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Comment by gphil | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if you're asking sama about his opinion or if you want others to chime in. A popular answer among the HN crowd that I tend to agree with is to tax the wealthy and distribute the proceeds to the poor via a "basic income" scheme.

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> distribute the proceeds to the poor via a "basic income" scheme

Basic income goes to both the poor and the rich. It's universal. The net affect may be redistributive, but there's no preference given to the recipient's income level.

Most rich people would just take the basic income as a small tax break, but they're still getting it.

I know you know this, but it's important to frame this issue properly if you want to support it. There can be no question in basic income of "undeserving" groups getting it, because everybody gets it. This also has the worthy effect of eliminating all the bureaucracy that current benefits programs carry.

> Most rich people would just take the basic income as a small tax break, but they're still getting it.

Right, I wasn't clear about this but you're correct that the idea is that technically everybody is given the same amount in one form or another.

This ideal has helped Social Security and Medicare keep popularity. They are not seen as poverty programs, but they help the poor a lot.

A better answer is removing expensive barriers of entry to allow small businesses to compete with larger companies, removing artificial boundaries to allow labor to go where it is most needed just as capital is allowed the same today, and _reducing taxes_ allowing the middle class to thrive once more instead of giving special privileges to the wealthy and buying off the poor with free debt.

As a member of the middle class, I'm honestly curious how reducing taxes would help me in the least.

An extra thousand bucks or so at the end of the year gets me what exactly?

A really good article about basic income was published in Vox last year (seems to have been updated recently).

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-in...

Why wait for a tax? If we're in the top %x of income earners, why aren't we taking it upon ourselves to give away our wealth? Form a charitable organization that takes care of people, donate your money.

Edit: I'm with the others here replying with "reduced burdens on the middle class and small businesses" and "...teach a man to fish..." I keep seeing this basic income and wealth distribution topic on HN and I would genuinely like to understand why those preaching for these ideas never actually do anything about it. "Make the government bigger" isn't the answer as it'll then be used as a tool of oppression.

Further, assuming we implemented a basic income in the USA, how many generations until the motivators for innovation and advancing society are completely eliminated? I've everything I need at $BASIC_INCOME, and as soon as I start producing more income, the government is stripping it from me, so what's my motivation to ever do anything besides subsist on that minimum? And once everyone is just taking the minimum and not doing work, who's gonna farm the food? Drive the trucks? Operate a grocery? Build the houses?

It doesn't work very well without broad participation.

I don't have a good answer for why this doesn't happen. However, the fact of the matter is that the wealthy, on the whole, don't naturally redistribute their wealth very effectively.

Because keynesians don't really want to help the poor, they want to be taxed which serves as flogging to atone for their guilt for the poor, which then makes them feel better about themselves.

If we wanted to help the poor we would be making things easier for small businesses, not harder.

You don't help people by giving them fish, you help them by teaching them how to fish. I can't believe I'm having to remind HNers about this.

The short answer? Game theory.

The longer answer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer%27s_dilemma

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

And, more broadly:

http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html#coordination_problems

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