My own private basic income • Hacker News Board

Re: My own private basic income

#221

Post by the_cat_kittles » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 1:15 AM UTC

dollar wrote: post #205

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #3

for the articles description: "how [the economy] rewards people who own stuff rather than people who do stuff" i cant believe i never summarized my own feelings that succinctly. of course the reality is it does both, but i think its way out of balance towards ownership rather that doing.

Capitalism rewards value. "Doing stuff" is not inherently valuable.

i smell tautological reasoning. people are paid what they deserve cause thats what the market decides? ok- if that is your premise, then i have a couple follow up q's:

1. do thieves deserve the money they steal? 2. are there people who profit from things that are legal but shouldn't be?

those are abstract q's that i think point out how saying "people are paid what they deserve" is wrong. if you reject that because you draw a distinction between "deserve" and "value they create", then i think "value" is kind of meaningless. in that case, it has the literal meaning you ascribe to it (i.e. it is what you call the amount of money someone pays for something), but nothing beyond.

i run into this view very often on here- that capitalism is fair because it pays you what you are worth. but thats so so lazy. you may not agree with me about how its unfair, or that its even worth worrying about, but id hope you would grant me that that premise is just a way to not think about the issue.

Re: My own private basic income

#222

Post by closeparen » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 1:20 AM UTC

xxSparkleSxx wrote: post #143

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…

>We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing. Some people are born with nothing, others are born with just about everything. Many laws, regulations, etc exist so that JUST existing with nothing is not feasible. It is nigh impossible to live in this world like the birds do, flying from one food source to the next, roosting wherever you find comfort. Those with means have entire departments to police the u…

>Pretty sure most of the improvements we have made for the common man, at least in the US, have come at the behest of those born with nothing standing up and saying "we won't work unless the rewards are distributed better/we get a 40 hour work week/we get cleaner and less dangerous work conditions/etc."

Yes. These improvements were won through the most thoroughly and deeply market behavior possible: raising the price on what you're selling.

Labor price-gouging capital is a beautiful sight to see. Usually only capital remembers it can do that.

Re: My own private basic income

#223

Post by mac01021 » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 1:25 AM UTC

wturner wrote: post #204

mod wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's painfully obvious that Oprah provides more value than one garbage man, so I don't see the disconnect. Also your above comment even says that "to the person paying them." I pay Oprah and the garbage man, respectively, what they're worth to me. I guess it hurts your feelings that Oprah has more value than your local garbage man, but it's just a fact. You can probably come up with the reasons yourself: pers…

I never said Oprah Doesn't provide more value than one garbage man. I am saying that I don't understand how a task that is literally needed for society to function is less valuable than one that is negligible for society to function and I don't understand why the person who does the more needed task is paid less than the person who does the negligible task. It's really a philosophical question about values but I thin…

> I don't understand why the person who does the more needed task is paid less than the person who does the negligible task.

If your garbage man cost the community $80k per year, there would probably be 100 other dudes, all just as good at collecting refuse, offering to take his job and only charge $50k. That doesn't mean the disposal of all that waste disposal is not worth $80k (or $250k) to the community, but competition allows the community to pay less than the value it places on the service.

I bet there are also 1000 people lining up to underbid Oprah on whatever deals it is she is making with her partners(broadcast networks? advertisers?). But none of those people will attract nearly as many eyeballs. From the partner's perspective, it's simply a matter of choosing which TV personality will bring the most revenue (over and above their fee), and that's Oprah.

Re: My own private basic income

#224

Post by dnautics » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 1:33 AM UTC

pizza wrote: post #202

weberc2 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a really hard time believing that governments will do better at distributing resources equitably than a market. To act as though governments can magically fix this is lazy and not realistic.

Giant companies are incentivized to kill the competition and then jack up prices while also lobbying for their interests with lawmakers. Said markets will also only give you the choice between products that you don't want, when you really want something that only a government would take on. Another thing that is distorted is that if a transnational corporation has a factory in one country, sends it to one of their fa…

and the universe of "social organizations" is not exahaustively covered by "governments" and "corporations".

Re: My own private basic income

#225

Post by dnautics » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 1:38 AM UTC

opportune wrote: post #65

dragonwriter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Real life isn't just an elaborate Austrian economics simulator. Well, yeah; for one thing, given that Austrian economics is more normative than predictive, I'm not sure what such a simulation would do .

