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Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

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Re: Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

#71

Post by falcolas »

Bartweiss wrote: post #66
twblalock wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than you think. Even if all politicians agreed on what they wanted for UBI today , there is no reason to believe it would remain that way for long. There are any number of reasons people would want to tinker with it in the future, and some of them will be valid and will deserve to be considered -- for example, should disabled people receive more money under UBI, because they have a higher cost of living du…

This is a great summary. Your final paragraph actually brings to mind the famous Don't Rewrite Software essay. Specifically: "it's just a simple function... but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I'll tell you why: those are bug fixes." I imagine that as UBI goes to the table, someone will point out that unreliable mothers will squander the money and fail to feed their kids, and so…

From personal experience, unemployment scales terribly. It capped out for me at around $1,200 a month, pre tax. it's been a long time since I've tried to live on that little, and I hope it doesn't happen again.

Re: Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

#72

Post by BigDaddyD »

hexane360 wrote: post #67
BigDaddyD wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And UBI advocates generally say it benefits everyone. It benefits the poorer at the expense of the rich. >In fact, that's why they prefer it over other government programs! I would support the UBI as a replacement for the current welfare system but only as a replacement and only because it is less morally bankrupt and ineffective. Just to clarify, I don't support the UBI in general but if you're willing to complete…

But the argument is it benefits the poorer more than it hurts the rich. A society should search to maximize utility. Let's make some numbers up. One starving person has a utility of 1. One not starving person has a utility of 10. One mega-ultra-rich person has a utility of 100. One ultra-rich person has a utility of 99. If you take money from 1 mega-ultra-rich person and give it to 2 starving persons: 99-100 = -1 2*(…

> But the argument is it benefits the poorer more than it hurts the rich.

This is a really hard point to prove.

> A society should search to maximize utility.

"Society" doesn't do anything. There is no hivemind. We are each individuals pursuing our own self interest. It is up to the individual to help those who need it, not a small group of people who think they know what we should all be doing.

> One starving person has a utility of 1. One not starving person has a utility of 10. One mega-ultra-rich person has a utility of 100. One ultra-rich person has a utility of 99.

If you take money from 1 mega-ultra-rich person and give it to 2 starving persons: 99-100 = -1 2*(10-1) = 18 +___ +17

You are going to have to clear that up for me because I am frankly not understanding it.

> A rich American wouldn't be rich if they didn't receive any benefits from society.

Yes and society benefits from having rich people with capital invest in companies that produce things we want. It's not a fixed pie.

The main issue I see with this line of thinking is that you simply cannot speak for "society" and whenever we as a species tried to organize everything to our personal standards it has failed miserably.

Re: Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

#73

Post by lastyearman »

BigDaddyD wrote: post #64
lastyearman wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it were true that free market nor capitalism no longer benefit the poor, what do we do then? I think this can be argued since all markets are already regulated (thus not entirely free) nor is capitalism taken to its logical extreme anywhere in the world.

> What if it were true that free market nor capitalism no longer benefit the poor, what do we do then? If that were true then we would switch to a better system. I don't think it is and I don't think there is one. I don't know what capitalism's logical extreme is but if you are talking about anarchy then I am not for that. I believe government serves a very important role in capitalism. It enforces contracts (legal s…

Afaik income inequality has been rising despite the fact that markets have been deregulated. Of course the two may have no correlation, but if the current trajectory continues, then I suppose it's inevitable that something has to be done. As far as I can tell, if we must do something, then we can either deregulate more or implement socialistic schemes such as UBI.

Re: Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

#74

Post by lastyearman »

BigDaddyD wrote: post #48
elicash wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wrote, "Taking money from one person and giving it to another by force is wrong." You had an "especially" in there, so you think it particularly applies here, but you still said that statement is true generally. And UBI advocates generally say it benefits everyone. In fact, that's why they prefer it over other government programs! Because it goes to everyone! I get the policy disagreement on this, but that's stil…

> And UBI advocates generally say it benefits everyone. It benefits the poorer at the expense of the rich. >In fact, that's why they prefer it over other government programs! I would support the UBI as a replacement for the current welfare system but only as a replacement and only because it is less morally bankrupt and ineffective. Just to clarify, I don't support the UBI in general but if you're willing to complete…

The rich have nothing to do with UBI. It's the middle class, or new machines/automation, that we can only take from. Lets do a little thought experiment. Lets forget money and make some assumptions.

