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You'll find there are two voices for BI, the liberal and the liberatian. The liberal would prefer to keep universal healthcare and food programs and put cash on

You'll find there are two voices for BI, the liberal and the liberatian. The liberal would prefer to keep universal healthcare and food programs and put cash on top, making the total distribution to the poor larger. The liberatian would prefer to simply move the complex paternalistic safety net into a simpler cash payment which doesn't disincentivize work while not increasing it's size. As an aside, if you pay attention you'll see the two types of people will squelch their vocalizations in the interest of a short term alliance in support of BI. Personally I believe the liberal position has both moral and practical superiority. It's going to be cheaper to make sure people have bread and vaccinations despite themselves than it's going to be to solve the resulting issues later.

notahacker 10y ago
The two types of people might squelch their vocalization when writing arguments in support of the BI. But both would vote in favour of the status quo against the other side's proposal if given the opportunity: liberals don't want a meagre BI to replace most of the welfare state and most existing low income tax credits and libertarians certainly don't want high taxes to pay for a generous BI in addition to most existing programmes.
- acgourley 10y ago
  It's a serious problem, no doubt. I would still probably vote for a meager BI because I feel it's easier to turn the knob up later than it is to get everything done at once.
  - CWuestefeld 10y ago
    I appreciate your candor. But for the libertarian side of things (where I see it myself), I think there's a real fear that this would happen: we're being sold on a promise of greater efficiency, less space for corruption, etc., but in the end, we wind up bringing back in all that baggage anyway.
    - incongruity 10y ago
      Frequent libertarian here too – as I've started working with low-income populations in my day job, I've had many of my fundamental assumptions challenged – at this point, I'd say, more than sticking to ideals, I want to see data – if these programs solve well defined problems, there's a case for them. If not, then what are they doing and how can we fix or eliminate them?
      - CWuestefeld 10y ago
        > If not, then what are they doing and how can we fix or eliminate them? That's part of the problem. Government programs don't need to fix or eliminate problems. Once they've been launched, it's virtually impossible to get rid of them. We're stuck with the War On Drugs, the TSA, ethanol subsidies, and on and on and on. Fixing bad programs is very difficult, and once we've set something in motion, even if it was a really bad idea, it's all but impossible to pull it back. EDIT: freudian slip - I typed "government problems" in my first para, where I should have written (and have changed to) "government programs".
        brbsix 10y ago
        It should be obvious that government agencies lack the incentive (generally profit and the competitiveness necessary to maintain it) to meaningfully address and/or eliminate problems. Nor do they experience any significant downside to failure. They aren't legally accountable to shareholders and it certainly isn't their life savings that they stand to lose. Worse-case scenario, they're reassigned.
        paulmd 10y ago
        Government agencies aren't expected to innovate, they're legally required to carry out the will of Congress and do absolutely nothing else but the will of Congress. Most of the "failures" you see are the result of a dysfunctional political system. For example, the Post Office was looking to branch out into services like bill payments, identity verification, banking, etc but Congress forbid them from doing it. Not to mention the crazy requirements Congress set for pre-funding their retirees. No private company has to do that - most of them are pushing their funding obligations off to the future. Underfunding retirement isn't a good idea by any means, but the playing field is most definitely not level here, both in terms of responsibilities or ability to pivot. It's wildly unfair to blast government agencies for not innovating. They don't have a CEO or a board, they have Congress calling the shots. Of course they aren't agile. And even worse, half of Congress thinks the entire concept of government services is illegitimate and is actively engaged in sabotaging and defunding those services. There's not really a parallel in the private world where a CEO is destroying a company because he thinks it shouldn't exist.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> You'll find there are two voices for BI, the liberal and the liberatian. Actually, I think the two main groups are both libertarian, though there's a left-libertarian and a right-libertarian viewpoint, with the libertarians that aren't strongly left- or right- splitting between them. I personally prefer keeping the existing means-tested programs but counting UBI as income when considering eligibility, such that with growing UBI [0] you eventually reach the point where the income floor is above the eligibility level for the means-tested programs, allowing them to be discontinued. [0] I also prefer basically tying UBI to a tax stream that should grow with economic growth, with mechanisms to provide reserves so that you don't have UBI drop with cyclical recessions.
- vollmond 10y ago
  This whole thread is odd to me. My understanding of libertarian philosophy is that welfare in any form (BI or not) is not within the state's jurisdiction. Where does that view go on the right/left spectrum?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Where does that view go on the right/left spectrum? Its a not-uncommon libertarian view that's probably more common the farther right you go (but you'll also find some left-libertarians who believe it; heck, you'll find left-libertarians that are almost completely opposed to the existence of the state as such) "left", "right", and "libertarian" are all pretty broad groups within which there is lots of individual variation.
  - isleyaardvark 10y ago
    Increasingly libertarians make those arguments, but that wasn't always the case. Both Hayek and Friedman argued in favor of a basic income: http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic-income http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic...
