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The most compelling case I've seen made recently for basic income is from Yanis Varoufakis (the infamous Greek finance minister who resigned after refusing to a

The most compelling case I've seen made recently for basic income is from Yanis Varoufakis (the infamous Greek finance minister who resigned after refusing to agree to the terms of the bailout that the Greek people voted against in a referendum): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss There were many gems in that talk, but this one stood out to me in particular: "The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. And to have that right, a genuine right, to turn down a job, you must have an alternative: An outside option. Because desperate people will accept to do desperate things..." "Libertarian economists, who claim that liberty is a driving force, define liberty in a negative sense, in the sense of an absence of constraints, of voluntarism: If you've said yes to some contract, that contract must be, by definition, a free contract, and therefore, it must be some act of free will... Well, it's not. The Mafia loves to give us options that we can't refuse, to make us offers we can't refuse. The fact that we say yes to them doesn't mean that they were chosen freely. The fact that the Greek government accepted the terms, last summer, of the troika, does not mean that it was a voluntary transaction. To have a free contract, to have a contract that is signed by both sides, representing and exuding the freedom of both sides, each side must have a capacity to say no. I said that before, and I am saying this once more: In essence, freedom in action requires a basic income."

InclinedPlane 10y ago
Basic income has a whole host of pretty interesting self-reinforcing feedback loops that seemingly would improve things overall. For example, people would be more likely to leave jobs that were unsafe, treated people poorly, etc. Including situations where employers weren't following labor laws and regulations (which is a huge problem today). Meaning that maybe it'd be more likely that the fire code, sanitary regulations, etc. were followed consistently. Additionally, people would be more able to have the flexability to be able to train for new careers (whether on their own or through a school or program). Shifting the balance of power in the job market to labor would also generally improve the wage situation, which has stagnated for the last several decades due to the growing power of employers.
- vehementi 10y ago
  Or, if the fire code weren't followed, there wouldn't be bullshit political pressure to keep the factory open because "Think of the jobs you're killing!"
- hellodevnull 10y ago
  Same logic is used in free market arguments: Workers leaving jobs to go to other companies creates an incentive for employers to improve work environments. In both scenarios the workplaces become better off, but what really happens in practice is less than ideal.
  - imarg 10y ago
    Yes but what happens if you are poor and living paycheck to paycheck? And what if there are not enough jobs? You have no choice but to stay in a job no matter how bad it is. BI supposedly will give you a choice. You won't starve to death if you leave your job.
  - geon 10y ago
    You can only leave a job for another if there actually is another one.
    - mgkimsal 10y ago
      Or... if the other job is literally no better... there's no positive benefit to be had, and possibly negative backlash.
  - ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
    UBI is not an alternative or opposite to free labor markets. It simply provides a baseline level of income so that at the bottom end, the driving force behind an employee's decision to take a job or not is not driven by things like starvation.
- dilemma 10y ago
  Scenario: You're married with 2 kids and live in San Francisco. Is an $8,000/year UBI going to enable you to quit your $100,000/year job without another lined up?
platz 10y ago
"Take an IPhone - you find a variety of technologies - each one was created by some government grant... The collective production of wealth, which is then privately appropriated.. it's very easy to start thinking of basic income as a dividend that goes to the collective that was responsible for collectively producting the wealth." "We need to create a system whereby society stakes a claim to the returns to aggregate capital, and this claim becomes an income stream that goes to everyone. I don't see why my children and your children have a right to a trust fund [or] why Paris Hilton has a right to a trust fund, when nobody else does, or very few people do. Think of basic income as a trust fund for all our children - to be financed by dividends from our aggregate capital, which was after all, created collectively."
- alttab 10y ago
  Except "collectively" is very misleading when you're taking the capital gains from say, 20k employees of a tech company and re-distributing it to 300M / 6 Billion people. Generally I agree that being fed and housed will remove constraints on labor allocation - but its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.
  - pj_mukh 10y ago
    No, actually that's straight up hyperbolic. There is no upper bound on the 20k employees' income i.e. not communism (or socialism even).
    - alttab 10y ago
      Unless of course the governing body deems the massive revenue the 20k employees generate as "excess" and is confiscated for Basic Income in Africa - the company employing these people will have practical upper limits on what they can pay their employees as exists today - but with the additional caveat that governments can just take the money for "the common good." It's globalism. It's socialism/communism.
qq66 10y ago
The right to turn down all work, at an evolutionary level, is granted only to photosynthetic organisms.
- vehementi 10y ago
  The rest of the animal kingdom doesn't have their food stockpiled behind lock and key.
- themartorana 10y ago
  The right to free speech and religious expression at an evolutionary level is non-existent. What's your point?
  - landryraccoon 10y ago
    Free speech and freedom of religion demands nothing of your neighbors except non interference. Basic income, on the other hand, demands their labor (at our current level of technology). In the future automation may change this, but right now there is a big gap between demanding free as in speech and free as in beer.
    - ItendToDisagree 10y ago
      It in fact does not require their labor. It requires effective taxation of land and distribution of said taxation effectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism "... revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can reduce or eliminate existing taxes on labor and investment that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue back to the people through a basic income or citizen's dividend."
      - webXL 10y ago
