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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Basic income as proposed at the societal scale is essentially a wealth redistribution scheme, which implies that there is some concrete actual value removed from somebody and given to somebody else. Using a cryptocurrency to provide basic income would manifest simply as the creation of currency, with no actual value being created to correspond to the new currency, so it's just going to be inflationary. I don't see any proposals on the linked page on how to overcome that, links welcome if there are, nor does anything leap to mind to solve this problem in a sensible way.

(This has nothing to do with whether basic income is a good idea or not; the point is that this does not appear to actually be basic income except at an extremely superficial level. Nor is my calling it a "wealth redistribution" scheme intended to be a criticism. I'll admit to being extremely skeptical about basic income, but that is what it is, just like EITC. Whether redistribution is a good idea is a separate discussion I'm not trying to have here.)

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What this scheme does is create equitable inflation. That is, I concur, not identical to BI. However, inflation does come with redistributive effects.

In most macroeconomic models, the question of "who makes the money" is abstracted into "the banks make it and lend it to everyone." That means that money has to start in the investment sphere - the expected impact on individuals is to experience cheaper debt and higher wages and prices - a sort of "regression to the mean" in their financial status.

But in a situation like the post-GFC markets, investment tends to slosh around in financial instruments without reaching Main Street in any meaningful way - the money isn't turned into capex or wages. This is the kind of thing that is smoothed out when the inflation is reformulated as a benefit. Individuals still experience the regression to the mean, but it happens instantaneously, on a predictable schedule.

Most likely, it's just an impedance mismatch between current models and reality. Institutions and individuals with access to money taps will find ways to divert some of the flows towards their benefit while ignoring all of the downstream effects.

Could we create a system where inflation would hit harder on the one that had the most money? That way, rich people would be enticed to move their money, and invest in risky plays. Some of them would grow very rich, others would lose a lot of money, but, on the end, they would end up reducing their income...

The tool for that is demurrage, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_%28currency%29, which adds devaluation of the currency over time. This complements Basic Income very well, with UBI for money creation and demurrage for money destruction.

For physical currency is has some obvious practical problems, which has prevent adoption, but for virtual currencies it is easy to implement.

Well sorry, I did not explain myself properly: my idea was that, if every coin could be associated with a specific person, rich people's coins might devalue quicker than poor people's coins. It's a weird idea and giving it a little more thought, I don't see how could a state enforce such a system effectively, though.

variable Sales tax/VAT pegged to credit card and linked to SSN/NI

Cash purchases would be problematic. Maybe drawing out cash incurs the variable tax too?

No basic income scheme is viable unless the economy that implements it already produces 100% of the basic living consumables required by the populace. It is not a wealth redistribution--more like a production capacity redistribution.

Naively attempting to do that using currency manipulation as your only tool seems doomed to failure, in my opinion.

I don't care to argue for or against basic income at the moment, but presuming that it is to be implemented, the task cannot be accomplished with an alternate currency. I think that ultimately, it will be necessary to threaten highly productive owners of capital with the use of force unless they meet some portion of the consumption requirements of non-working individuals.

The producers would be taxed, at a cruelly high rate, such that if they sold a product that is both appealing and affordable for the people on basic income, they would break even on a cashflow basis, only losing some use of their productive capacity. For some made-up, spewed-out numbers, Apple is taxed $1G on the sale of 4 million of its fully-featured iPhones, at $250 cost and $750 retail--effectively taxing 50% of the profits--and recoups $1G in revenue from selling 20 million "Nekhama iPhones" (Nekkhamma is a Buddhist term) that cost $25 to make, and sell at $75. Maybe it's just the same guts as an iPhone 1, using a smaller chip feature size. Or they could just tell that $1G to go piss off, and less prestigious manufacturers pick up the slack in the basic market. Obviously, sales in the basic market could not trigger the onerous taxes, or the scheme wouldn't work.

Basic income could work as a segregated portion of the economy for basic essentials. Food, shelter, transportation, and hygienic items.

Some combination of a tax on luxury goods and services, low income housing, and regulation on food production might be one way to offset the resources required to sustain the basic income output.

The scenario of thousands of citizens living purely on basic income in free housing projects should also be considered. What is the minimum level of contribution we require from citizens in return for the minimum level of support that the State provides? In some countries, it's required to do a year or so of public service though the equivalent of peace corps. It seems fair to ask for a minimum level of work contributing back to society in exchange for society providing a minimum level of life support.

