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My own private basic income

opendemocracy.net

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Re: My own private basic income

#131

Post by Spooky23 »

rrggrr wrote: post #120
ktta wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mixing together business owners and rentiers (property owners). Very different things. Property owners don't need to work 60-hour weeks unless they are the sole handyman for 100+ houses.

I'm not mixing anything together. The intellectual property, real property or personal property you are referring to is the product of all the risks and costs I'm talking about. And, the rent-seeking from that property is the reward. And, that rent-seeking is very much taxed, contrary to the author's contention, at multiple levels and in many ways.

Nope.

Owning real estate means that your income is market rent - carrying cost - amortized capital expenses.

My coworker owns about a dozen 2-4 family properties and spends about 10 hours a week on them. Most tenants are section 8, which means he's paid on time by the government and gets above market rate for marginal property. He probably nets around $250k.

Re: My own private basic income

#132

Post by Spooky23 »

This guy sounds like a real shithead.

He makes his living teaching the children of totalitarian aristocrats at a faux university, is saving for the future on the backs of the poor back at home, and gets a kick out of having indentured servants at his beck and call.

I wouldn't shed a tear when his little empire of dirt collapses.

Re: My own private basic income

#133

Post by weberc2 »

opportune wrote: post #32
maerF0x0 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Real life isn't just an elaborate Austrian economics simulator. In this case, there are a lot of complex dynamics at play: will workers emigrate elsewhere if trained well (Basically the IIT problem)? Are constituents/subjects ok with reductions in their quality of life so that other people can be provided these resources. To act as if the market will magically fix this is lazy and not realistic. Also yes of course I…

I have a really hard time believing that governments will do better at distributing resources equitably than a market.

To act as though governments can magically fix this is lazy and not realistic.

Re: My own private basic income

#134

Post by weberc2 »

hk__2 wrote: post #72
vilmosi wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which it doesn’t.

It does in many very poor nations. What's the significance of the $1 figure anyway? Whose point hinges on this number?

Re: My own private basic income

#135

Post by david_shaw »

rrggrr wrote: post #82

Gosh. OP made me sad with his thesis. "1. For owners, work is optional." ... As an owner I wish this were true. For me and most owners I know work is mandatory, and its 60 hour weeks and a lot of sleepless nights. There is no safety net. There is no unemployment. I get no workman's compensation. I have no employment law protections. Its, as one HN comment said some time ago, "a suffering contest" a lot of the time. "…

> UPDATE: I'm really not confusing types of owners. The author's thesis is broad not only in the article, but in his works in general.

I totally agree with your points, but only when talking about the traditional/entrepreneurial sense of "business owner." The article is talking more about owning equity in a business, whether that's real estate (which is his example), or just investing in businesses. He even explicitly states that:

> Owners do not have to be entrepreneurs. They don’t even have to be competent. They can hire competent people to manage their money for them. The amount of 'entrepreneurship' in my story was miniscule.

In other words, if you're very wealthy, you can invest in diversified REITs and have exposure to the real estate market. You do not (and cannot, really) work on these projects, and your investments -- ownership of real estate through REITs -- will keep making money. That's not to say it's without risk, of course: the market could crash, the funds could fail to return on investment, the business could collapse.

Again, I think that for the HN crowd, your critiques are totally valid and I agree 100%. I just think this article is more about "hey, if you're really wealthy, your money can work for you!"

Not that that's particularly groundbreaking.

Re: My own private basic income

#136

Post by pishpash »

drewcon wrote: post #96
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…

> keep people poor, underfed, and uneducated so that they will always be a cheap source of grunt labor. Poor, underfed, and uneducated is the default position for human beings. We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing. There is no conspiracy to "enslave" anyone, nearly all public health and wealth measures over the last 100 years are overwhelming up and to the right. That growth did not happened throu…

Begin with fallacies and you shall conclude nonsense.

As a species, once we reached apex predator status, we were already born with the entire Earth's resources as our inheritance, not nothing. Somehow those got divided up and almost never was it via the mechanisms of an open market economy -- only in exceptional circumstances did those mechanisms provide a modicum of mobility, especially during technological transitions. The rest of the uplift was through outright redistribution, either through the occasional enlightened king's edict, the politburo's fist, or the exercise of raw political power in the legislatures of the world.

An unfettered open market economy that gets farther and farther from initial conditions ends in a revolution.

Re: My own private basic income

#137

Post by wturner »

j2bax wrote: post #125
wturner wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't get my head around the logic that a garbage collector gets paid next to nothing relative to someone who is paid millions to talk into a microphone and the reasoning is that the latter "provides more value". "They provide more value" just seems like a very partial catch phrase to make this all look less absurd than it actually is.

I think the difference is Oprah provides a little value to a lot of people (whether it be therapeutic, entertainment or what have you). Collectively, she is providing a lot more "value" because of the platform and distribution she has achieved. Your garbage collector provides great value to you, but no value to the grand majority of people.

My point was that each garbage collector is more valuable to the person paying for them than Oprah Winfrey is, but Oprah makes hundreds of millions of dollars and the garbage collector makes a typical wage. I understand the reasoning that Oprah provides a little value that is distributed to a lot of people and that the garbage industry in its totality is more valuable than Oprah. With all that, I still think it's a bit of a partial way to summarize whatever is happening here - and something about it just seems misleading. Then again, maybe I just think societies values and priorities are bizarre.

Re: My own private basic income

#138

Post by twic »

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…

> Market economies do not function on work, but on value.

That's the whole point of the article.

"Those rules are not some natural feature of the universe. People made them. People can change them."

Re: My own private basic income

#139

Post by ktta »

rrggrr wrote: post #124
ktta wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A lot of work goes into property ownership Sure, but the $/hour return is much higher that the average job. 'A lot' isn't a good quantifier. I bet the same people who live in the house he rents work a lot more for a lot less money. >Very few people are Scrooge McDucks with all the time in the world to swim around in a vault full of gold coins True, but there are a lot more people who comfortably live off money their…

Okay, so research the author to better understand the context. He rejects the Hobbesian ideal that a social contract, enforced by a central power, provides critical scaffolding upon which wealth and prosperity can exist in a society. On this point he confuses the existence of Hobbes Leviathan, with how and where that power is applied. Removing property rights isn't just unrealistic, it doesn't work where its been app…

No one is advocating for removal of property rights, sheesh. The author is pointing out the realities of life today, and I'm just surprised how you tend to bring in these complexities to divert such a simple point.

The many ideas that people had a couple centuries ago don't hold up so well anymore. The population of the world when the book you refer to was published (17 century) was 8% of what it is currently. Resource utilization was a fraction of what it is today.

Today natural resources are dwindling and powerful people are quicker than ever at capturing anything of value. There is an imbalance in what one can do with their best efforts today, and that's not fair.

Acknowledging the faults in our current society is a better path to take rather than advocating for the arguments put forward by someone who probably couldn't fathom today's world.

Re: My own private basic income

#140

Post by samstave »

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…

>instead I want to ensure they have some mobility so that they can always better their situation

and tis is why I feel that there is an active oppression of access to quality education. The sentiment you share above is NOT shared by MANY and likely most of the deca-billionaire class...

Keeping people stupid has value to those who would benefit from stupidity (governments, institutions, corporations and entrenched wealth) -- thus platitudes and "foundations" with very very slow if any progressive impact are the true status quo...

The trick is to keep people holding themselves down by providing them the baggage to keep their minds off the unlimited and focused on the limitations.

/tinfoil

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