Topic: Basic income guarantee - opinions&criticism welcome - page 3. (Read 14403 times)

I may never understand the reasoning behind "Maybe my method for taking money by force isn't the best, but definitely, taking it by force is the way to go."

The point is that if government is funded primarily on land taxes, then land consumption will be distorted. So some rich guy will live on the land at a loss rather than a factory using it at a profit. That may be revenue neutral for the government, but it's definitely not neutral on its effect on the economy.

An ideal tax wouldn't significantly change how people live or how goods are manufactured. A tax on land alone would cause massive such changes. Huge amounts of innovation would senselessly go to minimizing land use just as it now goes to income tax avoidance strategies. Industrial processes that use less, or cheaper, land would be senselessly favored over superior processes that require more, or more expensive, land. Taxing one single good or type of good is pretty much the worst tax in terms of harm done to the economy per unit of revenue raised.

The problem with a land tax is that it promotes highly inefficient land usage. For example, if 100% of taxation were in the form of land taxes, products that required very little land to produce would be much less expensive than products that require a lot of land. A race to use less and less land could result in higher and higher tax rates leading to a vast waste of resources. Funding a sizeable government 100% with a land tax is a very bad idea and would result in massive economic inefficiency and distortion.

Ask yourself this question: If you could pay only half as much in taxes as you pay now, would you be willing to live in half as much space? I think most people would say yes. But as people do that, the tax base would go down, forcing the rate up, making the problem even worse.

Would you have told that to the man who penned this?

Read what myrkul is writing.  He's talking about how absurd it would be to pay the rent for OTHER tenants.

Sure you would, but that decision is entirely up to the landowner. Your options are to pay up or leave.

Well, it is indeed.

So let us find out how much they cost!  Just let the market handle those extra services.  Then we'll know their real price.  Why should those services be financed via taxation, anyway??

Sorry. I'll just come out and say it, then: Taxation is theft. And slavery.

And if the "social safety net" is what causes the low crime rate in rural communities, why is crime so prevalent in inner city areas, where that selfsame social safety net is most utilized? How, exactly, do welfare and housing projects prevent crime in a farming community that has few recipients of the former, and none of the latter?


No, more like the renter who'd like to stop paying for the other tenants...across the city.

Guys, slavery has very little to do with the amount of work you're being ripped of, when you are.  Theft is theft.  Slavery is slavery.  Don't mix up everything.

A slave is someone who belongs to another human being.  That's it, that's all, and that's totally off-topic in this thread.

Slavery is when you can't leave and you never agreed to stay. You are free to leave the US or wherever you are whenever you want. Your position is like the hippies who demand to be allowed to live in someone else's house without paying.

+1. And does that mean if you're 60% slave, you are 40% owner?

maybe it'll be possible for most to earn their income with their computers running calculations. Think Bitcoin mining, but many more diverse tasks, via a good infrastructure with a website, client and plugins so that a proper market can flourish. GPUs will be useful again. A distributed high performance grid.

I meant that it's the only thing that can.  If it actually can't, then nothing can.

You just have to get the wealth from somewhere.  You can't create it out of thin air.  If there is not enough wealth in dividends to allow everyone to live happy doing nothing, then I don't see where exactly you plan on getting the wealth to implement your system.

Let's say it:

44% of USA budget belongs to social programs...

quite a discussion going on here...

As we all know there are 3 kinds of people in this world: slave, free man, and owner.
Well actually that's not true. Free man don't exist anymore:

A highly evolved society like ours comes with a high degree of interdependence, and that implies that each member is BOTH slave and owner. However, sometimes the proportions are massively skewed. E.g. when people just earn enough to barely live. Then you're effectively a slave. And you are owned by the people who provide the jobs.

The way I see it: the basic income guarantee is an attempt to "free the slaves". But it ignores the other problem, which are the people who provide the jobs.

So, the fundamental question which should be answered is: why do some jobs hardly pay enough to make a living? And if people are freed from the pressure of doing those jobs, would people still do them? What about the people who provide the jobs? Why don't they pay more salary?

The answer - my friends - is greed. Profits from businesses are kept at the high levels and hardly diffuse down to the people who implement the business. It's exploitation of human resources. The only tangible way of dealing with that is taxes on income and profits. However, people who profit the most usually succeed in weaseling their way out of paying large income taxes.

thus my conclusion: if you don't solve the tax problem, you ain't gonna solve the income problem.

Only one arable land owner on the planet is never going to happen in real life. So, that has to be assumed, for this model to work. But even assuming that, Why would they sell half their production? Why sell 50M @ $10 per year when they can sell 100M @ $10? The answer, of course, is that no sane monopolist would intentionally limit his profits when the idea behind monopoly is to maximize profits. If the people have the money, they can get the food. You're arguing that first, an impossible situation would arise, and then, that the person able to benefit from that impossible situation would choose not to. And why he chooses not to, that's the best part. You claim it is out of greed.

The point that you've missed is that the company that gets to the stage where it owns a market completely has no reason to sell 100M @ $2 if it has the power to sell 50M @ $10 over two years. If only 50M are sold into the market, and they're consumed, and it's a food monopoly, 50M have no way of buying that food. Only 1 arable land owner on the planet. The people cannot eat money, no matter how much they have.

This is still off topic, because this problem is irrelevant to how much money those people have.

You're missing the point. I've bolded the parts of my previous statement that might help you get it. A food seller cares about selling his food. The shareholders in a food selling company only care about getting profit from the company. This means that all the company cares about is selling as much of its food as possible, for the best price possible.

The shareholders, employees, farmers, etc. of the food company only find useful 50 million people. So what? Those 50 million people will find the other 50 million people useful in some manner. Money circulates, it does not make one transfer and then stop. Everybody needs something, and the 50 million people can't get the necessary services and products from the food company, it's too busy providing food. Even doctors go to other doctors when they're sick.

I'm not the OP, the OP was from Germany, I'm also not from Germany, but I believe that's what the OP was aiming for, yes. I don't really see the difference between what you said and what I said, but ok, "doesn't need help with obtaining". That doesn't remove the fact that he still "needs" it to live, in the other context of need.

Firstly, I very much doubt that person would say no. There might be a few with principles so lofty as that to be the case, but not many.

Secondly, need isn't the issue. To use a metaphor, how important is not needing help to climb stairs if you live in a stairless society? This proposal is about having that stairless society, for things everyone knows the society can easily and sustainably provide.

Those with a job will still fulfill whatever desires their hearts can imagine, including investing in capital and shares and have a life beyond subsistence in retirement, and they will still be far better off than those who only rely on the basic income.


Yes, in the first paragraph you're describing how things currently are, not where they are heading. I'm talking about the assumption you display in the second paragraph that companies are allowed to grow (as they naturally will) to own as much as possible, such that they control the entire food supply of a nation. These companies do not necessarily have to be public companies. So one arable land owner produces the food for 100 million people, and all of it's vested shareholders spend every penny they make as much as possible, and only 50 million people are found to be useful to them.

Since I made those remarks, I've realized it's off topic since its about "necessity control" and not really relevant to this discussion. One way or another that food must be accessible for a flat basic income be calculable.