11 ms·

Guaranteeing $3000 a year isn't exactly what the Swiss have on the ballot. They are proposing the equivalent of $2800 per month. [1] Sounds like a socialist id

Guaranteeing $3000 a year isn't exactly what the Swiss have on the ballot. They are proposing the equivalent of $2800 per month. [1] Sounds like a socialist idea right? But in fact the libertarian in me loves it - if implemented, it removes the need for vast swaths of government. If everyone is guaranteed a basic income, you no longer need vast systems to manage all the means-tested programs. No social security, no disability, no unemployment insurance, no retirement programs and tax shelters. No need for minimum wage. The list goes on and on. And that's why it won't happen here... [1]http://www.salon.com/2013/10/11/rather_than_savage_cuts_switzerland_considers_star_trek_economics/ http://www.salon.com/2013/10/11/rather_than_savage_cuts_swit...

JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Nonsense. Poverty level isn't $3000, nor is it a basic income - its peanuts. That's the amount to take them 'over the line' out of poverty. They'll still need the rest of the support they're getting or its pointless.
- d4vlx 13y ago
  I think the point is that if a $3000 a year basic income program was implemented successfully it could lead to other programs being replaced with a higher basic income.
- quadrangle 13y ago
  It's a step in the right direction and would make a massive difference, it isn't pointless just because it isn't a complete solution.
invalidOrTaken 13y ago
"...if implemented, it removes the need for vast swaths of government." Of course it does. What are the odds, however, that said swaths of government and the constituencies that support them would simply surrender and close up shop?
- legutierr 13y ago
  Well, at least in the worst case, they would all have $2800 per month to fall back on.
amerika_blog 13y ago
This is a good point, and one that most people haven't written about. UBI means no welfare state other than UBI. It also means you rely on people to administer that income themselves. On the other hand, it is socialism, and socialism has a dismal record of success. Europe tried it, and is now bankrupt and having waves of social problems that did not exist 40 years ago. The USA has tried it and now is permanently divided, either 47/53 or 99/1, depending on who you ask. I say go back to natural living. Let government handle defense, roads and environmental protection. Let local governments handle everything else flexibly. But stop trying to solve people's problems. It doesn't work, creates other problems, and discourages people from accepting responsibility for their own futures.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  You're fallaciously posing a dichotomy between the "natural living" of 19th-century American late-feudalism/industrializing capitalism versus the "failures" (failures by what metric, compared to what capitalist competitors?) of "socialism" (actually social democracy). Here are a few facts to the contrary: * Europe is not "bankrupt" from "socialism". In fact, even the most successful European countries (the Nordic states and Germany) are far more social-democratic than the "successfully capitalist" Anglo countries, most particularly the United States of America. * Why is Europe "bankrupt"? Trade imbalances, and a monetary policy aimed at maintaining those trade imbalances for the benefit of the incumbent capitalist class rather than correcting them for the good of all citizens. It's not just net-importer nations like the "PIIGS" undergoing wage deflations and heavy debt, Germany has actually been leading Europe in wage deflation, not to mention that it does actually have a public debt issue. The cause of the Euro troubles, after the Great Recession itself of course, is the German use of mercantilism; the mercantilist system in Europe is not broken but working as (inadvertently, nobody outside Germany intended for Germany to become a mercantile empire) designed. Citation: http://seekerblog.com/2012/01/17/euro-crisis-german-unit-labor-cost-repression-is-the-primary-cause-of-periphery-stress/ http://seekerblog.com/2012/01/17/euro-crisis-german-unit-lab... * When have the successful Western nations been at their richest, in terms of total economic growth and socioeconomic equality? In their peak social-democratic years of the Postwar Consensus, precisely when what Americans decry as "big government" was used to shore up demand for labor and pump productivity into the economy through national infrastructure projects. * Open question: does public and private debt growth have a causative relationship with the use of social-democratic fiscal policies, or with the use of certain trade and monetary policies instead? It's important to note that the late '60s and early '70s switched the entire Western world from the Bretton-Woods regime of trade and currency regulations (not to mention capital controls!) to today's neoliberal, neo-mercantilist regime of virtual debt-money. Today capitalist governments manipulate their currency whenever they want in order to suppress labor wages and increase exports, even despite normal market mechanisms acting against them (as in the cases of both China and Germany, who under "clean" markets would be effectively forced to consume and import more stuff, lest their money degrade into worthlessness from capital glut).
