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Comment by lcedp | Hacker News Reader

The problem with quotes about money that money is considered to be some limited resource akin to wood and spending money is like burning the wood.

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The problem with left wingers is that they assume money can be printed at will without realising inflation will turn their wealth into dust before you can say "poverty".

The problem with people who use words like "left wingers" is that they don't realize that money is a fiction and macroeconomics works quite different from running a household or small business.

That sentence in itself is an assumption.

There appears to be an experiment with moderately succesful results. Let's expand the experiment and see where the results take us. We could always stop if we don't like future results.

I thought basic income sounded like naive left thinking the first time I heard about it, but you should know it actually has a rich tradition in conservative/libertarian thinking as well, including well-respected (and definitely anti-socialist) economists like Friedman and Hayek. Here is one discussion from a definitely non-left-winger site: http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/26/scrap-the-welfare-stat...

Thanks, but it's completely US-centric and doesn't address the problem that such a system would drive down wages to a bare minimum.

Allowing wages to be at the market value of the work done while providing basic needs via a tax-supported program is better, all-around, than stopping low-value work from being economically viable by way of a mandatory minimum wage, and then supporting the people put out of work by the minimum wage by way of a tax-supported means-tested programs.

It is a more efficient way of serving the same anti-poverty goals that minimum wage + meas-tested welfare programs aim to serve, which also provides a better set of opportunities for people living on solely the minimum safety net program at one point in time to progress to participate in the economy to the extent of their desire and ability.

The problem with central bankers is they print money at will to bail out corrupt financial institutions creating inflation that destroys the wealth of everyone except those who own hard assets

I'm not a left winger and it doesn't matter what's the total amount of money printed but rather it's about the way it distributes.

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