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> The incentive to take whatever job you can is that even if a job pays very little, that's on top of the basic income. The goal isn't to provide largess (is i

• dragonwriter 12y ago
  > The goal isn't to provide largess (is it?) its to provide the basics with no strings attached free of charge, anything beyond that should require satisfying the desires of other humans. The goal, in my view, of Basic Income is to mitigate the fundamental structural inequity of capitalist markets (particularly in the way that money/commodity exchanges work as a proxy for value/utility), to wit, that such markets weight present utility experienced by market participants by past wealth accumulation, and thus are progressively distortive in terms of distribution of utility. Providing a basic, no-strings-attached allowance is a means, not an ends. > anything beyond that should require satisfying the desires of other humans. As it does in BI -- you have to gain income from market exchange to realize utility beyond that attainable with the BI alone. The difference between BI and your "basic welfare" where the government provides a standard-issue basket of goods and services is that BI is simply additive with other income, whereas the limited exchangeability and substitutability of the standard basket of basic welfare goods and services means that it takes a large additional income to get a small additional benefit, which reduces the incentive to provide additional value since, over some range at the bottom. > I understand the reason this check is necessary, I also think you're going to end up with a lot of dead illegals. BI serving its purpose does not preclude other programs serving people present in the jurisdiction of the nation that aren't subject to it. Nor does the example of potential classifications mean that BI couldn't have a different eligibility rule ("everyone physically present in the national jurisdiction" is also a possible rule.) > This is a moral problem we're trying to solve right? There are many moral problems. Not all of them have the same solution. > Why should specific people starve? I don't recall arguing that anyone should starve.
  • grinnbearit 12y ago
    > such markets weight present utility experienced by market participants by past wealth accumulation, and thus are progressively distortive in terms of distribution of utility Are you against the accumulation of capital or do you feel it should have an upper limit? IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society and money saved is debt that hasn't been called in, whether inherited or earned. If society has seen vast productivity gains in the interim then of course money earned by mowing someones lawn a 100 years ago would go a lot further today. I don't see the accumulation or ownership of capital as fundamental structural inequity
    • dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Are you against the accumulation of capital or do you feel it should have an upper limit? Neither. > IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society Obviously, its a way to measure that. I specifically identified how its a problematic way to measure that -- providing equal utility to someone with greater wealth provides greater reward, which means that those who have accumulated wealth -- often aided by inheritance and circumstance of birth -- are most able to redirect society to serve their utility, including reshaping it to direct future wealth to themselves and their descendants. Left unchecked, this tends to make money, overtime, a worse and worse representation of social value provided by the person holding it, and the market value of exchanges a worse and worse measure of the social value of the exchange. That's not to say that wealth accumulation should not be permitted nor that it should have a fixed upper limit, because those have their own problems. But it does need to be recognized as a distortion and balanced. and that's increasingly more true the more the rewards of the economy, before considering regulatory interventions, go to capital rather than labor.