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> you could fix it with taxes Someone still has to work to produce the food that UBI wastrels consume. Please, explain to me why we should feed everyone for fr

> you could fix it with taxes Someone still has to work to produce the food that UBI wastrels consume. Please, explain to me why we should feed everyone for free? What gives them the right to commandeer someone else's labour while they languish? All of these schemes to shift taxes here and burdens there ultimately just have the effect of making it so that the people who do work and do produce value are shouldering the burden for everyone else. You can print money, but you cannot print calories.

CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
One example argument I find interesting is that people actually have equal rights to our environment and our commons. So if we are to have such institutions as private property and similar rights to exclusivity, those excluded should be justly compensated for being excluded. Edit: To clarify. Take John Locke, he argues that when you mix your labor with nature you should have right to the result of that labor, but that you can only take from nature what is not needed by anyone else. One could also extend from that argument that one should not have the right to destroy that which is needed either (think pollution). So be it land value taxes or carbon taxes, you can argue that some compensations is just.
skybrian 6y ago
There's nothing about UBI that says you need to work for free, nor does it set prices. If you choose to work, you should have more bargaining power and get better terms. Businesses providing essential goods should see more demand. Maybe you should ask instead, if there are a lot of people living only on UBI, how will we generate enough demand to keep the whole economy going? If it's a $1000 a month, someone living on that isn't going to be eating out or going on vacation. As we're learning this year, people settling for the essentials (housing and groceries) is not enough. Agriculture and related industry only requires 11% of the workforce in the US. But anyone with ambition is going to want more in life than just the basics, and so they will keep working, earn more money, and spend more. That doesn't change. Also, I think you may have missed this: any UBI can be entirely undone by taxing people exactly the same amount. That would be silly, but it shows that a UBI scheme could be an ambitious redistribution, or just a formality, depending on how taxes are set.
- TheCycoONE 6y ago
  I never considered until now combining UBI with regressive taxation to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich... Thank you for the thought experiment.
cyphar 6y ago
> Someone still has to work to produce the food that UBI wastrels consume. Please, explain to me why we should feed everyone for free? What gives them the right to commandeer someone else's labour while they languish? Right now, tens of millions of people in the US alone are unemployed through no fault of their own. To characterise them as "languishing" is ridiculous (and most unemployment rates only take into account people who are actively looking for work, as a measure to make a government's numbers look better). It is simply a fact that capitalism as a system cannot function with 0% unemployment because there would be no job market. Thus, there will always be people who are willing to work but don't have a job. To me, it is fundamentally unethical to have an underclass of people who cannot afford food or shelter while their "fellow citizens" have an excess of resources. We are not an island, we live in a society and rising unemployment and homelessness hurts us all. But even if it had no impact on you or me, we should still help people who need it. Not to mention that the actual producers of foods and products are still being paid with money, so I don't get why you think any aspect of this is related to the "right to commandeer someone else's labour" (in most countries the government actually does have that power, but that's a different topic). > All of these schemes to shift taxes here and burdens there ultimately just have the effect of making it so that the people who do work and do produce value are shouldering the burden for everyone else. You can print money, but you cannot print calories. Any economic system has at least some people who generally do not produce things -- babies and the elderly. In capitalism, you also have the unemployed. One of the goals of economic systems is to determine how value created by those who work is distributed to those who don't. Placing a value judgement on the need for this redistribution makes no sense. It's like saying a boulder is lazy because it only chooses to go downhill.
- gwright 6y ago
  > Any economic system has at least some people who generally do not produce things -- babies and the elderly. In capitalism, you also have the unemployed. There is a big difference between people who are incapable of producing things (perhaps because of circumstances beyond their control) and people who choose to not produce things. This is one weakness of the UBI concept that I haven't seen addressed in a forthright way.
c22 6y ago
The main reason why we might want to "feed everyone for free" is that there are strong indications it could improve the health of our society (more innovation, more self-directed time for individuals, more freedom) and reduce things we don't like (crime, homelessness, drug abuse). On top of that, some people just think it's the moral thing to do. No one asked to be born into a poor starving family or a corrupt fucked up world, but the only people around who could possibly stop this from happening to more people in the future are those of us pre-existing humans who set all the policy around here.