bhauer 13y ago
As a libertarian myself, I am also sympathetic to the basic income proposition. I like the idea in principle, but feel more experimentation is warranted. I like the premise of trying it out in small increments. My chief concern is that progressives will ask us to explain how we contend with people who despite being given a stack of currency still manage to squander that, leaving themselves hungry, without shelter, or without savings. They may not say that now, but I think that challenge would eventually arrive. I personally favor family and charity as a last safety net, but progressives routinely dismiss those as impractical or insufficient. My pessimistic side believes that a portion of the progressive inclination for central planning comes from a fear of allowing people to act stupidly and suffer the consequences. In other words, it's not necessarily that they want to manage the allocation of funds and/or delivery of services and products to the poor, but that they believe if they don't do this, bad decisions will be made, leading to suffering. Meanwhile libertarians such as myself routinely are naively optimistic, believing everyone will make decent or good choices in spending their basic income (knowing to put some into healthcare, some into savings, and so on).
- DanBC 13y ago
  > My chief concern is that progressives will ask us to explain how we contend with people who despite being given a stack of currency still manage to squander that, leaving themselves hungry, without shelter, or without savings. They may not say that now, but I think that challenge would eventually arrive. I personally favor family and charity as a last safety net, but progressives routinely dismiss those as impractical or insufficient. It's complex. See the UK, where we have complicated benefits and medical care and social housing. If you drink your money, and cause yourself to become homeless, you'll have no money and have nowhere to live. I think understanding how people get themselves into that kind of situation, and guiding them into better choices, is useful to society as a whole. That small investment avoids costs later.
- glibgil 13y ago
  Remedies for those problems already exist. Courts can order many things to happen automatically (think of child support payments as an example). The community and police can refer a case to a government attorney. The government can sue an individual in court for misuse of funds. The court can order that the individual's income be garnished to pay for housing automatically. Then the individual who has demonstrated that they cannot handle too much freedom keeps their minimum income but doesn't become homeless. This can all happen very quickly and stacks of these cases can be resolved in a couple of hours.
jiggy2011 13y ago
The problem with this system is that those who have the most genuine need for welfare will be the ones who are made worse off. Namely, the permanently and severely disabled. These are the people who will have the highest cost of living because they will need additional care and special considerations made for housing etc. They are also the people who will find it the most difficult to supplement their minimum income by working.
kephra 13y ago
The swiss idea is much to high. The theatlantic idea much to low. I guess Euro800-1000/month is a much better choice. A basic income should allow living, health insurance, small flat, but not luxury goods like cars, big houses or the like. A basic income should be a security net to catch all, who failed to earn enough for living, but not to much to avoid that everybody stops working and starts party. One problem of a basic income is the iron law of wages and the private property on housing. Wages tend to balance to a point that they are barely enough to make ends needs. When wages climb, also housing costs and rental prices climb. So a basic income must accompanied with a big social housing program to allow cheap housing for everybody. Else a basic income would only make the 0.1% who have large assets even richer, because they would earn most of this basic income by renting out housing.
- sologoub 13y ago