You know what I meant to say: the real world does not adhere to economic thought as strictly as many would claim it does. The main reasons are usually due to some additional complexity that economic models fail to account for. Humans like being able to describe things in terms of cogent, concise rules, and in doing so can oversimplify and lead themselves to faulty conclusions.

> the real world does not adhere to economic thought as strictly as many would claim it does

That's absolutely true, and if anything the assumptive concepts that underly how government creates regulations are more dependent on "economic" principles than the assumptive concepts that underly how businesses work.

"people don't always do the most rational thing" is so often used as an excuse for government to intervene and make choices for people. As if government itself is not made and run by people who also don't necessarily (individually or collectively) make 'rational' decisions, only now given a really big stick.

There are other ways besides government to provide for people, even when doing so does not fulfill an obviously incorrect model of human as the hyperrational self-maximizer.

Re: My own private basic income

#226

Post by bufordsharkley » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 1:59 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #183

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Just as a note for those unfamiliar, there's a whole economic philosophy around the idea of utilizing land rents (and also all other rents) for public goods: Georgism.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

Re: My own private basic income

#227

Post by mojoe » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 2:08 AM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #222

xxSparkleSxx wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing. Some people are born with nothing, others are born with just about everything. Many laws, regulations, etc exist so that JUST existing with nothing is not feasible. It is nigh impossible to live in this world like the birds do, flying from one food source to the next, roosting wherever you find comfort. Those with means have entire departments to police the u…

>Pretty sure most of the improvements we have made for the common man, at least in the US, have come at the behest of those born with nothing standing up and saying "we won't work unless the rewards are distributed better/we get a 40 hour work week/we get cleaner and less dangerous work conditions/etc." Yes. These improvements were won through the most thoroughly and deeply market behavior possible: raising the price…

> Labor price-gouging capital is a beautiful sight to see. Usually only capital remembers it can do that.

This was a pleasure to read, although it made me wonder what the optimal unit of labor is to still have a functioning competitive market. If all capital was controlled by one entity, no market could exist -- that's basically why the US has anti-trust laws. The same is true for labor. Seems like for each market there must be an optimal unit of labor (number of workers in a union, for example), to balance well-being of an individual worker with functioning of the market. Hard problem, though.

Re: My own private basic income

#228

Post by cookiecaper » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 2:19 AM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #185

cookiecaper wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, that's what I said. Any cultural ideals, let alone modern ones, haven't been around long enough to make a dent in our biology ... so we should stop pretending that our instincts are irrelevant and that we can just say "ALL HUMANS WILL NOW COOPERATE IN PERFECT SOCIAL HARMONY, BY DECREE FROM THE GREAT LEADER" and expect it all to go swimmingly.

Useful social systems contemplate typical human behavior and account for it in a reasonable way, instead of pretending that it won't apply.

When you create a central chokepoint for all ownership and economic resources, the distributors show massive favoritism for the ingroup (generally government bureaucrats and their relatives), while the rest of the population is essentially left to starve.

Anyone who claims the purity of their political philosophy or their strength of character or the quality of the education of their central planners will prevent this from occurring under their implementation of centralized resource distribution is essentially claiming to hold a trump card over human biology, and they should be immediately discounted, because that's not how it works. Instead, we keep trying to reboot it, hopeful that this time, the superhumans are in charge.

It is disappointing to see that juvenile dismissals like yours are apparently now countenanced on HN, especially when they're the result of a misreading in the first place.

Re: My own private basic income

#229

Post by accountyaccount » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 2:26 AM UTC

yesbabyyes wrote: post #60

accountyaccount wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends. Is $1 enough to grant you housing, food, healthcare, and free time to see your family?

No. $1 is not enough.

That's my point though. Talking dollar amounts isn't the end goal. The end goal is what you can get for the money.

Re: My own private basic income

#230

Post by cookiecaper » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 2:35 AM UTC

state_less wrote: post #164

cookiecaper wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We also have lesson from the 1920s to draw from and the breaking up of monopolies. Social security has social in the name, and nobody wants that social program to die off without something better replacing it (except for some crude wealthy folks). This isn't an install/uninstall thing. More of an alloy of waxing/waining ideas.

I agree that it's probably more useful to conceptualize economies as kernel subsystems with complex interdependencies rather than individual drivers. :)