201–210 of 552 posts
In order to reduce the amount of money needed to support the BI scheme, you are given a card to buy some standardized products: jeans, bread, soup, chairs, tables, beds, bikes, ubuntu and the like. The main point is that those products are cheaper to produce and distribute. You lose some of the power of money but since society is paying the bill I think you should accept the deal.
Edited: grammar and shorter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Struggling everyone. Why the hell is some bank CEO making several hundred million a year and we have people that can't even reliably be home in the evening to tuck their kids in because they're working 5 jobs. I'm all for taxing high-end income (coporate and private) even more to pay for this. Why would everyone need to work anyway? It's not tenable. A few more years/decades and we'll have automated so much it'll be…
The level of koolaid here is just too large a mountain to attempt to scale. Automation will just move a few jobs around, like it always has done. And yes - we don't need jobs. But no - that doesn't mean the state should give everyone free money.
Why not?
One of the first pieces of advice I had when my company landed its investment was to pay ourselves a decent (not extravagant) wage so that my time went on worrying about the company rather than how I was going to afford to do things in my personal life. The same is true for employees - if they're paid a good living they will spend more time on thinking about problems in their job instead. If a government were to do t…
People starting companies are driven, determined people who want to create things. The vast majority of people are not. You're vastly over-estimating the general population. The majority are lazy, and if given money, will sit watching reality TV and stuffing their face with ice cream. (Step outside the startup bubble for a while). Most people are also selfish. The idea that they'll all start doing things to benefit o…
Its not a matter of meritocracy vs basic income. Its the current welfare state vs basic income.
People like you and I are already paying loads of money to the masses in the form of (from an American perspective) Food Stamps, continued Federal make-work programs (like the USPS/military), Social Security, Disability Insurance, Medicare/Medicaid, etc.
Just as a freebie example, The US spends ~$3000 per capita on its military. Cut that in half and give everyone $1500/year no strings attached. That alone would relieve a lot of stress for a large percent of Americans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Communism (Which is what this is), has failed. Why this generation seems determined to try it again is beyond me. A bit of a stretch there and i should know i was born in a communist country. The reason Communism has failed is because of the lack of checks and balances on power compounded with corruption not because of concepts like this. > This is about stealing money from the successful, and giving it to everyone…
The real reason Communism couldn't succeed (not necessarily the reason it failed) is because none of the countries trying it were or are advanced capitalistic economies before the revolution. Imagine a transition into communism in a less-scarcity scenario, where robots generate so much material wealth as to provide it to everyone, and no one HAS to work, and technology married to political science in turn allows more…
revolution was the least common way to turn communist. Far more common was "forced by nearby communist country"
Also for example Czechoslovakia was advanced capitalist country. It's often overlooked - it was very industrialized country, with long capitalistic traditions, and democracy before WW2. It also went through war relatively unscratched. In 1950 it had GDP per capita roughly equal to Italy and Ireland, 50% higher than Spain.
> Imagine a transition into communism in a less-scarcity scenario
From the POV of medieval people We're already in a less-scarcity scenario. We just don't like to share, as a species. I highly doubt technology will change that.
Basic Income is sometimes dogmatically derided as 'socialist' thus evil. Proponents of Basic Income - or varieties thereof - can be found on the left and the right of the economic political compass. Even Milton Freedman was a proponent of some guise. Personally I think it is lazy to dismiss the thinking behind Basic Income as merely communism.
But won't someone have to pay all those annoying taxes? And when we go to spend other people's money, won't someone have to be there earning that money?
One of the first pieces of advice I had when my company landed its investment was to pay ourselves a decent (not extravagant) wage so that my time went on worrying about the company rather than how I was going to afford to do things in my personal life. The same is true for employees - if they're paid a good living they will spend more time on thinking about problems in their job instead. If a government were to do t…
> If a government were to do that for everyone Inflation would eat it up.
There's enough money wasted on stuff I consider more useless and at least this experiment has the potential to generate surprises. I'm all for experimenting with economic systems, worst case it generates some new ideas.
For example, if you have one group with a basic income and one group without a basic income in the same population, the group without would be more likely to be hired for low wage jobs because that salary is much more important to them. If everyone had a basic income, then all potential hires would be on an equal footing and it would not look like the non-basic income group is more employable.
One way to test the basic income theory is to give everyone a very low basic income and then slowly increase that amount over time. If basic income works, it should be beneficial even at low rates that do not massively disrupt the tax and welfare system. When this is seen to have beneficial effects (or at least not adverse effects), the rates can be increased.
One of the first pieces of advice I had when my company landed its investment was to pay ourselves a decent (not extravagant) wage so that my time went on worrying about the company rather than how I was going to afford to do things in my personal life. The same is true for employees - if they're paid a good living they will spend more time on thinking about problems in their job instead. If a government were to do t…
People starting companies are driven, determined people who want to create things. The vast majority of people are not. You're vastly over-estimating the general population. The majority are lazy, and if given money, will sit watching reality TV and stuffing their face with ice cream. (Step outside the startup bubble for a while). Most people are also selfish. The idea that they'll all start doing things to benefit o…