        This is the second time I've seen"taxation of land" in this thread as if the dirt my house is sitting on has the ability to write checks to the local government. I might be missing something, but all tax revenue ultimately comes from profits, or the difference between our value of something and its cost. That difference requires someone's labor. Even if there's a ton of gold under my house, someone has to dig it up, process it and find buyers. You might not think I'm entitled to 100% of the profits, but it's naive to think you're somehow not taxing labor.
pif 10y ago
Comparing mafia and creditors is non-sense: mafia get their power from their choice to use unjustified violence, while creditors get their power from your choice to borrow in the first place.
- woah 10y ago
  Disagree with him if you want, but his entire point is that the lines between "their choice" and "your choice" are often blurred.
- ItendToDisagree 10y ago
  Creditors also get their power from the ability to jail those who do not pay debts (threat of force). These debts are often unknown to the debtors. This is becoming an increasingly large problem in the United States.
- risk000 10y ago
  Creditors get their power by virtue of the monopoly they have on the creation of money. This is a right restricted to an extremely small subset of people, which are basically the government and large banking institutions. This right is backed by violence. I think the comparison between Mafia and banking cartels has merit.
jeffdavis 10y ago
Let's say you have a person living in a remote area and they don't interact much with other people and they don't have a basic income. Are they free? Let's say someone lives in the city without BI, is it fair to say that moving into the wilderness is an option for them, and therefore they are free? Does it change if they started in the wilderness?
- lmm 10y ago
  Note that there is (virtually) no terra nullis any more, and likely not enough wilderness to accommodate today's world population living the kind of lifestyle one can live on without interacting with other people.
- drabiega 10y ago
  I've stated elsewhere, I don't think it is fair to say that moving into the wilderness is an option. As cheap as land is in some remote areas, it's still beyond the resources of the people for whom it would be an improvement from their current situation.
  - jeffdavis 10y ago
    That doesn't really answer the question though: if you could live in the wilderness, is that freedom?
    - quadrangle 10y ago
      who gives a shit? The pedantic question of "is that freedom?" only applies to nincompoops who think that ethics or economics revolve around whether or not we achieve some singular dogmatic principle like "freedom". It's far more valuable to ask actually useful questions that have practical answers.
    - marcus_holmes 10y ago
      I kinda does answer the question. If there isn't any "wilderness" to live in, because it's all owned by people, then the question is pointless. I live in Australia, where we actually do face this question. There are Aboriginal people living on their ancestral lands in the outback. They have dramatically shorter lifespans and worse health conditions. There are all sorts of reasons for this, not least that colonialist administrations have messed with their ability to live on their land. But the government now faces a choice: - do we let them live out in the bush on their ancestral lands, where they have these measurably worse lives by all the standards we use to measure such things, or - do we remove them from their lands and try to improve their life choices so they live better (in all the standards we measure such things). This question basically comes down to: if a person wants to live free in the wilderness, but the cost of that freedom is a dramatic reduction in their health, life expectancy, education, and quality of life, should we let them? We haven't really worked out an answer yet, but it is increasingly looking like the right one is actually "no". So, to answer your question "if a person wants to live free in the wilderness, are they free?", the answer that we're discovering is: "maybe, it depends on whether they can support themselves and their children to an acceptable standard doing that, and there needs to be government inspectors who decide whether that's the case"
pithic 10y ago
>The Mafia loves to give us options that we can't refuse, to make us offers we can't refuse. Send us a fat portion of your workers' pay to fund our Utopian vision. Or else.
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  It doesn't have to come from income tax. It could come from unearned sources of income, such as a tax on land, or on interest.
  - jmngomes 10y ago
    Or by reducing the financial excess/waste that goes to corruption, tax avoidance or rent-seeking companies (many of who oppose the very idea of a basic income).
    - saiya-jin 10y ago
      ... and now we jumped straight to utopia. imagining that ending corruption just like that to support this thingie... I wish to take BI seriously, but then the whole topic needs to be serious, and not start with these childish statements and assumptions. All the simulations/proposition in Switzerland are heavily relying on increased taxation of work force. All spending saved on cutting of existing social systems is far from being enough to finance it. Almost nobody is strictly against ideas of BI. What all opponents have against is the high potential for catastrophic failure once it hits reality. Like all other utopistic ideas that started with good intentions. or anybody considers communism a success?
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        > "Like all other utopistic ideas that started with good intentions. or anybody considers communism a success?" I've said this before but it bears repeating, communism has never been fully realised because it got stuck at the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' stage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria... "In Marxist sociopolitical thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a state in which the proletariat, or the working class, has control of political power.[1][2] The term, coined by Joseph Weydemeyer, was adopted by the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the 19th century. In Marxist theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate system between capitalism and communism, when the government is in the process of changing the ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership." "Marxism–Leninism follows the ideas of Marxism and Leninism, seeking to establish a vanguard party, to lead proletarian uprising, assume state power on behalf of the proletariat, and create a single party socialist state. The socialist state, representing a dictatorship of the proletariat is governed through the process of democratic centralism, which Vladimir Lenin described as "diversity in discussion, unity in action." It remains the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, and was the official ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the other ruling parties making up the Eastern Bloc." IMO this intermediate step was the biggest mistake of those who attempted communism, the transition from this centrally-controlled state to a decentralised egalitarian is highly unlikely to work. UBI on the other hand is not an attempt to build a utopia, and does not interfere with the freedom for people to choose where to work and what to spend their money on. It's just a better safety net to prepare for an increasingly uncertain future.
