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If You Think Basic Income Is “Free Money” or Socialism, Think Again

60 points by denzil_correa 9y ago

azeotropic 9y ago
This looks more like an exercise by someone trying (and in my opinion failing) to pass an ideological Turing test than a real argument.
- tzakrajs 9y ago
  What is an ideological Turing test? I don't think I understand your parenthetical remark.
  - randallsquared 9y ago
    The "ideological Turing test" is the attempt to argue for a position indistinguishably from a supporter of that position, when you yourself are not. If you can't convincingly do so, it's strong evidence you do not understand what supporters believe. Related to, but not identical with, "steelmanning".
jondubois 9y ago
I think that some sort of UBI has become absolutely necessary. People who have money tend to have so much of it that they can't possibly spend it efficiently - There is no way for the money to trickle down evenly because wealthy individuals rarely interact with people who are outside of their own social class. In the case of extremely wealthy individuals, they even have to hire a security detail in order to further insulate themselves from the lower classes. I think that's why cryptocurrencies are going up so much; the very rich can afford to keep 'throwing away' an unlimited amount of surplus money. I don't think cryptocurrencies are a bubble because bubbles only pop when the fear sets in; but if you have unlimited money which you don't care about losing, you have nothing to fear. The way I see it, cryptocurrencies are like UBI for tech people.
hal9000xp 9y ago
Yes, it's a free money! What else it could be?? You give free money to people who don't work (and probably don't want to work at all) and you naively expect them to have high-level of responsibility in the sense they eventually find a job and pay back money in form of taxes. Do you know what's happen if you give free money to people? They just ask for more money! They won't feel guilty for not working because they would think it's rich people who has to pay back what they "stole from society" during last centuries. They would create complicated conspiracy stories which justify their side. Many people (if not most!) are completely irresponsible for their own life. Face it! If it were not true, people in Russia wouldn't support paternalistic ideology of Putin's government, people in Venezuela wouldn't buy free-lunch ideology of Hugo Chavez, people around the world wouldn't believe in god to whom they would beg for solving their problems. The only reason many people work (and contribute to economy) instead of drinking beer is that they need money for that beer. If you don't believe me, just go to Ibiza's San Antonio West End street and see how brits got wasted.
- peter-m80 9y ago
  Basic income should be perceived by everyone. Working or not.
  - croizat 9y ago
    Everyone, except for illnesses and severe disabilities, is actually working. Why would you call worker someone with a salary on a construction company building other people houses but not someone, with UBI, building its own family house ?
- vertex-four 9y ago
  Perhaps, as a society, we don't need everyone "working" (as in participating in work-for-wages, as opposed to other forms of ad-hoc and uncompensated work). In fact, the idea that we do is very new - it's only really in the last 60 years or so that women, a good 50% of the working-age population, have entered the workforce. Instead of using involuntary sexism as a basis for shrinking the working population, perhaps building a system in which working several hours 5-7 days a week for a wage is more voluntary would be a good thing and allow the rebuilding of communities and society.
mmjaa 9y ago
I feel like this basic income ideology is really rooted in laziness - like, everyone likes free things, right? You don't have to work for it? But - do we ever really ask where that money is coming from? The rich just give it? So then, why would I work hard to become rich, if its just going to be taken from me? Its like income tax. Everyone loves paying tax on their income, right? (I, personally, do not.). So why don't we switch to taxing spending, instead? I'd much rather see the income tax abolished before any UBI fantasy ...
- tw1010 9y ago
  That might be part of it. But things are rarely that simple. Another big argument is to act as a safety net allowing people to take bigger risks, like starting a startup.
- PoachedSausage 9y ago
  Technology itself is rooted in laziness. I'm too lazy to wash my clothes and dishes so I have robotic washing boxes do it for me. The protestant work ethic has no place in the 21st century, so lets drop it.
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  Taxing spending tends to be regressive. Rich people end up paying less tax as a proportion of their income while the poor end up paying more. It is however less visible. Income tax is at least upfront about how much is taken whereas tax on spending is spread out and often invisible unless you're actively thinking about it. Sure you can make people happier about taxation by making it less visible but I'm not sure that's a good argument for it.
  - Simon_says 9y ago
    I never really understood the argument that taxing spending taxes rich people a lower proportion of their income. Even allowing for investments and savings, rich and poor are all going to spend the money they have in their life (ignore or tax the estates). If there’s a 10% sales tax, then 9.0909...% of your wealth will go to it, no matter how much you make, invest, save.
uoaei 9y ago
Basic income is a bottom-up stimulus package, like how bailouts for banks are "stimulus" packages but nestled in Reaganomics, i.e., expecting the money to trickle down. Except that bailouts sequester the money almost exclusively in the banking industry and so are useless for everyone except those who are already rich, and the government itself. Basic income fills the economy with money that can be really spent, and like the article says people will vote with their dollars. I can't understand why free market fanboys don't like it! It's the best way to incite competition in the marketplace by removing the exploitative (i.e., freedom-revoking) abilities of the companies that prey on the lifestyles of low-income workers who are stuck working multiple jobs just to get by.
- candiodari 9y ago
  How about I just point out the huge flaw here: Bank bailouts, in theory, are to be paid back, with interest. In a lot of cases they were. Not all, of course, but the economy turned. Net, bank bailouts were a good investment. QE may turn out to be as well (I may doubt that, but truth it the jury's still out) If that same deal can be made, believably, for basic income, we wouldn't be having this argument: we'd provide basic income, today, as a loan. Hell, I'd fight to add my own money to provide that basic income. Since you pretty much don't like me anymore at this point, why not just go ahead and fully state the problem: What we cannot have in the economy, is a large, and potentially exponentially growing, group of expenses without any useful work. And when I mean "we cannot" I don't mean that I'm denying this to you. I don't mean states don't want it. I don't mean I don't want to give everyone that. I mean we cannot. Any such policy must fail in a limited amount of time. I mean you cannot have basic income for any length of time in the same sense that you cannot paint the sky green. Disappointing perhaps, but simply a parameter of existence, nothing more. You shouldn't blame economics for this. Nor should you blame states, banks, the rich, or anyone. The only things to be blamed for it is thermodynamics. Of course the universe couldn't exist stably without those laws, so maybe math itself should bear the guilt.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > group of expenses without any useful work. Pensioners? Rentiers?