CuriousSkeptic 6y ago

One example argument I find interesting is that people actually have equal rights to our environment and our commons. So if we are to have such institutions as private property and similar rights to exclusivity, those excluded should be justly compensated for being excluded. Edit: To clarify. Take John Locke, he argues that when you mix your labor with nature you should have right to the result of that labor, but that you can only take from nature what is not needed by anyone else. One could also extend from that argument that one should not have the right to destroy that which is needed either (think pollution). So be it land value taxes or carbon taxes, you can argue that some compensations is just.

skybrian 6y ago

There's nothing about UBI that says you need to work for free, nor does it set prices. If you choose to work, you should have more bargaining power and get better terms. Businesses providing essential goods should see more demand. Maybe you should ask instead, if there are a lot of people living only on UBI, how will we generate enough demand to keep the whole economy going? If it's a $1000 a month, someone living on that isn't going to be eating out or going on vacation. As we're learning this year, people settling for the essentials (housing and groceries) is not enough. Agriculture and related industry only requires 11% of the workforce in the US. But anyone with ambition is going to want more in life than just the basics, and so they will keep working, earn more money, and spend more. That doesn't change. Also, I think you may have missed this: any UBI can be entirely undone by taxing people exactly the same amount. That would be silly, but it shows that a UBI scheme could be an ambitious redistribution, or just a formality, depending on how taxes are set.

TheCycoONE 6y ago
I never considered until now combining UBI with regressive taxation to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich... Thank you for the thought experiment.

cyphar 6y ago

> Someone still has to work to produce the food that UBI wastrels consume. Please, explain to me why we should feed everyone for free? What gives them the right to commandeer someone else's labour while they languish? Right now, tens of millions of people in the US alone are unemployed through no fault of their own. To characterise them as "languishing" is ridiculous (and most unemployment rates only take into account people who are actively looking for work, as a measure to make a government's numbers look better). It is simply a fact that capitalism as a system cannot function with 0% unemployment because there would be no job market. Thus, there will always be people who are willing to work but don't have a job. To me, it is fundamentally unethical to have an underclass of people who cannot afford food or shelter while their "fellow citizens" have an excess of resources. We are not an island, we live in a society and rising unemployment and homelessness hurts us all. But even if it had no impact on you or me, we should still help people who need it. Not to mention that the actual producers of foods and products are still being paid with money, so I don't get why you think any aspect of this is related to the "right to commandeer someone else's labour" (in most countries the government actually does have that power, but that's a different topic). > All of these schemes to shift taxes here and burdens there ultimately just have the effect of making it so that the people who do work and do produce value are shouldering the burden for everyone else. You can print money, but you cannot print calories. Any economic system has at least some people who generally do not produce things -- babies and the elderly. In capitalism, you also have the unemployed. One of the goals of economic systems is to determine how value created by those who work is distributed to those who don't. Placing a value judgement on the need for this redistribution makes no sense. It's like saying a boulder is lazy because it only chooses to go downhill.

gwright 6y ago
> Any economic system has at least some people who generally do not produce things -- babies and the elderly. In capitalism, you also have the unemployed. There is a big difference between people who are incapable of producing things (perhaps because of circumstances beyond their control) and people who choose to not produce things. This is one weakness of the UBI concept that I haven't seen addressed in a forthright way.

c22 6y ago

The main reason why we might want to "feed everyone for free" is that there are strong indications it could improve the health of our society (more innovation, more self-directed time for individuals, more freedom) and reduce things we don't like (crime, homelessness, drug abuse). On top of that, some people just think it's the moral thing to do. No one asked to be born into a poor starving family or a corrupt fucked up world, but the only people around who could possibly stop this from happening to more people in the future are those of us pre-existing humans who set all the policy around here.