost of covering everyone is less than or equal to the current cost, why not?

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.

Discipline and pressure are not the only ways to prevent laziness (there are also passion, curiosity, and imagination), and the threat of deprivation is not the only way (and is probably not the best way) to teach discipline.

The problem here is what will happen if basic income means that costs for things like garbage collection start to explode.

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.

> The problem here is what will happen if basic income means that costs for things like garbage collection start to explode.

Or, as I think will soon be happening, robots will do it.

What you described is not wealth as the question was posed. They are all lifestyle choices that wealth enables.

I think that this is more of a philosophical question. What is wealth if it is not these things?

I think the concern is that if (some amount of) people are not effectively forced into shitty jobs that wealth will decline a lot for everyone.

Crappy jobs should be made less crappy, or pay enough that a reasonable person with options would choose to do it. All the comfort we get from people who have to do bad jobs or starve, feel unfairly gained.

> how does it handle the race to the bottom after everyone realizes work sucks?

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.

Its not an impossible concept, but most people's workplaces suck to varying degrees. Unless you are a highly valued "knowledge worker" you will find that you life has a large component of drudgery.

To me that is an argument in favor of basic income: it would force workplaces to suck less, since they'd have competition at the bottom end.

Most people would rather work in whatever they want than working for a wage for someone else's benefit. Even if they find their job rewarding, being told what and when to do something is not as rewarding as... not being.

Also: what about highly unrewarding jobs?

Well, if no one would work the unrewarding jobs, and they were needed. The wages for these jobs would go up. As Bertrand Russell said there's two types of jobs. "The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid". Reversing this might not be the worst thing in the world.

And/or they'll be automated (or at least sufficiently automated).

Unrewarding jobs would pay more, in some combination of money, perks, social status... To the degree the last held true, they'd become more rewarding. To the degree the first held true, there would be increased pressure to automate.

Unrewarding jobs in an ideal world would pay more.

Let's think this through ... how much would they pay more ? Well, for most unrewarding jobs I think you'll find that labor costs dominate. So any wage rise needs to be reflected in the cost of those services ... which results in a need for more money (since cost rises in basic goods will disproportionally affect poor people, resulting in the need for further basic income rises)

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.

So you're suggesting that a Basic Income would drive increasing automation in virtuous cycle as labor costs rapidly rise to more than the cost of designing and building the automation?

Because we don't have the technology to get rid of shitty jobs yet. We can't make that technology come faster by eliminating incentives to perform shitty jobs.

We totally can make it come faster. If we institute basic income tomorrow, you seriously don't think we'll have mostly-automated McDonald's next year?

s/mostly-automated/eliminated the need for/

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.

It's sort of like self-checkout - people don't like it, but if there are no humans, they'll (try to) use it.

And sociologically... how does it handle the race to the bottom after everyone realizes work sucks? Where does wealth come from if nobody works?

Robots, and higher wages for those who works.

Because taxing high earners will magically make the necessary technology appear.

The magic middle step is that the job market would decide that crappy jobs need to pay a lot more. This would make it reasonable to invest in robots where it doesn't make sense today.

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.

The money for basic income must come from somewhere, right?

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"

1. would probably work better in a basic income world because in theory the resulting boom and bust cycle would cause less distress because people would have something more to fall back on. Eventually this has to end but in the long run we'll all be dead anyway.

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.

Really? Do you really think everyone on welfare, or even a majority, are just lazy poor people living off the money earned by the glorious, noble, hard-working, libertarian class? Is it really that simple?

Of course not. They're just people responding to incentives to make the best choices they can. I don't judge anyone on welfare or not.

I think this "poor people are dumb animals and if we stopped giving the money they'd go get jobs" attitude is super fucked up.

Why did you throw the word "libertarian" in there? It makes absolutely no sense in that context.

It's not an unreasonable adjective to use; the makers/takers dichotomy is a mainstay of popular libertarianism in America.

"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!""

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.

Is there an argument there?

As far as I see it. The point is that a big wealth gap is detrimental to a society. Having a good minimum wage is a good way to reduce such a wealth gap.

Then why not raise it to $30/h? I'm serious.

Will those who previously made e.g. $20/h get a $10 raise or will their employer outsource/automate?

I've spent my life researching economics. If econ 101 solved all of our problems, I would be out of a job. People who think that way are dangerous. The world isn't black and white. It doesn't sound like you understand that.

No offense but it sounds like we'd better off without you working. If you think minimum wage laws don't harm anyone you're terribly mistaken. They invariably hurt marginal and low skilled workers. The very people you aim to help.

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.

Is there an argument here?

Yes.

> If you think minimum wage laws don't harm anyone you're terribly mistaken.

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.

"No offense but it sounds like we'd better off without you working."

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.

None of what you said is coherent to me but I withdraw my comment that you rightly described as needlessly provocative and apologize for it.

Could you clarify what you don't understand about what I said? Sounds like at least one of us has some space to learn, here - quite possibly both.

The issue with that comment was that you were introducing off topic points that weren't previously discussed or defined. You mentioned assistance while mentioning "in isolation" as the basis for my analysis which is the only point in which my analysis could possibly be valid. If you start introducing variables outside the discussion it makes it hard if not impossible to seriously discuss the impact of a policy change or some market force change. For instance we can see that in general as supply increases the price will drop absent other factors. There are tons of factors that could be introduced to make my minimum wage argument invalid. For instance if the market wage is never practically below $5 then a minimum wage of $3.60 is unlikely to have an outcome (unless something changes).

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.

My point in pulling in other assistance was that we are not implementing a minimum wage in an environment without other assistance so your analysis of what happens when we implement a minimum wage in an environment without other assistance doesn't represent the real world.

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.

> 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.

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.

Peg the BI amount to targeted inflation, not to actual (or projected) inflation. If fewer people are interested in working, labor commands more value, and work becomes more desirable. There is no race to the bottom; it's self correcting, not a downward spiral.

Where do open source programs come from if nobody is paid for them?

Altruism?

Many open source projects have paid contributors anyways.

Yes, among other reasons such as solving a problem for themselves or enjoyment of the process. The point is that financial motivation doesn't even explain all the production in the economy right now, so obviously removing the financial motive won't remove all production. And a basic income doesn't imply no financial motivation anyway, how many investment bankers and programmers quit their job yesterday because they already have enough savings to eat and live in a crappy sharehouse for the rest of their lives?

Making open source projects is fun. Flipping burgers and cleaning toilets isn't.

And believe it or not, people do pay for open-source programs. It's just not necessarily the end user.

People clean toilets without being paid... just not typically other people's toilets.

Have you ever looked at the breakdown of who writes the Linux kernel? It's mostly maintained by corporations, notably companies like Red Hat and strangely enough even Microsoft.

Read this article instead: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/rethinking-the-...

The idea is to remove the current welfare system and replace it with basic income.

No. It is impossible. What will happen is add basic income on top of current welfare system.

Read:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...

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