Proven 9y ago
What an idiot
stesch 9y ago
After a few years of reading UBI (Universal Basic Income) debates I come to the conclusion that it is impossible to teach humans new tricks. The way you earn and spend money is deeply ingrained into our brains. When the Neanderthal used the ATM he knew that it was his successful killing of a sabre tooth that lead to the money he had in his hands. Maybe we should just skip this immediate step and go full on Star Trek/Venus Project.
- hyperpallium 9y ago
  Some things are already free, such as the air. We don't worry about it day-to-dzy, because we have that need met. Once a need is met, we worry about the next one. There is no end to our needs and wants. So, with basic income, it just means all those needs step up one rung. But without basic needs met, a workforce is less productive. It's a similar argument as for universal health care and education. If that's too contentious, consider that most civilizations provide many things to their citizens, such as roads, currency, military, law and law enforcement. that are free to the user. Thw difference is that today, basic income can be afforded by the state.
johndoe489 9y ago
The term "free money" is a silly put down term designed to close a discussion before it even started. Nothing is free. Money comes from somewhere, and it goes somewhere. Even if this money did not end up creating more jobs, or reducing health care costs and so on, it's still going somewhere and doing something.
- bjelkeman-again 9y ago
  > Money comes from somewhere Someone entering a few zeros behind another non-zero number into a bank lending system. http://positivemoney.org/how-money-works/how-banks-create-money/ http://positivemoney.org/how-money-works/how-banks-create-mo...
- taysic 9y ago
  If its being printed out of thin air (if hypothetically taxes can't cover costs) then its creating massive inflation.
pjc50 9y ago
Well, it is free money, that's the point; but neither that nor being "socialism" automatically makes it bad. This article is an interesting way of pitching basic income to a "capitalist"/right audience by phrasing it in ways like "basic income is fuel for markets", "buying is like voting" (!) and "I like markets. I want to reduce the size of government. I want less bureaucracy. I want less administration. I want fewer government jobs."
- DanielBMarkham 9y ago
  Yes, it was an unusual article in that the author was doing a lot of work to strawman-out conservatives and then make the UBI pitch. It wasn't a bad pitch, but it felt really loose and meandering, like it could have ran a third of its length and been much more cogent and direct. Instead of direct and succinct, I got the feeling of an author standing out in a field, waving their arms around, while breathlessly making all sorts of tangentially-related generalizations and responses. And I think that's the problem here: folks on both sides of the UBI issue would rather deal in generalities and grandstanding instead of just trying the dang thing out a bunch of times and seeing what works and what doesn't. Twenty years ago, the U.S. was obviously in need of some kind of revamping of its healthcare system. Instead of trying hundreds of things out and quickly iterating a learning over time, what happened was that the issue was argued at the highest level of abstraction and in generic terms: what kind of modern country doesn't provide healthcare for it's people? It took decades of argument, and in the end we got a one-size-fits-all solution that is now going to take decades to modify and adjust. If you want responsive government, this way of discussion and change is a dysfunctional way to improve the quality of people's lives. So with UBI, I'm quite interested in the various experiments and the low-level details of what was tried and what kind of results are produced, much more so than some nebulous arguing and strawmanning around the concept in general. I support the concept in general -- if we're going to spend a lot of money on the poorer folks in society (I believe that isn't changing), then we should be constantly looking for ways to make the outcomes better. Big, animated discussions around what socialism is or isn't? Not part of an effective national dialog. Also, Alaska is not a conservative state. It's a libertarian one. Many, many people seem to want to conflate libertarianism with conservatism. They are entirely separate (Insert long discussion here about the differences between libertarianism in the states and conservatism. Also another discussin about just what the heck conservatism is after the election of the recent president. Neither of these discussions are probably useful or germane to the topic of the essay)
tzakrajs 9y ago
I think UBI needs to be thoughtfully and strategically phased so as not to disrupt the status quo derogatorily. An overnight switch to UBI seems politically unfeasible because of typical quixotism of so many people. It's an experiment on a grand scale which always unnerves markets.
jostylr 9y ago
The author also has a series of different ideas on how to pay for it without raising income taxes. I found that more interesting than this, but I already fully support and believe in the capacity for amazing stuff from people who are set free https://medium.com/economicsecproj/how-to-reform-welfare-and-taxes-to-provide-every-american-citizen-with-a-basic-income-bc67d3f4c2b8 https://medium.com/economicsecproj/how-to-reform-welfare-and...
IvanK_net 9y ago
"First, saying basic income is socialism is as absurd as saying money is socialism. It’s money. It’s all it is. What do people do with money? They use it in markets. In other words, basic income is fuel for markets." The brilliant flow of thoughts and deduction just blew my mind.
- Simon_says 9y ago
  If Basic Income isn’t socialism, I shudder to think of what the author would consider socialism.
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    Socialism might be central planning. Basic income is almost the opposite of central planning, because it replaces all sorts of conditional and focused welfare with what is equivalent to a negative income tax. That's why so many libertarians are on board with the idea.
    - Simon_says 9y ago
      That doesn’t sound right to me. Speaking as someone with mild Libertarian tendencies, UBI seems pretty contra to Libertarian ideals. Not the UBI itself, but the taxation required to fund it. Can you give references to any well-known Libertarian thinkers who are on board with UBI?
      - Firadeoclus 9y ago
        There is more than one strand of libertarianism, and not all of them strive to minimize taxation. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism
        Simon_says 9y ago
        Thanks for showing me this. I never knew about "Libertarian Socialists". I'm afraid of falling into the Scottsman fallacy, but they don't sound like the other Libertarians I've read. I couldn't find anything about basic income on that page. Is there any writing from a self-proclaimed Libertarian in support of UBI?
dingo_bat 9y ago
I want to write a loooong point-by-point rebuttal but I'm just too lazy. Now if I were awarded a basic income maybe I'd take out a day and write it up! But here's a summary: I am in the top 20% whose income is still going up and whose tax will be used to pay out the UBI. What's in it for me? Why should I care? I really don't. And all the politicians are also in the top 1% (POTUS is a fucking billionaire, former POTUS gets $400k for a speech). Even a poor man becomes rich when he is elected. Why would he care about the 80%. There is no rational world in which a UBI will work or be implemented as envisioned by the author.
