6 ms·

Except that socialism has failed already. Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

by _9ptr 1y ago

bryanrasmussen 1y ago
UBI is obviously a far less intensive project than Socialism would be.
- mantas 1y ago
  If you want to provide truly livable UBI, it’d be even bigger than socialism. The working people would have to be taxed through the nose. And necessary professions like trash car drivers should be paid a crapton.
  - eru 1y ago
    What do you define to be 'truly livable'? Let's have a look at Scandinavia or Germany. They have reasonably generous welfare systems, but they are means tested. So for the sake of argument, declare them to be 'truly livable'. Especially by global standards. Now I claim, that you can get pretty much the same net payments (of means tested welfare - taxes) that these countries have today with a system of (UBI - taxes). Basically, at the moment both taxes and welfare are means tested; you could move to UBI by moving all the means testing from welfare to taxes. Because net payments would be pretty much the same, all incentives would stay pretty much the same as today. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax which is one way to implement something like a UBI. Of course, if you want to go much beyond what Germany and Scandinavia are already paying, you'd need even higher taxes or a stranger economy. Btw, per capita the US is one of the world leaders of social welfare spending. They spend more than France. (Mostly because while France spends a higher proportion of GDP, American GDP per capita is much higher.)
    - valenterry 1y ago
      > Because net payments would be pretty much the same, all incentives would stay pretty much the same as today. Nope, in Germany you are required to work. If you can't find a job, you still have to try (and prove that), you need to stay at home / be available (and notify the state about your vacation or you might be punished by receiving less welfare) and of course you have to use up all money or wealth you have and state, in written, that you have no other sources of wealth. So UBI would absolutely change incentives here.
      - eru 1y ago
        Good point! Though in practice it's fairly easy to put in a token effort so your welfare won't be cut, but avoid actually getting hired. But you are very right that the token effort is still effort. > [...] and of course you have to use up all money or wealth you have and state, in written, that you have no other sources of wealth. That is similar to taxing that money and wealth. But you are right.
        mantas 1y ago
        The sell-possessions-before-welfare is very very different from taxing. With taxes, even crazy high, you can still accumulate wealth. Taxes slow you down, but it’s still possible. With net-worth-ceiling to receive welfare, you’re forced you cannot accumulate wealth on welfare. And your previous wealth is gone before you get to earn welfare. Got a nice house and BMW and decided to slow it down and live on welfare? Or, more likely, work under table and collect welfare too? Good luck with that :)
        eru 1y ago
        > With taxes, even crazy high, you can still accumulate wealth. Taxes slow you down, but it’s still possible. That's only true for income taxes, not for wealth taxes.
        mantas 1y ago
        Even wealth taxes don’t force you to sell. But welfare with wealth threshold does.
    - mantas 1y ago
      And Scandinavian or German systems are in pretty bad shape. Both hard to finance (see Denmark raising pension age to 70) and lots of people getting thrown out of the system for minuscule reasons (German pensioners collecting deposit bottles to make ends meet is not unheard of). In euro style systems very few people receive welfare at a given time. Many people may receive it at some point in lifetime, but not at the same time. UBI would completely change the picture. On top of that, salaries for basic jobs would need to get much higher to incentivize people to work. Thus UBI would have to be much higher as current welfare. Unless you expect citizens to live on UBI but keep services cheap with cheap migrant labor.
      - Digit-Al 1y ago
        > On top of that, salaries for basic jobs would need to get much higher to incentivize people to work. Not true. The 'B' in UBI means 'Basic'. UBI wil pay your rent, utilities, and food, but not much else. Now, there are some people that are willing to just exist on only the bare minimum, but that's a significant minority. The vast majority of people want more. There will be plenty of people willing to do minimum wage jobs to top-up their UBI so they can afford extras like holidays, nicer phones, meals out, etc... The main difference would be that the security of UBI would give them more power to distch a job if they were being abused in some way, rather than being so desperate that even if their employer is abusing them they are forced to take it because they need the job to survive. I feel like too much discussion on UBI is poisoned by the idea that the vast majority of people are bone idle and are willing to just sit at home doing nothing and just existing with the bare minumum required to live. It's just not true
        hibikir 1y ago
        It's not that the majority of people would prefer to be idle, but that right now we manage to make some really uncomfortable jobs pay very little. It's not that you'd not find people to, say, work concessions at the movie theater. It's that the pay for harvesting a whole lot of crops, or do roofing work, will not work out . It's the same reason few Americans do those jobs in the US already.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Why would the working people necessarily need to be taxed? You could pay for UBI with taxes on investment, or wealth, or luxury taxes, or other things besides labor.
    - mantas 1y ago
      Working people in general. Those who keep producing and not sit on their asses enjoying UBI. You can tax incomes, wealth, whatever. Either way it’d be taxing those who want more than UBI. And you’ll need to tax them a lot. There’s no way taxing super-rich-only would cover fair UBI. It’ll have to be much much wider. Unless 99% of jobs would become automatized.
bigyabai 1y ago
Food stamps tried it too, they're plenty successful.
- eru 1y ago
  Food stamps are means tested. UBI as commonly understood ain't.
  - arrowsmith 1y ago
    Not "as commonly understood" - UBI isn't means tested by definition. That's what the "U" stands for!
- nlitened 1y ago
  Successful in what?
yoyohello13 1y ago
The top 1% of people controlling more wealth and resources than the bottom 50% is mortally justifiable? It’s funny whenever there is a comment like “hey, maybe we shouldn’t let individual people get so rich they can basically become thier own country.” Always get called socialists/communists. You can be capitalist while also having some care and protection for the little people.
- eru 1y ago