  Couldn't disagree more! We shouldn't try to provide poverty-level income. We should ensure that people can live with dignity. As a side-effect, we will also guarantee that consumption levels won't easily fall below certain level.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    To me, it is not obvious that it is wrong to say "to live with dignity you must do something that benefits others in a way the market can recognize, or have a compelling story why you can't," for some value of "dignity" which is partly dependent on the surplus capacity of society.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Couldn't disagree more! We shouldn't try to provide poverty-level income. We should ensure that people can live with dignity. That's a nice goal, but its probably not practical on basic income given current technology and means of production; the more automation advances, the more basic income can be (and, arguably, the more it needs to be) but if you aim to high you end up driving down production and driving up prices uncontrollably.
- dllthomas 13y ago
protomyth 13y ago
I'm a fiscal conservative, (actual) small government-type and I'm ok with the related idea of minimum guaranteed income for much the same reason. As you have said, it seems like there is a huge potential to eliminate quite a number of programs and taxes. Once you get to the point that transfer payments are not going to go away, it seems like optimizing the cost and efficiency of said payments while reducing the cost (thus taxes) and size of government become priorities. This is basically one way to remove quite a lot of the government. I'm still not sure about a fixed payment however. I guess I can see a minimum pro-rated[1] guaranteed income payed on a very tight schedule (weekly, but preferably every weekday morning). I can see it would take more paperwork, but I think the difference in payment versus admin costs probably would make it a better pick. I get the feeling that a country with the constitution that says voting rights are dependent on not taking transfer payments might have a better chance of acceptance. It is a bit of a radical idea. 1) something like for every 2 dollars earned you subtract a dollar of payment
- in2liberty 13y ago
  There's a way to do it and actually spend less money on welfare: http://www.morganwarstler.com/post/44789487956/guaranteed-income-choose-your-boss-the-market-based http://www.morganwarstler.com/post/44789487956/guaranteed-in...
- dllthomas 13y ago
  "Guaranteed Minimum Income" is different than "Basic Income". The latter, which is what is suggested here, involves giving everyone the same amount of money on top of whatever they earn or don't earn. For the former, the government pays the difference between whatever you're actually making and the minimum amount (if positive). With BI there is still incentive to work at low paying jobs - you always keep more as you earn more. With GMI you are basically volunteering until there's a job that pays more than the minimum - it's effectively a different way of implementing a minimum wage.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    "Guaranteed Minimum Income" is different than "Basic Income". Yes, that why I said I was in favor of it (Guaranteed Minimum Income - well actually a pro-rated GMI) for much the same reason sologoub was in favor of the Basic Income from the article. > With BI there is still incentive to work at low paying jobs - you always keep more as you earn more. With GMI you are basically volunteering until there's a job that pays more than the minimum - it's effectively a different way of implementing a minimum wage. That is why I am in favor of a pro-rated version so that there is an incentive to work and people are softly leaving government payments.
lutusp 13y ago
> But in fact the libertarian in me loves it - if implemented, it removes the need for vast swaths of government. True as far as it goes. Collecting taxes and then turning around and giving the money back might be a good first step, but it should be obvious that it would be more efficient not to collect the taxes in the first place. Some may object and say that giving money to the poor changes the social makeup of society by redistributing wealth from haves to have-nots. But that doesn't change anything, because the money given to the poor quickly finds its way to the same places it does now.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> Sounds like a socialist idea right? But in fact the libertarian in me loves it - if implemented, it removes the need for vast swaths of government. If everyone is guaranteed a basic income, you no longer need vast systems to manage all the means-tested programs. No social security Social security isn't means-tested, its contribution-based (the only way that it even approximates being means-tested is that SS income is subject to income tax if your total income is above a certain level.) > no retirement programs Retirement programs other than Social Security aren't safety net programs, so inasmuch as there is a need for them without basic income income, it doesn't go away with basic income.