- madez 9y ago
  The poor won't burn your neighbourhood and threaten your children. That's what's in for the rich. That sounds dramatic, but look at Brazil, and you can see that what I'm saying is not hyperbolic. There is a huge correlation of the success of one person and their surrounding. In other words, for ones own interest the success of those around one is important. Helping the weaker helps a lot of other people.
  - thescribe 9y ago
    I feel like you're saying that basic income is extortion? That seems like a bit of an extreme stance.
    - madez 9y ago
      I think it depends on how you want to frame what I said. Helping the poor at least around you is good for you. Now, you could say equivalently not helping the poor around you is bad for you. Rephrase what I said if you feel uncomfortable with how I stated it. If in a mafia controlled city you tell a friend not to publicly expose a mafioso for else he and is family is in danger, are you blackmailing your friend or are you simply stating facts?
- rjsw 9y ago
  The alternative to UBI for you is that you either spend the rest of your life in a castle or your head ends up on a spike. It isn't a coincidence that Thomas Piketty is a Parisian, you can still see plenty of signs of the Revolution on buildings around the city.
jasonlfunk 9y ago
> Everyone should get enough money to be able to refuse to work. That way, the incentive is shifted to employers, where it should be. Want someone to do something? Pay them enough to do it. This sounds nice in theory, but how doesn’t this result in price inflation? Not only are you going to be taking a portion of businesses’ profits in taxes, but now you are increasing the cost of labour. And frankly, some jobs suck so badly that no one is going to want to do them without being paid a ton of money. For example, manual agricultural labor. Food costs would almost certainly skyrocket. (Unless you account for illegal immigrants, which you couldn’t naturalize because then you’d have to give them a UBI).
- Stefstefstef 9y ago
  I don't know about the US but in my country manual agricultural labor pays so much only immigrants living in hay barns can afford to do the work. for everyone else it doesn't pay enough to do the work
  - BartSaM 9y ago
    Would be nice if you would mention what is your country.
- goliatone 9y ago
  I always see UBI mentioned when people discuss automation and the disruption of labor. Automation could address your last concern regarding inflation and jobs people don’t want to do.
- Firadeoclus 9y ago
  There would be a rebalancing of prices, which is really an intended effect. Things would be in flux for a time, then settle at a new equilibrium. Food prices may go up, other prices may go down. The new equilibrium prices may well be higher on average, but the more important question is, how much can a poor person afford to buy?
- mcbruiser4 9y ago
  yeah, this results in $200 for a haircut or $500 to get your lawn mowed. pass.
rentmoney 9y ago
UBI is free money for landlords. Just once, just one single time, I'd like to hear or read a convincing explanation for how UBI will not be completely captured by rents. I'm still waiting.
- PoachedSausage 9y ago
  You fund it with a Georgist style land value tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
  - croizat 9y ago
    which is another way to state that, once construction costs are repaid, you cannot earn money from your apartment. UBI implies that property cannot be used as a way to extract money from someone else work.
  - taysic 9y ago
    When you tax something you penalize it - so in this case you'd penalize owning land. This would seem to concentrate land in the hands of the wealthy as far as I can see.
- Firadeoclus 9y ago
  In a wider sense, it couldn't be "completely" captured since many people don't rent. But I suppose you meant it from the perspective of an individual tenant. Rents are set by supply and demand. If we assume your hypothesis is correct then complete capture via rents would have to be a stable state. I do not think that's the case. First of all, if rents were to go up by that much (relative to everything else) then supply would increase (more building, renting out of currently empty properties, subdividing, etc.). Furthermore, regions with lots of empty homes could not keep rents high because landlords compete against each other. And as a consequence, people in high-price areas would move away to cheaper areas. In conclusion, it is likely that rents and other prices would go up, but it is almost inconceivable that it would lead to no additional purchasing power for the poorest at all.
- err4nt 9y ago
kapauldo 9y ago
It's free money by definition. It's a bad idea because it will serve as a sedative.
k__ 9y ago
What are good alternatives? How can we motivate people to work but still keep them from being poor? I have some ideas, but no real solution. For example, I work as a software developer and after I switched to self employment I noticed that I made more money by working less. I started seeing people everywhere making money with stuff that requires far less "hard skills" then software development. And still people do this, they work for much less than they're worth, so it can't be "just money" that motivates people to work.
- logicallee 9y ago
  >What are good alternatives? I'm not an expert but here is my thinking: Basic income could be interest-free debt extended by the government, whose repayment is done entirely from future taxes, i.e. without increasing the taxes they would have otherwise paid. This would motivate people to stop accumulating the debt quickly, it would force people to make investments into their education (to increase earnings later), and it would act as a smaller incentive to game the system than a pure money transfer. The basic reason basic income is so important is that people are not able to make any investment of their time if they are trying to make ends meet: going to work for McDonald's is not an effective strategy for climbing out of the poverty hole. Staying home and attending classes or learning a skill, however, is. There are few people whose natural talents are so low that after investing 5-10 years, they cannot become skilled or productive enough to contribute meaningfully to society. Additionally it would finance artistic endeavors which often take over a decade of practice before producing anything worth being sold. Indeed, many artists could fail ever to make a meaningful tax contribution (to repay the basic income they were given), however, this may be a burden society as a whole could bear. In addition there should be some kind of easy grace period or tapered end of benefits so that accepting a job does not "endanger" someone's benefits that they're already receiving. We can't talk about all the different parts of society, but to talk about this incentives thing in terms of hackers: some programmers will choose to devote themselves to open source and take a basic income. This is simply a fact. For years, (5-10-20 years) they will live on basic income and contribute to open source. This is just a simple byproduct of introducing basic income. So what needs to happen is that after someone has done that for 15 years, if a commercial company wants to hire that hacker for some reason, then there needs to be a smooth way for the hacker to accept that salary. This transition is a difficult one, but ideally, over a few years of working for their corporate sponsors, they'll have generated enough taxes to repay all of their previous transfer payments. All of the future taxes they generate are now tax base value that never would have existed without the basic income. So this kind of a 'success story' can work. Basic income needs to be quite low, i.e. not much of an incentive, and it is important for people not to feel like they are endangering their basic income, by taking paid work. I believe these issues can be solved very well.
