Why we should all have a basic income

When I was 3 years old, my dad bought a brand new house in a brand new suburb. It was 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, etc. For its era, it was a very solidly middle class or upper middle class house and he had 3/4 of the price of the house in the bank. The house cost $16k. He had $12k in the bank. It was a LOT of money when I was 3 years old. It is not a lot of money today.

A $1000/month sounds like a lot now. But the minute you issue UBI, it will spur inflation and the value of that $1000 will immediately be less than it is now. This is a problem faced by every single welfare or aid program the world over: It takes no time for whatever figures you came up with to be out of date and for your program to not be accomplishing its intended goals.

I have written about this before (for example: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsol...) and I expect to write about this more. The UBI is a bad solution to the problem. We have faced this problem before in the form of the Industrial Revolution and we invented the 40 hour work week. It helped distribute work more fairly. We need similar solutions today. Turning most people into sheeple and charity cases merely because they are not rich is a terrible, terrible idea.

If I had basic income, I would go back to study, get a PhD in Computer Science Majoring in AI/Machine learning and then I would try to do something meaningful with it. I am tired of doing pseudo-intellectual software 'engineering' tasks - I would like to use my intellect to tackle difficult problems instead of trivial problems like building UI components and managing databases. Unfortunately, I can't afford to go to back to uni right now.

I think that there are a lot of people in my position who are desperate for basic income. From a societal point of view, innovation would move quicker if people had more time to invest in themselves.

Unfortunately for me, right now, I just have two options if I want to buy myself some time to study:

- Hope that one of the startups I work/worked for gets a big exit and that I can cash in and fund my studies.

- Wait for retirement age before going back to uni (and hope that my brain still works OK at that age).

>Creating jobs is one thing, but creating meaningful jobs is something completely different.

* Hoover Dam

* Lincoln Tunnel

* LAX

* LaGuardia Airport

Just a few examples of things created by jobs created primarily to give people work.

>Are these meaningless jobs really better than universal basic income?

Would you rather pay somebody to build the next Lincoln Tunnel or pay for them to write some poetry and start an emo band?

So I get where you're going with this, but the businesses are still competing with one another in a free market.

So yes, you're right that if all the avocado farmers in California decided to engage in price fixing because they know that more money exists and that they can get it, they probably can. But it presupposes highly monopolistic behavior that doesn't seem very likely to work for most markets. Especially if it's easy to become an entrepreneur.

The business, after all, makes a profit as long as their price is above their cost. So unless their costs go up, competition keeps prices down.

Now, I think you're half right -- prices will go up, but it's not because of gouging by middlemen or traditional inflation. It will be because as people drop out of the labor market, the really undesirable jobs will become more costly to fill.

But that strikes me as a much more fair free market than what we have now. Yes, you will have to pay more to have your garbage picked up in front of your house. Why? Because as it turns out, you would much rather be doing whatever you do than deal with a thousand people's garbage. Maybe they should be getting paid more than you, in a voluntary free market.

So I imagine it will be sort-of inflation, but almost better described as a rebalancing of the economy. Jobs that humans can do much more easily than robots will get higher salaries. Jobs that are enjoyable get lower salaries. Overall, salary spread across jobs becomes much smaller.

But I don't think it's necessarily likely to be some kind of overall inflation, it's a redistribution of wealth accomplished by simultaneous direct transfer of wealth through the UBI, in addition to a redistribution of power accomplished by allowing "Nothing" to be an option that employers have to compete against.

I've met someone who spun a sign for a living... he was a huge stoner... I love weed, but he clearly smoked too much of it while his brain was still developing and he could barely hold a conversation... Now... maybe he was self-medicating or whatever... but the point was he failed out of high school, failed out of a few jobs... and then ended up spinning a sign because he really had no meaningful skill to contribute to society. (And I think he failed at showing up to work so he lost that job eventually...)

I suspect most people who are in really shit jobs are there because they have issues... they can't show up on time, they don't follow employment rules, or they have something just wrong with them (they are sex-offenders, or have untreated behavioral issues or whatever)... not the sort of people who should be empowered to just sit around. I will go so far as to say nobody who really has potential ends up spinning a sign for very long... they use the job to cover their rent, and they find a way to get a better job.

Anyway I don't want to come off as against a UBI, I but I've never met someone who benefited by sitting around doing nothing. I think it's bad for people to be lazy -- like fundamentally brain-rotting to sit around being idle. I like the idea of a UBI that's tied to doing something... anything... getting outside and picking up trash in the road ditches even... or getting vocational training (which we should find a way to make free)... or getting mental health treatment... Prove you have a regular paycheck, or prove you are clocking in 30 hours at some "just move your body" type of approved activity every week to qualify.