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
>"The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. And to have that right, a genuine right, to turn down a job, you must have an alternative: An outside option. Because desperate people will accept to do desperate things..." i think it will bring downs the salary for a number of professions - why bother to pay when you can get volunteers on basic income for free?
- adrianN 10y ago
  It also increases the salary for other professions. Who wants to clean toilets for minimum wage if basic income is an alternative.
  - Drakim 10y ago
    Isn't it part of the point with basic income in that it doesn't disappear if you have a job? The choices would be "basic income" vs "minimum wage + basic income". There is also the fact that there is no inherent reason why toilet washers should have minimum wage. It's exactly because of economic uncertainty among the lower class that they can be coerced into accepting such sub-par situations such as doing an undesired job at low wage, when it's more logical that an undesired job should offer more pay than a desirable job.
    - pif 10y ago
      Well, from one point of view, cleaning toilet can be a very desirable job because of one fundamental property: you need no prior training! Yes, cleaning toilet is awful, but investing years of your life into a degree before being able to apply is a considerable price, too.
      - krashnburn200 10y ago
        You want to have your cake and eat it too. Either the required training is enough of a disincentive to make the Job Undesirable... and pay high. Or it's not. Required training is not likely to be so scarce when people can chose to train without risking starvation or surviving on 4 hours of sleep a night. Which is the real problem most of those with "training" fear. It's devaluation when even poor people can get it without Herculean efforts.
wyager 10y ago
What a foolish analogy. The Mafia uses violence to force people to "agree" to things. If one "can't say no" to a contract because their pre-contract situation sucks and will be improved by adopting the contract, they have suffered no violence.
- lisper 10y ago
  What difference does it make if the threat is actual violence or leaving you without an income so you end up on the street? What matters is not the particulars of the unpleasantness that awaits you if you don't accept the mafia's/corporation's offer, but the fact that the unpleasantness is a consequence of a situation that the mafia/corporation have themselves created.
  - pif 10y ago
    > ... the unpleasantness is a consequence of a situation that the mafia/corporation have themselves created. I don't understand how the corporation can be guilty. If someone offers you a job with a wage that you find modest, how is it his fault if nobody else is making you a better offer?
    - lisper 10y ago
      There are a lot of things that companies do to make sure no one makes you a better offer. Here is just one recent example from the tech industry: http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/4-tech-companies-are-paying-a-325m-fine-for-their-illegal-non-compete-pact/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/4-tech-companies-are-payin...
- paulddraper 10y ago
  It's foolish, but that's not even the biggest reason. It's foolish because he wants to replace one corrupt group of people that take your money and distribute it (the Mafia) with another corrupt group of people that take your money and distribute it (the government).
grecy 10y ago
> The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. I agree 100%, and I must say having immigrated from Australia, it's probably the worst thing about America. It feels like Employers have all the power in America, and therefore all the Employees are basically slaves, and are treated as such. I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workforce over the profits of businesses.
- skeeper 10y ago
  "I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workforce over the profits of businesses" I agree. Corporate greed. That's exactly the issue being addressed in this article: https://medium.com/@LevelWorkingField/do-you-like-new-pricing-or-higher-fees-upwork-is-changing-again-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-6c755e245fb7 https://medium.com/@LevelWorkingField/do-you-like-new-pricin...
  - alanwatts 10y ago
    This was the biggest move which Dr. King was calling for in his fight for civil rights, a year before he was assassinated. >We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]
- autokad 10y ago
  if you loved austrailia so much, move back. you have to take the 'bad' with the good. we built a system that enables people with ideas to chase their dreams and succeed. that means companies have the ability to pay people with low skills and experience less than those with. honestly, if you are being treated like a slave, move to another company. if you cant, you don't have skills employers want. get them. during the recession, many companies used their position of power to their advantage. the smarter companies (and now more successful) used the recession as an opportunity to get the best workers. the ironic thing is, to try and force employers to treat everyone like stellar employees would probably result in treating everyone poorly.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Its a replay of something called "Enclosure" in Britain in the 1700s (actually for several hundreds of years) where the commons got fenced and contracted out. It meant laborers could no longer live for a while off the land - a brace of rabbits, a partridge for the pot. So labor had to work for an employer to live, at whatever pay the employer chose. Which essentially enslaved them. Or so the argument went.
- ethbro 10y ago
  I think it's an interest ebb and flow of history. The US had (and continues to have) a similar process related to grazing lands in the West (someone correct if I'm wrong). But the broader theme of "in order to make more, we privatize this resource so that it may be exploited more efficiently" starts to become questionable in a hypothetical post-material scarcity, "we don't need more" world.
andrenth 10y ago
Contracts signed with the mafia are not free market contracts. It's feasible to admit though that the mafia's own existence is a failure of governments in providing security for the population. Possibly a free market for police services would fix that. Otherwise, if the government would stop wasting people's money and its own time meddling with people's freedoms, it would be able to better deal with violent actions against individuals, one of its main attributions. Regarding Greece, their lack of ability to say no is a direct consequence of their irresponsible actions of the past.

