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My own private basic income

opendemocracy.net

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Re: My own private basic income

#181

Post by nwatson »

imgabe wrote: post #42
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…

Well, what's going on in Qatar IS slavery for all intents and purposes. The workers are imported from southeast Asia, and their employer holds their passport, preventing them from leaving. In a free market people need to be able to have a choice to freely leave. Many of those workers would probably leave if they could.

The same motivation driving Southeast Asians to work in Qatar drives Mexicans and Central Americans to the United States to work as legal or illegal migrant workers ... some of the latter working independently, most working for a series of established companies.

The big difference between Qatar/middle-east and the U.S. is that in the U.S. the business culture does not have as much recent history of indentured servitude, and has ever-diminishing use of unsafe practices (e.g., dangerous pesticides applied by farm workers without adequate protection). My father-in-law saw over the past 20 or 30 years many such Latin American workers come through furniture and manufacturing plants in North Carolina where he managed H.R. ... and they were paid very fairly and worked very hard, conscientiously, thoroughly. A fair number were found to have registered with false Social Security numbers and had to move on, but my father-in-law says it always was a loss for the plant. Those in the U.S. illegally still had to hazard the trip, and face deportation always ... but they mostly can leave any employment situation, or go back home, at any time.

Those workers stuck in Qatar / middle-east are unfortunate suckers reeled in by bastards and an uncaring system both in their countries of origin and in Qatar.

So ... on to the interesting part ... what are those Latin American workers in the U.S. doing with the majority of their wages? >>> They're by-and-large remitting that money back home to plow into joint RENT-SEEKING ventures with family / friends back home. They endure the hazardous journey, sub-standard housing, time away from family and their own comfortable culture, and two or three simultaneous jobs, because they have the initiative and need to build the nest egg so they can escape the "wage slavery". <<<

Re: My own private basic income

#182

Post by jlg23 »

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…

> A glass of water provided at the right time in a desert is invaluable and thus expensive.

If you travel a real desert, you'll realize that water is always offered for free[1] to people in need. As is bread. And that is the very idea of basic income: Provide essentials for free.

[1] Disclaimer: I did about 20k miles by car in Western Sahara and the south of Morocco in the last 4 years.

Re: My own private basic income

#183

Post by cortesoft »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #148
cortesoft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

There aren't many people earning money as rentiers of unimproved land. But it turns out that people are much more willing to make improvements when they have secure title to the land. But who gets to rent out the apartment building? Well, the one who put an apartment building there, that's who. Why should anyone else get to?

In many places, unimproved land has a TON of value. In those places, in fact, many people buy a home just to tear it down and rebuild on the lot. They would pay MORE if the house wasn't there. There is a reason the saying in real estate is 'location, location, location' and not 'build quality, build quality, build quality'. The reason you can buy much larger homes for less money in other parts of the country isn't because the building materials or labor are cheaper, but because the land itself is cheaper.

Now, I am not saying that the building itself doesn't have value, or that the person who built and owns the building shouldn't be compensated for that investment and work, but it is disingenuous to pretend that the majority of the value is from the building and not the land itself (at least for most places where rent is high)

I am not in any way, shape, or form arguing that we should seize all private property in some kind of communist revolution; I am simply saying we need to think about how we divide up the value of something like real estate to fairly compensate and encourage development without promoting unfair and ineffecient rent seeking.

Re: My own private basic income

#184

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #119
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. "…

You're conflating two different roles: owner and operator. While many owners, particularly of smaller businesses, wear both hats, your responses to points (1) and (3) arise out of wearing the operator hat, not the owner hat. For the companies that comprise most of the economy (less than half of U.S. GDP is attributable to small businesses), ownership and operatorship are distinct roles. The CEO of GE is not the compa…

[deleted]

Re: My own private basic income

#185

Post by michaelmrose »

cookiecaper wrote: post #123
opportune wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The core fallacy here is believing that we can all agree to supersede biological imperatives and everything will all go fine. The challenge of society is the establishment of a system that cooperates with biology to create a peaceful, prosperous environment for all members of that society. Humans are naturally competitive. Humans have tribal instincts (which include a default hostility to known outgroups). Humans hav…

The pretense of tying the state of the system as is to biology seems to amazingly silly. We are the product of billions of years of evolution. Society is a much more recent artifact that has already seemed to go through several stages over thousands of years none of which has had time to leave much of a mark on the underlying biology.