  - zanny 10y ago
    There is a completely valid subset of libertarianism (which includes social libertarians) that would argue for economic liberty, and how your liberty can be impeded by finances just as much as by the gunpoint of the state. It is often modernly invoked in the exclusive context of when taxes or state programs harm people enough to put them into financial insecurity, but it applies to private finance as well, and is principally rooted in the hierarchy of needs, which can also be considered a growing degree of freedom - if you are stuck at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, you are prisoner to it.
crdoconnor 10y ago
Universal healthcare is simply more efficient. The NHS delivers the same outcomes (longevity, infant mortality, etc.) as the American health system at less than half the cost (healthcare spending / % GDP). Fully private provision of insurance for any events that follow a non-normal distribution (as most, but not all healthcare costs do) simply does not work, has never worked and will never work.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  [deleted]
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    The UK also has infinitely better healthcare-related bankruptcy statistics. I suspect it would be easier to improve the 5-year cancer survival rates in the UK than it would be to eliminate healthcare-related bankruptcies in the US. The NHS has also become increasingly inefficient over the last couple of decades, as managerialisation and stealth privatisation have diverted funds away from front-line patient care towards administration costs and third-party profits.
  - nkrisc 10y ago
    How do those rates look when you account for income?
  - stephencanon 10y ago
    > The UK also has dramatically worse 5-year cancer survival rates than the US - in some cases, almost half what the US provides[0][1]. 5-year survival rate is an extremely misleading statistic. Much of the increase in the US is simply attributable to the fact that we detect the cancers earlier, so that patients pass out of the 5-year window before they die.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      Stipulating that five years is the wrong period to use, what would the right period be? Intuitively, there must be some period of time over which different nations could be meaningfully compared on this basic health result.
ncallaway 10y ago
The thing I'd like to see is government services that will optionally replace portions of your Basic Income. If you're having problems feeding yourself, I would like to see an opt-in program where you can receive food, in exchange for $X out of your BI. If you're having problems housing yourself, an opt-in program for housing in exchange for $Y out of your BI. The same options should be available for all the necessities (clothes, food, water, shelter, communications, and savings). The sum of these government services should sum to your total BI grant, so if you opt-in to all government services you have the basics of survival totally covered but receive no direct BI.
- parennoob 10y ago
  The agencies required to maintain all these services will come at a cost though; and I bet that removes the "Well, we won't have to maintain thousands of agencies for giving these specific kinds of aid" argument in favor of BI. That having been said, I personally like this idea a lot. Maybe the balance between the two can be adjusted by cutting out (the market rate + agency cost) out of your BI – i.e. If a month's cheap food is $200 at cost, if you participate in a food stamp program, it takes $250 out of your BI (since a bunch of people have to be employed to verify things about it). That way, people will be more motivated to not use the government agencies since they get a better deal by just saving that amount out of their BI.
  - clort 10y ago
    Hm, except that this seems to penalize people at the bottom who cannot adequately manage their own finances and I'm not sure I'm completely comfortable with that. In the UK currently, we do that by things like having pre-pay meters for electricity - but the pre-pay electricity costs more even though you paid for it up front! (there are other similar scenarios, where poor people are penalized because they haven't a positive credit report) I don't know the answer though; I think what ncallaway suggested was to provide it at-cost which seems fair (also, the bulk-buying power of a food kitchen means that it should not really cost any more - in fact it may cost less than doing it yourself)
    - 10y ago
koolba 10y ago
> As an aside, if you pay attention you'll see the two types of people will squelch their vocalizations in the interest of a short term alliance in support of BI. I don't think so, replacing one with the other sure, but adding a basic income atop all the other programs is a no-go for most libertarians. Otherwise you're just feeding the beast.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
>> "The liberal would prefer to keep universal healthcare and food programs and put cash on top, making the total distribution to the poor larger." I'd definitely say I look at it from a liberal (non-libertarian perspective) but I don't agree with your statement. I believe universal, free health care should be available but not a food program. The money you get as your BI should cover basic living requirements - rent, food, clothing, heat. I come from a country which has free health care (NHS) which I think should remain in place. If citizens had no choice but to pay for health care then the BI should be higher to cover that cost (although I think cost of health care would rise and people would end up screwed - hence why we should have a free system). So put simply your BI should be enough for you to live 'comfortably'. That doesn't mean with a nice TV and steak for dinner every night - it means clean, warm shelter, healthy home cooked meals, adequate health care etc. The essentials for living. If you want anything more you can work. We're putting more trust in people by giving them the money without any conditions on it but I believe if there aren't extra safety nets and BI is equal to or greater than current welfare payments people will learn quickly. Their financial position doesn't change, just the trust put in them.
