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If you don't produce it directly or demand it as taxes, you can't guarantee that it gets produced at all. And you need to guarantee that, if you're going to go

If you don't produce it directly or demand it as taxes, you can't guarantee that it gets produced at all. And you need to guarantee that, if you're going to go around giving it away for free. You don't need a bureaucracy to figure anything out. I have already done it. Everyone gets 2 L of bottled drinking water, 2200 kcal of food, a lockable room about 8'x10'x8.5', tap water, electricity, and Internet. The utility numbers mostly came from current usage statistics, the room size is based on solitary-confinement prison cells and self-storage units, and food and water based on the generally recognized dietary subsistence level of 2000 kcal/day and 1 mL/kcal rule of thumb for drinking water. An easy way to do it is to rely on the Geneva Conventions. If you cannot supply conditions sufficient for humane treatment of refugees and prisoners of war to your own citizens and residents, your numbers are wrong. If you don't like the food you get with your ration, sell it. I'm sure there will be a service around to collect your unwanted UBI tangible goods and resell them to someone else in exchange for a cut of the proceeds, so you can get more, different, or better of something else that you do want. If you're a petite lady, you could likely trade in your 2200 kcal of basic UBI food for enough cash to buy 1800 kcal of better food. If you don't use all your free electricity, you could use it to mine bitcoins or purify copper electrode or recharge batteries. If you don't use your tap water, you could do someone else's laundry for money. But I picked the numbers to be in the "this kinda sucks" territory for a typical American. You'll probably always want more than you get, and for that, you still need to access the paid trade markets. And if for some reason you don't already want more than you get, that's what advertising is for. The same calculation problem exists with the cash-only vision of UBI. Someone has to decide how much is enough. But then that number constantly changes as prices adjust to what people actually buy with their "enough". The point of the tax thing is that the US has long been conditioned to be averse to communism in any recognizable form, and a less sizeable fraction is also averse to fascism. The fact remains that whatever you want to give away for free has to be produced first, and you can't guarantee that a for-profit business would make enough as long as it is possible to earn higher profit by producing less. If the government needs 750 Tcal of food to meet its UBI requirements, it can do one of 3 things: own farming capacity sufficient to produce it, order existing agribusiness to produce at least that amount and surrender it, or tax/print whatever it takes to buy that much on the open market. If communism is unacceptable, you have to do one of the other things, and the latter has the potential to destabilize your entire monetary system.

shkkmo 9y ago
> If you don't produce it directly or demand it as taxes, you can't guarantee that it gets produced at all. How the heck does that work? Demanding bottled water as taxes is ridiculous. Either producing the bottles water is cheaper than paying equivalent taxes, and every company will do it or it is more expensive and nobody will do it. Add that to the fact that you are trying to mandate the production of 4x the bottled water that the US currently uses per capita. This means there will be NO market for bottled water and thus you will have no idea the of the value of the bottled water that is being used to pay taxes. Why mandate the production of 8x10x8.5 rooms for every citizen when most people won't want that? Why waste large amounts of energy and petrochemicals producing enough bottled water to hydrate the population? Why waste everyone's time by forcing them to engage in secondary markets to resell the goods they don't need? > The same calculation problem exists with the cash-only vision of UBI. Someone has to decide how much is enough. Yes, but this is a far simpler problem. We can use measures of inflation, economic growth and employment to determine the level of UBI that we can afford and that will optimize economic output.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  In order for it to be there for the people who need it, it also has to be there for the people who don't want it. Right now, most people in the US live in homes far bigger than they need, but we also have people who have no homes at all, and those who pay rent far higher than their home is worth. If everybody has a guaranteed space to occupy, though it be meager, then rents for more luxurious and prestigious digs will not include the cost of human misery, from a combination of those people who fear not having shelter and an intentional dearth of supply because that fear may be monetized. If everyone has their own monastic cell, no one can inflate the price of their own freestanding home by being such a NIMBY that no new housing can be built. There will be enough housing, by public mandate and eminent domain, even if no luxury housing is available. You know an easy way to produce a lot of bottled water? Use bigger bottles, and reuse them. Stamp out a bunch of stainless steel 20 L watertight containers, let's say two for every person you wish to serve, so that they have one to use while the other is being refilled, heat-sterilize them, and fill them each with 20L of tap water. For 1000 people, you make 2000 bottles, and sterilize and refill an average of 100 per day. At the end of the year, you have produced 730 kL of bottled water, with only 40 kL of actual bottle volume. People will still demand disposable 0.5 L plastic bottles for their convenience, but they will have to pay for them, and it would definitely not be at the tap-water rates of ~$0.25 per 20 L. The value of the drinking water benefit would come from the bulk treated-water rate, because nobody needs to drink out of tiny disposable plastic bottles; they just need water at the minimum standard of purity, at the cheapest price. It is true that there would be no cash price available for a filled 20L steel bottle, but you can still price it by adding up the costs of production. Those are not made from things that are free. So you have the wages of the programmers and machine operators for the stamping and welding robots, and the steam-cleaning robot, and the refill robot, and the delivery truck, and the truck-to-doorstep robot, and the capital expense of building them, and the operating expense of running them. Then you add 7% as ownership incentive, and that's the nominal cost. You just have to show receipts and pay stubs instead of counting up the gross revenue and dividing by number of units delivered. It would be a workable system, provided the additional complexity is largely automated. It would be far simpler to do it via public agency and just skip all the tax calculations, but US people are more wary of communism and corruption than they are of public-private partnerships, for some strange reason.