JoeAltmaier 13y ago

Nonsense. Poverty level isn't $3000, nor is it a basic income - its peanuts. That's the amount to take them 'over the line' out of poverty. They'll still need the rest of the support they're getting or its pointless.

d4vlx 13y ago
I think the point is that if a $3000 a year basic income program was implemented successfully it could lead to other programs being replaced with a higher basic income.
quadrangle 13y ago
It's a step in the right direction and would make a massive difference, it isn't pointless just because it isn't a complete solution.

invalidOrTaken 13y ago

"...if implemented, it removes the need for vast swaths of government." Of course it does. What are the odds, however, that said swaths of government and the constituencies that support them would simply surrender and close up shop?

legutierr 13y ago
Well, at least in the worst case, they would all have $2800 per month to fall back on.

amerika_blog 13y ago

This is a good point, and one that most people haven't written about. UBI means no welfare state other than UBI. It also means you rely on people to administer that income themselves. On the other hand, it is socialism, and socialism has a dismal record of success. Europe tried it, and is now bankrupt and having waves of social problems that did not exist 40 years ago. The USA has tried it and now is permanently divided, either 47/53 or 99/1, depending on who you ask. I say go back to natural living. Let government handle defense, roads and environmental protection. Let local governments handle everything else flexibly. But stop trying to solve people's problems. It doesn't work, creates other problems, and discourages people from accepting responsibility for their own futures.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
You're fallaciously posing a dichotomy between the "natural living" of 19th-century American late-feudalism/industrializing capitalism versus the "failures" (failures by what metric, compared to what capitalist competitors?) of "socialism" (actually social democracy). Here are a few facts to the contrary: * Europe is not "bankrupt" from "socialism". In fact, even the most successful European countries (the Nordic states and Germany) are far more social-democratic than the "successfully capitalist" Anglo countries, most particularly the United States of America. * Why is Europe "bankrupt"? Trade imbalances, and a monetary policy aimed at maintaining those trade imbalances for the benefit of the incumbent capitalist class rather than correcting them for the good of all citizens. It's not just net-importer nations like the "PIIGS" undergoing wage deflations and heavy debt, Germany has actually been leading Europe in wage deflation, not to mention that it does actually have a public debt issue. The cause of the Euro troubles, after the Great Recession itself of course, is the German use of mercantilism; the mercantilist system in Europe is not broken but working as (inadvertently, nobody outside Germany intended for Germany to become a mercantile empire) designed. Citation: http://seekerblog.com/2012/01/17/euro-crisis-german-unit-labor-cost-repression-is-the-primary-cause-of-periphery-stress/ http://seekerblog.com/2012/01/17/euro-crisis-german-unit-lab... * When have the successful Western nations been at their richest, in terms of total economic growth and socioeconomic equality? In their peak social-democratic years of the Postwar Consensus, precisely when what Americans decry as "big government" was used to shore up demand for labor and pump productivity into the economy through national infrastructure projects. * Open question: does public and private debt growth have a causative relationship with the use of social-democratic fiscal policies, or with the use of certain trade and monetary policies instead? It's important to note that the late '60s and early '70s switched the entire Western world from the Bretton-Woods regime of trade and currency regulations (not to mention capital controls!) to today's neoliberal, neo-mercantilist regime of virtual debt-money. Today capitalist governments manipulate their currency whenever they want in order to suppress labor wages and increase exports, even despite normal market mechanisms acting against them (as in the cases of both China and Germany, who under "clean" markets would be effectively forced to consume and import more stuff, lest their money degrade into worthlessness from capital glut).

bhauer 13y ago

As a libertarian myself, I am also sympathetic to the basic income proposition. I like the idea in principle, but feel more experimentation is warranted. I like the premise of trying it out in small increments. My chief concern is that progressives will ask us to explain how we contend with people who despite being given a stack of currency still manage to squander that, leaving themselves hungry, without shelter, or without savings. They may not say that now, but I think that challenge would eventually arrive. I personally favor family and charity as a last safety net, but progressives routinely dismiss those as impractical or insufficient. My pessimistic side believes that a portion of the progressive inclination for central planning comes from a fear of allowing people to act stupidly and suffer the consequences. In other words, it's not necessarily that they want to manage the allocation of funds and/or delivery of services and products to the poor, but that they believe if they don't do this, bad decisions will be made, leading to suffering. Meanwhile libertarians such as myself routinely are naively optimistic, believing everyone will make decent or good choices in spending their basic income (knowing to put some into healthcare, some into savings, and so on).

DanBC 13y ago
> My chief concern is that progressives will ask us to explain how we contend with people who despite being given a stack of currency still manage to squander that, leaving themselves hungry, without shelter, or without savings. They may not say that now, but I think that challenge would eventually arrive. I personally favor family and charity as a last safety net, but progressives routinely dismiss those as impractical or insufficient. It's complex. See the UK, where we have complicated benefits and medical care and social housing. If you drink your money, and cause yourself to become homeless, you'll have no money and have nowhere to live. I think understanding how people get themselves into that kind of situation, and guiding them into better choices, is useful to society as a whole. That small investment avoids costs later.
glibgil 13y ago
Remedies for those problems already exist. Courts can order many things to happen automatically (think of child support payments as an example). The community and police can refer a case to a government attorney. The government can sue an individual in court for misuse of funds. The court can order that the individual's income be garnished to pay for housing automatically. Then the individual who has demonstrated that they cannot handle too much freedom keeps their minimum income but doesn't become homeless. This can all happen very quickly and stacks of these cases can be resolved in a couple of hours.

jiggy2011 13y ago

The problem with this system is that those who have the most genuine need for welfare will be the ones who are made worse off. Namely, the permanently and severely disabled. These are the people who will have the highest cost of living because they will need additional care and special considerations made for housing etc. They are also the people who will find it the most difficult to supplement their minimum income by working.