- aetherson 10y ago
  Health care is a fundamentally different kind of expense. Housing, food, clothing, basic necessities are pretty stable expenses in the short run. An income of a particular size could be judged to be more or less sufficient for the needs of that expense or not. Healthcare is a lottery. If you're 30 years old, your healthcare needs for the year might be $0 or $1,000,000. Trying to make basic income cover that doesn't make sense.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    OTOH, BI could be expected to cover minor healthcare costs plus insurance for major costs.
    - aetherson 10y ago
      Sure, but, like, changing the fundamental cost structure of our health care system seems like a pretty big add to the already absurdly big policy change of a basic income. (Which is not to say that I disagree with you, though I do think that there are actually three different cost categories of health care: 1. Routine/preventative/minor care. Probably best dealt with as out-of-pocket costs. 2. One-time catastrophes, like "I broke my arm" or "I got pneumonia." Probably best dealt with as insurance. 3. Long-term or lifelong large expenses, like "I have HIV" or "I have MS." Probably best dealt with as a government program. But then you'll have a lot of problems with the boundary cases.)
LordKano 10y ago
I'm afraid that I'm going to have to disagree with you on Libertarian philosophy. Anarcho-Capitalists are not in the business of advocating that we take money, in the form of taxes, from one group to give it to another.
- jtuente 10y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but the libertarian ideology isn't a philosophy and it isn't "anarcho-capitalistic" either. It's a umbrella term meaning that a person prefers a more liberty-minded government versus an authoritarian one.
- ska 10y ago
  Libertarian is not equivalent to anarcho-capitalist, so it is not quite clear what point you are trying to make.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Anarcho-capitalists are a subset of libertarians, and one which may not overlap much with the subset that sees UBI as a preferred alternative to current programs. But "anarcho-capitalists do not..." is not a basis for any generalization about libertarians.
- icebraining 10y ago
  http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/
TelAviv_1 10y ago
Given that 60% of Americans are obese or overweight we certainly don't need to be subsidizing food anymore.
vidarh 10y ago
As a left libertarian I fall firmly in the camp you call "liberal", for the reason that provisioning about universal healthcare is not just about cost, but about liberty. If one sees protection of life as a moral imperative - because without life there can't be any liberty - then allowing someone to purchase priority over those who need healthcare most is already morally dicey; allowing them to do so without ensuring there is a well funded alternative a big problem (and no, doctors etc. are not an infinite supply that just grows to handle an increased demand). To me, the right libertarian property centric view does not maximise liberty because it guarantees a resource distribution that deprives a lot of people of essential means. BI could help somewhat with that, but it would likely always be a bandaid - the bare minimum that keeps people quiet.
- SpaceCadetJones 10y ago
  Agreed. It does not address the high concentrations of wealth which allow a small minorty of people to be in direct control of the majority of our resources and economic activity.
- bcheung 10y ago
  Liberty is about having a choice. Being taken care of is security. They are completely different concepts. If you are given liberty you can still make foolish choices that lead to a loss of life or shortening of your life. Also, if someone else is forced to provide for the other person they definitely don't have liberty, they are basically a slave to another person. A basic income system like that proposed by Georgists,Geo-Libertarians, and I think Thomas Paine (Agrarian Justice) is compatible with both left and right libertarian views. The right to life is a moral imperative, but the protection of life is something completely different and is a slippery slope.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    > Being taken care of is security. They are completely different concepts. They are different, but closely related. The lack of security, health and life drastically reduce your choices. It is meaningless to have the right to make a choice, if the means and abilities to make that choice is inaccessible to you. We can not give everyone the means and ability to be able to make every choice, but that does not mean there are not certain choices that are so basic that they are essential if we are to not make a mockery of claiming to want to ensure liberty. > Also, if someone else is forced to provide for the other person they definitely don't have liberty, they are basically a slave to another person. I would fuly support your ability to "secede", so to speak, from society. As long as you then were to accept that society can choose not to deal with you, as forcing rest of society to deal with you would equally deprive them of liberty, and as long as you control no more than an even proportion of land and other scarce resources. Ultimately, if you truly want to maximise liberty for yourself as well as others, it means choosing to give up some of your own to integrate into wider society. > A basic income system like that proposed by Georgists,Geo-Libertarians, and I think Thomas Paine (Agrarian Justice) is compatible with both left and right libertarian views. It's compatible with some left libertarian views. More widely, it is compatible with the views of many left libertarians that even so see it as undesirable because it's basically a repeat of Bismark's "state socialism": Bismark created the first relatively modern welfare system explicitly as an attempt at pulling the rug from under the revolutionary movements in Germany at the time (at the same time as he outlawed dozens of parties and newspapers). His goal was to reduce the appetite for revolution, to prevent the socialists from going much further. Basic income, similarly, is a half-assed measure at guaranteeing a bare minimum in the face of mounting fears that automation will in the coming years sooner or later make demands for larger reforms grow stronger (basically we're seeing mounting fears that Marx description of end-stage capitalism was correct when he assumed that capitalists will essentially run out of new markets to expand into and find that ultimately their only way of driving down prices is to drive down employment costs, and thus at the same time reduce their markets). As such, it is "compatible" in the sense that it is - subject to issues about provisioning of scarce resources, such as healthcare provisioning - not worse than most current systems. But it is also not all that much better. This is the reason why you tend to see far more support for basic income coming out of classical liberal groups than left libertarian / socialist groups.