> It seems fair to ask for a minimum level of work contributing back to society

I think BI proponents argue that specifying what counts as a contribution leads to economic inefficiencies, in the broadest sense. Does taking care of your own children count as a contribution? Or sitting in the pub and making other visitors happy by your presence? What about writing software and putting it on Github? And for the latter, should you get a minimum number of stars to make it count? How long should the list of "useful activities" be, that the Department of Civil Contributions would maintain? And how much money would we spend on civil servants who determine whether your edge case qualifies?

The result would be that people end up doing artificially much of what counts as "contributing", and too little of some things that aren't specified as "contributing", but that society actually still benefits from.

Would some people just sit on the couch all day, and really contribute nothing, by any standard? Yes, probably. So the premise here is that the number of true freeloaders is small enough, that it would be inefficient to worry about them. I personally don't know any true freeloaders, which leads me to think that that's probably a fair assumption.

I imagine to appease anyone with doubt to the benefits of basic income some sort of "basic work credits" type system would need to be in place for anyone without a normal job to contribute something noteworthy back to society.

The matter of what is acceptable as "basic work" may already be in place as court ordered community services, peace corps, or local public works projects. Maybe even a new variation of non-profit organization [1] that has specific structural rules for "basic work" credits?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501%28c%29_organization

It's a noble attempt at compromise, but at that point, you're not talking about UBI anymore. The entire point of UBI is a rejection of the notion that a person must contribute before they have permission to live. It's a statement that the right to life is inherent to every individual, details on the morality of suicide or abortion aside, and that if we can't simply provide those necessities, then we can at least provide the means to get them through guaranteed income.

Basic Income is, by itself, already a compromise. To compromise again is to no longer be a separate concept.

At the point you're talking about, it's not actually different from the situation as it stands now: what you're really saying is that the minimum wage needs to be sufficient for living expenses. Nothing more.

The problem remains the same. No point in worrying about what name you attach to the solution.

What exactly is it you think the problem is?

This expectation largely derives from II Thessalonians 3:10--"The one who is unwilling to work, let him not eat"--and it comes from an era of civilization where the majority of the populace was employed as agricultural laborers, by necessity.

Now we have robotic tractors that can operate with a tiny amount of human supervision. The Industrial Revolution made it possible for children and elders to not work. We do not begrudge them their allowance, because their labor was no longer needed. Female integration into the workforce further lessened the need for the marginal laborers.

Computerized automation has further lessened the demand for unskilled labor to such an extent that the equilibrium market rate is likely below subsistence level. Minimum wage laws transform that into unemployment. People want to work, but cannot find enough to pay for their consumption.

You are demanding that people work, but you are not explicitly making the inchoate demand that someone be forced to buy their labor. It is not needed. We have enough bullshit jobs already. It may be time to end the charade and find more reasons for people to choose to exit the labor pool. Lower the retirement age. Guarantee living expenses for both graduate and undergraduate students. Extend maternity/paternity leave out to a whole year. Simplify disability payments such that everyone who cannot lift a 15kg mass from the floor and move it 20m is exempted from work that may require it.

I would very much prefer that the people doing work be both competent and motivated to do the work, rather than grudgingly present as the means to pay their bills.

The minimum I expect is zero. I don't want anyone to create more bullshit jobs that occupy people with busy work. Let them pursue their vocations instead.

Fair enough, but I have seen the effects of people and kids in living conditions where all basic necessities are provided and they're quiet often completely unmotivated and stagnate.

It might be great to let the robots do everything though.

Were there conditions attached to the provision of those necessities? Would they be reduced or revoked if the recipients earned any income on their own initiative?

Would your observations be explained by removal of the implicit requirement that one must do work of a particular type to survive, or could they also be explained by conditioned helplessness, where people receive negative stimuli in response to attempts to change their own lifestyle?

The welfare system in many US states is not a great model for predicting human behavior in an environment where the basic needs are not particularly scarce. In any case, an unmotivated, stagnating person is preferable to someone who becomes violent and destructive. I'll take 1000 couches filled with 1000 semi-professional marijuanologists over one angry arsonist any day of the week, and twice on Fridays.

What I meant by unmotivated people with all basic necessities met being unmotivated - I was speaking of middle class suburbanites I know, who's goals and accomplishments hardly exceed watching full seasons of television shows. A civilization of couch potatoes just reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkPGlVqqEP0

As for any reform that would help treat, rehabilitate, and employ [1] former convects (or differ to rehabilitation programs instead of the money sink hell hole of the prison system) - that would bring a welcome and significant impact to all the millions of dollars, lives, time and resources wasted on for profit prisons and the vicious cycle of convicts with no where to turn.

