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Thanks for pointing out Brazil. And as for the OP, I would also point out History! I mean what is this bullshit - basic income guarantee has been in practice fo

by f055 13y ago

Thanks for pointing out Brazil. And as for the OP, I would also point out History! I mean what is this bullshit - basic income guarantee has been in practice for 50 years in almost every communist state around Russia, my Poland included. It wasn't called that way, but the policy was that everyone has to have a job and receive a specified wage. And everyone did. You know what happened? Money was useless because there was no supply. Everybody had money, nobody was poor, the problem was - you can't eat paper. You know what would happen in the US, where there is supply? It would drive spending nuts, demand would grow, prices would grow, therefore inflation would grow and the dollar would lose its value, effectively diminishing the basic income benefits. Because life ain't fair, it never will be unless we live in utopia where everyone is good and there is no evil. So why not try it? Because there was a guy who wrote it all down. His name was Marks. And you know who used his theories in practice? Lenin. And you know what happened next? The Red Revolution. Seriously, such ideas for the US… "Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony."

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
> I mean what is this bullshit - basic income guarantee has been in practice for 50 years in almost every communist state around Russia, my Poland included. It wasn't called that way, but the policy was that everyone has to have a job and receive a specified wage. But is it really the same thing? A basic income guarantee is the same as having a basic (food/healthcare/public services/whatever) guarantee (basically, state welfare already implemented in many countries) - the difference is the government is paying in money instead of trying to provide the services themselves. The way I see it, it's quite different than everybody getting the same income. It has the potential to improve public service efficiency and foster the economy away from big production centers (decreasing city population density, which causes a lot of problems on it's own, like homelessness or poor housing conditions, traffic, health and environmental issues, all of which are problems the government has to waste money on already).
scarmig 13y ago
"basic income guarantee has been in practice for 50 years in almost every communist state around Russia, my Poland included" This type of statement betrays a total lack of understanding of what a basic income guarantee even is. Plenty of deeply anti-communist thinkers--including probably the most effective one in history--have supported a basic income. Why did your native Poland fall far short of its productive potential? As you yourself say, it wasn't for lack of money: it was because the things people wanted to consume were not being produced. The root cause of that was broken capital markets: special interests (or foreign special interests, in the case of Poland) captured political control of the economic resources of Poland and used non-market decision making to allocate capital. If people who completely deprioritize popular standard of living control capital, then, yes, unsurprisingly other things--military, party functionaries, foreign invaders--will end up getting their demand met. Also: "Because life ain't fair, it never will be unless we live in utopia where everyone is good and there is no evil. So why not try it? Because there was a guy who wrote it all down. His name was Marks. And you know who used his theories in practice? Lenin. And you know what happened next? The Red Revolution." It's abundantly clear that, for all his faults, you don't even have a passing acquaintance with Marx. He's wrong on virtually everything, but you're not even wrong.
- f055 13y ago
  I can't comment on your reply because it lacks any argument against my post. Tell me where I'm wrong. But what I can tell you is that if you give $1,000 per month to every adult in US without any requirement, then: 1) you might as well not give any money to anybody, because relatively no ones wealth will change 2) at first everybody will be able to buy the essential stuff, food etc. but then 3) you will end up with inflation, because free money will create more demand, which in turn will result in smaller supply (relatively to demand) and higher prices, and cheaper dollar - in the end these $1,000 after a couple of months will buy you only $500 worth of goods (end game is that these $1,000 will be worthless after some period) 4) you will be spending $3bn per month on this, out of thin air, effectively pumping cash into the system, decreasing dollar value even more To some extent this already has been tried in the US in the form of cheap mortgage credit to the poor. Thousands of dollars were given to people who defaulted and never paid back. Look where it got us…
  - scarmig 13y ago
    Your points are inconsistent with each other: first you claim that no one's pattern of consumption will be affected, but then you move to claiming that the prices of basic goods will change. Those two things cannot both be true: which would you like me to address? Overall, your main flaw is that you're considering the economy an entirely static thing. But as the demand for basic goods increases, it creates new business opportunities for both incumbents and potential entrants into the market. Capital seeks out profits, and relatively more capital would flow into the provision of basic goods. That's what prevents the basic income from dissipating into worthlessness.
    - f055 13y ago
      Not at all, not static. I'm just saying you cannot give people free money and not take that money from somewhere else. FED has been doing this, the quantitative easing, for some time now, but it's not feasible in the long run. Wealth is created, not given.
      - 13y ago
nbouscal 13y ago
> It wasn't called that way, but the policy was that everyone has to have a job and receive a specified wage. That is not a basic income guarantee. With a basic income guarantee, you receive the basic income regardless of whether you have a job or not. You do not have to have a job. If you choose to have a job, you earn a wage in addition to your basic income. The system you're describing is a completely, fundamentally different thing from a basic income guarantee.
- f055 13y ago
  Let me explain: in a communist country, people had various jobs. Each job had a different salary. But everyone had a job, everybody had income. So, if you asked anyone "Do you earn at least $100?" - all would say "Yes". But some could earn more if they were in better jobs. Obviously that meant you didn't actually have to work to receive salary - that's why productivity sucked. Not so different now, huh?
  - nbouscal 13y ago
    Yes, still very, very different. Having a job where you don't actually accomplish any work is completely different from not having a job at all. Having a non-productive job wastes your time and saps your energy. I've had them before, and they're soul-crushing. Not having a job at all, on the other hand, frees you to do real work. Creative work, work in line with your passion. That's what we really need people to be spending their time on, not raking all the leaves from one end of Central Park to the other and back. When J.K. Rowling was on benefits from the UK government, she wrote the first in a series of novels that would go on to become the best-selling novel series of all time and earn her hundreds of millions of pounds, a good portion of which went back to the UK government in tax revenue. If instead she had been forced to do a menial, unproductive job, none of that would have happened. Her words on the subject: “I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. … And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” Buckminster Fuller hit the nail on the head with this quote: “We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
saraid216 13y ago
> Because life ain't fair, it never will be unless we live in utopia where everyone is good and there is no evil. So why not try it? Because there was a guy who wrote it all down. His name was Marks. And you know who used his theories in practice? Lenin. And you know what happened next? The Red Revolution. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6311812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6311812
- lutusp 13y ago
  > Because there was a guy who wrote it all down. His name was Marks [sic]. And you know who used his theories in practice? Lenin. Marks, really? If you want to pose as a scholar, at least learn to spell the names of important historical figures. And this isn't a trivial correction -- because you think his name is Karl Marks, your post will not show up in Web searches of the topic you think you're writing about.
  - f055 13y ago
    I don't pose for anything, I'm just saying what is logical. 2+2 != 5. And sorry for this heresy I committed by not writing Karl's surname properly - force of habit, this is how we write his surname in Poland. Now does it change the discussion in any way? I don't think so...
zentiggr 13y ago
A big difference between the BIG scenario and what you describe is "everyone has to have a job". The inefficiencies of/resistance to state-mandated production quotas make the two systems significantly different.