mc32 10y ago
I agree with universal healthcare being separate from BI. I would also favor all of this being a kind of hybrid federal-local system. I'd also be receptive to having minimums. Like a minimum amount of basic healthcare (rather than unlimited). Also, for housing, give people a fair chance at finding a job wherever they got laid of from their previous longest term relevant job, but if they fail, move the resources to a more affordable area (after say, two years). Food, provide very basics (avoiding starvation) anything above these minimums would be covered by BI. Why? Because some people will succumb to bad decisions and I'd rather the consequences be softened by a set of minimums.
jjtheblunt 10y ago
I read your "personally" sentence and immediately thought "this person has not lived in chicagoland where purposeful manipulation of such a system has famously been an artform".
- bduerst 10y ago
  Sounds like a problem with Chicagoland.
ekianjo 10y ago
> the liberatian would prefer to simply move the complex paternalistic safety net into a simpler cash payment which doesn't disincentivize work while not increasing it's size. I dont think all libertarians are partisans of BI.
jimbokun 10y ago
"It's going to be cheaper to make sure people have bread and vaccinations despite themselves than it's going to be to solve the resulting issues later." The limited research so far seems to show people generally make good decisions when given money without stipulation, and the idea we need to tell them how to spend their money "despite themselves" is probably very misguided. Of course, more research is needed, which is exactly what the YCombinator program is planning to do.
- danudey 10y ago
  People can make good decisions, but one health care provider (e.g. the government, in most countries) can provide health care and purchase supplies more efficiently than individuals can. Specifically, the American system is flawed because 'shopping around' between different providers whose sole purpose for existing is to make and maximize profits just results in you picking someone who's taking the least advantage of you. A single payer, for example in Canada, you go to any doctor, clinic, hospital, pharmacy, etc. and you get the thing. The health authority pays a fixed amount to the provider (and they make a good living, make no mistake), and the health authority attempts to maximize the value it gets from every dollar without compromising patient care, and following the mandate that everyone should have the same access to care.
beat 10y ago
Healthcare != food. As a liberal and a libertarian, I'd like to see BI replace welfare for basic living expenses like food, shelter, and transportation. Healthcare is different. It can be very cheap, or suddenly very expensive. Part of the motivation for BI is that it's the least expensive means to the end of not having homeless people starving in the street (among other ends). Likewise, universal health care is the least expensive way to keep working-age adults from dying or being crippled by treatable health conditions.
- gwright 10y ago
  That is why we have insurance. It is a mechanism for converting individually unpredictable risk into predictable group expenses.
  - zeckalpha 10y ago
    We?
  - beat 10y ago
    I mentioned "cheapest". The American private insurance model is clearly not the cheapest. Americans pay about twice as much as other industrialized nations for health care, with the added bonus of many people not being covered. Worse, because the insurance system is employer-centric, many people are trapped in jobs they hate for fear of losing their insurance, starting your own business without a spouse who provides insurance is incredibly risky and maybe impossible, and small businesses are at a massive cost disadvantage relative to big corporations because of the administrative overhead of health insurance. The current American system is completely idiotic. It's incredibly expensive, it's inconsistent and unreliable, and it undermines the basic American value of working where you want or starting your own business.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      > many people not being covered Now, such behavior is illegal. We don't need no liberty.
tsmffh 10y ago
There's no moral superiority when you're relying on the use of force to acquire funds. (i.e. theft)
- tsmffh 10y ago
  Anyone who down votes, happy to be proved wrong. Very simple test: don't pay and see what happens.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    If you steal someone's golf money and use it to save 100 lives, is there no morality in that?
    - tsmffh 10y ago
      That's still immoral. If you're worried about the public good, there are nonviolent and consensual means of cooperation that I believe would make all of us far more prosperous than today.
      - lmm 10y ago
        You mean like voting for a government that sets a tax policy?
        tsmffh 10y ago
        How is tax policy enforced? (Hint: force, not peace)
        lmm 10y ago
        How do your "nonviolent and consensual means of cooperation" deal with free riders? Hint: force, or the whole thing fails.
  - imtringued 10y ago
nl 10y ago
I'm on the Liberal side here, and I think there should be (actual, real) universal healthcare, but no food programs. Not from the US though (not sure if it matters).
mbostleman 10y ago
It's unfortunate that the word liberal is used for the position you describe. And conversely that the word libertarian must be used to describe liberalism, literally.
imjustsaying 10y ago
Basic income as a taxpayer-funded program is wealth redistribution through state force. I have never heard of this described as libertarian.

