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My own private basic income

opendemocracy.net

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Re: My own private basic income

#211

Post by jacknews »

Owning land is certainly a private basic income.

Consider that land prices (and therefore rents) basically reflect the surrounding economy. By buying land you are essentially profiting from the work of everyone else in that economy, forever, and only taxed minuscule property taxes.

IMHO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George had the correct solution; tax land (though not the structures developed on it) at it's full market rental value. And the concept should apply to ownership in all resources.

Re: My own private basic income

#212

Post by jlg23 »

ZoeZoeBee wrote: post #201
jlg23 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And what happens if a thousand people show up and there is not enough of that limited resource in the desert for all of them? We live on a planet of finite resources, without controlling the number of people drawing from said resources you will over load the system, this and human nature are fundamental issues with the idea of Universal Basic Income

> And what happens if a thousand people show up and there is not enough of that limited resource in the desert for all of them?

By the time water and bread are this rare you have long stopped thinking in economic terms, armed yourself and probably got killed. If it is a temporary outage, you can count on people to help each other.

> Without controlling the number of people drawing from said resources you will over load the system

From an economic point of view we don't have to worry about food and water, just about its distribution.

Realizing that I'm going halfway Godwin on you here: "Controlling the number of people drawing from said resources" is a very.. weird thing to say when the resources in question are water and bread.

You are over-generalizing the "basic necessities/basic income" to "resources". People who only have their "basic income" won't be able to purchase rare resources, they just won't have to worry about a roof over their head, water and bread. Why does everyone assume that people don't want more? You want to go on a holiday? You work. You want that bigger TV, a car or just a new game? You work.

Re: My own private basic income

#213

Post by charlesdm »

wturner wrote: post #208
grotsnot wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If millions of people each like Oprah enough to give her a dollar, she makes millions. (pardon the napkin math) If you live in a town of, say, 25k people and your town has 10 garbage collectors (napkin math: each pair covers 1000 people's trash every weekday) each earning minimum wage 15k/year (if it takes 1min to pick up trash for an average household of 2, we get just over the standard 2k work-hour year. To me this…

Here's how I see it: If Oprah dies tomorrow society lives on and for the most part nothing changes. If all the sewer treatment plant workers die there is a scramble to replace these invaluable workers to abate a national health crisis. Why does Oprah make more than these individuals? Is it because she provides "More value" ? If you believe she does.... then fine. If society, through implicit acceptance does...then fi…

She delivers less (absolute) value per person, but because of the way the business model works, she can reach more people.

If I build a local website and sell access to it for $10 in, say, Monaco (population: approx. 38,000 people) then I'll be making less money in comparison to the same situation but where the entire US is the market for said website.

The sewer treatment plant workers don't matter to me, unless I'm living in the town where this stuff is going down. If I'm not however, those workers have zero value to me.

Re: My own private basic income

#214

Post by bmelton »

opportune wrote: post #90
jedmeyers wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have a decent (of course it's not the best) public education system What's your take on the current student loans situation where almost everyone is able to obtain resources to go to a limited number of colleges and pay for whichever degree they like? Should we expand this and instead of loaning money give it away for free, if this goes towards achieving maximum potential? In your opinion, how much would a regul…

We should be looking at ways to reduce the cost of college. Education doesn't need to be a hand-holdy 4 year summer camp, and I think the expectation that it should be is based on cultural expectations. The loan based payment model is only a problem because it's leaving a certain subset of students in a lot of debt with degrees that don't enable them to pay it off. I definitely don't think we should just give everyon…

Do you want to reduce the cost, or do you want to increase accessibility? There are a finite number of colleges, so reducing cost does not necessarily increase accessibility. An incentive to build more colleges may increase accessibility, but may or may not exacerbate prices.

Another model might be to increase subsidy for fields with more guaranteed profit centers, while decreasing the amount of subsidy for fields in which a career profit is less likely, such that loans are more likely to be paid off. This again may make college cheaper, and/or more accessible, but may fail to yield enough trained workers to deliver in necessary but unprofitable fields.

That said, I'm not just trying to poop on the idea, but to highlight that "cost" is not the only rubric of accessibility, and that "cheaper" doesn't necessarily yield the results you're looking for, and may actually result in contrary outcomes from what we expect.

Re: My own private basic income

#215

Post by drewcon »

ue_ wrote: post #163
drewcon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Poor, underfed, and uneducated is the default position for human beings. We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing. Have you had a look at 19th century philosopher Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread ? Here's an excerpt: > For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Eu…

I actually agree with much of that assessment; I just don't think it paints the full story over the arc of history. I also don't think access to and domain over raw materials or "riches" equates to wealth in the same way having access to charcoal is not the same as creating carbon fiber. Transforming those materials into useful technologies has happened exactly because of things like property rights (ownership), open markets, and the rule of law. It might not be perfect, but so far it does seem to work for our common benefit, over time, even acknowledging the hardships those toiling in the mines do seem to bear.

