Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

>No, socialism says focusing on group cooperation optimizes aggregate wealth. Socialism says that somewhere between a completely shared economy and a completely private economy is a sweet spot where you get the best of both worlds.

Socialism may claim that but the results are very anti-social as demonstrated in my previous comment. You say "no" in response to my comment concerning socialism preventing two people from entering an agreement--then why can't I hire someone for $4 an hour, if that's what they and I agree upon? That's just one of dozens of possible scenarios I could mention which socialism prohibits.

>You're very focused on this "socialism is anti-social" stance

Yes, as that was the idea I was refuting from the parent comment.

>but not only does it not make any intuitive sense, it is not backed up by any data. Show me a modern, prosperous state that absolutely abstains from social programs or promoting collective interest.

Does the absence of a modern state which meets this criteria prove the point? Hardly. It does not follow. We need not compare state to state, as socialist programs are typically applied to individual sectors of an economy. Take any sector of the modern economy which is heavily affected by socialist programs and you will find a sector which is scraping by. You will find corruption and you will find greater public outrage. Healthcare being a prime example. Ironically progressives blame the short comings in these sectors on capitalism.

>The very idea of a state is a threat to (completely) free exchange of property and labor.

I agree. I would like to see more thought, more experiment and more results to see how little of a state might be accomplished.

>Great! Then you should be strongly in favor of a basic income, because part of the logical construction of BI is the abolition of minimum wage.

Nope.

>Minimum wage is a collective agreement to avoid people working below subsistence wages. Once subsistence is guaranteed covered by BI, there will be much less need for low end wage distortions.

No, minimum wage is a political stunt which results unemployment. That is why you now see the same union lobbyists who pushed for the $15 minimum wage now lobbying for exemptions for their unions.

>Admittedly, many wealthy people seem to prefer having subsistence not guaranteed, it makes negotiating for low wage low skill servants much easier.

Are you suggesting that wealthy people are ok if all of their workers died? Seems pretty ridiculous. If I am opposed to someone stealing my wallet, does that mean I am in favor of their kids starving to death?

I've wondered if a "guaranteed basic goods" systems might make sense, either as an alternative to a basic income system, or as a way to slowly transition to one.

The idea would be that as we figure out how to automate things, we make those things essentially public goods. We end up with a mixed economy, where we have one class of goods that are produced in publicly owned automated factories and do not cost the consumer money, and another class of goods that work like they do now where private parties produce them and sell them for money which the buyers earn through paid employment.

For instance, consider vegetables. We're close to being able to make almost fully automated farms for many crops, and we're close to fully automating most of the shipping from farm to market. The idea would be that as we achieve this, the government buys up these farms (or starts its own farms), and everyone gets a daily allotment of the produce from these farms. Some meat production is also highly automated, and so we should be able to at some point in the not too distant future add meat to this.

At that point everyone who has a place to cook has their basic food requirements taken care of.

How about transportation? Automobile manufacture is very automated. At some point that too will be almost completely automated. Combine that with self-driving cars, and we should be able to have a publicly owned nationwide fleet of self-driving taxis. Ideally these would be electric cars, powered by publicly owned solar, wind, hydroelectric, or nuclear systems.

As automation gets more and more advanced, more and more goods can be added to the "made by publicly owned automated factories" list and made available to all.

When enough stuff is automated and turned into public goods to allow someone to survive reasonably without a job as long as they have housing, we can start making publicly owned housing in places where land and construction costs are cheap. That will be away from the big cities, but for people who decide to not work that would be fine, as it would for people who can work remotely. So we should be able to reach a point where everyone can have a basic apartment or small house and the necessities to survive reasonably there, without an income.

Will we ever be able to automate everything except creative intellectual work? I don't think so, at least not for a long time. I think that would require the development of something like the robots from Asimov's stories--robots that have human form factors (so that they can work anywhere that a human can work) and human level intelligence, and I don't think we'll be there anytime in the next 100 years.

A nice thing about this approach is that it can be done with minimal disruption. With basic income you have to give everyone enough to reasonably survive right from the start. With basic goods, you go item by item, industry by industry.

The lower paying get jobs will have to start paying more.

If, all of a sudden I don't need your $4 per hour job, I quit. If everyone else also doesn't need it they quit.

Then you as an employer need to pay more to get people to work for you, or use self driving mopeds to deliver the pizzas.

Hmm, well I'm quite sure you would apply that knowledge somewhere eventually, after resting for a while maybe...