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European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

eci-ubi.eu

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Re: European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

#71

Post by barbazoo »

spurgu wrote: post #34

Something I've been thinking about is how are addicts and mentally ill detected/addressed in a UBI society? Today it becomes apparent because when you have issues you tend to lose your job and have to join job seeking programs and/or contact social services. With UBI you could just fall through the cracks undetected. Has this been addressed by someone?

I haven't heard of any programs anywhere where people who suffer from addiction or mental health issues and subsequently lose their job are somehow taken care of. People fall through the cracks all the time, every day. Here in BC, 851 people died of toxic drugs so far in 2021[1].

This is a huge issue and one that UBI might make easier to address. The person suffering from addiction or mental health issues would not be dependent on the job which could help prevent homelessness and further degradation of their state. Friends and family being able to temporarily leave the workforce to care for each other could help get that person the help they need.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-toxic-dru...

Re: European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

#72

Post by wyager »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #50
slg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea if you are right or not, but it is a pretty wild political science theory that a policy can benefit too large of a majority of the population and therefore would be unpopular.

I'm not a political scientist, but it doesn't seem too far fetched? What OP seems to be saying is that it's easier to capture a small but strong follower base with focused effort, than a large (or any) follower base with diffuse effort. If the current social and political climate is any indication, people (at society level) genuinely don't seem to be receptive to efforts of unification and the betterment of mankind.…

> In the US, higher taxes are a very controversial topic, even if they would benefit the majority of the people.

I don't think it's certain that it would benefit the majority of people. In fact, I think it's unlikely.

One of the tremendous advantages of the US (and why we're so rich compared to almost all EU countries) is that our cultural programming includes the implicit understanding that higher taxes introduce deadweight loss and other higher-order losses of efficiency. Taxes aren't as simple as "taking from A and giving to B" except in the very short term. Over time, it results in less efficient resource allocation, capital resources leaving to less distorted markets, etc.

This happens on both a personal and institutional level. The gamble you're taking when you raise taxes is that "stickiness" (social ties, pre-existing legal and technical infrastructure, procedural momentum, etc.) won't just cause your tax base to leave. However, stickiness only slows the process down, rather than stopping it entirely.

This is encoded in American culture's sense of economic fairness, which precludes aggressively shafting people with more stuff just because you want their stuff.

Re: European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

#73

Post by colechristensen »

nr2x wrote: post #30
wyager wrote: post #16

Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote. From this angle, the problem with UBI is it doesn't really represent a clear win…

Many people have more than a billion, and I can't really think of any sort of luxury you get with 10 billion you can't easily have with 1B. Above the 1B mark you are solely holding wealth to further manipulation of macro-level power structures to your advantage. UBI is a means to forcibly redistribute anything above a certain "unlimited life of luxury" threshold to keep it below oligarchy. Also, I want fun, cool, tec…

Many of the 1B+ people out there aren’t in it for the cash but the B comes from valuation of things that they own, those things usually being big chunks of corporations, and what they own isn’t stuff but power and influence in that entity.

You do away with those people and that power leaving gl everything else the same, what you are doing is giving more power to the other existing social structures and ensuring no single person outside them can check their power.

So? More outsized government official power and more power to faceless corporations no longer under individual control but an entity up for its own best interests at the whim of a complex social structure bound by law to do the best for that entity which often ends up very bad for the interests of individual freedom.

You want to take away multibillionaires you have to start with structural changes to prevent mergers and pseudomonopolies, you need ten companies fighting for what two or three have now.

If you don’t you end up further encouraging next quarter profitability targets and megacorp best interests.

in other words there is probably something to fix, but you can’t just target a few of the symptoms or trying to make things better you drive us further into dystopia

Re: European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

#74

Post by xondono »

slg wrote: post #21
wyager wrote: post #16

Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote. From this angle, the problem with UBI is it doesn't really represent a clear win…

I have no idea if you are right or not, but it is a pretty wild political science theory that a policy can benefit too large of a majority of the population and therefore would be unpopular.

