The Star Trek Economy

I blame Roddenberry. He sold the network 'Wagon Train to the Stars' but what he deliberately _produced_ was an episodic morality play.

Good fiction and a consistent universe were just not going to happen in that kind of a deal.

As you suggest , fiat currency issuers backstop the value of their currency via taxation. But its not their willingness to accept the backstops it, its the power to impose mandatory taxes on the population that gives value to the currency.

Warren Mosler -one of the founders of Modern Monetary Theory- has a great allegory to describe how it all works: ( I paraphrase) A group of people are in a room and I have business cards in my pocket. I have a gun in my hand and no one else does and I am standing in front of the only exit. Now I decree, in order to exit the room it will cost you 1 business card. Suddenly, the business cards have value and folks in the room will provide me goods and services in exchange for payment in business cards.

Excellent point.

> Is it really true that most people don't want to work?

Most if not all people, unless hobbled by various ailments, are not only content to perform almost daily light work, but basically require it for their own well-being. Think how gardening keeps you healthy well into old age. Think how the boredom of total inaction destroys people.

Also, a minority of people will always be driven to perform intense, prolonged, excruciating work for sheer fame. Another minority would do the same out of pure passion for the subject matter. These two groups have a large common portion, but are not identical.

Maybe we should look at the environment where we evolved as a species, and try and model a similar thing for the trans-scarcity period, and for the post-scarcity era afterwards. Whatever environment was ideal for Stone Age people, in terms of amount of work and reward (only as a psychological metaphor, of course, I am not proposing a return to material sticks and stones, duh), should fit like a glove.

I'm guessing cavemen did some amount of near-daily, light labor, to gather fruits and vegetables, and perhaps had bouts of intense effort more rarely for greater rewards (kill an antelope, defeat the neighbors in a war). There probably always was a minority who was obsessively chipping away at some obscure project all day long (the stone carvers making the Moai, the shaman observing Nature and talking with spirits).

If we could model something like that, but on top of high technology, it should work pretty well. We are, after all, evolved to live like that.

> there will probably always be jobs that people don't want to do.

This is why PSE (post-scarcity econ) is only truly feasible after huge advancements in AI and robotics. Let the robots clean the toilets.

I think there's a serious misunderstanding here. Any basic income that is high enough to be useful will also be high enough to be distortive. Any basic income which is low enough not to distort will also be low enough not to be useful.

Consider a few thought experiments. Set a basic income to $100 per month. Time 300 million americans that's only $3b per month or $36 billion per year. That's a small enough portion of the economy that it's totally doable, but not useful.

Now instead let's set it to $10k per month. That's definitely enough to pay a mortgage, cars, etc. Times 300 million folks we end up at $3 trillion a month or $36 trillion a year. GDP in 2013 was about 17 trillion so we've definitely distorted prices by a huge margin. The price of everything probably triples.

OK, you say, let's dial it back just a tad and calibrate it to the size of the economy. Let's set our target at 30% of total GDP which we would argue we can totally do since the government historically gets about 19% of GDP so growing that by 50% should be doable. Of course this means that the federal government provides no services or does nothing except for basic income; no military, no NSF, no dept of education, none of that stuff. Ignore it for now. 17 trillion time 0.3 = 5.1 trillion a year, or 425 billion a month. Divide that by 300 million people and you get $1416 per month.

That's not a TERRIBLE number, if you live in a rural area you could pay a mortgage, car payment and even buy some food for that. If you lived in a big city that might cover your rent, but probably not.

But wait, you say, there aren't 300 million adults in the US? OK let's assume it's only 200 million. That number goes up to $2125 per month and you don't get a check until you turn 18. Yeah that's better, for sure, you might even make rent in a big city. In a rural area you're doing fairly nicely.

But how do we raise this money? There's a difference between income and wealth, if you took every penny from all the Forbes 400 list you'd have $2 trillion. But actually you wouldn't because you're assuming that you can sell their assets for cash at exactly the price they're valued at right now. If you did that you might recoup 80% because it'd be a giant sell-off. But let's ignore that for a minute. Let's also say that you by the time you get down to every person whose net worth is over a million (remember, only the rich) that you've raised another 2 trillion (pie in the sky, the distribution of wealth isn't anywhere near equal remember?). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Forbes_4... At that point you've got enough cash to make this whole thing run for about 10 months.

The total US income for all people in 2013 was $13 trillion. https://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-tpi.htm Take all that money and divide it up between 200 million adults and you've got $65k per person per year once you turn 18. BUT that's it. Janitor? $65k. Doctor? $65k. Lawyer? $65k. Startup founder? $65k. CEO? $65k. VC? $65k. Nobody, anywhere, ever could make more than $65k or else you don't have somewhere to take the money from. And at that point I think it might be hard to convince people to work harder, take more risks with their personal wealth, study longer, etc if NO MATTER WHAT they can't make more than $65k.

If you want to allow people to make more, that's OK. But for every person that makes $75k under this scheme you've got to find someone to only give $55k and to convince them that it's right, or dial the basic income back to $55k and start giving only select bonuses.

Of course, remember that all this ignores the idea that we still have to provide all those federal functions that we're currently providing.