Its feels a bit myopic to pretend like the the miner mining iron ore 150 years ago used in the creation of a steam engine somehow only benefits from his direct wage, and not indirectly from the product he's helping to create. Yes, the direct monetary benefits accrue to the owners, but by and large those owners produce things of value (increasingly so) to society in a way that that makes that miner's great-grandson far far better off than a "lowest savage" today. I think this is the same false litany that tells us the world is getting worse and worse (especially for the poor), whereas data tells us the exact opposite.

So not everyone gets to be an owner and be directly rewarded, and that work is certainly hard, but we do all seem to share in the collective benefits ownership creates.

Re: My own private basic income

#216

Post by dvtv75 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #156
dota_fanatic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people in the developed world do NOT live like kings of old. They have bosses. They struggle to find mates. They live in small, impermanent homes with no land of their own. They tend to be in debt, and don't even understand how permanent that debt will be for them. They're socially at the bottom. This is nothing like a king, who could have a large family, and was well fed, had permanent shelter, didn't pay rent,…

Well, for example, even poor people can get antibiotics. Quite a few kings of old died from not having them.

Quite a few poor people still die from not having medical attention where a king would almost always have a personal physician at his side - a king of old would have a much higher chance of survival from a wound that would kill a modern poor person who couldn't afford medical care.

Re: My own private basic income

#217

Post by [deleted] »

wturner wrote: post #208
grotsnot wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If millions of people each like Oprah enough to give her a dollar, she makes millions. (pardon the napkin math) If you live in a town of, say, 25k people and your town has 10 garbage collectors (napkin math: each pair covers 1000 people's trash every weekday) each earning minimum wage 15k/year (if it takes 1min to pick up trash for an average household of 2, we get just over the standard 2k work-hour year. To me this…

Here's how I see it: If Oprah dies tomorrow society lives on and for the most part nothing changes. If all the sewer treatment plant workers die there is a scramble to replace these invaluable workers to abate a national health crisis. Why does Oprah make more than these individuals? Is it because she provides "More value" ? If you believe she does.... then fine. If society, through implicit acceptance does...then fi…

[deleted]

Re: My own private basic income

#218

Post by ZoeZoeBee »

jlg23 wrote: post #212
ZoeZoeBee wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happens if a thousand people show up and there is not enough of that limited resource in the desert for all of them? We live on a planet of finite resources, without controlling the number of people drawing from said resources you will over load the system, this and human nature are fundamental issues with the idea of Universal Basic Income

> And what happens if a thousand people show up and there is not enough of that limited resource in the desert for all of them? By the time water and bread are this rare you have long stopped thinking in economic terms, armed yourself and probably got killed. If it is a temporary outage, you can count on people to help each other. > Without controlling the number of people drawing from said resources you will over lo…

>Realizing that I'm going halfway Godwin on you here: "Controlling the number of people drawing from said resources" is a very.. weird thing to say when the resources in question are water and bread.

That's an asinine assumption, UBI is never restricted to simply bread and water, you ignore the reality that UBI is free to be used, however. Arguing for a basic sustenance program is entirely different than UBI models.

No reason to bother delving deeper into demographic issues

Re: My own private basic income

#219

Post by wturner »

tqi wrote: post #210
wturner wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how I see it: If Oprah dies tomorrow society lives on and for the most part nothing changes. If all the sewer treatment plant workers die there is a scramble to replace these invaluable workers to abate a national health crisis. Why does Oprah make more than these individuals? Is it because she provides "More value" ? If you believe she does.... then fine. If society, through implicit acceptance does...then fi…

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/garbage-collector "...predicts that employment in this industry will increase 7 percent, adding 9,400 new jobs by 2024... Median Salary $33,800" If we assume median salary ~ average salary, then $33,800* (9,400/.07) = $4.5bn. Oprah net worth is estimated at around $3bn.

@tqi So when you get down to the numbers and the prevalent value assumptions we all have, Oprah Winfrey (one person) provides more value to the country than 2/3's of the nations garbage collection workers. Even though that is apparently what the numbers say, I can't help but believe it is divorced from reality in terms of practical day-to-day life.

In other words, if the average person was forced to choose to either "get rid of" Oprah Winfrey or 2/3's of the countries garbage collection workers, which one would the average person pick?

*edited

You could easily replace Oprah with some other person. I am simply using her as an example because she is wealthy, popular and her creative output isn't easily quantifiable the way someone like Bill Gates might be.

Re: My own private basic income

#220

Post by dugluak »

Its not two big lucky breaks it should be actually three big lucky breaks. Being born as a human is the first lucky break every human being on the earth gets. If you think about it 'merit' is man made. Nature most of the time works on pure chance.
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