First, lets assume that after UBI the total amount of work done does not change. Then lets assume that after UBI the poor does not work any harder and certainly neither does the rich (do the rich even work at all?). So if poor were to come out ahead from this deal, then it must be either the middle class, or the new machines (automation), that are now working harder.

And thus if we come up with new automation, or a way for the poor to work more, then UBI does not have to come at anyones expense.

Re: Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

#75

Post by hexane360 »

BigDaddyD wrote: post #72
hexane360 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the argument is it benefits the poorer more than it hurts the rich. A society should search to maximize utility. Let's make some numbers up. One starving person has a utility of 1. One not starving person has a utility of 10. One mega-ultra-rich person has a utility of 100. One ultra-rich person has a utility of 99. If you take money from 1 mega-ultra-rich person and give it to 2 starving persons: 99-100 = -1 2*(…

> But the argument is it benefits the poorer more than it hurts the rich. This is a really hard point to prove. > A society should search to maximize utility. "Society" doesn't do anything. There is no hivemind. We are each individuals pursuing our own self interest. It is up to the individual to help those who need it, not a small group of people who think they know what we should all be doing. > One starving person…

Sorry, the formatting was off. It's fixed now.

>Yes and society benefits from having rich people with capital invest in companies that produce things we want. It's not a fixed pie.

That's my entire point. It isn't a fixed pie. The whole concept that a person "owns" part of the pie is dubious, because they relied on everyone else to get that part of the pie.

>you simply cannot speak for "society"

I'm not speaking for society. Society is speaking for society by voting.

>whenever we as a species tried to organize everything to our personal standards it has failed miserably.

What are you referring to? Because I see:

-public services

-public education

-firefighters

-single payer healthcare

-law & order

-criminal justice

-Software standards (you're talking to me over a "personal standard" called TCP/IP)

Re: Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

#76

Post by twblalock »

Bartweiss wrote: post #59
twblalock wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The jobs lost to those trade deals are generally pretty crappy jobs. Not to mention, that if those jobs hadn't gone to Mexico because of NAFTA, they would have gone to China, or southeast Asia somewhere. There is pretty much no way they would have stayed in the US. It's also the case that the US manufactures more goods now than ever before, but with fewer people. We manufacture more goods per worker than ever befor…

Pretty much all the "death of American manufacturing" stories neglect this. You can find a lot of unemployed steelworkers and abandoned factories, but those factories have largely been supplanted by newer, more efficient ones. 'Onshoring' is becoming popular because domestic production is actually cost-effective once you factor in the low ongoing costs and defect rates for automated production. So NAFTA mattered, and…

A recent NY Times article argues that NAFTA may have saved some American jobs in the auto industry: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/business/economy/nafta-may...

The argument is that NAFTA caused low-wage jobs to move to Mexico instead of to Asia. Suppliers in Mexico work closely with US suppliers, because they are geographically close to one another -- therefore, the supply chain stayed in North America. If the jobs had gone to Asia, the Asian suppliers would probably have worked with other suppliers close to them, rather than US suppliers. So the US suppliers would have lost their business partners, and many would have gone out of business.

I think we should also keep in mind that trade happens whether you have free-trade deals or not. Even with US tariffs of 2.5% on cars and 25% on trucks, Japanese car companies did very well in the US and took a substantial amount of market share away from domestic automakers in the 1970s and 1980s, back when all of their cars were imported from Japan (they build many in the US now, though). The Japanese cars were so competitive that Americans chose to buy them even though they cost more than American cars, due to both the tariffs and shortages -- Hondas sold substantially above MSRP for a while due to demand, for example. So, unless you prevent imports from coming into the country at all, you still have to compete whether you have free trade or tariffs.