shkkmo 9y ago

> If you don't produce it directly or demand it as taxes, you can't guarantee that it gets produced at all. How the heck does that work? Demanding bottled water as taxes is ridiculous. Either producing the bottles water is cheaper than paying equivalent taxes, and every company will do it or it is more expensive and nobody will do it. Add that to the fact that you are trying to mandate the production of 4x the bottled water that the US currently uses per capita. This means there will be NO market for bottled water and thus you will have no idea the of the value of the bottled water that is being used to pay taxes. Why mandate the production of 8x10x8.5 rooms for every citizen when most people won't want that? Why waste large amounts of energy and petrochemicals producing enough bottled water to hydrate the population? Why waste everyone's time by forcing them to engage in secondary markets to resell the goods they don't need? > The same calculation problem exists with the cash-only vision of UBI. Someone has to decide how much is enough. Yes, but this is a far simpler problem. We can use measures of inflation, economic growth and employment to determine the level of UBI that we can afford and that will optimize economic output.

logfromblammo 9y ago
In order for it to be there for the people who need it, it also has to be there for the people who don't want it. Right now, most people in the US live in homes far bigger than they need, but we also have people who have no homes at all, and those who pay rent far higher than their home is worth. If everybody has a guaranteed space to occupy, though it be meager, then rents for more luxurious and prestigious digs will not include the cost of human misery, from a combination of those people who fear not having shelter and an intentional dearth of supply because that fear may be monetized. If everyone has their own monastic cell, no one can inflate the price of their own freestanding home by being such a NIMBY that no new housing can be built. There will be enough housing, by public mandate and eminent domain, even if no luxury housing is available. You know an easy way to produce a lot of bottled water? Use bigger bottles, and reuse them. Stamp out a bunch of stainless steel 20 L watertight containers, let's say two for every person you wish to serve, so that they have one to use while the other is being refilled, heat-sterilize them, and fill them each with 20L of tap water. For 1000 people, you make 2000 bottles, and sterilize and refill an average of 100 per day. At the end of the year, you have produced 730 kL of bottled water, with only 40 kL of actual bottle volume. People will still demand disposable 0.5 L plastic bottles for their convenience, but they will have to pay for them, and it would definitely not be at the tap-water rates of ~$0.25 per 20 L. The value of the drinking water benefit would come from the bulk treated-water rate, because nobody needs to drink out of tiny disposable plastic bottles; they just need water at the minimum standard of purity, at the cheapest price. It is true that there would be no cash price available for a filled 20L steel bottle, but you can still price it by adding up the costs of production. Those are not made from things that are free. So you have the wages of the programmers and machine operators for the stamping and welding robots, and the steam-cleaning robot, and the refill robot, and the delivery truck, and the truck-to-doorstep robot, and the capital expense of building them, and the operating expense of running them. Then you add 7% as ownership incentive, and that's the nominal cost. You just have to show receipts and pay stubs instead of counting up the gross revenue and dividing by number of units delivered. It would be a workable system, provided the additional complexity is largely automated. It would be far simpler to do it via public agency and just skip all the tax calculations, but US people are more wary of communism and corruption than they are of public-private partnerships, for some strange reason.