simonsarris 9y ago
> It’s really hard to look at the evidence and say giving people money is wrong, because having enough money means being able to buy enough food. This person is conflating cash transfers (welfare) with UBI. One can think cash transfers and general welfare are good while still thinking UBI may have fatal flaws. And anyone that paints UBI experiments as approaching what truly Universal Basic Income would look like are deceiving. This person is repeatedly dodging real criticisms. This article is mostly a verbose emotional string of arguments, but it doesn't do a very good job of explaining either of its two title claims. Claim 1: Many people say "socialism" to mean top-down social programs funded by taxes, e.g. when people say uncontroversially "Sweden is more socialist than the USA," this is what they mean. UBI is a top-down social program. If you don't think that, ask yourself: What happens to the payments if the federal gov collapses or is incapacitated? (Is unable to organize payments or tax collection). UBI halts everywhere. As a contrast, Farming is bottom up: For example the government of Afghanistan could collapse and it may take years before remote individual farmers even know that it happened. UBI receivers on the other hand would know as soon as the first check didn't come. Claim 2: But UBI is "Free Money." That's the point. It has to be unconditional to be UBI, that's how they draw the distinction. Most people who advocate for UBI contrast it specifically with means-tested welfare. > Have you ever played the game Monopoly? I’m sure you have. Is that a game about socialism? According to “free money is socialism” logic it is, because everyone starts the game with free money and everyone gets free money for simply passing Go. This is a silly analogy. It's not free money even within the game rules. Passing Go is the condition. You can go to jail in the game, being forced to skip passing Go, even. Citing a game mechanic as a proof that UBI isn't free money is bonkers. When UBI proponents say universal or unconditional, that's what they (proponents and opponents) are talking about when they mean free. I made my own criticisms of UBI last week (OP's article is from Sept) where I raise objections that I think are relevant even if UBI is agreeably implemented: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-income-the-flood-217db9889c07 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-incom... Convincing people that it's not socalism or free money is not enough. You have to make the argument that price inflation won't occur, that it can fail gracefully, that destroying the other welfare programs that do more than just give cash (like case workers in medicaid) is a good idea, and so on. UBI proponents ignore these just like Marx ignored implementation details, relying on the World-spirit-of-the-people (an odd kind of hand-waving mysticism) to ensure that it would work. If you meet someone pro-UBI, ask them this: What happens if it fails or we can no longer afford it, after 30 years running? What does the generation that was never required to work, do? If they say it won't fail, you know you're not talking to someone interested in creating a robust system. If your ideal is incapable of planning for failure, you haven't really thought about your ideals much. We know what large scale top down social failure looks like, after the last century.
Mz 9y ago
I can't manage to get past about paragraph two. What an idiotic piece of writing with zero basis in reality. Money is not a means to "vote" on what we should produce. Money is a means to reduce friction in the trade process. It does other things as well, but its primary purpose is to make it easier to get the things we want by reducing how much time and effort goes into coming up with a thing to trade for the thing we want. So, say you want a steak dinner and you are a programmer. You don't have to go to the restaurant and offer to program something for the owner in order to get your steak dinner. You program for your employer. They give you money. You take money to the restaurant. The restaurant doesn't have to have immediate need of programming to cut a deal with you. There is an argument to be made wrt the idea that lots of people are adding value to the system that is hard to quantify, hard to translate into money, etc and those people shouldn't be left out in the cold, not just because it is cruel, but because it actively harms the system as a whole. I was a homemaker and the feminization of poverty is a genuine phenomenon. A big piece of that puzzle isn't sexism per se, but the simple fact that women are expected to invest time and energy in taking care of other people on an ongoing basis. The degree to which they do this for other people often doesn't really come back to them. But, I am doubtful that basic income does anything to remedy that situation. In fact, I have fears that it would only serve to entrench the expectation that women should just accept basically being treated like slaves by the world around them. I don't think this is a good thing. It is one of the reasons I am not pro UBI. I think there are much better ways to try to not leave people out in the cold entirely. They include universal basic healthcare and access to genuinely affordable housing. Addressing those two issues wouldn't fix everything for everyone, but neither will UBI. I think this is an unusually good write up of some of what is broken with the idea of UBI: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-income-the-flood-217db9889c07 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-incom...
- untangle 9y ago
  The article that you linked was well-thought and well-written. I liked the more bottom-up approach to the issues and that Mr Sarris at least offered kernels of alternatives. Ignoring for a moment that the decision-making ability of the US legislature is all but broken, I worry that the sheer complexity of the issues surrounding UBI would make adoption – or even learned consideration – impossible. And, as you and Sarris mention, the relationship between UBI and healthcare and housing (rents) is a whole other can of complexity.
purplezooey 9y ago
The thing I would worry about mainly is inflation.
dibbsonline 9y ago
It's very biased, so the people that get the UBI won't be able to afford nice things or to live in nice suburbs near good social/health/education services as people with earned money will be competing for those. Choosing not to work is choosing to not take part in society, social services are part of a society. It still needs some sort of utopia to work, that's where it has some similarity to socialism, but there is no utopia.
stmfreak 9y ago
Money is not a market demand signal, it is a medium of labor exchange. I buy your labor with my labor. Some labor is more in demand than other labor, some is in short supply. Money bridges all the divides between these. Where UBI fails is that it cuts labor out of the mix and allows some to benefit from the labor of others without performing any labor in exchange. Of course, banks and politicians have been doing this for decades, but a host can only support so many parasites.

