Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult • Hacker News Board

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#551

Post by smoe » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 7:13 PM UTC

tsotha wrote: post #396

Thrymr wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that that is true for immigration, but not for customs. There are still limits on the amounts that can be imported into Switzerland, even from the EU, without duties [1]. Some products are more restricted, e.g. a limit of 0.5 kg of meat per person per day [2]. Anecdotally, this is rarely enforced, except during summer barbecue season, and customs officials have the authority to stop vehicles withi…

Without border checkpoints official limits are sort of irrelevant, assuming you don't try to resell what you bought.

That's the point. They do check quite a lot of people for undeclared goods. However they're no after those who buy stuff for themselves, but for example restaurant owners who try to smuggle in cheap meat in big quantities.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#552

Post by PeterisP » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 7:19 PM UTC

iliis wrote: post #452

polarix wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if the low-skill jobs stay around, but nobody wants to do them, their price increases, because nobody is forced to do them to stay alive. Then we have a greater incentive to automate and deprecated the immorally unfulfilling jobs.

Yes, the economic argument looks solid. Good old supply and demand. Problem is, we may not be able to automate these jobs so easily.

While we're not able to automate them, the labor costs for them will rise - and that's a very good thing.

I've looked at business process automation analysis in a few industries, and I've seen a TON of mind-numbing things that we actually would able to automate, but it's not worth to try since a bunch of low-wage people is cheaper. In some cases it's not even a question of "how to automate" - simply purchasing well-known machines would do that, but people were cheaper. It would be oh so great if that would change - there are a lot of jobs that IMHO are below humans as such, which are so stupid and soul-crushing shouldn't ever be done by a sentient being, but we as society force them to do so because they want to eat. People can handle shit-jobs - they "turn off", or socialize with coworkers and power through it in order to get their paycheck and come back to their "real life" afterwards - but in the long run, people shouldn't be forced to do that, not anyone, not ever.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#553

Post by smoe » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 7:25 PM UTC

arjunnarayan wrote: post #295

eli wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you still have to go through customs and maybe pay duties since Switzerland is non-EU?

No, it's Schengen area, so no border checks. You drive across just as you would from Massachusetts to Vermont.

The Schengen agreement does not include customs. That's in the European Union Customs Union, which Switzerland is not part of. You still have to self declare goods when entering Switzerland. Border patrol checks on suspicion.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#554

Post by rwallace » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 8:28 PM UTC

thedufer wrote: post #478

rwallace wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem I see with it is the age discrimination, of which modern society already has far too much. Strike that clause (and in the case of children too young to understand money, give it to their parents to spend on their behalf), and I would see a good case for it being a net positive, but not the proposal as it currently stands.

The problem is that this creates an _enormous_ incentive to have kids. Is that something you really want to incentive? Pushing it back until they're legal adults removes this. That said, if this wouldn't be enough for someone with kids to live on, that could be a problem. Its a tough problem to solve.

Given that the birth rate has dropped below replacement level and our society is headed for Darwin's bit bucket unless we make some drastic change, the answer to your question is very much yes.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#555

Post by luckyisgood » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 9:16 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #98

cabalamat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this works out to $2800/month or $33600/year. Switzerland's per capita GDP is about USD 79000/year, so assuming 80% of the Swiss population are adults and citizens, this would cost about 34% of GDP, which may be unaffordable.

Define "unaffordable". It's really annoying that people say "it's unaffordable" to mean "we don't want to pay", when the phrase is supposed to mean "we can't pay, we don't have enough money". I understand why people don't want to part with money, but at least let's be honest. If you sort everyone from poorest to richest, and plot their incomes on a graph, basic income just means that the slope is flatter than before…

Thank you for this image. It helps us basic income activists explain to people that basic income is about redistribution, and how it works. I don't know if you know this or not, but this image is being shared on Facebook and Twitter like crazy :) There's a European citizens' initiative going on right now, we're collecting one million signatures and we're using your comment and your image (with attribution, of course) to drive a point home.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#556

Post by Someone » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 9:38 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #549

Someone wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The US is obligated, by treaty and policy, to provide mutual defense to most of the world." The parties at the other end of those mutual obligations manage to do so at way lower (in absolute, but also in relative terms) budgets. The obligation is not "the USA will save you", but "we will help each other", and that, somehow, has become "the USA will produce an extraordinary amount of weaponry and keep an enormous mil…

The Monroe Doctrine requires the US to protect the Americas as a whole from foreign incursion. The US is obligated by treaty or law to defend Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, and practically all of Europe (NATO extends as far as parts of the former Soviet Union). Not all of these defensive arrangements are fully mutual, either in practice (the US has troops stationed to defend Germany but not vice-versa) or indeed…

"Not all of these defensive arrangements are fully mutual, either in practice (the US has troops stationed to defend Germany but not vice-versa)"

For NATO, that's purely the way it gets executed. The only thing special about the USA in http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.htm is that it is the place where the treaty is kept. Otherwise, the treaty is symmetrical. There are/were NATO (not only US, but also from other countries; for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Air_Base_Geilenkirchen#Ope... shows there still are 12 other NATO forces in Germany) troops in Germany and not in the USA because that was the most likely front of World War 3.

The USA made tremendous efforts to help Europe in world war 2 and the Cold War, but it could have slowly decreased its effort once the western economies recovered, if it wanted to.