[1] http://www.triplepundit.com/2014/07/3p-weekend-10-companies-...

> No basic income scheme is viable unless the economy that implements it already produces 100% of the basic living consumables required by the populace.

Maybe my thinking is off, but isn't that the sort of capacity the "group fund" could go toward building?

Where does the 'redistribution' come from? From what I can tell the currency is created at an agreed on rate proportional to the pre-existing arbitrary community that is participating in the currency. There is no 'previous wealth' that you can bring into the scheme, so there is no redistribution going on.

The real fallacy is believing that wealth is a concrete entity.

> Using a cryptocurrency to provide basic income would manifest simply as the creation of currency, with no actual value being created to correspond to the new currency, so it's just going to be inflationary.

CryptoUBIs/group currencies can be deflationary. Have a look at the first item in the FAQ [1]. If the value represented by AcademicCoin is increasing faster than the issuance of tokens, AcademicCoin becomes deflationary.

[1] http://groupcurrency.org/#FAQ

Disclaimer: I am a co-author of the document.

Your FAQ says:

>Provide others with a token that represents the group's value and potential as human beings. That is already non-zero (researchers are very valuable!).

If that's the logic, you can do that today without any cryptocurrency. Take a blank sheet of paper and write, "the bearer of this note acknowledges my value & potential as a human being."

Go and take that paper out on the street and see if you can trade it for other pieces of paper such as Euros, US Dollars, or real goods such as hamburgers. If your experiment works, everyone can have "basic income" just by writing affirmations on sheets of paper and trading them.

I'm not being flippant with my example. Warren Buffet can take a piece of paper and write, "the bearer of this note is entitled to a 1 hour lunch with me." Someone could take that note and sell it on ebay for over $1000. (A similar type of transaction happens everyday with celebrity autographs.)

There's a reason why Warren Buffet's piece of paper (scrip, IOU, whatever) is more valuable than your piece of paper or my piece of paper. Cryptocurrency doesn't solve that. Basic income is also not something that can be solved by cryptocurrency.

Dude don't be such a cynic. You can use a paper based ledger system as a backup to the paper scraps. Meanwhile all the group members can sell their academiccoin paper scraps for dollars and perform their group dealings using the greenbacks as a sort of proxy. This has the immediate advantage of allowing you to store your currency in bank accounts and buy newspapers and gum. Then when you run out of smokes and beer for example you can just issue some academiccoin2s to yourself and repeat the process.

"If the value represented by AcademicCoin is increasing faster than the issuance of tokens, AcademicCoin becomes deflationary."

Yes, but that's tautological, simply the basic definition of "deflationary", not an argument.

If the act of issuing tokens is disconnected from the process of bringing value into the given ecosystem, then the act of issuing tokens is merely inflationary. If the act of issuing tokens is directly connected to bringing value ("Bob brought X units of value in, Bob gets X tokens"), then it's not really a basic income. You have to be able to remove value from some people and give it to others to create a basic income. In theory if the system were already bootstrapped inflation might be able to do it, but it would be an awfully blunt instrument, and might well still collapse the system in a standard inflationary spiral. Where basic income may be advantageous at a societal level, where the mechanisms of government can be used to force participation, you've got serious incentive problems in a voluntary system. Why wouldn't someone generating a lot of value simply opt back out of a system that deflates it away on them, when just by stepping away from it they can avoid the problem? Who's going to voluntarily sign up to be the one giving away value to others?

The libertarian skeptical about basic income (me) can't help but observe you really need government to make basic income work, if it's going to work at all. In fact, even with a government we can all observe in the real world that those with a lot of "value" (wealth) are often able to wiggle out from underneath their putative obligations even when it's not voluntary.

> If the act of issuing tokens is disconnected from the process of bringing value into the given ecosystem, then the act of issuing tokens is merely inflationary. If the act of issuing tokens is directly connected to bringing value ("Bob brought X units of value in, Bob gets X tokens"), then it's not really a basic income.

True, the process of issuing tokens disconnected from new value is inflationary. But that doesn't imply that the currency as a whole is inflationary.

Some members might not be doing anything for some period of time and simply inflating the currency while others are deflating it through value creation. But sooner or later those folks will produce something of new value that deflates the currency while others take a break.

