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Basic income could pay for itself with the things created by people who are doing what they want, as a result of losing their fear of falling below a basic leve
by genwin 13y ago
Basic income could pay for itself with the things created by people who are doing what they want, as a result of losing their fear of falling below a basic level of living.
- vixen99 13y agoYes, the four million in Britain who have never had a job in their lives are immensely productive and make an outstanding contributon to cultural life. Five million would be even better.
- rbanffy 13y agoThey never had a job, but, still, they need to make ends meet. They live under the pressure to make some money. Removing that pressure may allow them to find more interesting things to do.
- nhaehnle 13y agoI am assuming your comment is meant to be sarcastic. Be careful about assigning cause and consequence properly. Mass unemployment is an involuntary, macroeconomic problem. [1] I am not an expert in the British economy, so I don't know whether your numbers make sense. But just taking them at face value, it is quite likely that those millions of people are unproductive precisely because they have never had a job. So it's not their fault. Incidentally, I partly agree with you in that I think that basic income advocates are too starry-eyed about what people would do on basic income. This is part of why I prefer a Job Guarantee, as I have explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5931534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5931534 [1] http://alittleecon.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-parable-of-100-dogs-and-92-bones-why-the-work-programme-cant-work/ http://alittleecon.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-parable-of-1...