The indignity of no work

BUT, and I only realized this recently, my education has allowed me to live largely outside the traditional workplace. I've worked just under 9 years out of the 18 since I turned 18, with the longest jobless stretches lasting about 3 years. My last office job ended 1 year ago and I've become so busy with online contracting that I don't plan on going back.

So I know that it can be frustrating to hear about fortunes being made by startups and entrepreneurs, but it’s helped me to step back and not look at the money. The vast majority of people have no or nearly no wealth (in the form of assets that provide income). They only have cash flow, and most of that money is wasted on things they don’t need. When you look at the people who really are living on a fixed income below the poverty level, remarkably, they treat it as an asset (like a retirement account), using the disbursements to pay for necessities. So a person on $10,000 per year welfare has the equivalent net worth of something like half a million dollars when you consider taxes. It’s no wonder that they don’t want to give it up for a regular job. And this really, really pisses fiscal conservatives off to no end, because they only see the world through the lens of means testing.

To get to the point, my education has provided me the lifestyle of someone with the equivalent wealth of the government having to shell out half a million dollars. That’s a fantastic return on investment for an ~$80,000 four year degree. If fiscal conservatives were serious about reforming welfare, they would be open to the idea of extending public education four more years to cover college. They would also be open to something that will probably always be unfathomable to them, that money and quality of life can be independent variables.

You know we're in new territory when the Economist puts forward something like this without pulling it apart in the next paragraph and explaining why a free market solution is preferable.

Sorry, but the idea scales from almost zero spending into infinity. You can not claim that there isn't enough money.

Our future looks very interesting because our machines promise to make goods very, very cheap. But they also promise to put almost everybody out of work. Left to a market, most of the population will starve, and very few become very rich. But almost any level of basic income will solve this, even if today it's too little.

That doesn't sound quite correct. Working just for the money is a neutral, the _negative_ here is involuntary taxation. I agree that it's in a negative (and have pointed out later in my comment a particularly bad form of it), but some kind of taxation is unavoidable (anarcho-capitalism is a fascinating theory, but none of its variants strike me as realistic).

Further, I'm not advocating a system that covers every single type of heath benefits for free. I'm simply talking about insurance against catastrophes and in some cases arguing against government interference -- e.g., the kind that essentially made healthcare go through employers and insurance agencies, as opposed to Milton Friedman's idea of MSAs (a stronger form of HSAs/high-deductible insurance -- something that ACA has actually made more expensive).

Essentially it's about marginal utility: having no healthcare available is much worse than not having certainly elective healthcare but having other healthcare. Likewise earning $0 vs. earning $15k a year (not enough to live on in Silicon Valley, but ok for getting by elsewhere in the country) is much bigger difference than the difference between earning $15k and $30k, which is a much bigger difference than going betwen earning $30k and $45k. No one should be entitled to a comfortable life, but I don't think a system where individuals who are not employable (whether involuntarily or voluntarily) are left to rely on charity alone is one that will ever be created (irrespective of whether or not it could be theoretically justified). I'm an advocate of scraping the current welfare state and replacing it with a simple basic income payment (if that's not politically feasible, I'm fine with Friedman's idea of a negative income tax). This will actually lead to less government interference: less welfare programs, possibly lower (or at least no higher) taxes, and so forth. Here's an argument for this from a well known socialist organization Cato Institute (backed by such left-wing pinko commies as the Koch Brothers): http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic...

Furthermore, in terms of reducing tax rates, I strongly favour slashing military and police spending (no SWAT teams for tiny suburbs), ending the drug war, and cutting middle class entitlement programs (or at least privatizing them or making them voluntary).

> If you raise salaries for a wide class of employees - what do you think will happen to the housing prices? Also, where would the money come from? California has about 300K teachers. Each 10K of salary increase would cost 3 billion dollars (not counting pension costs, employer's part in taxes, etc. so actually more). Where those additional billions would come from?

Raising the salary is not the only way to do so: increasing the supply of housing. I live in Saratoga and lived in Mountain View: the avg price of a resident (averaged between condos, townhomes, and single family homes) is well north of $1mm in those areas. In Mountain View this can attributed to location (and Sunnyvale which is directly adjacent is cheaper, especially the north parts of Sunnyvale closer to Mountain View), but in Los/Gatos-Saratoga this is entirely due to minimum lot sizes (my place is currently worth significantly below that -- but due to being in a small area that was annexed to Saratoga and which retained much smaller lot sizes).

My point also wasn't about the need of higher pay, it was about job satisfaction having more to do with being over certain thresholds as opposed to the bizarre idea that it had something to do with how much I am making in relation to some CEO.

Re: salary itself. This also does not include the pay that is docked to go to unions (union membership is mandatory for teachers in California -- I am all in favour of removing that requirement for unions of government employees). These are closer to starting salaries of SWEs not average salaries of all engineers (my first job out of college was $85k in 2006 at Yahoo -- not exactly a company known for highest wages). Finally RSUs are a huge part of engineer's salaries: $100k in RSUs vested over four years (with refreshers) is common for even new college grads. I am not advocating raising everyone's salary of course. I am in favour of treating teachers more as software engineers: merit pay increases, performance reviews, and no traps like tenure -- much as with software engineers, it should be easy for teachers to switch schools or move to a different area if their pay is not satisfactory (and as with software engineers, it might mean some would leave the profession if they are doing it just for the money and money doesn't suffice, this again is a positive).

I think you mistook me as someone advocating greater taxation -- done in the same manner as today -- I am not; I actually believe we far less meddling in our lives, certain kinds of taxes could be lower (but perhaps other kinds -- e.g., tax on rent per Henry George), and so forth. However, I find that arguing about immediately abolishing all taxation (logical outcome of what you're advocating) are going to work -- I much prefer to acknowledge that the problems much of the left perceives are real, but offer solutions that are less coercive than status quo or other alternatives.