60 points by denzil_correa 9y ago

This looks more like an exercise by someone trying (and in my opinion failing) to pass an ideological Turing test than a real argument.

tzakrajs 9y ago
What is an ideological Turing test? I don't think I understand your parenthetical remark.
- randallsquared 9y ago
  The "ideological Turing test" is the attempt to argue for a position indistinguishably from a supporter of that position, when you yourself are not. If you can't convincingly do so, it's strong evidence you do not understand what supporters believe. Related to, but not identical with, "steelmanning".

jondubois 9y ago

I think that some sort of UBI has become absolutely necessary. People who have money tend to have so much of it that they can't possibly spend it efficiently - There is no way for the money to trickle down evenly because wealthy individuals rarely interact with people who are outside of their own social class. In the case of extremely wealthy individuals, they even have to hire a security detail in order to further insulate themselves from the lower classes. I think that's why cryptocurrencies are going up so much; the very rich can afford to keep 'throwing away' an unlimited amount of surplus money. I don't think cryptocurrencies are a bubble because bubbles only pop when the fear sets in; but if you have unlimited money which you don't care about losing, you have nothing to fear. The way I see it, cryptocurrencies are like UBI for tech people.

hal9000xp 9y ago

Yes, it's a free money! What else it could be?? You give free money to people who don't work (and probably don't want to work at all) and you naively expect them to have high-level of responsibility in the sense they eventually find a job and pay back money in form of taxes. Do you know what's happen if you give free money to people? They just ask for more money! They won't feel guilty for not working because they would think it's rich people who has to pay back what they "stole from society" during last centuries. They would create complicated conspiracy stories which justify their side. Many people (if not most!) are completely irresponsible for their own life. Face it! If it were not true, people in Russia wouldn't support paternalistic ideology of Putin's government, people in Venezuela wouldn't buy free-lunch ideology of Hugo Chavez, people around the world wouldn't believe in god to whom they would beg for solving their problems. The only reason many people work (and contribute to economy) instead of drinking beer is that they need money for that beer. If you don't believe me, just go to Ibiza's San Antonio West End street and see how brits got wasted.

peter-m80 9y ago
Basic income should be perceived by everyone. Working or not.
- croizat 9y ago
  Everyone, except for illnesses and severe disabilities, is actually working. Why would you call worker someone with a salary on a construction company building other people houses but not someone, with UBI, building its own family house ?
vertex-four 9y ago
Perhaps, as a society, we don't need everyone "working" (as in participating in work-for-wages, as opposed to other forms of ad-hoc and uncompensated work). In fact, the idea that we do is very new - it's only really in the last 60 years or so that women, a good 50% of the working-age population, have entered the workforce. Instead of using involuntary sexism as a basis for shrinking the working population, perhaps building a system in which working several hours 5-7 days a week for a wage is more voluntary would be a good thing and allow the rebuilding of communities and society.

mmjaa 9y ago

I feel like this basic income ideology is really rooted in laziness - like, everyone likes free things, right? You don't have to work for it? But - do we ever really ask where that money is coming from? The rich just give it? So then, why would I work hard to become rich, if its just going to be taken from me? Its like income tax. Everyone loves paying tax on their income, right? (I, personally, do not.). So why don't we switch to taxing spending, instead? I'd much rather see the income tax abolished before any UBI fantasy ...

tw1010 9y ago
That might be part of it. But things are rarely that simple. Another big argument is to act as a safety net allowing people to take bigger risks, like starting a startup.
PoachedSausage 9y ago
Technology itself is rooted in laziness. I'm too lazy to wash my clothes and dishes so I have robotic washing boxes do it for me. The protestant work ethic has no place in the 21st century, so lets drop it.
ChrisSD 9y ago
Taxing spending tends to be regressive. Rich people end up paying less tax as a proportion of their income while the poor end up paying more. It is however less visible. Income tax is at least upfront about how much is taken whereas tax on spending is spread out and often invisible unless you're actively thinking about it. Sure you can make people happier about taxation by making it less visible but I'm not sure that's a good argument for it.
- Simon_says 9y ago
  I never really understood the argument that taxing spending taxes rich people a lower proportion of their income. Even allowing for investments and savings, rich and poor are all going to spend the money they have in their life (ignore or tax the estates). If there’s a 10% sales tax, then 9.0909...% of your wealth will go to it, no matter how much you make, invest, save.

uoaei 9y ago

Basic income is a bottom-up stimulus package, like how bailouts for banks are "stimulus" packages but nestled in Reaganomics, i.e., expecting the money to trickle down. Except that bailouts sequester the money almost exclusively in the banking industry and so are useless for everyone except those who are already rich, and the government itself. Basic income fills the economy with money that can be really spent, and like the article says people will vote with their dollars. I can't understand why free market fanboys don't like it! It's the best way to incite competition in the marketplace by removing the exploitative (i.e., freedom-revoking) abilities of the companies that prey on the lifestyles of low-income workers who are stuck working multiple jobs just to get by.

candiodari 9y ago
How about I just point out the huge flaw here: Bank bailouts, in theory, are to be paid back, with interest. In a lot of cases they were. Not all, of course, but the economy turned. Net, bank bailouts were a good investment. QE may turn out to be as well (I may doubt that, but truth it the jury's still out) If that same deal can be made, believably, for basic income, we wouldn't be having this argument: we'd provide basic income, today, as a loan. Hell, I'd fight to add my own money to provide that basic income. Since you pretty much don't like me anymore at this point, why not just go ahead and fully state the problem: What we cannot have in the economy, is a large, and potentially exponentially growing, group of expenses without any useful work. And when I mean "we cannot" I don't mean that I'm denying this to you. I don't mean states don't want it. I don't mean I don't want to give everyone that. I mean we cannot. Any such policy must fail in a limited amount of time. I mean you cannot have basic income for any length of time in the same sense that you cannot paint the sky green. Disappointing perhaps, but simply a parameter of existence, nothing more. You shouldn't blame economics for this. Nor should you blame states, banks, the rich, or anyone. The only things to be blamed for it is thermodynamics. Of course the universe couldn't exist stably without those laws, so maybe math itself should bear the guilt.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > group of expenses without any useful work. Pensioners? Rentiers?