notahacker 10y ago

The two types of people might squelch their vocalization when writing arguments in support of the BI. But both would vote in favour of the status quo against the other side's proposal if given the opportunity: liberals don't want a meagre BI to replace most of the welfare state and most existing low income tax credits and libertarians certainly don't want high taxes to pay for a generous BI in addition to most existing programmes.

acgourley 10y ago
It's a serious problem, no doubt. I would still probably vote for a meager BI because I feel it's easier to turn the knob up later than it is to get everything done at once.
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  I appreciate your candor. But for the libertarian side of things (where I see it myself), I think there's a real fear that this would happen: we're being sold on a promise of greater efficiency, less space for corruption, etc., but in the end, we wind up bringing back in all that baggage anyway.
  - incongruity 10y ago
    Frequent libertarian here too – as I've started working with low-income populations in my day job, I've had many of my fundamental assumptions challenged – at this point, I'd say, more than sticking to ideals, I want to see data – if these programs solve well defined problems, there's a case for them. If not, then what are they doing and how can we fix or eliminate them?
    - CWuestefeld 10y ago
      > If not, then what are they doing and how can we fix or eliminate them? That's part of the problem. Government programs don't need to fix or eliminate problems. Once they've been launched, it's virtually impossible to get rid of them. We're stuck with the War On Drugs, the TSA, ethanol subsidies, and on and on and on. Fixing bad programs is very difficult, and once we've set something in motion, even if it was a really bad idea, it's all but impossible to pull it back. EDIT: freudian slip - I typed "government problems" in my first para, where I should have written (and have changed to) "government programs".
      - brbsix 10y ago
        It should be obvious that government agencies lack the incentive (generally profit and the competitiveness necessary to maintain it) to meaningfully address and/or eliminate problems. Nor do they experience any significant downside to failure. They aren't legally accountable to shareholders and it certainly isn't their life savings that they stand to lose. Worse-case scenario, they're reassigned.
        paulmd 10y ago
        Government agencies aren't expected to innovate, they're legally required to carry out the will of Congress and do absolutely nothing else but the will of Congress. Most of the "failures" you see are the result of a dysfunctional political system. For example, the Post Office was looking to branch out into services like bill payments, identity verification, banking, etc but Congress forbid them from doing it. Not to mention the crazy requirements Congress set for pre-funding their retirees. No private company has to do that - most of them are pushing their funding obligations off to the future. Underfunding retirement isn't a good idea by any means, but the playing field is most definitely not level here, both in terms of responsibilities or ability to pivot. It's wildly unfair to blast government agencies for not innovating. They don't have a CEO or a board, they have Congress calling the shots. Of course they aren't agile. And even worse, half of Congress thinks the entire concept of government services is illegitimate and is actively engaged in sabotaging and defunding those services. There's not really a parallel in the private world where a CEO is destroying a company because he thinks it shouldn't exist.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> You'll find there are two voices for BI, the liberal and the liberatian. Actually, I think the two main groups are both libertarian, though there's a left-libertarian and a right-libertarian viewpoint, with the libertarians that aren't strongly left- or right- splitting between them. I personally prefer keeping the existing means-tested programs but counting UBI as income when considering eligibility, such that with growing UBI [0] you eventually reach the point where the income floor is above the eligibility level for the means-tested programs, allowing them to be discontinued. [0] I also prefer basically tying UBI to a tax stream that should grow with economic growth, with mechanisms to provide reserves so that you don't have UBI drop with cyclical recessions.

vollmond 10y ago
This whole thread is odd to me. My understanding of libertarian philosophy is that welfare in any form (BI or not) is not within the state's jurisdiction. Where does that view go on the right/left spectrum?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Where does that view go on the right/left spectrum? Its a not-uncommon libertarian view that's probably more common the farther right you go (but you'll also find some left-libertarians who believe it; heck, you'll find left-libertarians that are almost completely opposed to the existence of the state as such) "left", "right", and "libertarian" are all pretty broad groups within which there is lots of individual variation.
- isleyaardvark 10y ago
  Increasingly libertarians make those arguments, but that wasn't always the case. Both Hayek and Friedman argued in favor of a basic income: http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic-income http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic...
- zanny 10y ago
  There is a completely valid subset of libertarianism (which includes social libertarians) that would argue for economic liberty, and how your liberty can be impeded by finances just as much as by the gunpoint of the state. It is often modernly invoked in the exclusive context of when taxes or state programs harm people enough to put them into financial insecurity, but it applies to private finance as well, and is principally rooted in the hierarchy of needs, which can also be considered a growing degree of freedom - if you are stuck at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, you are prisoner to it.