InclinedPlane 10y ago

Basic income has a whole host of pretty interesting self-reinforcing feedback loops that seemingly would improve things overall. For example, people would be more likely to leave jobs that were unsafe, treated people poorly, etc. Including situations where employers weren't following labor laws and regulations (which is a huge problem today). Meaning that maybe it'd be more likely that the fire code, sanitary regulations, etc. were followed consistently. Additionally, people would be more able to have the flexability to be able to train for new careers (whether on their own or through a school or program). Shifting the balance of power in the job market to labor would also generally improve the wage situation, which has stagnated for the last several decades due to the growing power of employers.

vehementi 10y ago
Or, if the fire code weren't followed, there wouldn't be bullshit political pressure to keep the factory open because "Think of the jobs you're killing!"
hellodevnull 10y ago
Same logic is used in free market arguments: Workers leaving jobs to go to other companies creates an incentive for employers to improve work environments. In both scenarios the workplaces become better off, but what really happens in practice is less than ideal.
- imarg 10y ago
  Yes but what happens if you are poor and living paycheck to paycheck? And what if there are not enough jobs? You have no choice but to stay in a job no matter how bad it is. BI supposedly will give you a choice. You won't starve to death if you leave your job.
- geon 10y ago
  You can only leave a job for another if there actually is another one.
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    Or... if the other job is literally no better... there's no positive benefit to be had, and possibly negative backlash.
- ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
  UBI is not an alternative or opposite to free labor markets. It simply provides a baseline level of income so that at the bottom end, the driving force behind an employee's decision to take a job or not is not driven by things like starvation.
dilemma 10y ago
Scenario: You're married with 2 kids and live in San Francisco. Is an $8,000/year UBI going to enable you to quit your $100,000/year job without another lined up?