by f055 13y ago

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

> I mean what is this bullshit - basic income guarantee has been in practice for 50 years in almost every communist state around Russia, my Poland included. It wasn't called that way, but the policy was that everyone has to have a job and receive a specified wage. But is it really the same thing? A basic income guarantee is the same as having a basic (food/healthcare/public services/whatever) guarantee (basically, state welfare already implemented in many countries) - the difference is the government is paying in money instead of trying to provide the services themselves. The way I see it, it's quite different than everybody getting the same income. It has the potential to improve public service efficiency and foster the economy away from big production centers (decreasing city population density, which causes a lot of problems on it's own, like homelessness or poor housing conditions, traffic, health and environmental issues, all of which are problems the government has to waste money on already).

scarmig 13y ago

"basic income guarantee has been in practice for 50 years in almost every communist state around Russia, my Poland included" This type of statement betrays a total lack of understanding of what a basic income guarantee even is. Plenty of deeply anti-communist thinkers--including probably the most effective one in history--have supported a basic income. Why did your native Poland fall far short of its productive potential? As you yourself say, it wasn't for lack of money: it was because the things people wanted to consume were not being produced. The root cause of that was broken capital markets: special interests (or foreign special interests, in the case of Poland) captured political control of the economic resources of Poland and used non-market decision making to allocate capital. If people who completely deprioritize popular standard of living control capital, then, yes, unsurprisingly other things--military, party functionaries, foreign invaders--will end up getting their demand met. Also: "Because life ain't fair, it never will be unless we live in utopia where everyone is good and there is no evil. So why not try it? Because there was a guy who wrote it all down. His name was Marks. And you know who used his theories in practice? Lenin. And you know what happened next? The Red Revolution." It's abundantly clear that, for all his faults, you don't even have a passing acquaintance with Marx. He's wrong on virtually everything, but you're not even wrong.