crdoconnor 10y ago

Universal healthcare is simply more efficient. The NHS delivers the same outcomes (longevity, infant mortality, etc.) as the American health system at less than half the cost (healthcare spending / % GDP). Fully private provision of insurance for any events that follow a non-normal distribution (as most, but not all healthcare costs do) simply does not work, has never worked and will never work.

chimeracoder 10y ago
[deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  The UK also has infinitely better healthcare-related bankruptcy statistics. I suspect it would be easier to improve the 5-year cancer survival rates in the UK than it would be to eliminate healthcare-related bankruptcies in the US. The NHS has also become increasingly inefficient over the last couple of decades, as managerialisation and stealth privatisation have diverted funds away from front-line patient care towards administration costs and third-party profits.
- nkrisc 10y ago
  How do those rates look when you account for income?
- stephencanon 10y ago
  > The UK also has dramatically worse 5-year cancer survival rates than the US - in some cases, almost half what the US provides[0][1]. 5-year survival rate is an extremely misleading statistic. Much of the increase in the US is simply attributable to the fact that we detect the cancers earlier, so that patients pass out of the 5-year window before they die.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    Stipulating that five years is the wrong period to use, what would the right period be? Intuitively, there must be some period of time over which different nations could be meaningfully compared on this basic health result.

ncallaway 10y ago

The thing I'd like to see is government services that will optionally replace portions of your Basic Income. If you're having problems feeding yourself, I would like to see an opt-in program where you can receive food, in exchange for $X out of your BI. If you're having problems housing yourself, an opt-in program for housing in exchange for $Y out of your BI. The same options should be available for all the necessities (clothes, food, water, shelter, communications, and savings). The sum of these government services should sum to your total BI grant, so if you opt-in to all government services you have the basics of survival totally covered but receive no direct BI.

parennoob 10y ago
The agencies required to maintain all these services will come at a cost though; and I bet that removes the "Well, we won't have to maintain thousands of agencies for giving these specific kinds of aid" argument in favor of BI. That having been said, I personally like this idea a lot. Maybe the balance between the two can be adjusted by cutting out (the market rate + agency cost) out of your BI – i.e. If a month's cheap food is $200 at cost, if you participate in a food stamp program, it takes $250 out of your BI (since a bunch of people have to be employed to verify things about it). That way, people will be more motivated to not use the government agencies since they get a better deal by just saving that amount out of their BI.
- clort 10y ago
  Hm, except that this seems to penalize people at the bottom who cannot adequately manage their own finances and I'm not sure I'm completely comfortable with that. In the UK currently, we do that by things like having pre-pay meters for electricity - but the pre-pay electricity costs more even though you paid for it up front! (there are other similar scenarios, where poor people are penalized because they haven't a positive credit report) I don't know the answer though; I think what ncallaway suggested was to provide it at-cost which seems fair (also, the bulk-buying power of a food kitchen means that it should not really cost any more - in fact it may cost less than doing it yourself)
  - 10y ago

koolba 10y ago

> As an aside, if you pay attention you'll see the two types of people will squelch their vocalizations in the interest of a short term alliance in support of BI. I don't think so, replacing one with the other sure, but adding a basic income atop all the other programs is a no-go for most libertarians. Otherwise you're just feeding the beast.

k-mcgrady 10y ago

>> "The liberal would prefer to keep universal healthcare and food programs and put cash on top, making the total distribution to the poor larger." I'd definitely say I look at it from a liberal (non-libertarian perspective) but I don't agree with your statement. I believe universal, free health care should be available but not a food program. The money you get as your BI should cover basic living requirements - rent, food, clothing, heat. I come from a country which has free health care (NHS) which I think should remain in place. If citizens had no choice but to pay for health care then the BI should be higher to cover that cost (although I think cost of health care would rise and people would end up screwed - hence why we should have a free system). So put simply your BI should be enough for you to live 'comfortably'. That doesn't mean with a nice TV and steak for dinner every night - it means clean, warm shelter, healthy home cooked meals, adequate health care etc. The essentials for living. If you want anything more you can work. We're putting more trust in people by giving them the money without any conditions on it but I believe if there aren't extra safety nets and BI is equal to or greater than current welfare payments people will learn quickly. Their financial position doesn't change, just the trust put in them.

aetherson 10y ago
Health care is a fundamentally different kind of expense. Housing, food, clothing, basic necessities are pretty stable expenses in the short run. An income of a particular size could be judged to be more or less sufficient for the needs of that expense or not. Healthcare is a lottery. If you're 30 years old, your healthcare needs for the year might be $0 or $1,000,000. Trying to make basic income cover that doesn't make sense.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  OTOH, BI could be expected to cover minor healthcare costs plus insurance for major costs.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    Sure, but, like, changing the fundamental cost structure of our health care system seems like a pretty big add to the already absurdly big policy change of a basic income. (Which is not to say that I disagree with you, though I do think that there are actually three different cost categories of health care: 1. Routine/preventative/minor care. Probably best dealt with as out-of-pocket costs. 2. One-time catastrophes, like "I broke my arm" or "I got pneumonia." Probably best dealt with as insurance. 3. Long-term or lifelong large expenses, like "I have HIV" or "I have MS." Probably best dealt with as a government program. But then you'll have a lot of problems with the boundary cases.)

