4 ms·

Minimum guaranteed income can not get here soon enough.

by pmb 13y ago

mikepurvis 13y ago
Also known as Basic Income: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income Charles Eisenstein makes the case for it in chapter 14 of Sacred Economics: http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-chapter-14-the-social-dividend/ http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-chapter-14-the-...
- scarmig 13y ago
  Not exactly the same. Guaranteed minimum incomes are conditional: as you make more money, they phase out. This makes them significantly cheaper than basic incomes, which you get regardless of how much money you make. The former makes more sense on the face of it, but it exposes workers to very steep marginal tax rates when they're trying to move from the underclass to the middle class. Trap enough people in the underclass, and the apparent cheapness of the guaranteed minimum income no longer looks so cheap.
paul_f 13y ago
For what? Living deserves an income? Can I opt out?
- erikpukinskis 13y ago
  It's only fair. Before the State, people were born into a homeland. Just by virtue of being born, you were entitled to a share of the natural resources around you. (Of course without a state, murder and such are allowed on a who-can-get-away-with-it basis. That's the downside.) When the state stepped in and seized control of our homelands, and then said: "This person, with this piece of paper, now owns these resources", essentially creating out of thin air the concept of "wealth", they took upon themselves a moral responsibility to see to it that wealth was distributed in a way that everyone gets at least a living share. The current system, where you are either born into a dynasty with resources, or you are for all intents and purposes enslaved to people who are (albeit with some small chance of moving between groups) fails at that promise, even though the poor largely fulfill their end of the bargain by making themselves available for labor. Many go without their basic needs taken care of. A basic income would fix that. The situation is absurd, and it's an utter waste of human capital to throw talented "low" class kids into the thresher.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    On the other hand, the neolithic revolution, the rise of agriculture, were responsible for accelerated human population growth, and with that, the rise of the city states (and later states) needed to deal with the resulting population densities. People in cities were more free to specialize, leading to art and technology advancements. Welfare via the state is probably as old as Rome, and probably much older than that.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    I'm not actually sure that's how it worked, though I'm sure that's a common anarchist mythology. States arrived along with agriculture, but hunter-gatherers had very similar, and much smaller groups with their own structures of authority, control, and social norms. In-group and out-group dynamics were more prevalent as in-groups did not, by definition, exceed Dunbar's number. Things like in-group murder were undoubtedly discouraged and punished. And when resources grew thin, violence and warfare against other groups was prevalent. Agriculture was generally borne of desperation and scarcity, and cultures that adopted agriculture also adopted government and notions of land ownership. It was still a pretty raw deal compared to being a hunter-gatherer though, especially since hunter-gatherers were still better at warfare than farmers so from time to time a group of hunter-gatherers might show up and take whatever they wanted from you. But even among hunter-gatherers, there were no human rights. You had to work, you received your share, but only if the hunter-gatherers from around the way didn't run short on resources and showed up one day and killed all your men and captured all your women.
- scarmig 13y ago
  Deserving is a funny idea. I'm not talking about "does Paris Hilton deserve her money?" or even "does Bill Gates deserve his money?" which all too often devolve into personal attacks and minutiae and miss the broader systemic question. When you implicitly demand that people work for money, you're making an intuitive error that brilliant economists, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, have mistakenly stepped into many times: the idea that value comes from a day's work. That's the folk version of it, but in economic's early days it was professionally argued for enough to get its own name: the labor theory of value. There's a long history of debate around it, and even today there are highly sophisticated versions of it floating around that have added epicycles and epicycles of subtlety, but the long and short of it is that it's been proven wrong. Not from a normative point of view (which is impossible anyways, as that's just moralizing), but empirically speaking. And the moral version of it doesn't make much sense either. I'd be the last to say that an investment banker doesn't work hard, but does he work harder than a single mother on food stamps holding down three part time jobs? Or, for that matter, do either of them work harder than a peasant in rural India? Lots of things determine income. But by far the biggest is economic productivity, which is heavily correlated to capital intensity. As a collective whole, we are far more productive now than we were a couple decades ago, let alone a couple centuries. For that we get far higher incomes for far less work. Does being born in a first world country in the 21st century deserve extra income? No, not really. Yet we live with it and don't beat ourselves over the head for it: we do it because we can. And even once developing countries have caught up with us, we'll still have to ask ourselves if we deserve greater income than our ancestors merely for coming after them. Capital will continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future. It will not be long before the labor of maybe a billion people worldwide are able to provide a standard of living for everyone that's higher than people in first world countries get today. Do the people who aren't part of that productive core "deserve" the money? I mean, maybe, maybe not, but does the answer to that question even matter? None of us really deserve what we have, so so long as we make a workable system where the incentives line up so that everyone can live rich lives with a base level of income, I'm all for it.
  - pdonis 13y ago
    the idea that value comes from a day's work Where did Adam Smith say this? From what I understand of Smith's position, it was that value comes from either use or trade: you produce something and either use it yourself, or trade it for something else. How long it took you to produce it is irrelevant to what you can use it or trade it for.

