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Moving Forward on Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#961

Post by Bjartr »

haaen wrote: post #247
Bjartr wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: why should everyone work? Followup: why is having some minimum amount of resources to live on immoral as opposed to merely unfair?

First of all, not everyone should work. Be it a child that lives off of his parents' money, a stay at home mom whose bills are paid by her husband, or a young, poor but promising artist who lives in an apperment from his mecenas. BI is immoral (imho of course) because people get paid for doing nothing. It sends a message to society: laziness pays.

>It sends a message to society: laziness pays.

What is the underlying reason that laziness is bad?

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#962

Post by lubesGordi »

I think of basic income as a venture capital firm that treats us all as individual startups. Lots of value can be generated by people doing what they find worthwhile on their own terms. Some people will sit around playing video games all day. Others will raise their kids. Others (like me) will build things. I'd wager we'd get more out of this then forcing people to work at McDonalds.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#963

Post by bduerst »

newobj wrote: post #960
bduerst wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're asking how bad actors will be handled by the system. It's using an analogy to ask a question, not propping up a straw man and knocking it down.

The question is utterly hyperbolic, that's why it's a straw man. Phrasing your answer in the form of a question does not magically grant rhetorical validity to your line of reasoning.

Maybe I'm mistaken but they pretty clearly did not answer their own question about how BI bad actors will be handled.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#964

Post by TimJRobinson »

InquilineKea wrote: post #927
grecy wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. I agree 100%, and I must say having immigrated from Australia, it's probably the worst thing about America. It feels like Employers have all the power in America, and therefore all the Employees are basically slaves, and are treated as such. I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workf…

How does Australia give one the right to turn down a job?

Australia has very strong safety nets. Currently welfare pays $250AUD per week for a single person or $225 each for a couple. There is also plenty of social housing.

My favorite welfare program they've created (called NEIS) is for those who want to start their own company. You get paid the above but get to build a company instead of having to search for a job (which is very useful when there are no jobs available in your area).

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#965

Post by dragonwriter »

misja111 wrote: post #317

What amazes me in this discussion about BI is that most people don't seem to realize that systems similar to BI have already been tried in Europe, and that they didn't work. I come from the Netherlands, which has always had unemployment benefits. Nowadays you get those only if you meet a bunch of strict conditions but it hasn't always been so tough. In the early eighties, there were almost no checks whatsoever. The r…

Unemployment insurance (even if its not time limited, and the benefit isn't set by your income by previous employment -- which are typically the case with UI schemes) is not at all like BI, because unemployment insurance is lost when you are employed, whereas BI is not; avoiding the disincentive to work that comes with tailing off benefits rapidly with labor income is central to the concept of BI.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#966

Post by risk000 »

pif wrote: post #832
lewisl9029 wrote: post #804

The most compelling case I've seen made recently for basic income is from Yanis Varoufakis (the infamous Greek finance minister who resigned after refusing to agree to the terms of the bailout that the Greek people voted against in a referendum): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss There were many gems in that talk, but this one stood out to me in particular: "The right to turn down a job is essential for a w…

Comparing mafia and creditors is non-sense: mafia get their power from their choice to use unjustified violence, while creditors get their power from your choice to borrow in the first place.

Creditors get their power by virtue of the monopoly they have on the creation of money. This is a right restricted to an extremely small subset of people, which are basically the government and large banking institutions. This right is backed by violence. I think the comparison between Mafia and banking cartels has merit.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#967

Post by alttab »

CPLX wrote: post #957
alttab wrote: post #936

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except "collectively" is very misleading when you're taking the capital gains from say, 20k employees of a tech company and re-distributing it to 300M / 6 Billion people. Generally I agree that being fed and housed will remove constraints on labor allocation - but its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.

> its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above. That's not correct. Communism is ownership of the means of production. Nobody has proposed that the technology company be owned or operated by the government. What's being proposed is a reallocation of streams of income. While I understand there is some vague sim…

In practice this doesn't actually work because the organization doesn't have freedom to re-invest. Once the government can come in and say "we deem all this money in excess, so we will confiscate it". What if that happened to Apple after the successful iMac in the early 2000's? We may have never seen the iPod or iPhone - as an example.

All the system needs to control resources is to define it as "excess capital or resources." You end up with a globally centralized economy, where the independent business owners are robbed when successful to feed the system.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#968

Post by alttab »

pj_mukh wrote: post #953
alttab wrote: post #936

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except "collectively" is very misleading when you're taking the capital gains from say, 20k employees of a tech company and re-distributing it to 300M / 6 Billion people. Generally I agree that being fed and housed will remove constraints on labor allocation - but its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.

No, actually that's straight up hyperbolic. There is no upper bound on the 20k employees' income i.e. not communism (or socialism even).

Unless of course the governing body deems the massive revenue the 20k employees generate as "excess" and is confiscated for Basic Income in Africa - the company employing these people will have practical upper limits on what they can pay their employees as exists today - but with the additional caveat that governments can just take the money for "the common good."

It's globalism. It's socialism/communism.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#969

Post by dllthomas »

weddpros wrote: post #830
Namrog84 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you miss the point of why we actually need BI research and one of the foundational reasons for it. I know predictions could be off. But if in 20 years there are simply no jobs available to 60% of the population. What are they gonna do? Just all starve to death? BI is the inevitable step towards a post scarcity society. When majority of people not only don't want to work but that there are simply no jobs for m…

The same researchers probably think there will be no oil either, just like researchers thought there would be no oil today. 20 years ahead projections are always wrong, sometimes VERY wrong. It's just another case of "X will kill jobs" where X could be steam machines, electricity, robots, whatever... In the 80s my dad who worked in the automotive industry told me I should study IT because robots would eventually repl…

Of course predictions can be wrong; that includes yours.

Betting tremendous amounts that 60% of the population will be out of work in 20 years seems foolhardy to me. But so would be assuming that it can't happen. Building systems (and our understanding of how we can build systems) that can help, in those circumstances or others, seems like a good move.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#970

Post by paulddraper »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #964
InquilineKea wrote: post #927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Australia give one the right to turn down a job?

Australia has very strong safety nets. Currently welfare pays $250AUD per week for a single person or $225 each for a couple. There is also plenty of social housing. My favorite welfare program they've created (called NEIS) is for those who want to start their own company. You get paid the above but get to build a company instead of having to search for a job (which is very useful when there are no jobs available in…

That sounds....awful.

Taxpayers would basically be funding all the hackathon projects that are "Uber for X".

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