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Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

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101–110 of 158 posts

Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

#101
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this! If you create UBI and have universal healthcare, entrepreneurship, makership, lifestyle businesses, etc, are going to explode.

"and have universal healthcare" is the functional clause here, but it's thrown in as an afterthought. All the BI in the world isn't going to help you if you incur a $200k broken arm 'cause you didn't have health insurance.

$200K seems pretty extreme for a broken arm, even if it required surgery. I'd guess $1K max for non-surgical, $10/20K for surgery.

Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

#102

Sorry, which "powerful political forces"? A Canadian newspaper? In keeping with HN guidelines, I don't like to comment on why I flag articles, but I'm going to continue to flag the nearly content-less Basic Income posts that seemingly rocket up the front page a few times a week. I'm sure there are comprehensive, insightful articles on BI out there. If they're ever posted, I'll probably vote them up.

The article stated that the party that won Canada's most recent election has proposed BI. That's "powerful political forces", at least within Canada.

Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

#103
post #91
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not the state. And when I look around, a lot of states certainly aren't 'for' or 'by' the people. Maybe you have to start thinking independently, rather than smugly reciting one-liners from school. The state is a large entreprise that gives us some things and forces us to do things and pay money under the threat of violence and incarceration. I argue for voluntaryism, the notion that people enter into contracts…

What you argue has been tried in the early have of the 20th century in the United States where workplace safety laws and minimum wages were ruled unconstitutional based on the theory of free contracting parties. It failed MISERABLY and by miserably I mean it left working people in ... literally ... misery. BTW, my 'smug one liner' I learned in school was uttered by President Abraham Lincoln who is widely regarded as…

The conqueror of half the country, who set the stage for federal government uber all?

Oppressive power structures want freedom for large structures at the top (themselves), to enable domination over individuals on the bottom - a lack of workers' rights fits right into this. Libertarians want freedom for the bottom and should only be secondarily concerned with freedom for the top, lest their philosophy be coopted into supporting standard tyranny.

Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

#104
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet nowhere has this been "field tested" for any length of time. Unless one makes the case that it has been tested in the form of several countries in the 20th century. Places like the the Soviet Union, China, etc. We see that it failed in those places and in Soviet countries it failed fantastically. The fatal flaw in all of this...who is going to pay for it?

That and what economic activity will be suppressed as capital moves away from prior uses. Nobody is talking about generating new wealth to make this happen: it's pure consumption and some of that will be at the expense of capital investment. The seen and the unseen indeed. Unless there's more than hand-wavy dismissive talk about the negatives such schemes bring, one is foolish to think that this does anything positiv…

> Morally, that any one person, by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is judged a provider, at gunpoint if necessary, to others who, by virtue of their relative lack of wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance, is such an inversion of right and wrong as to warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward.

That makes quite a few assumptions about the nature of money, the ownership of money, and how it is accumulated. Given, those assumptions are shared by most people in capitalistic systems, but that doesn't mean they are sacrosanct and we should reexamine them from time to time.

For example, one possible interpretation is that it's the system that allows this accumulation of wealth, and that the system favors certain people and starting conditions over others. If we accept that the system is responsible for quite a bit of the wealth (could the same be achieved in a drastically different system, say, North Korea?), then it can be viewed less as taking money from one and giving to another as much as fees and discounts, or incentives and disincentives built into the system in the hope of either making it more efficient in the end or better in some desired respect.

Note: I'm not necessarily pushing the above view, but instead using it to illuminate that perspective informs our opinions quite a bit, and that stepping back and reexamining our assumptions may have benefit or change how we think. At worst it will be a waste of time and we'll come away with the same opinion.

Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

#105
post #44
post #5

A rarely discussed benefit to minimum income: The higher the social benefits, then I think the greater the labor market liquidity, for both employers and workers. Currently everything else depends on your job: Either you have one, and you have income, benefits, and all that goes with them in a society where everything costs money; or you don't and you have nothing (or very little). But if you don't lose you house, st…

Yet nowhere has this been "field tested" for any length of time. Unless one makes the case that it has been tested in the form of several countries in the 20th century. Places like the the Soviet Union, China, etc. We see that it failed in those places and in Soviet countries it failed fantastically. The fatal flaw in all of this...who is going to pay for it?

Actually it was tested in Canada; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

#106
post #5

A rarely discussed benefit to minimum income: The higher the social benefits, then I think the greater the labor market liquidity, for both employers and workers. Currently everything else depends on your job: Either you have one, and you have income, benefits, and all that goes with them in a society where everything costs money; or you don't and you have nothing (or very little). But if you don't lose you house, st…

1. UBI can be thought of as large-scale debt forgiveness. You are simply giving people the means to escape (often, but not always) self-imposed debts. 2. UBI would lead to a huge jump in inflation (as a %, nearly as much as the initial UBI stimulus % of total money in circulation) as the vast majority of UBI recipients would have a large propensity to immediately spend that money, thereby simply releasing it into cir…

> 1. UBI can be thought of as large-scale debt forgiveness.