  'A' being morally unjustifiable (by some metric), doesn't mean that 'B' is morally justifiable. If there was a button that I could press that would double the wealth of the 99% of people and quadruple the wealth of the top 1%, I would keep pressing it, even though it technically makes inequality worse and worse every time. It would be morally reprehensible not to press that button. EDIT: just be clear, I am talking about real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wealth. I am not talking about how many zeros we add to all dollar amounts. So I am talking about the number of houses and shoes and cars we have, and the amount of ice cream and education we can enjoy.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    It would be morally reprehensible to push that button, because the button would also cause prices of everything to inflate by the average increase (more than 2x). So you’d be making the 1% richer, relative to inflation, and the 99% poorer. Ironically, our society is basically continuously pushing that button today, much to the glee of the 1%.
    - eru 1y ago
      You are mixing up nominal and real prosperity. To be clear: I was talking about real prosperity. You are talking about nominal prosperity. And I agree: just adding a zero at the end of all dollar amounts wouldn't make anyone better off.
  - metabagel 1y ago
    If you could press another button which would shift some of the obscene wealth from the ultra-rich to people living at the margins of society, you should also be mashing that button over and over.
blueboo 1y ago
Depends if socialism means the US highway system, Medicare, or The Great Leap Forward
- _9ptr 1y ago
  I'm european, so socialism means actually socialism (no/no/yes).
  - blueboo 1y ago
    And I’m American, so socialism actually means western Europe in 2025!
ElFitz 1y ago
Would you care to provide some facts to support your affirmations?
scarmig 1y ago
Socialism didn't fail because of a UBI, which it never attempted; it failed because it couldn't calculate prices accurately, because it was bad at finding and processing information, political economy, and deeper computational complexity reasons. UBIs don't have these problems (or, rather, they'd have some of them in different ways, but in ways that are closer to market capitalism than socialism).
- _9ptr 1y ago
  I made the socialism-remark because of the post before blaming everything on economic inequality. While that can lead to problems, I don't think it's necessarily a problem in itself or a sign of injustice. You're correct in that UBI is something different than socialism.
  - scarmig 1y ago
    Ironically, I suspect a UBI not only can coexist with inequality but might substantially increase it (not a bad thing in my book). The vast majority of Americans already have incomes above a UBI level, especially when current government benefits are accounted for. But post UBI, a substantial minority would exit entirely from market labor, while another substantial minority would be more willing to take career and entrepreneurial risks that are on average income increasing. There are also some very favorable aspects of it for marginal tax rates, which would encourage workers to earn more income.
- orthoxerox 1y ago
  That was the trait of planned economy, not socialized ownership of the means of production. You could theoretically have market socialism, where the only difference from market capitalism would be the lack of distinction between workers and owners. Gig economy would be its kryptonite, though: if allow it you are back to exploiting workers, if you ban it you will also ban a whole lot of actual self-employed professionals.
  - scarmig 1y ago
    We don't need theoretical market socialism; we had actual existing Yugoslavia. Although it functioned better than centrally planned socialism, it still had lots of issues related to prices, particularly of capital. Who provides capital for enterprise? In practice, the state. And this ran into the same political economy issues with centrally planned economies. What happens when a company is about to go under? Unemployment is bad, so the worker-owned company gets a bail out. Who can start a firm? Well, better make sure your company satisfies the objectives of your local government.
noelwelsh 1y ago
Socialism is community ownership of resources. UBI is not socialism. It is income redistribution. Your morals are very strange if they don't include care for others.
- _9ptr 1y ago
  UBI is not about "care". That's just the typical left-wing compassion framing. I don't want to abolish all taxes, I'm not a libertarian. But giving away the money you took from somebody else needs a justification (for example to pay for the roads). And I find "income redistribution" for the sake of it not an acceptable goal.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Why is paying for roads justifiable, but providing people a safety net not justifiable?
    - Workaccount2 1y ago
      Because people don't treat it as a "safety net" and instead use it as a "living net". There is some contingent of people who will just not participate in society no matter what. So the question becomes where do we set the bar - the lower this bar, the smaller that contingent.
eru 1y ago
> Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally. It's pretty easy to justify morally. I mean at least as easy as any other welfare. The net payments for UBI plus (income) taxes don't have to look to different from what many countries already do today. It's just the accounting that looks a bit different.
- foxglacier 1y ago
  By morally, he might mean it creates a moral hazard. I know that when I was poor, I worked only the minimum to support myself. If I had UBI that covered those costs, I certainly wouldn't have worked, so there'd be less productivity in the economy.
  - eru 1y ago
    Well, exactly that problem already exists qualitatively with current tax and welfare systems. Whether UBI would make the problem quantitatively worse depends on the exact design of the UBI system you have in mind and the current system you want to compare it with.
- hn_throw2025 1y ago
  UBI means giving money to people, which means that money has velocity because it would be promptly spent. We did this during Covid as furlough payments, and the result was high inflation. Wages didn’t significantly increase to match, so in my country anyway people feel that the cost if living is significantly worse post-Covid. Anywhere that implemented UBI would also have to implement rent controls, otherwise Landlords would just see it as money on the table. But you couldn’t have controls for all prices, so inflation would still result.
  - geoffmunn 1y ago
    This is what most people miss when they criticise UBI - for most people, it will be immediately spent, taxed, and put back into the economy. As long as the velocity is there, it's not an entirely bad idea as long as inflation can be kept under control.
djmips 1y ago
People that have inherited capital have income without merit. Is that immoral? Randomly being born in a rich nation to an advantaged life. Is that immoral too?
ascorbic 1y ago
UBI is not a socialist policy. It's supported by many across the political spectrum. It seems particularly popular with many libertarians
tehjoker 1y ago
capitalism has failed, the economy is turning into pure financial speculation. our products are made in socialist china which delivered the largest proportion of people rising from poverty