Proven 9y ago

What an idiot

stesch 9y ago

After a few years of reading UBI (Universal Basic Income) debates I come to the conclusion that it is impossible to teach humans new tricks. The way you earn and spend money is deeply ingrained into our brains. When the Neanderthal used the ATM he knew that it was his successful killing of a sabre tooth that lead to the money he had in his hands. Maybe we should just skip this immediate step and go full on Star Trek/Venus Project.

hyperpallium 9y ago
Some things are already free, such as the air. We don't worry about it day-to-dzy, because we have that need met. Once a need is met, we worry about the next one. There is no end to our needs and wants. So, with basic income, it just means all those needs step up one rung. But without basic needs met, a workforce is less productive. It's a similar argument as for universal health care and education. If that's too contentious, consider that most civilizations provide many things to their citizens, such as roads, currency, military, law and law enforcement. that are free to the user. Thw difference is that today, basic income can be afforded by the state.

johndoe489 9y ago

The term "free money" is a silly put down term designed to close a discussion before it even started. Nothing is free. Money comes from somewhere, and it goes somewhere. Even if this money did not end up creating more jobs, or reducing health care costs and so on, it's still going somewhere and doing something.

bjelkeman-again 9y ago
> Money comes from somewhere Someone entering a few zeros behind another non-zero number into a bank lending system. http://positivemoney.org/how-money-works/how-banks-create-money/ http://positivemoney.org/how-money-works/how-banks-create-mo...
taysic 9y ago
If its being printed out of thin air (if hypothetically taxes can't cover costs) then its creating massive inflation.

pjc50 9y ago

Well, it is free money, that's the point; but neither that nor being "socialism" automatically makes it bad. This article is an interesting way of pitching basic income to a "capitalist"/right audience by phrasing it in ways like "basic income is fuel for markets", "buying is like voting" (!) and "I like markets. I want to reduce the size of government. I want less bureaucracy. I want less administration. I want fewer government jobs."

DanielBMarkham 9y ago
Yes, it was an unusual article in that the author was doing a lot of work to strawman-out conservatives and then make the UBI pitch. It wasn't a bad pitch, but it felt really loose and meandering, like it could have ran a third of its length and been much more cogent and direct. Instead of direct and succinct, I got the feeling of an author standing out in a field, waving their arms around, while breathlessly making all sorts of tangentially-related generalizations and responses. And I think that's the problem here: folks on both sides of the UBI issue would rather deal in generalities and grandstanding instead of just trying the dang thing out a bunch of times and seeing what works and what doesn't. Twenty years ago, the U.S. was obviously in need of some kind of revamping of its healthcare system. Instead of trying hundreds of things out and quickly iterating a learning over time, what happened was that the issue was argued at the highest level of abstraction and in generic terms: what kind of modern country doesn't provide healthcare for it's people? It took decades of argument, and in the end we got a one-size-fits-all solution that is now going to take decades to modify and adjust. If you want responsive government, this way of discussion and change is a dysfunctional way to improve the quality of people's lives. So with UBI, I'm quite interested in the various experiments and the low-level details of what was tried and what kind of results are produced, much more so than some nebulous arguing and strawmanning around the concept in general. I support the concept in general -- if we're going to spend a lot of money on the poorer folks in society (I believe that isn't changing), then we should be constantly looking for ways to make the outcomes better. Big, animated discussions around what socialism is or isn't? Not part of an effective national dialog. Also, Alaska is not a conservative state. It's a libertarian one. Many, many people seem to want to conflate libertarianism with conservatism. They are entirely separate (Insert long discussion here about the differences between libertarianism in the states and conservatism. Also another discussin about just what the heck conservatism is after the election of the recent president. Neither of these discussions are probably useful or germane to the topic of the essay)

tzakrajs 9y ago

I think UBI needs to be thoughtfully and strategically phased so as not to disrupt the status quo derogatorily. An overnight switch to UBI seems politically unfeasible because of typical quixotism of so many people. It's an experiment on a grand scale which always unnerves markets.

jostylr 9y ago

The author also has a series of different ideas on how to pay for it without raising income taxes. I found that more interesting than this, but I already fully support and believe in the capacity for amazing stuff from people who are set free https://medium.com/economicsecproj/how-to-reform-welfare-and-taxes-to-provide-every-american-citizen-with-a-basic-income-bc67d3f4c2b8 https://medium.com/economicsecproj/how-to-reform-welfare-and...

IvanK_net 9y ago

"First, saying basic income is socialism is as absurd as saying money is socialism. It’s money. It’s all it is. What do people do with money? They use it in markets. In other words, basic income is fuel for markets." The brilliant flow of thoughts and deduction just blew my mind.

Simon_says 9y ago
If Basic Income isn’t socialism, I shudder to think of what the author would consider socialism.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  Socialism might be central planning. Basic income is almost the opposite of central planning, because it replaces all sorts of conditional and focused welfare with what is equivalent to a negative income tax. That's why so many libertarians are on board with the idea.
  - Simon_says 9y ago
    That doesn’t sound right to me. Speaking as someone with mild Libertarian tendencies, UBI seems pretty contra to Libertarian ideals. Not the UBI itself, but the taxation required to fund it. Can you give references to any well-known Libertarian thinkers who are on board with UBI?
    - Firadeoclus 9y ago
      There is more than one strand of libertarianism, and not all of them strive to minimize taxation. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism
      - Simon_says 9y ago
        Thanks for showing me this. I never knew about "Libertarian Socialists". I'm afraid of falling into the Scottsman fallacy, but they don't sound like the other Libertarians I've read. I couldn't find anything about basic income on that page. Is there any writing from a self-proclaimed Libertarian in support of UBI?

