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You misunderstand Basic income as providing equal wealth to everyone... That is not the goal. The point is to provide the bare minimum amount of money required

You misunderstand Basic income as providing equal wealth to everyone... That is not the goal. The point is to provide the bare minimum amount of money required for someone to survive. You would base the amount of money each person gets on the cost of living where they live, just like how wages very from place to place today. The amount of Basic income wouldn't be the same everywhere. Basic Income isn't socialism, people would still work, they just wouldn't work as much. Since the Basic income only takes care of your basic needs if you want to buy a new tech toy you will have to go to work and get the money to pay for it. Since your basic needs are already taken care of, businesses won't have to provide a "living wage", there would either be a very low minimum wage or no minimum wage at all so a much smaller percentage of a businesses's revenue would go towards paying employees meaning more profit. Hopefully along with basic income we would also adopt universal healthcare that would further take finical burden off of businesses.

msandford 13y ago
> You misunderstand Basic income as providing equal wealth to everyone... I can see how you might think that, but I disagree. What I am trying to do is show that the idea that a basic income can provide without distorting prices isn't grounded in reality. What is the bare minimum amount of money required for someone to survive? And who defines what "surviving" is? If you're married with six kids (four currently of the right age for private school) your "bare minimum" might be $25k/mo. No that's not legit? What is? Does the "bare minimum" require that you get only a small 1 bedroom to yourself? Or an efficiency? Or maybe you should be required to live with roommates to bring your rent cost down? Do you get more money if you have kids, or less? What happens if you get married or divorced? If you live somewhere where the cost of living is high you get more money; how do you ensure people actually live where they say they do? What would prevent me and 100 of my closest friends from all saying we live in a shithole in NYC while we use that money to buy all kinds of good lives for ourselves in more rural areas? The cost of living differential is probably at least 2x and maybe higher, so there's a lot of incentive to abuse the system. So the businesses have more profits, but higher taxes right? The money for a basic income doesn't just magically appear does it? Where does the money come from to pay it?
- landryraccoon 13y ago
  The point of the article was that this applies to a nearly post scarcity society. For example, suppose we lived in an Asimov style world where autonomous robots could produce enough food, clothing and housing to sustain everyone on Earth even if Every Single Person decided to never work again. In such a society, the basic income can be determined by what the robots can produce. I think it's interesting to think about what could be possible in a future society, as opposed to just the fact that this probably won't work today.
  - msandford 13y ago
    Yeah that's cool too, but where does the $100 trillion to build all the robots come from? Robots ain't cheap and it's not like it's all software license fees either, you need to actually pay people (or robots) to dig ore out of the ground and to use energy to transform it into metal and then form those ingots into usable shapes and then transform those usable shapes into robot frames and then attach electrical or hydraulic actuators and pumps and put controlling circuitry in there and then you still have to have the control system. So far all that stuff is owned privately and I don't foresee the people who've spent millions or billions of dollars of private capital to make all that exist suddenly say "hey it's cool, we're giving all this stuff away for the greater good!"
    - landryraccoon 13y ago
      Well, if the robots can produce ten times more then the amount needed to sustain everyone, then the government can tax the robots productivity at 10% to achieve the same thing. You're going to say that that's theft at gunpoint probably, and I'm going to say I don't have any moral problem with that. Taxes have existed since human beings first banded together to form large groups and they aren't going away anytime soon. So is this just going to turn into another stupid libertarian argument about how all taxes are evil? Because I'm pretty sure that debate has been settled in every single successful civilization since the dawn of time.. Taxes won. Lastly, I think your viewpoint is pretty evil honestly. So there is a robotic surplus sufficient to feed the world multiple times over in this scenario and people still starve because fuck you I own the robots and I'm only going to help myself? If that's the world there will be a revolution and I'll be on the side of the dirty hippies.

msandford 13y ago

> You misunderstand Basic income as providing equal wealth to everyone... I can see how you might think that, but I disagree. What I am trying to do is show that the idea that a basic income can provide without distorting prices isn't grounded in reality. What is the bare minimum amount of money required for someone to survive? And who defines what "surviving" is? If you're married with six kids (four currently of the right age for private school) your "bare minimum" might be $25k/mo. No that's not legit? What is? Does the "bare minimum" require that you get only a small 1 bedroom to yourself? Or an efficiency? Or maybe you should be required to live with roommates to bring your rent cost down? Do you get more money if you have kids, or less? What happens if you get married or divorced? If you live somewhere where the cost of living is high you get more money; how do you ensure people actually live where they say they do? What would prevent me and 100 of my closest friends from all saying we live in a shithole in NYC while we use that money to buy all kinds of good lives for ourselves in more rural areas? The cost of living differential is probably at least 2x and maybe higher, so there's a lot of incentive to abuse the system. So the businesses have more profits, but higher taxes right? The money for a basic income doesn't just magically appear does it? Where does the money come from to pay it?

landryraccoon 13y ago
The point of the article was that this applies to a nearly post scarcity society. For example, suppose we lived in an Asimov style world where autonomous robots could produce enough food, clothing and housing to sustain everyone on Earth even if Every Single Person decided to never work again. In such a society, the basic income can be determined by what the robots can produce. I think it's interesting to think about what could be possible in a future society, as opposed to just the fact that this probably won't work today.
- msandford 13y ago
  Yeah that's cool too, but where does the $100 trillion to build all the robots come from? Robots ain't cheap and it's not like it's all software license fees either, you need to actually pay people (or robots) to dig ore out of the ground and to use energy to transform it into metal and then form those ingots into usable shapes and then transform those usable shapes into robot frames and then attach electrical or hydraulic actuators and pumps and put controlling circuitry in there and then you still have to have the control system. So far all that stuff is owned privately and I don't foresee the people who've spent millions or billions of dollars of private capital to make all that exist suddenly say "hey it's cool, we're giving all this stuff away for the greater good!"
  - landryraccoon 13y ago
    Well, if the robots can produce ten times more then the amount needed to sustain everyone, then the government can tax the robots productivity at 10% to achieve the same thing. You're going to say that that's theft at gunpoint probably, and I'm going to say I don't have any moral problem with that. Taxes have existed since human beings first banded together to form large groups and they aren't going away anytime soon. So is this just going to turn into another stupid libertarian argument about how all taxes are evil? Because I'm pretty sure that debate has been settled in every single successful civilization since the dawn of time.. Taxes won. Lastly, I think your viewpoint is pretty evil honestly. So there is a robotic surplus sufficient to feed the world multiple times over in this scenario and people still starve because fuck you I own the robots and I'm only going to help myself? If that's the world there will be a revolution and I'll be on the side of the dirty hippies.