Re: Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

#77

Post by minikomi »

dTal wrote: post #55
Bartweiss wrote: post #34

> An odd coalition of conservative, libertarian, and liberal intellectuals has advocated for Basic Income over the past 60 years. This, of course, is the (political) downfall of UBI. That coalition will stand together right up until someone has to draft an actual Senate bill implementing the thing. Then, the liberals want to phase out existing social programs gradually, or implement it as a more-palatable negative in…

We need a word for this dynamic, which also surfaced in Brexit. You had the "dey turker jerbs" crowd, the sovereignty crowd, the free market crowd, and the racist crowd - and the only common element between them was "Brexit", rather than any kind of unified vision. And now we're stuck with an a priori decision with no idea how to go about implementing it in a sensible way. Cries of "shouldn't we have thought of this…

Like a social fulcrum - a tiny point upon which large changes are made, yet really it's the lever and the force(s) behind it which make up the bigger picture.

Re: Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

#78

Post by gwright »

Bartweiss wrote: post #68
dTal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a word for this dynamic, which also surfaced in Brexit. You had the "dey turker jerbs" crowd, the sovereignty crowd, the free market crowd, and the racist crowd - and the only common element between them was "Brexit", rather than any kind of unified vision. And now we're stuck with an a priori decision with no idea how to go about implementing it in a sensible way. Cries of "shouldn't we have thought of this…

I hadn't made the connection, but you're right. This pattern comes up constantly when people become allies over some narrow point of convergence. In some cases, like UBI, the alliance will probably fall apart before anything gets done. In other, like Brexit, some huge change gets accomplished by a coalition that all wanted it for different reasons. At least in the case of Brexit, the awful error was giving a simple u…

This is one reason why representative forms of governance are better than direct democracy/referendum. Bureaucratic inertia can be a good thing.

Re: Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

#79

Post by gwright »

drabiega wrote: post #45
gedy wrote: post #30

It's not 'automation' it's free/low-tariff trade pacts with cheap labor countries supported by both corporations and politicians (both Democrat and Republican) Blaming tech and automation is all a lot of hand-waving and finger pointing away from the real issue.

The jobs lost to those trade deals are generally pretty crappy jobs. We'd be better off if we captured some of the value those treaties create and redistribute it to those negatively impacted... with something like UBI.

The value doesn't need to be captured because it isn't lost. The value is simply distributed across the entire economy by lower costs.

There is room for policies that support workers displaced by economic change (i.e. unemployment insurance) but free trade helps to maintain a vibrant, adaptive, and productive economy (i.e. to create wealth).

Highly regulated trade is riddled with preferential treatment for politically connected firms or industries. This is a great way for politicians and bureacrats to wield power, exchange favors, and generally funnel value away from consumers and towards the favored firms and industries.

Re: Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats

#80

Post by gwright »

lastyearman wrote: post #74
BigDaddyD wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And UBI advocates generally say it benefits everyone. It benefits the poorer at the expense of the rich. >In fact, that's why they prefer it over other government programs! I would support the UBI as a replacement for the current welfare system but only as a replacement and only because it is less morally bankrupt and ineffective. Just to clarify, I don't support the UBI in general but if you're willing to complete…

The rich have nothing to do with UBI. It's the middle class, or new machines/automation, that we can only take from. Lets do a little thought experiment. Lets forget money and make some assumptions. First, lets assume that after UBI the total amount of work done does not change. Then lets assume that after UBI the poor does not work any harder and certainly neither does the rich (do the rich even work at all?). So if…

You are assuming a static system in which wealth transfer is a zero-sum game. Unfortunately that isn't the world we live in. It is entirely possible that administrative systems to transfer wealth could utterly destroy the economy (for example, Venezuela).

In particular I'm at a loss to understand the arguments for UBI that assume the system could/should provide a sufficient income for everyone to 'live' independent of any other source of income. How exactly would that work? Wouldn't the people actually working be just a bit unhappy being taxed to support people who didn't work at all? Wouldn't people on the margins simply stop working? Wouldn't this system drift into a completely unsustainable configuration?

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