kephra 13y ago

The swiss idea is much to high. The theatlantic idea much to low. I guess Euro800-1000/month is a much better choice. A basic income should allow living, health insurance, small flat, but not luxury goods like cars, big houses or the like. A basic income should be a security net to catch all, who failed to earn enough for living, but not to much to avoid that everybody stops working and starts party. One problem of a basic income is the iron law of wages and the private property on housing. Wages tend to balance to a point that they are barely enough to make ends needs. When wages climb, also housing costs and rental prices climb. So a basic income must accompanied with a big social housing program to allow cheap housing for everybody. Else a basic income would only make the 0.1% who have large assets even richer, because they would earn most of this basic income by renting out housing.

sologoub 13y ago
Couldn't disagree more! We shouldn't try to provide poverty-level income. We should ensure that people can live with dignity. As a side-effect, we will also guarantee that consumption levels won't easily fall below certain level.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  To me, it is not obvious that it is wrong to say "to live with dignity you must do something that benefits others in a way the market can recognize, or have a compelling story why you can't," for some value of "dignity" which is partly dependent on the surplus capacity of society.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Couldn't disagree more! We shouldn't try to provide poverty-level income. We should ensure that people can live with dignity. That's a nice goal, but its probably not practical on basic income given current technology and means of production; the more automation advances, the more basic income can be (and, arguably, the more it needs to be) but if you aim to high you end up driving down production and driving up prices uncontrollably.
dllthomas 13y ago

protomyth 13y ago

I'm a fiscal conservative, (actual) small government-type and I'm ok with the related idea of minimum guaranteed income for much the same reason. As you have said, it seems like there is a huge potential to eliminate quite a number of programs and taxes. Once you get to the point that transfer payments are not going to go away, it seems like optimizing the cost and efficiency of said payments while reducing the cost (thus taxes) and size of government become priorities. This is basically one way to remove quite a lot of the government. I'm still not sure about a fixed payment however. I guess I can see a minimum pro-rated[1] guaranteed income payed on a very tight schedule (weekly, but preferably every weekday morning). I can see it would take more paperwork, but I think the difference in payment versus admin costs probably would make it a better pick. I get the feeling that a country with the constitution that says voting rights are dependent on not taking transfer payments might have a better chance of acceptance. It is a bit of a radical idea. 1) something like for every 2 dollars earned you subtract a dollar of payment

in2liberty 13y ago
There's a way to do it and actually spend less money on welfare: http://www.morganwarstler.com/post/44789487956/guaranteed-income-choose-your-boss-the-market-based http://www.morganwarstler.com/post/44789487956/guaranteed-in...
dllthomas 13y ago
"Guaranteed Minimum Income" is different than "Basic Income". The latter, which is what is suggested here, involves giving everyone the same amount of money on top of whatever they earn or don't earn. For the former, the government pays the difference between whatever you're actually making and the minimum amount (if positive). With BI there is still incentive to work at low paying jobs - you always keep more as you earn more. With GMI you are basically volunteering until there's a job that pays more than the minimum - it's effectively a different way of implementing a minimum wage.
- protomyth 13y ago
  "Guaranteed Minimum Income" is different than "Basic Income". Yes, that why I said I was in favor of it (Guaranteed Minimum Income - well actually a pro-rated GMI) for much the same reason sologoub was in favor of the Basic Income from the article. > With BI there is still incentive to work at low paying jobs - you always keep more as you earn more. With GMI you are basically volunteering until there's a job that pays more than the minimum - it's effectively a different way of implementing a minimum wage. That is why I am in favor of a pro-rated version so that there is an incentive to work and people are softly leaving government payments.

lutusp 13y ago

> But in fact the libertarian in me loves it - if implemented, it removes the need for vast swaths of government. True as far as it goes. Collecting taxes and then turning around and giving the money back might be a good first step, but it should be obvious that it would be more efficient not to collect the taxes in the first place. Some may object and say that giving money to the poor changes the social makeup of society by redistributing wealth from haves to have-nots. But that doesn't change anything, because the money given to the poor quickly finds its way to the same places it does now.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> Sounds like a socialist idea right? But in fact the libertarian in me loves it - if implemented, it removes the need for vast swaths of government. If everyone is guaranteed a basic income, you no longer need vast systems to manage all the means-tested programs. No social security Social security isn't means-tested, its contribution-based (the only way that it even approximates being means-tested is that SS income is subject to income tax if your total income is above a certain level.) > no retirement programs Retirement programs other than Social Security aren't safety net programs, so inasmuch as there is a need for them without basic income income, it doesn't go away with basic income.