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My own private basic income

opendemocracy.net

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Re: My own private basic income

#51

Post by sharemywin »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #21
opportune wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't disagree more. As a society (and this goes from a community to a global scale) we should make it a priority to give everyone the resources to meet their maximum potential. I don't mean that we should give everyone a million dollars to invest of their own. What I mean is that we should ensure that everyone gets provided with a good education and food/water/shelter, etc. The author specifically mentions the…

Entrepreneurs have incentive to ensure everyone meets their maximum potential because this is the place where there is the most to extract. If my value is $10 per day and someone makes my value $20 per day, there is $10 per day worth of value for us to negotiate over. We _both_ have an incentive to maximize my potential. Also: >we should ... thats a morality statement but without a canonical source of ethics that som…

Why is your assumption a better assumption than say children, the elderly, and disabled should be taken care of. outside of a psychopath compassion is also more or less universal.

Re: My own private basic income

#52

Post by vilmosi »

taway_1212 wrote: post #30
accountyaccount wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends. Is $1 enough to grant you housing, food, healthcare, and free time to see your family?

It's enough to get a can of Coke (not everywhere though).

I think the point is that $1 a day is acceptable if it provides shelter/food etc.

Re: My own private basic income

#53

Post by DailyDreaming »

I agree with the author's points. There have been, almost certainly, Einsteins who have lived and died in poverty without ever having tasted a book. I feel like a basic income for everyone is supportable and would give people falling to an unknowable fate the lift they need to go beyond surviving. Less work seems to need to be done with tech advances today, but the only thing a job replacing robot seems to do is take the incomes of two u people and give it to the person who owns the robot. The slippery slope is that we will eventually do this for most jobs, if we survive long enough as a species, and I agree we need change to evolve as our society does.

Re: My own private basic income

#54

Post by dota_fanatic »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #17
Sodman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is for a lot of people, they'd need something more like a 10x multiplier or more. (Eg the folks he references trapped working as cheap labor that can't even leave without the company's permission, who likely can't even afford travel).

for the record I'm speaking of a "Real" multiplier (taking in account inflation / standard of living) . IMO if every generation is 2x-ing their parent's lifestyle, its nearly instantaneous wealth in the scale of humanity. In the developed world today's poor live like kings of old. In 1000 yrs I would imagine that their poor will live better than our wealthy "Playboys" of today. I see nothing wrong with people being i…

Poor people in the developed world do NOT live like kings of old. They have bosses. They struggle to find mates. They live in small, impermanent homes with no land of their own. They tend to be in debt, and don't even understand how permanent that debt will be for them. They're socially at the bottom.

This is nothing like a king, who could have a large family, and was well fed, had permanent shelter, didn't pay rent, etc etc. How ridiculous.

Re: My own private basic income

#56

Post by imgabe »

> No one is going to give tens of thousands of dollars every year to some guy who owned a couple of houses and said he knew how to manage more,

Well, not no one. There are hard money lenders who will loan money to "some guy" to do more or less that.

Re: My own private basic income

#57

Post by pasquinelli »

MichaelRenor wrote: post #14

> My first big lucky break happened in 2009 when Georgetown University hired me as a philosophy professor on their campus in Qatar Apparently going to high school, studying and passing the SAT, applying and being accepted into university, studying, passing, and graduating university is just luck. Have we we reached peak luck yet? Is there nothing ever we can do to improve our circumstances and our lives? This is like…

"My first big lucky break happened in 2009 when Georgetown University hired me as a philosophy professor on their campus in Qatar

'Apparently going to high school, studying and passing the SAT, applying and being accepted into university, studying, passing, and graduating university is just luck.'"

let's finish the paragraph, shall we:

"My first big lucky break happened in 2009 when Georgetown University hired me as a philosophy professor on their campus in Qatar. Georgetown-Qatar, which is funded entirely by the Qatar government, has to pay an enormous premium to get faculty to agree to live and work in Qatar. I get paid three times as much as my wife. I teach half as many classes. She’s a full professor. I’m only an associate."

hey, quite a lot of people go to high school, pass their sats, get into a university and earn a degree, but almost none of them are offered a professorship in qatar, where they earn three times as much for half the work. quite a fortuitous circumstance, and one which wasn't in control of the author. so, luck.

Re: My own private basic income

#58

Post by cortesoft »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #6

> I lucked into money. The basic point is that he gets paid more whilst not doing more "work". For those whom "Work" is the only lever they use to convert into money, they see inequitable work:cash ratios as "unfair" (a morality statement). Market economies do not function on work, but on value. He did the same work in a high value scenario. A glass of water provided in the middle of a developed city is worthless and…

You are totally ignoring the crux of his argument, which is centered on ownership; how we decide who owns what, how we tax owned things versus earned-through-work things, and how we tax the things people do with what they own.

Yes, a piece of property earns rent because it has 'value' to someone else; however, who gets to earn that value? At some point, this piece of land was 'unowned', and then someone came along and said 'I own this'. Do we let them keep that forever? Do they have to pay society a fee for being able to claim it as their own? Can they give it to their kids for perpetuity? Can they do anything they want with it? What about the air above it, or the ground below?

These are all very important questions, and there isn't some 'true' moral answer to them that is the right way to govern property rights. There are easier moral arguments to make about ownership of property I produce, but not about land or natural resources.

Re: My own private basic income

#59

Post by dragonwriter »

moeymo wrote: post #24

Property tax is $15 per month in South Bend for a house? Wrong. Capital gains is taxed lower than income? Wrong -- sometimes it is, sometimes the other way around. Multiple factual errors.

> Capital gains is taxed lower than income? Wrong -- sometimes it is, sometimes the other way around

Capital gains is always taxed equal (for short-term gains) or less (for long-term gains) than "generic" income, except for a few edge cases (e.g., in the very-low income range where additional labor income has a negative net effective tax rate due to EITC and child tax credit and long-term gains have merely zero taxes.)

Re: My own private basic income

#60

Post by yesbabyyes »

accountyaccount wrote: post #10
gitpusher wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dont see it as unfair that a person making $1 a day is unlikely to become a deca-billionaire in their lifetime (total mobility); Do you see it as unfair that there are people stuck making $1 a day?

I think it depends. Is $1 enough to grant you housing, food, healthcare, and free time to see your family?

No. $1 is not enough.
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