Ask YC: Any Updates on the Basic Income Project?

> The incentive structure that is created when you take resources from producers to award to non-producers.

I'm sorry, but this is idealogical nonsense. The classic 'non-producer' is the rentier. Quite the opposite of what you seem to be implying (i.e. that the needy are the 'non-producers').

There is no other way to define this except that it is socialism brewing here. In that light, I'd like to refer you to the words of Milton Friedman, 'If you want to learn the truth about socialism, look at how people vote with their feet'. People always leave socialist nations when their inevitable collapse occurs.

Please folks, I'd like to urge you to reconsider such initiatives. Take a look at these two articles about how this kind of mindset has ruined lives in Venezuela:

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-06/socialism-...

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/12/17/world/americas/ap...

From the articles:

For many Americans, it's a news story piped in from a faraway place. For me? It's my friends and family who are suffering at the hands of an increasingly powerful and paranoid dictatorial regime. As a kid growing up in Caracas, I remember the difficult decision my parents had to make when Hugo Chavez attempted his coup and took over shortly thereafter.

The force that is driving Venezuela into the ground is socialism.

In the midst of this chaos, I see people in the United States – most of whom have never known a life outside of the abundance available to them as a result of our market economy – gravitating toward socialism like it's some natural force for good. As reported in these pages, a recent survey shows that nearly 60 percent of 18 to 26 year-olds believe socialism is the "most compassionate system."

socialism operates under the assumption that an insulated leader and his legion of bureaucrats are the best judges of what people are worth.

And the most important part:

Socialism assumes that government officials are more qualified than individuals to decide how much a person should earn, which products and services are necessary for that person to live and how much that person should have to pay for them.

> For the vast majority of people, if they don't have to work in order to earn, most people will choose not to work. So then who supports these folks?

Those people are already being supported with fantastically expensive bureaucratic benefit systems. Sometimes those systems also act as a disincentive to return to work, trapping people on benefits, by making it impossible for them to get education or work experience or part time work.

Once you have these massive bureaucracies they sustain themselves by land-grabbing more work.

Here's one example from the UK. A man claiming benefits gets temporary work on a zero hour contract. He needs to sign off benefits, so he calls (because that how you do things now) the helpline.

"Is this position going to last longer than 5 weeks?"

He has no idea. But they will only take a yes or no answer.

He is unable to convey that he has no idea whether the job will last for more than 5 weeks or not.

For people who don't know the system it's tempting to just say "it doesn't matter, just take her suggestion and move on to the next question", but sadly the penalty for getting a question wrong (even if you've used their suggested answer) is that you have your benefits suspended or sanctioned.

> celebrating and rewarding achievement based on genuine merit as opposed to cuddling our young ones

You should reward effort, not necessarily achievement. Note that this is different to "cuddling our young ones". This is apparently especially important for smart children.

>You should reward effort, not necessarily achievement. Note that this is different to "cuddling our young ones".

It is to a degree a question of semantics seeing as though we're mostly on the same page on most issues. However, I'll still indulge you; sustained effort often leads to achievement. I find achievement to be the best metric to measure effort, otherwise how do you know there's real effort if a given problem is not ultimately solved?

>Here's one example from the UK. A man claiming benefits gets temporary work on a zero hour contract. He needs to sign off benefits, so he calls (because that how you do things now) the helpline.

I personally know of a man in the UK who has an arrangement with his employer to receive payments in cash only. This thereby allows him to still claim unemployment benefits from the government. The employer benefits by not paying PAYE taxes and the employee benefits by earning from two income streams putting him fiscally at par with people who have much higher qualifications than he does.

You can see the sort of rot and inefficiencies that occur when systems such as these are adopted.

> Those people are already being supported with fantastically expensive bureaucratic benefit systems.

You are basically saying: We already have bad socialism so lets try good socialism. UBI is as bad if not worst. Distorted market will be least of our worries.

I am in favour of guranteed, no-string-attached food & shalter.