It’s not really that rare, there’s a reason for the common saying in public choice, “concentrated benefits, dispersed costs”.

Think subsidies. Industry specific subsidies (e.g. farmer subsidies) are popular, while industry wide subsidies (e.g. tax cuts for business) aren’t.

Re: European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

#75

Post by barbazoo »

knorker wrote: post #68

Where do I sign against this? This is just FIRE without the money. Did you read the actual proposal? They explicitly want to give a middle class life to everyone, with zero obligation from the individual. This is complete insanity. Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful. Kids are idiots (past me included), and if they knew they had the option to do nothing productive, then that's what a ver…

> This is just FIRE without the money.

I love how you framed this as a bad thing. As if FIRE was something one has to earn after years and years of wage slavery.

> Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful.

> So you'll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free.

That assumption has been disproved time and again.

Re: European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

#76

Post by hef19898 »

knorker wrote: post #68

Where do I sign against this? This is just FIRE without the money. Did you read the actual proposal? They explicitly want to give a middle class life to everyone, with zero obligation from the individual. This is complete insanity. Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful. Kids are idiots (past me included), and if they knew they had the option to do nothing productive, then that's what a ver…

The EU has around 450 million residents. And hey, maybe a portion of your 50 % start hyper disruptive start-ups in, say, Berlin. There they can really contribute.

Re: European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

#77

Post by js8 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #52
wyager wrote: post #16

Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote. From this angle, the problem with UBI is it doesn't really represent a clear win…

I am worried about how cost of living would explode to untenable levels. Low skilled labor prices would get out of control I am guessing since it is a basic supply/demand issue - when you put a floor with UBI, minimum wage to take up manual labor jobs would rise dramatically. It is actually incredible how much of our society depands on manual labor. Most people on HN are out of touch with this reality. The world runs…

> UBI I can see can diminishing the ability for the same laborers to obtain affordable food, housing, and transportation.

I don't understand how this follows. I was with you until then, but IMHO UBI might negatively affect middle/upper class who relies most on lower class paid labor (things like cleaning, delivery, cooking, repairs). But people who provide these services already can and have to do them themselves, I don't see how UBI causing rising labor costs hurts them.

Re: European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

#78

Post by zozbot234 »

andyana wrote: post #65
zozbot234 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth is not income; one is a stock, the other is a flow. This is not even Econ 101, it's grade-school level knowledge. You can't have a policy of draining "wealth" to fund an income subsidy without very severe side effects.

You don't need to ridicule. Can you explain why such a policy doesn't work? I must have skipped that day at school.

There was no intent to ridicule. The answer is that the policy is (1) unsustainable, not unlike a Ponzi scheme, and also (2) even prior to its inevitable collapse, such a policy distorts investment choices and thus makes society as a whole increasingly poorer. Note that there are similar policies that can be more sensible. For example, you can tax wealth and use the proceeds to gradually pay off some of the national debt. (Note that even these policies are typically only resorted to during emergencies, such as war.)

Re: European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

#79

Post by AnimalMuppet »

zozbot234 wrote: post #35
wyager wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes are less destructive than radically restructuring the entire economy, which most UBI advocates seem to want to do. Median household income in the US is significantly higher than any EU country except Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark. I think most Americans who complain incessantly about how "third world" America is view Europe through rose-colored glasses. Any third-world aspects of the US (which do exist) a…

The real idea behind the UBI is to "radically restructure" the economy in a freedom-promoting direction, closer to something like the US today than current policy in the EU.

Fine, but what's the argument that this proposal will restructure the economy in a freedom-promoting direction? What's the argument that this is a move in the US direction, instead of away?

Re: European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

#80

Post by hef19898 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #67
hef19898 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much economic and employment freedom does one have when health care is tied to the current employer?

The EU doesn't have that particular dysfunction.

My point entirely. The EU already has more freedom than the US, in sense. UBI would only increase that difference, and would by no means make the EU more like the US. And again, the EU is made up of independent nations, so these EU/US comparisons are already wrong.
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