Not everyone receiving UBI would be in debt.

> 2. UBI would lead to a huge jump in inflation

Your argument assumes a fixed supply of resources. In a perfect market, rising inflation means higher prices means higher profits for suppliers which then results in increased production and, eventually, lower prices again. The market isn't perfect of course -- supplies for some resources (e.g. real estate) expand very slowly, so we might see increased rent eat up a lot of UBI in the short term.

But the increased liquidity mentioned by the parent post counters that problem. For instance, in theory, rising rent prices should encourage renters to move elsewhere. But in reality, the cost of moving itself (plus the difficulty of finding a job in a distant location) is high enough to discourage people from making that move. UBI alleviates both concerns by helping pay for moving costs and by providing some cushion for job-seekers.

And most markets actually do a decent job of increasing supply in response to spending. At most, this argument calls for phasing in UBI a pace slow enough for markets to adapt rather than not doing it.

> 3. People who are not financially secure enough to bring children into this world will suddenly find themselves with the resources to have children.

Empirically, this doesn't seem to happen as much you might think. Poverty reduction usually results in a drop in birth rates. Bill Gates raises this point quite a bit when discussing public health. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/Resources-and-Medi...

Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

#107
One big benefit to minimum income that I never heard discussed is the wonderful ability make the minimum wage obsolete. (Since minimum wage is merely an alternative route to achieve minimum income without using direct taxes and that doesn't help those with no job.)

Each time we hit a rough patch we could boost the minimum income to increase liquidity, and drop the minimum wage to stimulate job creation.

This has the potential to fix some of the inefficiencies of the job market. There are jobs that people enjoy or find fulfilling that don't provide enough 'value' to exist (or only exist in the black/barter market where minimum wage is not enforced). There are also jobs that nobody enjoys or find fulfilling, that should have been automated already, but haven't because we force people to work to support themselves and thus create a glut of cheap labor with the minimum wage as the price floor.

As far as to how we pay for minimum income, I love the idea I ran across on HN of directly and progressively taxing capital/assets rather than income.

Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

#108
It is inevitable that the threat of withholding 'basic income' will be used to modify behavior. Didn't pay a fine? Didn't do your taxes? Post "radical" comments on the internet? On the no-fly list? On the no-drive list? Don't have a gov-issued InternetID™? No soup for you. How long until China couples it with it's human scoring system?

Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

#109
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet nowhere has this been "field tested" for any length of time. Unless one makes the case that it has been tested in the form of several countries in the 20th century. Places like the the Soviet Union, China, etc. We see that it failed in those places and in Soviet countries it failed fantastically. The fatal flaw in all of this...who is going to pay for it?

That and what economic activity will be suppressed as capital moves away from prior uses. Nobody is talking about generating new wealth to make this happen: it's pure consumption and some of that will be at the expense of capital investment. The seen and the unseen indeed. Unless there's more than hand-wavy dismissive talk about the negatives such schemes bring, one is foolish to think that this does anything positiv…

Innovation often happens from the ground up. Harry Potter for example was written by someone on housing assistance. Clearly the England made far more money from her than the cost of her benefits.

Further, if you tax a company at 10% or 20% the same investments are going to profitable. So, for the most part they behave the same which makes corporate tax breaks a very poor investment.

PS: More generally, people with a safety net are far more likely to invest in things like a home.

Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income

#110

Let's say that currently rent is $1,000 per month, food is $500, and Alice is earning $2,500. Now UBI is implemented and Alice and all fellow citizens receive $1,000 per month. What will keep the market from easing the entry level rent up to $1,500 and food to $1,000 since the money is available? At first glance it seems like we'd just be choosing a different number representing "broke".

Draw it out into the absurd to watch it work: Consider a society with 2 members, Mr Rich (net worth $10M) and Mr. Poor (net worth $100). Mr. Rich is 100,000 X richer than Mr. Poor right now. Institute a ridiculous UBI of $1M/year for everyone. At the end of the year, Mr. Poor has $1,000,100 and Mr Rich has $11M but Mr Rich is now only ~ 11 X richer than Mr Poor. Now sure cheeseburgers at Micky-D's are now $700 but th…

Mr Rich will have $9M because his taxes would have gone up by $2M/year to pay for the program.

And the cheeseburgers are still the same price. Mr. Poor was buying cheeseburgers before he got BI and he's still buying cheeseburgers; neither supply nor demand has changed. Mr. Rich bought caviar before and after.

If McDonald's gets greedy and raises its prices because it thinks it can, Burger King is still making money selling at $5.

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