Enough with Basic Income

Yes. The amount of money locum staff get is incredible. I know a doctor who exclusively does locum work - he works 3 months a year and has more than enough money to spend the rest of the time travelling. If you eliminate private health care you eliminate that cost and you are the only employer.

Edit: To clarify this as it seems like a very unpopular opinion around these parts: a public system isn't going to work in a free/competitive market. I think we need to either go all in on a public system or all in on a private system. When you land somewhere in the middle it just doesn't work.

Interesting article, and a good mind-expanding summary of various options and history.

TL/DR:

> Basic income is to the social state what the flat tax is to the tax system. It flatters the engineering mind with its apparent simplicity. But in fact it is impossible to implement; it’s also politically suicidal; nobody’s ready to die for it; and even if it existed, it would probably trigger extraordinary political tension and the highest level of inequality in modern Western history.

There may not be post scarcity as there will always people the desire more and thus commerce will exist. However that doesn't necessarily means that everyone needs to contribute to that economy. If we have developed the technology to allow for basic food, shelter, and healthcare then people who don't strive for anything more should be able to acquire these things without additional work and become a basic right. In my mind the idea of basic work isn't to stop people from working, it's to stop requiring it for basic livelihood.

As much as I disagree with the author, the reason why RMI is brought up is to highlight the next point of "Silicon Valley Hates / Ignores Politics". I think the difference in applicability is understood, otherwise this would be a really naively written article...

> So you could argue that the “RMI/RSA” is basic income, except maybe for the paperware frictions that it inflicts on those who are eligible and that could be removed thanks to technology. Accordingly, those in favor of basic income should pay attention to the “RMI/RSA” and draw appropriate lessons: it’s not simple (at all); it has adverse economic effects; and it is widely denounced, notably on the right, as “assistance” (assistanat) that deprives those who claim the benefit from any incentive to look for a job, thus making them live off the middle class taxpayers. If you know politics, you can guess where this is going. Unfortunately, politics is not Silicon Valley’s strong suit.

Basic Income (aka universal welfare) is bullshit because it is authoritarian. It depends on throwing people who refuse to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade in prison, where they are confined like captive animals, so that the rest of the population is cowed into handing over the demanded amount.

Likewise, the author's arguments for social welfare are bullshit:

>There are two reasons why those four risks call for social state intervention. The first is their high criticality. A risk is critical if it is highly probable: for instance, most of us are bound to get old (dying young, fortunately, remains a small probability). A risk is also critical if, however improbable, it can have a devastating impact on your life: having cancer can ruin you if you don’t have health insurance; losing your job can plunge you into a devastating spiral towards poverty, etc. By definition, criticality is probability times impact.

That does not explain why we have to resort to state intervention.

>The other reason why these risks are not well-covered on the insurance market is that they are all affected by what economists call market imperfections. Moral hazard, a well-known imperfection, “occurs when one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks”: it plays a key role when it comes to covering the unemployment risk.

This does not explain why we need state intervention. It sounds like market insurance doesn't want to cover these things for sound economic reasons, so he wants the government to cover it instead (even though it faces all of the same micro-economic problems, like moral hazard).

>Another frequent imperfection on insurance markets is adverse selection: if given the choice, an insurer will refuse to cover those who present signs of a high level of risk, thus providing insurance only to those who eventually don’t need it.

False. An insurer will cover a person who pays a premium that accounts for the risk.

This has the economically necessary effect of encouraging people to get insurance before they get sick and need it.