As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income

>There was a time in this country for nearly 40 years where the top tax bracket was above 75%, and for quite a while it was 91%, and for a short while it was 94%.

When we were at war. There was also a longer time when there were no taxes.

The error here is to assume an isolated development of one trend. If AI becomes as sophisticated as imagined, it will make most (if not all) other technologies evolve with it. When talking about manufacturing/production, better tech correlates to lower production costs, lower prices. If you still pay $500 for a mobile phone then, it is more a subject of brandwashing than economics. Same thing with services, medicines, food, etc. In sum: we'll need less money. If that money comes from universal min wage, or from working less hours, or from working more hours at lower wages, seems irrelevant next to this question: who will own AI?

Since WW2 most basic research has been funded by governments, but prior to WW2, the industrial revolution happened without state funding. Varoufakis' argument is that since the state has been taxing the productive to fund research, that gives it a moral right to tax the productive some more.

Paris Hilton obviously didn't earn her money, but her parents chose to give it to her, and millions of people chose to stay at Hilton hotels. If you assume ordinary citizens have a right to the money they earn, you have to grant Paris the same right to her trust fund. (Which is going to be invested or spent anyway). There's no consistent way to assert the right to violate property rights, without abolishing property altogether.

Marx didn't plan for lower prices.

Marx' theory starts with the same assumption as those arguing for basic income: That labour will eventually - as a natural effect of the drive of capitalism to compete - need to be automated away or squeezed on income, until capitalism faces the dual thread of causing mass unemployment (and so unrest) and too high manufacturing capacity (by driving incomes and employment down and so killing demand). This is outlined many places, but most prominently in the Communist Manifesto.

If that gets bad enough to lead to revolution, Marx "plan" was for a socialist government to use methods such as extremely progressive taxation and the like to basically drive capitalists into the working class. This is outlined in the Communist Manifesto and Critique of the Gotha Programme and many other places.

Once this leads to the end of class rule, Marx believed society would eventually take advantage of the overcapacity built by capitalism to allow distribution according to need. This is also covered in the Communist Manifesto, but expanded on at length in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

Marx did make the assumption that class struggle will cease if everyone basic needs are met, but he also cautioned a number of places, and most notably in The German Ideology, that attempting redistribution in a society that was not sufficiently advanced to be able to meet the needs of everyone would just restart the class struggle all over again.

You may be right that the threshold for what people "need" before they will be satisfied may be higher than what Marx may have thought, but the point Marx made was not that people won't want more, but at some point peoples willingness to fight for a bigger share than what others get will be lower than such a society's willingness and ability to resist special treatment. Where exactly that point would be, we don't know.

The more immediately relevant question is whether Marx' prediction of capitalist boom and bust cycles eventually running out of control and driving unemployment so out of control as to trigger revolutions will prove correct.

Basic income would be a simple way of proving him wrong, by creating a safety net that would prevent things from getting bad enough to trigger revolutions.

Marx argument there is that the ruling classes will resist these types of redistribution, with violence if necessary, and that is the reason for the Marxist idea that revolutions are in general necessary - it comes not from any idea that they are desirable, but from an assumption that any working class majority for large scale redistribution will be faced with an army. If that proves wrong, then that pulls the rug under large parts of Marx' historical materialism (the idea that history is defined in part by the predominant modes of production, and that these inevitably evolve in certain ways culminating with the end of class rule).

> Are we talking about rats or humans now?

We are not restricted to confined spaces with other people. Even the most destitute could walk down the street and leave. And we see in people that are so restricted the same kind of psychological problems you find in the rats, such as in prisons.

Population growth is not uncontrolled. Educated populations are equalizing and declining in growth. Once women are educated and empowered in society and people have a standard of living where their own survival isn't dependent on many children taking care of them in old age, you see birthrates decline dramatically.

The clan war problem is truly something mutual, but its something we might be able to surpass one day.

> would prefer against that.

Which isn't something reflected in rats, at all. The population decline was due to a breakdown of society. We are not having that at all, yet our replacement rate declines dramatically once you no longer need the kids to survive in your later years and you are educated on how to avoid getting pregnant. The only reason rats reproduce like... rats is because they don't have the rational mind to understand what contraception is, how to use it, and how it can avoid them the unhappiness later of having kids.

> Why are we still debating global warming, and having wars over religion?

Neither of these are rational arguments. For all intents and purposes, scientific consensus is the basis of rational thought, and everything else is emotional response to rationality. It is that scientific process that separates us from the animalistic emotional squabbles.