platz 10y ago

"Take an IPhone - you find a variety of technologies - each one was created by some government grant... The collective production of wealth, which is then privately appropriated.. it's very easy to start thinking of basic income as a dividend that goes to the collective that was responsible for collectively producting the wealth." "We need to create a system whereby society stakes a claim to the returns to aggregate capital, and this claim becomes an income stream that goes to everyone. I don't see why my children and your children have a right to a trust fund [or] why Paris Hilton has a right to a trust fund, when nobody else does, or very few people do. Think of basic income as a trust fund for all our children - to be financed by dividends from our aggregate capital, which was after all, created collectively."

alttab 10y ago
Except "collectively" is very misleading when you're taking the capital gains from say, 20k employees of a tech company and re-distributing it to 300M / 6 Billion people. Generally I agree that being fed and housed will remove constraints on labor allocation - but its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.
- pj_mukh 10y ago
  No, actually that's straight up hyperbolic. There is no upper bound on the 20k employees' income i.e. not communism (or socialism even).
  - alttab 10y ago
    Unless of course the governing body deems the massive revenue the 20k employees generate as "excess" and is confiscated for Basic Income in Africa - the company employing these people will have practical upper limits on what they can pay their employees as exists today - but with the additional caveat that governments can just take the money for "the common good." It's globalism. It's socialism/communism.

qq66 10y ago

The right to turn down all work, at an evolutionary level, is granted only to photosynthetic organisms.

vehementi 10y ago
The rest of the animal kingdom doesn't have their food stockpiled behind lock and key.
themartorana 10y ago
The right to free speech and religious expression at an evolutionary level is non-existent. What's your point?
- landryraccoon 10y ago
  Free speech and freedom of religion demands nothing of your neighbors except non interference. Basic income, on the other hand, demands their labor (at our current level of technology). In the future automation may change this, but right now there is a big gap between demanding free as in speech and free as in beer.
  - ItendToDisagree 10y ago
    It in fact does not require their labor. It requires effective taxation of land and distribution of said taxation effectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism "... revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can reduce or eliminate existing taxes on labor and investment that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue back to the people through a basic income or citizen's dividend."
    - webXL 10y ago
      This is the second time I've seen"taxation of land" in this thread as if the dirt my house is sitting on has the ability to write checks to the local government. I might be missing something, but all tax revenue ultimately comes from profits, or the difference between our value of something and its cost. That difference requires someone's labor. Even if there's a ton of gold under my house, someone has to dig it up, process it and find buyers. You might not think I'm entitled to 100% of the profits, but it's naive to think you're somehow not taxing labor.

pif 10y ago

Comparing mafia and creditors is non-sense: mafia get their power from their choice to use unjustified violence, while creditors get their power from your choice to borrow in the first place.

woah 10y ago
Disagree with him if you want, but his entire point is that the lines between "their choice" and "your choice" are often blurred.
ItendToDisagree 10y ago
Creditors also get their power from the ability to jail those who do not pay debts (threat of force). These debts are often unknown to the debtors. This is becoming an increasingly large problem in the United States.
risk000 10y ago
Creditors get their power by virtue of the monopoly they have on the creation of money. This is a right restricted to an extremely small subset of people, which are basically the government and large banking institutions. This right is backed by violence. I think the comparison between Mafia and banking cartels has merit.

jeffdavis 10y ago

Let's say you have a person living in a remote area and they don't interact much with other people and they don't have a basic income. Are they free? Let's say someone lives in the city without BI, is it fair to say that moving into the wilderness is an option for them, and therefore they are free? Does it change if they started in the wilderness?

