Hacker News Reader

Comment by ed_blackburn | Hacker News Reader

Basic Income is sometimes dogmatically derided as 'socialist' thus evil. Proponents of Basic Income - or varieties thereof - can be found on the left and the right of the economic political compass. Even Milton Freedman was a proponent of some guise.

Personally I think it is lazy to dismiss the thinking behind Basic Income as merely communism.

View on HN

There is no arguing that basic income, welfare, disability benefit etc. are socialist. That is not deriding them, it is an accurate description. It's strange that this is a bad term in the US, not so here in the EU.

It's not even slightly socialist. People talk as if all government action is socialist, but socialism includes controlling the means of production not just taxes. In the end the problems with socialism are organizational in nature, and large corporations face the same issues of misaligned incentives.

Edit: A minimum wage is socialist a minimum income is not.

PS: Now you could call it collectivist.

Since he mentions he is European, I think that he is thinking about Social Democracy rather than Socialism (which has a very clear economic meaning which, like you said, assumes state/social control of the means of production).

Friedman and Hayek were not socialists. One of the points is to get rid of the massive government overhead of distributing welfare. This particular aspect is anti-socialist.

That's why I hate political labels. People say UBI is 'communist' because it's similar to one aspect of communism, and therefore must be bad because of all the other aspects of communism. It's a strong failure mode of human thinking.

The Worst Argument In The World: http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html

There is one subtle difference between basic income and welfare systems, which is that welfare systems (even if you remove the requirement to look for work) place a higher effective marginal tax rate on the lower end of the income scale. This might seem like a bad idea, since it reduces the incentive to work for those people. E.g. in Australia, at some levels of income, you lose $5 of welfare for every $10 you earn, making the effective marginal tax rate 50%. However, every redistribution system reduces the incentive to work for some people. Basic income (plus progressive income tax) would make this disincentive gradually increase with wealth. Welfare systems have a high marginal tax rate up to the point where people no longer receive welfare, then the marginal tax rate drops sharply, and gradually increases with progressive income tax.

When viewed in this holistic way, it's not clear which system is better. Some might say that it's not worth "wasting" incentive to work on people who might, for all number of reasons, not be willing or able to work anyway. This is the argument for the welfare state. On the other hand, basic income advocates might argue that poor people are just as willing to work as anyone, and that creating very high effective marginal tax rates for them results in welfare dependence.

just fyi, in "communism" E-Europe everybody was forced to have a job. Vocational or not, efficient for the system or not, was there, mandatory. Thus the "guaranteed" income.

The Friedman negative income tax would surely be better than the complicated patchwork of taxes and welfare programs modern countries have today, if only for its simplicity.

I would not mind seeing an experiment in putting everyone on a BI and then taxing at a flat rate like that. What makes the welfare we know so terrible is that for all its good intentions, it works out to a system that pays people to do those things that keep them poor in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com