dingo_bat 9y ago

I want to write a loooong point-by-point rebuttal but I'm just too lazy. Now if I were awarded a basic income maybe I'd take out a day and write it up! But here's a summary: I am in the top 20% whose income is still going up and whose tax will be used to pay out the UBI. What's in it for me? Why should I care? I really don't. And all the politicians are also in the top 1% (POTUS is a fucking billionaire, former POTUS gets $400k for a speech). Even a poor man becomes rich when he is elected. Why would he care about the 80%. There is no rational world in which a UBI will work or be implemented as envisioned by the author.

madez 9y ago
The poor won't burn your neighbourhood and threaten your children. That's what's in for the rich. That sounds dramatic, but look at Brazil, and you can see that what I'm saying is not hyperbolic. There is a huge correlation of the success of one person and their surrounding. In other words, for ones own interest the success of those around one is important. Helping the weaker helps a lot of other people.
- thescribe 9y ago
  I feel like you're saying that basic income is extortion? That seems like a bit of an extreme stance.
  - madez 9y ago
    I think it depends on how you want to frame what I said. Helping the poor at least around you is good for you. Now, you could say equivalently not helping the poor around you is bad for you. Rephrase what I said if you feel uncomfortable with how I stated it. If in a mafia controlled city you tell a friend not to publicly expose a mafioso for else he and is family is in danger, are you blackmailing your friend or are you simply stating facts?
rjsw 9y ago
The alternative to UBI for you is that you either spend the rest of your life in a castle or your head ends up on a spike. It isn't a coincidence that Thomas Piketty is a Parisian, you can still see plenty of signs of the Revolution on buildings around the city.

jasonlfunk 9y ago

> Everyone should get enough money to be able to refuse to work. That way, the incentive is shifted to employers, where it should be. Want someone to do something? Pay them enough to do it. This sounds nice in theory, but how doesn’t this result in price inflation? Not only are you going to be taking a portion of businesses’ profits in taxes, but now you are increasing the cost of labour. And frankly, some jobs suck so badly that no one is going to want to do them without being paid a ton of money. For example, manual agricultural labor. Food costs would almost certainly skyrocket. (Unless you account for illegal immigrants, which you couldn’t naturalize because then you’d have to give them a UBI).

Stefstefstef 9y ago
I don't know about the US but in my country manual agricultural labor pays so much only immigrants living in hay barns can afford to do the work. for everyone else it doesn't pay enough to do the work
- BartSaM 9y ago
  Would be nice if you would mention what is your country.
goliatone 9y ago
I always see UBI mentioned when people discuss automation and the disruption of labor. Automation could address your last concern regarding inflation and jobs people don’t want to do.
Firadeoclus 9y ago
There would be a rebalancing of prices, which is really an intended effect. Things would be in flux for a time, then settle at a new equilibrium. Food prices may go up, other prices may go down. The new equilibrium prices may well be higher on average, but the more important question is, how much can a poor person afford to buy?
mcbruiser4 9y ago
yeah, this results in $200 for a haircut or $500 to get your lawn mowed. pass.

rentmoney 9y ago

UBI is free money for landlords. Just once, just one single time, I'd like to hear or read a convincing explanation for how UBI will not be completely captured by rents. I'm still waiting.

PoachedSausage 9y ago
You fund it with a Georgist style land value tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
- croizat 9y ago
  which is another way to state that, once construction costs are repaid, you cannot earn money from your apartment. UBI implies that property cannot be used as a way to extract money from someone else work.
- taysic 9y ago
  When you tax something you penalize it - so in this case you'd penalize owning land. This would seem to concentrate land in the hands of the wealthy as far as I can see.
Firadeoclus 9y ago
In a wider sense, it couldn't be "completely" captured since many people don't rent. But I suppose you meant it from the perspective of an individual tenant. Rents are set by supply and demand. If we assume your hypothesis is correct then complete capture via rents would have to be a stable state. I do not think that's the case. First of all, if rents were to go up by that much (relative to everything else) then supply would increase (more building, renting out of currently empty properties, subdividing, etc.). Furthermore, regions with lots of empty homes could not keep rents high because landlords compete against each other. And as a consequence, people in high-price areas would move away to cheaper areas. In conclusion, it is likely that rents and other prices would go up, but it is almost inconceivable that it would lead to no additional purchasing power for the poorest at all.
err4nt 9y ago

kapauldo 9y ago

It's free money by definition. It's a bad idea because it will serve as a sedative.

k__ 9y ago

What are good alternatives? How can we motivate people to work but still keep them from being poor? I have some ideas, but no real solution. For example, I work as a software developer and after I switched to self employment I noticed that I made more money by working less. I started seeing people everywhere making money with stuff that requires far less "hard skills" then software development. And still people do this, they work for much less than they're worth, so it can't be "just money" that motivates people to work.

logicallee 9y ago
>What are good alternatives? I'm not an expert but here is my thinking: Basic income could be interest-free debt extended by the government, whose repayment is done entirely from future taxes, i.e. without increasing the taxes they would have otherwise paid. This would motivate people to stop accumulating the debt quickly, it would force people to make investments into their education (to increase earnings later), and it would act as a smaller incentive to game the system than a pure money transfer. The basic reason basic income is so important is that people are not able to make any investment of their time if they are trying to make ends meet: going to work for McDonald's is not an effective strategy for climbing out of the poverty hole. Staying home and attending classes or learning a skill, however, is. There are few people whose natural talents are so low that after investing 5-10 years, they cannot become skilled or productive enough to contribute meaningfully to society. Additionally it would finance artistic endeavors which often take over a decade of practice before producing anything worth being sold. Indeed, many artists could fail ever to make a meaningful tax contribution (to repay the basic income they were given), however, this may be a burden society as a whole could bear. In addition there should be some kind of easy grace period or tapered end of benefits so that accepting a job does not "endanger" someone's benefits that they're already receiving. We can't talk about all the different parts of society, but to talk about this incentives thing in terms of hackers: some programmers will choose to devote themselves to open source and take a basic income. This is simply a fact. For years, (5-10-20 years) they will live on basic income and contribute to open source. This is just a simple byproduct of introducing basic income. So what needs to happen is that after someone has done that for 15 years, if a commercial company wants to hire that hacker for some reason, then there needs to be a smooth way for the hacker to accept that salary. This transition is a difficult one, but ideally, over a few years of working for their corporate sponsors, they'll have generated enough taxes to repay all of their previous transfer payments. All of the future taxes they generate are now tax base value that never would have existed without the basic income. So this kind of a 'success story' can work. Basic income needs to be quite low, i.e. not much of an incentive, and it is important for people not to feel like they are endangering their basic income, by taking paid work. I believe these issues can be solved very well.