lmm 10y ago
Note that there is (virtually) no terra nullis any more, and likely not enough wilderness to accommodate today's world population living the kind of lifestyle one can live on without interacting with other people.
drabiega 10y ago
I've stated elsewhere, I don't think it is fair to say that moving into the wilderness is an option. As cheap as land is in some remote areas, it's still beyond the resources of the people for whom it would be an improvement from their current situation.
- jeffdavis 10y ago
  That doesn't really answer the question though: if you could live in the wilderness, is that freedom?
  - quadrangle 10y ago
    who gives a shit? The pedantic question of "is that freedom?" only applies to nincompoops who think that ethics or economics revolve around whether or not we achieve some singular dogmatic principle like "freedom". It's far more valuable to ask actually useful questions that have practical answers.
  - marcus_holmes 10y ago
    I kinda does answer the question. If there isn't any "wilderness" to live in, because it's all owned by people, then the question is pointless. I live in Australia, where we actually do face this question. There are Aboriginal people living on their ancestral lands in the outback. They have dramatically shorter lifespans and worse health conditions. There are all sorts of reasons for this, not least that colonialist administrations have messed with their ability to live on their land. But the government now faces a choice: - do we let them live out in the bush on their ancestral lands, where they have these measurably worse lives by all the standards we use to measure such things, or - do we remove them from their lands and try to improve their life choices so they live better (in all the standards we measure such things). This question basically comes down to: if a person wants to live free in the wilderness, but the cost of that freedom is a dramatic reduction in their health, life expectancy, education, and quality of life, should we let them? We haven't really worked out an answer yet, but it is increasingly looking like the right one is actually "no". So, to answer your question "if a person wants to live free in the wilderness, are they free?", the answer that we're discovering is: "maybe, it depends on whether they can support themselves and their children to an acceptable standard doing that, and there needs to be government inspectors who decide whether that's the case"

pithic 10y ago

>The Mafia loves to give us options that we can't refuse, to make us offers we can't refuse. Send us a fat portion of your workers' pay to fund our Utopian vision. Or else.

DonaldFisk 10y ago
It doesn't have to come from income tax. It could come from unearned sources of income, such as a tax on land, or on interest.
- jmngomes 10y ago
  Or by reducing the financial excess/waste that goes to corruption, tax avoidance or rent-seeking companies (many of who oppose the very idea of a basic income).
  - saiya-jin 10y ago
    ... and now we jumped straight to utopia. imagining that ending corruption just like that to support this thingie... I wish to take BI seriously, but then the whole topic needs to be serious, and not start with these childish statements and assumptions. All the simulations/proposition in Switzerland are heavily relying on increased taxation of work force. All spending saved on cutting of existing social systems is far from being enough to finance it. Almost nobody is strictly against ideas of BI. What all opponents have against is the high potential for catastrophic failure once it hits reality. Like all other utopistic ideas that started with good intentions. or anybody considers communism a success?
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      > "Like all other utopistic ideas that started with good intentions. or anybody considers communism a success?" I've said this before but it bears repeating, communism has never been fully realised because it got stuck at the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' stage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria... "In Marxist sociopolitical thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a state in which the proletariat, or the working class, has control of political power.[1][2] The term, coined by Joseph Weydemeyer, was adopted by the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the 19th century. In Marxist theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate system between capitalism and communism, when the government is in the process of changing the ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership." "Marxism–Leninism follows the ideas of Marxism and Leninism, seeking to establish a vanguard party, to lead proletarian uprising, assume state power on behalf of the proletariat, and create a single party socialist state. The socialist state, representing a dictatorship of the proletariat is governed through the process of democratic centralism, which Vladimir Lenin described as "diversity in discussion, unity in action." It remains the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, and was the official ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the other ruling parties making up the Eastern Bloc." IMO this intermediate step was the biggest mistake of those who attempted communism, the transition from this centrally-controlled state to a decentralised egalitarian is highly unlikely to work. UBI on the other hand is not an attempt to build a utopia, and does not interfere with the freedom for people to choose where to work and what to spend their money on. It's just a better safety net to prepare for an increasingly uncertain future.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago

>"The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. And to have that right, a genuine right, to turn down a job, you must have an alternative: An outside option. Because desperate people will accept to do desperate things..." i think it will bring downs the salary for a number of professions - why bother to pay when you can get volunteers on basic income for free?