It's certainly possible. Universities do this for their tenured professors today and it seems to work out fairly well.

See also this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501494

What's wrong with wealth redistribution? Money is essentially a man-made concept anyway. We want to keep people alive, so this constraint is very well captured by giving a basic income to everyone, a social safety net.

Libertarian free market economics don't capture these constraints.

Hypothetically, some form of wealth redistribution is necessary in a democratic society, otherwise the poor will vote to take the wealth for themselves.

I would say that hypothetically, no form is needed because the poor won't vote to take from others.

In reality, though, it seems the poor will vote as much of it for themselves as they reasonably can. It's happening piecemeal here (in America).

They're doing an incredibly shitty job of it then.

It would be more accurate to say the rich are voting just enough to the poor to prevent widespread active looting.

In reality, the exact opposite is happening. In the U.S., wealth concentration is growing with the top 0.1%.

That, or as we're seeing today, the wealthy and corporations coopt all the discussion and essentially buy votes with "campaign financing".

To put it bluntly, no, the poor don't vote to redistribute--that's why they're still poor.

It's the rich who've made it a practice and habit to grab whatever they can, whenever they can; excepting those who were merely born rich, that's why the rich are rich.

That's circular reasoning. We have voted-in wealth distribution mechanisms today that have worked well enough to prevent the poor for voting for more.

But it is exactly as you said, recent changes in campaign financing policy and PAC funding has made it easier for the wealthy to preserve their position.

What?

What's circular about it?

The poor don't influence politics via campaign donations, the poor have less access to politicians.

The poor don't take advantage of what little political influence they do have--they vote less, as well.

The rich, on the other hand, use every influence at their disposal to enrich themselves.

If the poor had a tenth the willingness to go out and exploit the system the rich do, we'd see a far more equitable distribution of resources than we do.

When you start debates with uber simplified words as "the poor" and "the rich", you end up with a sub-par debate with sub-par arguments.

One might say the same for such rules.

>the poor don't vote to redistribute--that's why they're still poor.

Why are they poor? They didn't vote to redistribute. Why didn't they vote to redistribute? Because they're still poor.

I'm not disagreeing with you, just saying that it's disingenuous to claim "poor people haven't tried because they're poor".

I think that you have misread/misinterpreted what Frondo has said. Frondo said, "The X doesn't do Y, which is why they are still X." You say/interpret Frondo as saying, "The X doesn't do Y because they are X."

What's the difference? Assume that a group of people have an expected group of behaviors. If they had a different set of behaviors, they could remove themselves from the group. But if they don't have those other behaviors, they aren't able to remove themselves from the group. Are they in the group because they are in the group (as you have been saying Frondo has been saying)? Or are they in the group because they don't have a set of behaviors to remove themselves from the group (as I interpret Frondo as saying)?

In the context of poverty in the US, there are countless structural, cultural, behavioral, and just daily life practicalities of why rising above poverty is very difficult. While I don't agree that the lack of political motivation and clout are the only or primary reasons for continued poverty, I do agree they are substantial contributing factors.

Thank you, yes. That. Exactly.

And I agree, politics isn't the only place where the poor in this country fail to maximize their advantage, it's just one place where they're consistently trodden upon.

And there's that saying about democracy, the poor voting themselves free benefits, whatever, that's just so very wrong. It's just another substance-free attack on the least politically empowered group of people.

"Whether redistribution is a good idea is a separate discussion I'm not trying to have here."

Then you immediately say:

"What's wrong with wealth redistribution?"

Come on.

I'm a bit late to the topic but it seems to me that equitable inflation does result in some sort of "wealth redistribution". I know it's a little bit extreme but let's assume there are 3 people in the economy who respectively own 1, 1 and 100 units of currency. The person with 100 units is 50 times richer than the other two combined. However, if the inflation is set at 1000 units, after one cycle of inflation, the amounts are 1001, 1001 and 1100. The person who started out with 100 units is now poorer than the other two combined and only slightly richer than them individually.

Inflation is usually a percentage though.

I don't think this contradicts the point I was making though. If inflation was set at 50%, the total amount to redistribute would be (100+1+1 * 0.5) 51 units and each person would get and additional (51 * 1/3) 17 units. So the amounts after the first inflation cycle would be 18, 18, 117. The richest person, who was 100 times richer than the poorest before inflation, is now only 6.5 times richer. Do this a couple of times and the relative difference between the amounts become smaller and smaller.

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