LordKano 10y ago

I'm afraid that I'm going to have to disagree with you on Libertarian philosophy. Anarcho-Capitalists are not in the business of advocating that we take money, in the form of taxes, from one group to give it to another.

jtuente 10y ago
I hate to break it to you, but the libertarian ideology isn't a philosophy and it isn't "anarcho-capitalistic" either. It's a umbrella term meaning that a person prefers a more liberty-minded government versus an authoritarian one.
ska 10y ago
Libertarian is not equivalent to anarcho-capitalist, so it is not quite clear what point you are trying to make.
dragonwriter 10y ago
Anarcho-capitalists are a subset of libertarians, and one which may not overlap much with the subset that sees UBI as a preferred alternative to current programs. But "anarcho-capitalists do not..." is not a basis for any generalization about libertarians.
icebraining 10y ago
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/

TelAviv_1 10y ago

Given that 60% of Americans are obese or overweight we certainly don't need to be subsidizing food anymore.

vidarh 10y ago

As a left libertarian I fall firmly in the camp you call "liberal", for the reason that provisioning about universal healthcare is not just about cost, but about liberty. If one sees protection of life as a moral imperative - because without life there can't be any liberty - then allowing someone to purchase priority over those who need healthcare most is already morally dicey; allowing them to do so without ensuring there is a well funded alternative a big problem (and no, doctors etc. are not an infinite supply that just grows to handle an increased demand). To me, the right libertarian property centric view does not maximise liberty because it guarantees a resource distribution that deprives a lot of people of essential means. BI could help somewhat with that, but it would likely always be a bandaid - the bare minimum that keeps people quiet.

SpaceCadetJones 10y ago
Agreed. It does not address the high concentrations of wealth which allow a small minorty of people to be in direct control of the majority of our resources and economic activity.
bcheung 10y ago
Liberty is about having a choice. Being taken care of is security. They are completely different concepts. If you are given liberty you can still make foolish choices that lead to a loss of life or shortening of your life. Also, if someone else is forced to provide for the other person they definitely don't have liberty, they are basically a slave to another person. A basic income system like that proposed by Georgists,Geo-Libertarians, and I think Thomas Paine (Agrarian Justice) is compatible with both left and right libertarian views. The right to life is a moral imperative, but the protection of life is something completely different and is a slippery slope.
- vidarh 10y ago
  > Being taken care of is security. They are completely different concepts. They are different, but closely related. The lack of security, health and life drastically reduce your choices. It is meaningless to have the right to make a choice, if the means and abilities to make that choice is inaccessible to you. We can not give everyone the means and ability to be able to make every choice, but that does not mean there are not certain choices that are so basic that they are essential if we are to not make a mockery of claiming to want to ensure liberty. > Also, if someone else is forced to provide for the other person they definitely don't have liberty, they are basically a slave to another person. I would fuly support your ability to "secede", so to speak, from society. As long as you then were to accept that society can choose not to deal with you, as forcing rest of society to deal with you would equally deprive them of liberty, and as long as you control no more than an even proportion of land and other scarce resources. Ultimately, if you truly want to maximise liberty for yourself as well as others, it means choosing to give up some of your own to integrate into wider society. > A basic income system like that proposed by Georgists,Geo-Libertarians, and I think Thomas Paine (Agrarian Justice) is compatible with both left and right libertarian views. It's compatible with some left libertarian views. More widely, it is compatible with the views of many left libertarians that even so see it as undesirable because it's basically a repeat of Bismark's "state socialism": Bismark created the first relatively modern welfare system explicitly as an attempt at pulling the rug from under the revolutionary movements in Germany at the time (at the same time as he outlawed dozens of parties and newspapers). His goal was to reduce the appetite for revolution, to prevent the socialists from going much further. Basic income, similarly, is a half-assed measure at guaranteeing a bare minimum in the face of mounting fears that automation will in the coming years sooner or later make demands for larger reforms grow stronger (basically we're seeing mounting fears that Marx description of end-stage capitalism was correct when he assumed that capitalists will essentially run out of new markets to expand into and find that ultimately their only way of driving down prices is to drive down employment costs, and thus at the same time reduce their markets). As such, it is "compatible" in the sense that it is - subject to issues about provisioning of scarce resources, such as healthcare provisioning - not worse than most current systems. But it is also not all that much better. This is the reason why you tend to see far more support for basic income coming out of classical liberal groups than left libertarian / socialist groups.