In the words of jack nicolsons character in as good as it gets sell crazy someplace else we're all stocked up here.

Re: My own private basic income

#186

Post by thaumasiotes »

johnnyforeigner wrote: post #165
thaumasiotes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slaves have frequently been among the most high-status, most powerful people in their society. The slave who manages an important man's affairs is himself an important man. Concubines frequently wield power through their well-placed lovers. At the historical extreme, Wu Zetian was a concubine who worked her way up to being formally crowned emperor. The Mamluk Turks were slaves. This didn't stop them from taking contr…

So the fact that some slaves were treated well by their owners somehow makes it OK for one human being to actually own another? Because what you just wrote sounds an awful like a defence of slavery. What's awful about slavery is not the treatment of the slave. It's the fact that they are slaves in the first place.

I was under the impression I was responding to the question

>> How have slaves ever historically created leverage?

They do it in all of the ways that other people do.

> Because what you just wrote sounds an awful [lot?] like a defence of slavery.

I will note that in another thread from today, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14651019, you can see people speaking with approval of a company that funds training for its employees with a provision that, should they leave the company within a longish period of getting the training, they owe a large lump sum to repay the training costs. This differs in no way from a traditional contract of slavery, under which, if you want to leave your current employer, you must pay them a large lump sum.

Re: My own private basic income

#187

Post by michaelmrose »

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.

People are a disparate group and their needs matter only in proportion to their wealth. Something can provide negative value for a million people and be extremely valuable to bill gates and earn a lot of money.

Re: My own private basic income

#188

Post by harryh »

aerovistae wrote: post #83
bigtunacan wrote: post #74

Can someone clarify this piece for me? I don't understand how the author is able to completely avoid taxation on the rents. >My wife and I don’t need the money we make from owning most of the business. We live off the salaries of our jobs, and reinvest virtually our entire share of the business. These reinvestments count as “losses,” and so officially we have never made any income or paid income taxes on our share of…

If they took any sort of money from their business, it would be taxed as income. But if the money just stays inside the business and is used to buy more rental buildings-- what's there to tax? So the business keeps growing and growing. Case A: the owners take a paycheck of $100,000. It gets taxed at 30%, they get $70k. Case B: the owners take no paycheck but instead buy a $100,000 property through the business with t…

This isn't true in the United States if the business is organized as an LLC which is definitely the most common way of handling residential real estate. I, like bigtunacan, am very curious about this part of the story. It doesn't really add up.

EDIT: thinking about this more I suppose that one possibility is that the operator brother is taking basically all of the rent as income and the financier brother, instead of making a return from rent, is hoping to make a return from appreciation (selling the houses later for a profit). TBH this doesn't seem super likely to me either, but it's possible.

I really don't think that the author is correctly explaining his tax situation (which is fine. it wasn't the main thrust of the post).

Re: My own private basic income

#189

Post by harryh »

edpichler wrote: post #95

The article is about something that should be obvious, capitalism: money goes to the capital owner. Of course this has a lot of problems, but it's the best we have today. On this system, the rules of the game are: we need to work and spend less than we earn, and use the money to accumulate more capital, an not buying more things.

In the US, the vast majority of gross national income goes to labor not capital. FWIW.

Re: My own private basic income

#190

Post by flubert »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #13
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?

When you get to the bottom of this kind of thinking, there's always some form of a just world fallacy. Despite the fact that the wealthy engineer circumstances to keep the poor in their diminished condition for their own profit, it's never "unfair" because of this foundational error. See also programmers thinking they're "highly paid" despite years of collusion by tech giants to reduce their salaries and capital owne…

>Despite the fact that the wealthy engineer circumstances to keep the poor in their diminished condition for their own profit

Is there anything specifically you think the author has done to "keep the poor in their diminished condition"? Or is the act of owning rental property oppressing? What should the author do in his circumstance? He could stop investing in rental property, but would his investment in other areas be oppressive? Should he quit teaching rich people in Qatar so that he doesn't earn enough to engage in investments?

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