simonsarris 9y ago

> It’s really hard to look at the evidence and say giving people money is wrong, because having enough money means being able to buy enough food. This person is conflating cash transfers (welfare) with UBI. One can think cash transfers and general welfare are good while still thinking UBI may have fatal flaws. And anyone that paints UBI experiments as approaching what truly Universal Basic Income would look like are deceiving. This person is repeatedly dodging real criticisms. This article is mostly a verbose emotional string of arguments, but it doesn't do a very good job of explaining either of its two title claims. Claim 1: Many people say "socialism" to mean top-down social programs funded by taxes, e.g. when people say uncontroversially "Sweden is more socialist than the USA," this is what they mean. UBI is a top-down social program. If you don't think that, ask yourself: What happens to the payments if the federal gov collapses or is incapacitated? (Is unable to organize payments or tax collection). UBI halts everywhere. As a contrast, Farming is bottom up: For example the government of Afghanistan could collapse and it may take years before remote individual farmers even know that it happened. UBI receivers on the other hand would know as soon as the first check didn't come. Claim 2: But UBI is "Free Money." That's the point. It has to be unconditional to be UBI, that's how they draw the distinction. Most people who advocate for UBI contrast it specifically with means-tested welfare. > Have you ever played the game Monopoly? I’m sure you have. Is that a game about socialism? According to “free money is socialism” logic it is, because everyone starts the game with free money and everyone gets free money for simply passing Go. This is a silly analogy. It's not free money even within the game rules. Passing Go is the condition. You can go to jail in the game, being forced to skip passing Go, even. Citing a game mechanic as a proof that UBI isn't free money is bonkers. When UBI proponents say universal or unconditional, that's what they (proponents and opponents) are talking about when they mean free. I made my own criticisms of UBI last week (OP's article is from Sept) where I raise objections that I think are relevant even if UBI is agreeably implemented: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-income-the-flood-217db9889c07 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-incom... Convincing people that it's not socalism or free money is not enough. You have to make the argument that price inflation won't occur, that it can fail gracefully, that destroying the other welfare programs that do more than just give cash (like case workers in medicaid) is a good idea, and so on. UBI proponents ignore these just like Marx ignored implementation details, relying on the World-spirit-of-the-people (an odd kind of hand-waving mysticism) to ensure that it would work. If you meet someone pro-UBI, ask them this: What happens if it fails or we can no longer afford it, after 30 years running? What does the generation that was never required to work, do? If they say it won't fail, you know you're not talking to someone interested in creating a robust system. If your ideal is incapable of planning for failure, you haven't really thought about your ideals much. We know what large scale top down social failure looks like, after the last century.

Mz 9y ago

I can't manage to get past about paragraph two. What an idiotic piece of writing with zero basis in reality. Money is not a means to "vote" on what we should produce. Money is a means to reduce friction in the trade process. It does other things as well, but its primary purpose is to make it easier to get the things we want by reducing how much time and effort goes into coming up with a thing to trade for the thing we want. So, say you want a steak dinner and you are a programmer. You don't have to go to the restaurant and offer to program something for the owner in order to get your steak dinner. You program for your employer. They give you money. You take money to the restaurant. The restaurant doesn't have to have immediate need of programming to cut a deal with you. There is an argument to be made wrt the idea that lots of people are adding value to the system that is hard to quantify, hard to translate into money, etc and those people shouldn't be left out in the cold, not just because it is cruel, but because it actively harms the system as a whole. I was a homemaker and the feminization of poverty is a genuine phenomenon. A big piece of that puzzle isn't sexism per se, but the simple fact that women are expected to invest time and energy in taking care of other people on an ongoing basis. The degree to which they do this for other people often doesn't really come back to them. But, I am doubtful that basic income does anything to remedy that situation. In fact, I have fears that it would only serve to entrench the expectation that women should just accept basically being treated like slaves by the world around them. I don't think this is a good thing. It is one of the reasons I am not pro UBI. I think there are much better ways to try to not leave people out in the cold entirely. They include universal basic healthcare and access to genuinely affordable housing. Addressing those two issues wouldn't fix everything for everyone, but neither will UBI. I think this is an unusually good write up of some of what is broken with the idea of UBI: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-income-the-flood-217db9889c07 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-incom...

untangle 9y ago
The article that you linked was well-thought and well-written. I liked the more bottom-up approach to the issues and that Mr Sarris at least offered kernels of alternatives. Ignoring for a moment that the decision-making ability of the US legislature is all but broken, I worry that the sheer complexity of the issues surrounding UBI would make adoption – or even learned consideration – impossible. And, as you and Sarris mention, the relationship between UBI and healthcare and housing (rents) is a whole other can of complexity.

purplezooey 9y ago

The thing I would worry about mainly is inflation.

dibbsonline 9y ago

It's very biased, so the people that get the UBI won't be able to afford nice things or to live in nice suburbs near good social/health/education services as people with earned money will be competing for those. Choosing not to work is choosing to not take part in society, social services are part of a society. It still needs some sort of utopia to work, that's where it has some similarity to socialism, but there is no utopia.

stmfreak 9y ago

Money is not a market demand signal, it is a medium of labor exchange. I buy your labor with my labor. Some labor is more in demand than other labor, some is in short supply. Money bridges all the divides between these. Where UBI fails is that it cuts labor out of the mix and allows some to benefit from the labor of others without performing any labor in exchange. Of course, banks and politicians have been doing this for decades, but a host can only support so many parasites.