According to Wikipedia, the situation with Japan, technically, also is mutual, but (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Mutual_Cooperation_an...):

"It was understood, however, that Japan could not come to the defense of the United States because it was constitutionally forbidden to send armed forces overseas."

Given that this was forced on Japan by the USA and given the huge geopolitical influence he USA has, I would think they could have changed it, too.

The USA may have laws or morals that make it feel obliged to do more, but that are things it does to itself. I remain that the situation is (utterly simplifying and ignoring lots of facets):

- the USA polices the world, but cannot really afford to do so.

- large parts of the rest of the world keep financing the USA by ignoring that 'cannot afford' part. That keeps the dollar as a fairly strong currency.

And yes, the cost of surgical strikes can be way higher than that of a "win this war, whatever it takes" approach.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#557

Post by m_mueller » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 9:41 PM UTC

rquantz wrote: post #527

m_mueller wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our ancestors have put up a direct democratic system for a reason: In the believe that it will serve as a sufficient check on political groups not to perform experiments on our society that the majority of people don't agree with. Sorry, but there's just no way this is going to happen. On a related note: In the light of recent history I more and more come to believe that exactly these checks are what's missing in the…

I (an American) was having a discussion with some European friends recently, and we had a bit of a disconnect. I was trying to convince them that, contrary to their perceptions (they are fooled by the architecture) the United States is very old, and their countries -- France, in particular, are very young. We in the US have the oldest constitutional democracy in the world, or possibly the second oldest if you misinte…

That's exactly what I meant. The thing about being the first constitutional democracy - well, I guess it depends on how you look at it. By modern definitions yes, but what exactly is a democracy and what is a constitution? The confederation that came before the Swiss republic had their charter since 1291, and its cantons, being about as sovereign as a state, had constitutions long before the republic was formed. It was also a democracy, as in a largish percentage of male population had the right to vote, as opposed to all the monarchic rules in the rest of Europe. Before that you have of course Ancient Greece that probably had some sort of constitution as well[1].

The thing is - as you say - it's important to not be dogmatic about these sort of things - and dogmatism often seems to me part of the American way unfortunately. While the latest amendment to the US constitution apparently has been passed in 1992[2], the constitution has never been completely revised. Noone seems to even propose such a thing, since the 'founding fathers' obviously haven known best. Many shortcomings, like the election system and the lack of direct democracy, seem to go back to the limitations of information travel and organization back in the late 18th century. Others, like the president's veto power, are stranger, since the idea of a clear separation of powers go back to well before the founding of the USA[3] - it's hard for me to explain how George Washington was able to get this through, but it seems obvious from a European, French Republic influenced standpoint that it doesn't belong there. And the ability of the speaker of the house to block a vote? Come on, that's a systemic bug that should be squished with the reaction time of a Microsoft hotfix.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Athenians

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_the...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#558

Post by moocowduckquack » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 11:11 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #540

moocowduckquack wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just lifting the political premise of Heinlien's Starship Troopers. I am not sure that this would make a society less likely to go to war, because the society itself will become more obsessed with the military and is more likely to look for things that look great in military terms, like conquests.

Lots of real world countries have or had national service requirements. Hopefully it would make war less likely because it would more equally distribute the human costs of war. You wouldn't have these chickenhawks who never served themselves.

Hopefully it would make war less likely because it would more equally distribute the human costs of war.

It could also make war more likely by increasing the warrior mentality. People in warrior societies don't seem to go to war less, historically.

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#559

Post by llamataboot » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 1:46 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #309

llamataboot wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that the "But they just can't be like us" argument has been used on nearly every minority ethnicity coming to the US - you can find similar diatribes against Italian and Irish migrants from the turn of the century before they became white.

He just explained how the opposite is true.

No, actually. He used the same argument, siting some group that he thinks has successfully "assimilated" (assimilated is a rather colonialist notion anyway, and the "model minority" concept is hardly racially just) and some group(s) that he thinks can't or won't. But that same argument, well the X were here, but now the Y people just aren't like us and want to stay on their own has been used against the first generation(s) of nearly every immigration wave

Re: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

#560

Post by kijin » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 1:53 AM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #547

kijin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One problem I find with most jobs is that it's much easier to get more pay than less hours, even if I really want the latter. There is a large drop-off between full-time and part-time work. I wonder how much of that is due to habits and regulations that are necessary in the absence of basic income. When most people are full-time workers, and when most people need to be in order to survive, it's not surprising that…

Your example about part-time workers seems very strange - the policies you state don't mean 'part time workers are bad, limit their usage', it simply means 'part time workers are just as okay as everyone else, and naturally they deserve "benefits" as well'. We can (and most likely will) move towards a large part of society working part-time - why should that part have less labor rights than everyone else?

That might or might not be the assumption behind the regulation. But in practice, the most visible effect of such a regulation is to discourage employers from replacing full-time workers with part-time workers, and therefore keep the majority of the society's workforce employed full-time rather than part-time.

I don't expect everyone to agree with me on the following, but I think "labor rights" as we know it are not inalienable human rights, but a set of legal mechanisms to improve the bargaining position of employees. If something like basic income makes it possible for people to quit unfulfilling jobs without having to worry about putting food on the table, I think that will dramatically improve employees' bargaining position and make a lot of existing labor rights redundant.