Except that socialism has failed already. Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

by _9ptr 1y ago

Except that socialism has failed already. Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

bryanrasmussen 1y ago

UBI is obviously a far less intensive project than Socialism would be.

mantas 1y ago
If you want to provide truly livable UBI, it’d be even bigger than socialism. The working people would have to be taxed through the nose. And necessary professions like trash car drivers should be paid a crapton.
- eru 1y ago
  What do you define to be 'truly livable'? Let's have a look at Scandinavia or Germany. They have reasonably generous welfare systems, but they are means tested. So for the sake of argument, declare them to be 'truly livable'. Especially by global standards. Now I claim, that you can get pretty much the same net payments (of means tested welfare - taxes) that these countries have today with a system of (UBI - taxes). Basically, at the moment both taxes and welfare are means tested; you could move to UBI by moving all the means testing from welfare to taxes. Because net payments would be pretty much the same, all incentives would stay pretty much the same as today. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax which is one way to implement something like a UBI. Of course, if you want to go much beyond what Germany and Scandinavia are already paying, you'd need even higher taxes or a stranger economy. Btw, per capita the US is one of the world leaders of social welfare spending. They spend more than France. (Mostly because while France spends a higher proportion of GDP, American GDP per capita is much higher.)
  - valenterry 1y ago
    > Because net payments would be pretty much the same, all incentives would stay pretty much the same as today. Nope, in Germany you are required to work. If you can't find a job, you still have to try (and prove that), you need to stay at home / be available (and notify the state about your vacation or you might be punished by receiving less welfare) and of course you have to use up all money or wealth you have and state, in written, that you have no other sources of wealth. So UBI would absolutely change incentives here.
    - eru 1y ago
      Good point! Though in practice it's fairly easy to put in a token effort so your welfare won't be cut, but avoid actually getting hired. But you are very right that the token effort is still effort. > [...] and of course you have to use up all money or wealth you have and state, in written, that you have no other sources of wealth. That is similar to taxing that money and wealth. But you are right.
      - mantas 1y ago
        The sell-possessions-before-welfare is very very different from taxing. With taxes, even crazy high, you can still accumulate wealth. Taxes slow you down, but it’s still possible. With net-worth-ceiling to receive welfare, you’re forced you cannot accumulate wealth on welfare. And your previous wealth is gone before you get to earn welfare. Got a nice house and BMW and decided to slow it down and live on welfare? Or, more likely, work under table and collect welfare too? Good luck with that :)
        eru 1y ago
        > With taxes, even crazy high, you can still accumulate wealth. Taxes slow you down, but it’s still possible. That's only true for income taxes, not for wealth taxes.
        mantas 1y ago
        Even wealth taxes don’t force you to sell. But welfare with wealth threshold does.
  - mantas 1y ago
    And Scandinavian or German systems are in pretty bad shape. Both hard to finance (see Denmark raising pension age to 70) and lots of people getting thrown out of the system for minuscule reasons (German pensioners collecting deposit bottles to make ends meet is not unheard of). In euro style systems very few people receive welfare at a given time. Many people may receive it at some point in lifetime, but not at the same time. UBI would completely change the picture. On top of that, salaries for basic jobs would need to get much higher to incentivize people to work. Thus UBI would have to be much higher as current welfare. Unless you expect citizens to live on UBI but keep services cheap with cheap migrant labor.
    - Digit-Al 1y ago