mc32 10y ago

I agree with universal healthcare being separate from BI. I would also favor all of this being a kind of hybrid federal-local system. I'd also be receptive to having minimums. Like a minimum amount of basic healthcare (rather than unlimited). Also, for housing, give people a fair chance at finding a job wherever they got laid of from their previous longest term relevant job, but if they fail, move the resources to a more affordable area (after say, two years). Food, provide very basics (avoiding starvation) anything above these minimums would be covered by BI. Why? Because some people will succumb to bad decisions and I'd rather the consequences be softened by a set of minimums.

jjtheblunt 10y ago

I read your "personally" sentence and immediately thought "this person has not lived in chicagoland where purposeful manipulation of such a system has famously been an artform".

bduerst 10y ago
Sounds like a problem with Chicagoland.

ekianjo 10y ago

> the liberatian would prefer to simply move the complex paternalistic safety net into a simpler cash payment which doesn't disincentivize work while not increasing it's size. I dont think all libertarians are partisans of BI.

jimbokun 10y ago

"It's going to be cheaper to make sure people have bread and vaccinations despite themselves than it's going to be to solve the resulting issues later." The limited research so far seems to show people generally make good decisions when given money without stipulation, and the idea we need to tell them how to spend their money "despite themselves" is probably very misguided. Of course, more research is needed, which is exactly what the YCombinator program is planning to do.

danudey 10y ago
People can make good decisions, but one health care provider (e.g. the government, in most countries) can provide health care and purchase supplies more efficiently than individuals can. Specifically, the American system is flawed because 'shopping around' between different providers whose sole purpose for existing is to make and maximize profits just results in you picking someone who's taking the least advantage of you. A single payer, for example in Canada, you go to any doctor, clinic, hospital, pharmacy, etc. and you get the thing. The health authority pays a fixed amount to the provider (and they make a good living, make no mistake), and the health authority attempts to maximize the value it gets from every dollar without compromising patient care, and following the mandate that everyone should have the same access to care.

beat 10y ago

Healthcare != food. As a liberal and a libertarian, I'd like to see BI replace welfare for basic living expenses like food, shelter, and transportation. Healthcare is different. It can be very cheap, or suddenly very expensive. Part of the motivation for BI is that it's the least expensive means to the end of not having homeless people starving in the street (among other ends). Likewise, universal health care is the least expensive way to keep working-age adults from dying or being crippled by treatable health conditions.

gwright 10y ago
That is why we have insurance. It is a mechanism for converting individually unpredictable risk into predictable group expenses.
- zeckalpha 10y ago
  We?
- beat 10y ago
  I mentioned "cheapest". The American private insurance model is clearly not the cheapest. Americans pay about twice as much as other industrialized nations for health care, with the added bonus of many people not being covered. Worse, because the insurance system is employer-centric, many people are trapped in jobs they hate for fear of losing their insurance, starting your own business without a spouse who provides insurance is incredibly risky and maybe impossible, and small businesses are at a massive cost disadvantage relative to big corporations because of the administrative overhead of health insurance. The current American system is completely idiotic. It's incredibly expensive, it's inconsistent and unreliable, and it undermines the basic American value of working where you want or starting your own business.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    > many people not being covered Now, such behavior is illegal. We don't need no liberty.

tsmffh 10y ago

There's no moral superiority when you're relying on the use of force to acquire funds. (i.e. theft)

tsmffh 10y ago
Anyone who down votes, happy to be proved wrong. Very simple test: don't pay and see what happens.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  If you steal someone's golf money and use it to save 100 lives, is there no morality in that?
  - tsmffh 10y ago
    That's still immoral. If you're worried about the public good, there are nonviolent and consensual means of cooperation that I believe would make all of us far more prosperous than today.
    - lmm 10y ago
      You mean like voting for a government that sets a tax policy?
      - tsmffh 10y ago
        How is tax policy enforced? (Hint: force, not peace)
        lmm 10y ago
        How do your "nonviolent and consensual means of cooperation" deal with free riders? Hint: force, or the whole thing fails.
- imtringued 10y ago

nl 10y ago

I'm on the Liberal side here, and I think there should be (actual, real) universal healthcare, but no food programs. Not from the US though (not sure if it matters).

mbostleman 10y ago

It's unfortunate that the word liberal is used for the position you describe. And conversely that the word libertarian must be used to describe liberalism, literally.

imjustsaying 10y ago

Basic income as a taxpayer-funded program is wealth redistribution through state force. I have never heard of this described as libertarian.