adrianN 10y ago
It also increases the salary for other professions. Who wants to clean toilets for minimum wage if basic income is an alternative.
- Drakim 10y ago
  Isn't it part of the point with basic income in that it doesn't disappear if you have a job? The choices would be "basic income" vs "minimum wage + basic income". There is also the fact that there is no inherent reason why toilet washers should have minimum wage. It's exactly because of economic uncertainty among the lower class that they can be coerced into accepting such sub-par situations such as doing an undesired job at low wage, when it's more logical that an undesired job should offer more pay than a desirable job.
  - pif 10y ago
    Well, from one point of view, cleaning toilet can be a very desirable job because of one fundamental property: you need no prior training! Yes, cleaning toilet is awful, but investing years of your life into a degree before being able to apply is a considerable price, too.
    - krashnburn200 10y ago
      You want to have your cake and eat it too. Either the required training is enough of a disincentive to make the Job Undesirable... and pay high. Or it's not. Required training is not likely to be so scarce when people can chose to train without risking starvation or surviving on 4 hours of sleep a night. Which is the real problem most of those with "training" fear. It's devaluation when even poor people can get it without Herculean efforts.

wyager 10y ago

What a foolish analogy. The Mafia uses violence to force people to "agree" to things. If one "can't say no" to a contract because their pre-contract situation sucks and will be improved by adopting the contract, they have suffered no violence.

lisper 10y ago
What difference does it make if the threat is actual violence or leaving you without an income so you end up on the street? What matters is not the particulars of the unpleasantness that awaits you if you don't accept the mafia's/corporation's offer, but the fact that the unpleasantness is a consequence of a situation that the mafia/corporation have themselves created.
- pif 10y ago
  > ... the unpleasantness is a consequence of a situation that the mafia/corporation have themselves created. I don't understand how the corporation can be guilty. If someone offers you a job with a wage that you find modest, how is it his fault if nobody else is making you a better offer?
  - lisper 10y ago
    There are a lot of things that companies do to make sure no one makes you a better offer. Here is just one recent example from the tech industry: http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/4-tech-companies-are-paying-a-325m-fine-for-their-illegal-non-compete-pact/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/4-tech-companies-are-payin...
paulddraper 10y ago
It's foolish, but that's not even the biggest reason. It's foolish because he wants to replace one corrupt group of people that take your money and distribute it (the Mafia) with another corrupt group of people that take your money and distribute it (the government).

grecy 10y ago

> The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. I agree 100%, and I must say having immigrated from Australia, it's probably the worst thing about America. It feels like Employers have all the power in America, and therefore all the Employees are basically slaves, and are treated as such. I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workforce over the profits of businesses.

skeeper 10y ago
"I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workforce over the profits of businesses" I agree. Corporate greed. That's exactly the issue being addressed in this article: https://medium.com/@LevelWorkingField/do-you-like-new-pricing-or-higher-fees-upwork-is-changing-again-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-6c755e245fb7 https://medium.com/@LevelWorkingField/do-you-like-new-pricin...
- alanwatts 10y ago
  This was the biggest move which Dr. King was calling for in his fight for civil rights, a year before he was assassinated. >We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]
autokad 10y ago
if you loved austrailia so much, move back. you have to take the 'bad' with the good. we built a system that enables people with ideas to chase their dreams and succeed. that means companies have the ability to pay people with low skills and experience less than those with. honestly, if you are being treated like a slave, move to another company. if you cant, you don't have skills employers want. get them. during the recession, many companies used their position of power to their advantage. the smarter companies (and now more successful) used the recession as an opportunity to get the best workers. the ironic thing is, to try and force employers to treat everyone like stellar employees would probably result in treating everyone poorly.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

Its a replay of something called "Enclosure" in Britain in the 1700s (actually for several hundreds of years) where the commons got fenced and contracted out. It meant laborers could no longer live for a while off the land - a brace of rabbits, a partridge for the pot. So labor had to work for an employer to live, at whatever pay the employer chose. Which essentially enslaved them. Or so the argument went.

ethbro 10y ago
I think it's an interest ebb and flow of history. The US had (and continues to have) a similar process related to grazing lands in the West (someone correct if I'm wrong). But the broader theme of "in order to make more, we privatize this resource so that it may be exploited more efficiently" starts to become questionable in a hypothetical post-material scarcity, "we don't need more" world.

andrenth 10y ago

Contracts signed with the mafia are not free market contracts. It's feasible to admit though that the mafia's own existence is a failure of governments in providing security for the population. Possibly a free market for police services would fix that. Otherwise, if the government would stop wasting people's money and its own time meddling with people's freedoms, it would be able to better deal with violent actions against individuals, one of its main attributions. Regarding Greece, their lack of ability to say no is a direct consequence of their irresponsible actions of the past.