      > On top of that, salaries for basic jobs would need to get much higher to incentivize people to work. Not true. The 'B' in UBI means 'Basic'. UBI wil pay your rent, utilities, and food, but not much else. Now, there are some people that are willing to just exist on only the bare minimum, but that's a significant minority. The vast majority of people want more. There will be plenty of people willing to do minimum wage jobs to top-up their UBI so they can afford extras like holidays, nicer phones, meals out, etc... The main difference would be that the security of UBI would give them more power to distch a job if they were being abused in some way, rather than being so desperate that even if their employer is abusing them they are forced to take it because they need the job to survive. I feel like too much discussion on UBI is poisoned by the idea that the vast majority of people are bone idle and are willing to just sit at home doing nothing and just existing with the bare minumum required to live. It's just not true
      - hibikir 1y ago
        It's not that the majority of people would prefer to be idle, but that right now we manage to make some really uncomfortable jobs pay very little. It's not that you'd not find people to, say, work concessions at the movie theater. It's that the pay for harvesting a whole lot of crops, or do roofing work, will not work out . It's the same reason few Americans do those jobs in the US already.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Why would the working people necessarily need to be taxed? You could pay for UBI with taxes on investment, or wealth, or luxury taxes, or other things besides labor.
  - mantas 1y ago
    Working people in general. Those who keep producing and not sit on their asses enjoying UBI. You can tax incomes, wealth, whatever. Either way it’d be taxing those who want more than UBI. And you’ll need to tax them a lot. There’s no way taxing super-rich-only would cover fair UBI. It’ll have to be much much wider. Unless 99% of jobs would become automatized.

bigyabai 1y ago

Food stamps tried it too, they're plenty successful.

eru 1y ago
Food stamps are means tested. UBI as commonly understood ain't.
- arrowsmith 1y ago
  Not "as commonly understood" - UBI isn't means tested by definition. That's what the "U" stands for!
nlitened 1y ago
Successful in what?

yoyohello13 1y ago

The top 1% of people controlling more wealth and resources than the bottom 50% is mortally justifiable? It’s funny whenever there is a comment like “hey, maybe we shouldn’t let individual people get so rich they can basically become thier own country.” Always get called socialists/communists. You can be capitalist while also having some care and protection for the little people.

eru 1y ago
'A' being morally unjustifiable (by some metric), doesn't mean that 'B' is morally justifiable. If there was a button that I could press that would double the wealth of the 99% of people and quadruple the wealth of the top 1%, I would keep pressing it, even though it technically makes inequality worse and worse every time. It would be morally reprehensible not to press that button. EDIT: just be clear, I am talking about real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wealth. I am not talking about how many zeros we add to all dollar amounts. So I am talking about the number of houses and shoes and cars we have, and the amount of ice cream and education we can enjoy.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  It would be morally reprehensible to push that button, because the button would also cause prices of everything to inflate by the average increase (more than 2x). So you’d be making the 1% richer, relative to inflation, and the 99% poorer. Ironically, our society is basically continuously pushing that button today, much to the glee of the 1%.
  - eru 1y ago
    You are mixing up nominal and real prosperity. To be clear: I was talking about real prosperity. You are talking about nominal prosperity. And I agree: just adding a zero at the end of all dollar amounts wouldn't make anyone better off.
- metabagel 1y ago
  If you could press another button which would shift some of the obscene wealth from the ultra-rich to people living at the margins of society, you should also be mashing that button over and over.

blueboo 1y ago

Depends if socialism means the US highway system, Medicare, or The Great Leap Forward

_9ptr 1y ago
I'm european, so socialism means actually socialism (no/no/yes).
- blueboo 1y ago
  And I’m American, so socialism actually means western Europe in 2025!

