A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

People have kids outside of financial consideration. The desire for having children is an enormous natural force for many (not all). That's not even including all the children as result of youthful mistakes or just plain happenstance.

Technocrats are quick to frame having children as some sort of result of rational decision making, like buying a car. Since it's obviously not, this viewpoint readily becomes a normative prescription. What not is, instead should. Hence, poor people shouldn't have children because they can't afford them.

But humans aren't robots. It's like saying teenagers shouldn't wreck their dad's car (they will), adults shouldn't fall in love with abusive a-holes (happens all the time), or old Johnny over there should just give up smoking already (he won't).

A just community absorbs this messiness with patience, forgiveness, and empathy. Families generally do. Friends often as well. Tight-knit towns have that capacity. Perhaps even the polis as well. But the higher up we go, the more abstract a human becomes. Right now, humans are widgets, no more than appliances in the cybernetic feedback loop. Not too long ago, we were divinely chosen caretakers with responsibilities to God first&foremost; at some point we were hapless pieces on the game board of disinterest cosmic chess players. Not sure which abstraction to prefer honestly.

did you try breathing? well there is no oxygen on mars so breathing always does not work.

You are correct but we are talking about America.

Incentives. Incentives. Incentives.

People respond to incentives, it's been proven time and time again. A negative income tax isn't the worst idea, but it has all the wrong incentives. The more money you earn, the less help you get. Which seems sensible on the surface but can lead to situations where people ask themselves "why should I even bother working a job I hate when I can get the same money without working?"

The advantage of basic income is that no matter what you do you still get that money. You're still incentivized to work because a life on basic income won't exactly be a life of luxury. In fact you might be more incentivized to work for several reasons. One because working will get you money you can spend on stuff you want, not just stuff you need to survive. This is significant from a quality of life aspect. Also, working will enable you to get ahead, instead of just being on a treadmill as so often happens today. You'll be able to have more choice where you work and how much, and you'll be able to set aside some of your time to pursue new careers.

I don't think people understand just how much potential and talent is being wasted and misused in our economy at present. Human beings aren't meant to be drones, that's not our calling. And it's an insult to the human race to imply that a significant portion of the population is somehow genetically fit for nothing other than menial labor. That's never been my observation. In the vast majority of people I've met there is almost always a depth and a potential that is not being tapped by the current economic system. And you see some of this coming out with new economic models enabled by the internet. More freelancing, more startups, more people engaging in their passion projects through crowd funding or what-have-you. More people learning new things and trying new things because the internet makes discovery of knowledge a lot easier. That's true of musicians, artists, inventors, and so many others.

I can only imagine the world we'd have if we could unlock that huge untapped potential.

The grandparent post is highlighting an important point, though: you can't consider questions of morality without also considering morality for whom. There's often a hidden loser in decisions like this, and their perspective is ignored.

Say that a certain business unit has a labor budget of $3M/year. (Because that's how these things really work: a manager gets a budget to work with, driven either by his business's revenues or by the decisions of higher-ups.) He can hire 100 people at $15/hour, or he can hire 150 people at $10/hour.

The business owner, obviously, would prefer to hire 150 people at $10/hour. He can get more work out of them (in any industry other than R&D or software, where you have negative economies of scale). That part is not in dispute, but most commenters here don't care; business owners and managers have plenty of money & power already.

The person hired, obviously, would rather get $15/hour. It could be the difference between poverty and a decent middle-class lifestyle. The minimum wage is great for them.

But there's a third group: the 50 people who weren't hired because the business has decided they only have 100 positions instead of 150. They're fucked. They go back in the unemployment pool, and have to fend for yourself. And they're even more powerless and vulnerable than the minimum wage workers who have jobs.

I don't actually have a strong opinion on the morality of minimum wage laws, but I fear that the perspective of the workers who aren't hired is lost, and if you really want to talk morals, you need to account for all people involved. Would you still support minimum wage laws if they were sold as "Employment caps for low-wage industries"? Because that's their actual effect.