Minimum guaranteed income can not get here soon enough.

by pmb 13y ago

Minimum guaranteed income can not get here soon enough.

Also known as Basic Income: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income Charles Eisenstein makes the case for it in chapter 14 of Sacred Economics: http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-chapter-14-the-social-dividend/ http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-chapter-14-the-...

scarmig 13y ago
Not exactly the same. Guaranteed minimum incomes are conditional: as you make more money, they phase out. This makes them significantly cheaper than basic incomes, which you get regardless of how much money you make. The former makes more sense on the face of it, but it exposes workers to very steep marginal tax rates when they're trying to move from the underclass to the middle class. Trap enough people in the underclass, and the apparent cheapness of the guaranteed minimum income no longer looks so cheap.

paul_f 13y ago

For what? Living deserves an income? Can I opt out?

erikpukinskis 13y ago
It's only fair. Before the State, people were born into a homeland. Just by virtue of being born, you were entitled to a share of the natural resources around you. (Of course without a state, murder and such are allowed on a who-can-get-away-with-it basis. That's the downside.) When the state stepped in and seized control of our homelands, and then said: "This person, with this piece of paper, now owns these resources", essentially creating out of thin air the concept of "wealth", they took upon themselves a moral responsibility to see to it that wealth was distributed in a way that everyone gets at least a living share. The current system, where you are either born into a dynasty with resources, or you are for all intents and purposes enslaved to people who are (albeit with some small chance of moving between groups) fails at that promise, even though the poor largely fulfill their end of the bargain by making themselves available for labor. Many go without their basic needs taken care of. A basic income would fix that. The situation is absurd, and it's an utter waste of human capital to throw talented "low" class kids into the thresher.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  On the other hand, the neolithic revolution, the rise of agriculture, were responsible for accelerated human population growth, and with that, the rise of the city states (and later states) needed to deal with the resulting population densities. People in cities were more free to specialize, leading to art and technology advancements. Welfare via the state is probably as old as Rome, and probably much older than that.
- philwelch 13y ago
  I'm not actually sure that's how it worked, though I'm sure that's a common anarchist mythology. States arrived along with agriculture, but hunter-gatherers had very similar, and much smaller groups with their own structures of authority, control, and social norms. In-group and out-group dynamics were more prevalent as in-groups did not, by definition, exceed Dunbar's number. Things like in-group murder were undoubtedly discouraged and punished. And when resources grew thin, violence and warfare against other groups was prevalent. Agriculture was generally borne of desperation and scarcity, and cultures that adopted agriculture also adopted government and notions of land ownership. It was still a pretty raw deal compared to being a hunter-gatherer though, especially since hunter-gatherers were still better at warfare than farmers so from time to time a group of hunter-gatherers might show up and take whatever they wanted from you. But even among hunter-gatherers, there were no human rights. You had to work, you received your share, but only if the hunter-gatherers from around the way didn't run short on resources and showed up one day and killed all your men and captured all your women.
scarmig 13y ago
Deserving is a funny idea. I'm not talking about "does Paris Hilton deserve her money?" or even "does Bill Gates deserve his money?" which all too often devolve into personal attacks and minutiae and miss the broader systemic question. When you implicitly demand that people work for money, you're making an intuitive error that brilliant economists, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, have mistakenly stepped into many times: the idea that value comes from a day's work. That's the folk version of it, but in economic's early days it was professionally argued for enough to get its own name: the labor theory of value. There's a long history of debate around it, and even today there are highly sophisticated versions of it floating around that have added epicycles and epicycles of subtlety, but the long and short of it is that it's been proven wrong. Not from a normative point of view (which is impossible anyways, as that's just moralizing), but empirically speaking. And the moral version of it doesn't make much sense either. I'd be the last to say that an investment banker doesn't work hard, but does he work harder than a single mother on food stamps holding down three part time jobs? Or, for that matter, do either of them work harder than a peasant in rural India? Lots of things determine income. But by far the biggest is economic productivity, which is heavily correlated to capital intensity. As a collective whole, we are far more productive now than we were a couple decades ago, let alone a couple centuries. For that we get far higher incomes for far less work. Does being born in a first world country in the 21st century deserve extra income? No, not really. Yet we live with it and don't beat ourselves over the head for it: we do it because we can. And even once developing countries have caught up with us, we'll still have to ask ourselves if we deserve greater income than our ancestors merely for coming after them. Capital will continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future. It will not be long before the labor of maybe a billion people worldwide are able to provide a standard of living for everyone that's higher than people in first world countries get today. Do the people who aren't part of that productive core "deserve" the money? I mean, maybe, maybe not, but does the answer to that question even matter? None of us really deserve what we have, so so long as we make a workable system where the incentives line up so that everyone can live rich lives with a base level of income, I'm all for it.
- pdonis 13y ago
  the idea that value comes from a day's work Where did Adam Smith say this? From what I understand of Smith's position, it was that value comes from either use or trade: you produce something and either use it yourself, or trade it for something else. How long it took you to produce it is irrelevant to what you can use it or trade it for.