f055 13y ago
I can't comment on your reply because it lacks any argument against my post. Tell me where I'm wrong. But what I can tell you is that if you give $1,000 per month to every adult in US without any requirement, then: 1) you might as well not give any money to anybody, because relatively no ones wealth will change 2) at first everybody will be able to buy the essential stuff, food etc. but then 3) you will end up with inflation, because free money will create more demand, which in turn will result in smaller supply (relatively to demand) and higher prices, and cheaper dollar - in the end these $1,000 after a couple of months will buy you only $500 worth of goods (end game is that these $1,000 will be worthless after some period) 4) you will be spending $3bn per month on this, out of thin air, effectively pumping cash into the system, decreasing dollar value even more To some extent this already has been tried in the US in the form of cheap mortgage credit to the poor. Thousands of dollars were given to people who defaulted and never paid back. Look where it got us…
- scarmig 13y ago
  Your points are inconsistent with each other: first you claim that no one's pattern of consumption will be affected, but then you move to claiming that the prices of basic goods will change. Those two things cannot both be true: which would you like me to address? Overall, your main flaw is that you're considering the economy an entirely static thing. But as the demand for basic goods increases, it creates new business opportunities for both incumbents and potential entrants into the market. Capital seeks out profits, and relatively more capital would flow into the provision of basic goods. That's what prevents the basic income from dissipating into worthlessness.
  - f055 13y ago
    Not at all, not static. I'm just saying you cannot give people free money and not take that money from somewhere else. FED has been doing this, the quantitative easing, for some time now, but it's not feasible in the long run. Wealth is created, not given.
    - 13y ago

nbouscal 13y ago

> It wasn't called that way, but the policy was that everyone has to have a job and receive a specified wage. That is not a basic income guarantee. With a basic income guarantee, you receive the basic income regardless of whether you have a job or not. You do not have to have a job. If you choose to have a job, you earn a wage in addition to your basic income. The system you're describing is a completely, fundamentally different thing from a basic income guarantee.

f055 13y ago
Let me explain: in a communist country, people had various jobs. Each job had a different salary. But everyone had a job, everybody had income. So, if you asked anyone "Do you earn at least $100?" - all would say "Yes". But some could earn more if they were in better jobs. Obviously that meant you didn't actually have to work to receive salary - that's why productivity sucked. Not so different now, huh?
- nbouscal 13y ago
  Yes, still very, very different. Having a job where you don't actually accomplish any work is completely different from not having a job at all. Having a non-productive job wastes your time and saps your energy. I've had them before, and they're soul-crushing. Not having a job at all, on the other hand, frees you to do real work. Creative work, work in line with your passion. That's what we really need people to be spending their time on, not raking all the leaves from one end of Central Park to the other and back. When J.K. Rowling was on benefits from the UK government, she wrote the first in a series of novels that would go on to become the best-selling novel series of all time and earn her hundreds of millions of pounds, a good portion of which went back to the UK government in tax revenue. If instead she had been forced to do a menial, unproductive job, none of that would have happened. Her words on the subject: “I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. … And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” Buckminster Fuller hit the nail on the head with this quote: “We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

saraid216 13y ago

> Because life ain't fair, it never will be unless we live in utopia where everyone is good and there is no evil. So why not try it? Because there was a guy who wrote it all down. His name was Marks. And you know who used his theories in practice? Lenin. And you know what happened next? The Red Revolution. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6311812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6311812

lutusp 13y ago
> Because there was a guy who wrote it all down. His name was Marks [sic]. And you know who used his theories in practice? Lenin. Marks, really? If you want to pose as a scholar, at least learn to spell the names of important historical figures. And this isn't a trivial correction -- because you think his name is Karl Marks, your post will not show up in Web searches of the topic you think you're writing about.
- f055 13y ago
  I don't pose for anything, I'm just saying what is logical. 2+2 != 5. And sorry for this heresy I committed by not writing Karl's surname properly - force of habit, this is how we write his surname in Poland. Now does it change the discussion in any way? I don't think so...

zentiggr 13y ago

A big difference between the BIG scenario and what you describe is "everyone has to have a job". The inefficiencies of/resistance to state-mandated production quotas make the two systems significantly different.