ElFitz 1y ago

Would you care to provide some facts to support your affirmations?

scarmig 1y ago

Socialism didn't fail because of a UBI, which it never attempted; it failed because it couldn't calculate prices accurately, because it was bad at finding and processing information, political economy, and deeper computational complexity reasons. UBIs don't have these problems (or, rather, they'd have some of them in different ways, but in ways that are closer to market capitalism than socialism).

_9ptr 1y ago
I made the socialism-remark because of the post before blaming everything on economic inequality. While that can lead to problems, I don't think it's necessarily a problem in itself or a sign of injustice. You're correct in that UBI is something different than socialism.
- scarmig 1y ago
  Ironically, I suspect a UBI not only can coexist with inequality but might substantially increase it (not a bad thing in my book). The vast majority of Americans already have incomes above a UBI level, especially when current government benefits are accounted for. But post UBI, a substantial minority would exit entirely from market labor, while another substantial minority would be more willing to take career and entrepreneurial risks that are on average income increasing. There are also some very favorable aspects of it for marginal tax rates, which would encourage workers to earn more income.
orthoxerox 1y ago
That was the trait of planned economy, not socialized ownership of the means of production. You could theoretically have market socialism, where the only difference from market capitalism would be the lack of distinction between workers and owners. Gig economy would be its kryptonite, though: if allow it you are back to exploiting workers, if you ban it you will also ban a whole lot of actual self-employed professionals.
- scarmig 1y ago
  We don't need theoretical market socialism; we had actual existing Yugoslavia. Although it functioned better than centrally planned socialism, it still had lots of issues related to prices, particularly of capital. Who provides capital for enterprise? In practice, the state. And this ran into the same political economy issues with centrally planned economies. What happens when a company is about to go under? Unemployment is bad, so the worker-owned company gets a bail out. Who can start a firm? Well, better make sure your company satisfies the objectives of your local government.

noelwelsh 1y ago

Socialism is community ownership of resources. UBI is not socialism. It is income redistribution. Your morals are very strange if they don't include care for others.

_9ptr 1y ago
UBI is not about "care". That's just the typical left-wing compassion framing. I don't want to abolish all taxes, I'm not a libertarian. But giving away the money you took from somebody else needs a justification (for example to pay for the roads). And I find "income redistribution" for the sake of it not an acceptable goal.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Why is paying for roads justifiable, but providing people a safety net not justifiable?
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    Because people don't treat it as a "safety net" and instead use it as a "living net". There is some contingent of people who will just not participate in society no matter what. So the question becomes where do we set the bar - the lower this bar, the smaller that contingent.

eru 1y ago

> Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally. It's pretty easy to justify morally. I mean at least as easy as any other welfare. The net payments for UBI plus (income) taxes don't have to look to different from what many countries already do today. It's just the accounting that looks a bit different.

foxglacier 1y ago
By morally, he might mean it creates a moral hazard. I know that when I was poor, I worked only the minimum to support myself. If I had UBI that covered those costs, I certainly wouldn't have worked, so there'd be less productivity in the economy.
- eru 1y ago
  Well, exactly that problem already exists qualitatively with current tax and welfare systems. Whether UBI would make the problem quantitatively worse depends on the exact design of the UBI system you have in mind and the current system you want to compare it with.
hn_throw2025 1y ago
UBI means giving money to people, which means that money has velocity because it would be promptly spent. We did this during Covid as furlough payments, and the result was high inflation. Wages didn’t significantly increase to match, so in my country anyway people feel that the cost if living is significantly worse post-Covid. Anywhere that implemented UBI would also have to implement rent controls, otherwise Landlords would just see it as money on the table. But you couldn’t have controls for all prices, so inflation would still result.
- geoffmunn 1y ago
  This is what most people miss when they criticise UBI - for most people, it will be immediately spent, taxed, and put back into the economy. As long as the velocity is there, it's not an entirely bad idea as long as inflation can be kept under control.

djmips 1y ago

People that have inherited capital have income without merit. Is that immoral? Randomly being born in a rich nation to an advantaged life. Is that immoral too?

ascorbic 1y ago

UBI is not a socialist policy. It's supported by many across the political spectrum. It seems particularly popular with many libertarians

tehjoker 1y ago

capitalism has failed, the economy is turning into pure financial speculation. our products are made in socialist china which delivered the largest proportion of people rising from poverty