Topic: Basic income guarantee - opinions&criticism welcome - page 8. (Read 14403 times)

You have misunderstood, in this scenario he would get the basic income + what he earns by working, netting 1310$ + 1412$ = 2722 $ a month. Minus a little taxes on the earned 1412 $ money. So no matter what, working always is benefactory.

The only way I would find a minimum income even partially workable is if the minimum was paid to everyone, working or not.  And here's why:

Most people (at least in the US) start out their working life at minimum wage jobs.  You know, scooping ice cream or something.  Minimum wage in Oregon, for example, even full time, would only net $1,412.66/month.  1,000 Euros is currently worth $1,310 USD, so we'll go with that.  So, a person new to the workforce can work a full time, 40 hour work week and only be paid an additional $102/month?  Not worth it, so they elect to just not work at all.  And they live their entire life not working, because the increased $102/month isn't worth spending so much time in the workplace.

So, this minimum income of $1,310/month must be paid to everyone in order to at least partially uphold the incentive to work in the first place.  Even still, the incentive to work for wants is much lower than the incentive to work for needs, so society would end up with fewer workers.  Especially on the lower-end of the payscale, where the added benefit is smaller as a percentage of overall income than at the higher-end of the payscale.

I can definitely see the case for a minimum income far into the future, when we truly do have very little need for non-specialized workers.  When retail stores are as automated as a vending machine, farms can farm themselves, cars are produced with hardly any human labor involved and drive themselves autonomously, and packages are delivered to and from your residence without human involvement.  I can see all of this being technologically viable in the future, and all of it puts tens of millions of workers out of a job.

You could argue that those people need to better themselves to survive, but I think the expectations for betterment and innovation can only go so far.  The world would only need so many robot programmers.  But, I think we are still far from achieving such an autonomous society, so I think Germany is trying this too soon.

Another problem is, once the majority begins taking money from the minority, when does it stop?  If the majority of a society is living off this minimum income, why not vote to increase it?  Etc, etc.

Well, I have to say it would be a lot better then our current welfare system. Since people would spend "their" money better then the goverment. So no need for public Operas, culture houses, kindergardens, hospitals, school etc.

My main concern would be how high the basic income would be, and how to stop it from increasing too much.

Right now, we could reduce our taxes by half, from 60-70% to 35% and still give every single citizen, including childrens. 100 000 NOK (17500$) a year. People who live from social support gets 85 000 now.

We actualy have a party here in Norway proposing the idea, but very small about 4-5% off the votes.

This is silly.  Even in such a society where robots can produce all wealth, a basic income would make no sense since everything would be basically free.

Also, if you think such a basic income would make sense in such a society (and it wouldn't), why would you like to create one in the current society, where robots do obviously not produce all wealth??

I wrote in an other thread that even in a post-scarcity, robot driven economy, a basic income would not solve anything because people would buy and sell their "income right".

I was wrong.

Now that I think about it, a post-scarcity economy is possible if and only if robots are capable of producing themselves, so that robots can own to everyone.  Post-scarcity economy must also mean that there is no scarcity of whatever provides post-scarcity, i.e. robots.  A bit like what we are starting to see with 3D-printers.

But when this happens, price of everything will drop like a rock and your idea of a basic income is just futile.

Production, and even a large amount of maintenance, can be handled by robots. Not research. There are a great many jobs, even labor-intensive ones, which require a degree of judgment well beyond the capability of anything short of AI. Until we get at least human-level AI, there will still need to be humans in the decision loop, if only to answer the question, "Where do I put this?"

If all jobs that require repetitive, dangerous, or distasteful labor are automated, there will be no need for human laborers to do those jobs, but there will be plenty of other jobs to do... if nothing else, it frees people up for artistic endeavors. Remember that farming is one of those industries which has always been at the forefront of technology, and would therefor be heavily automated. Food would be cheap, plentiful, and may never touch a human hand until you pick it up. Starvation would be low on the list of worries. All a basic income guarantee would do is subsidize the lazy at the cost of the creative.

Again, the Luddite fallacy. There'll always be things that humans can do better than machines. Even if robots build other robots, do you want to let them decide what we want, where we would want to be heading to as a human race? So there'll still be high demand for people who can do the meta-programming necessary to make robots building robots do what would be in our best interest.

Also, again, market economy and automated society are not at all incompatible. No central planning to collect and distribute basic income needed. In a reasonably functioning economy, things will become ridiculously cheap in such a scenario, so you probably can restrict your work time to merely a few hours a month if you want to.

People would starve because the robots were keeping all the food for themselves? What would they do with it? Or because the starving people wouldn't command the robots to make food? Or because the robots would rebel? In this unrealistic scenario, what would you need a basic income for? Why would the robots even want money in exchange for the food they make? What would they do with it?

I think basic income guarantee is a must for all societies in the future. Imagine if all of our production/research is handled by robots, and even the maintenance of the robots are handled by other robots. Basically imagine there will be zero need for human labor in the society, how would humans enjoy the fruit of these advance of technology? You would need some kind of basic income guarantee, otherwise everyone would be unemployed and starve.

1/ It reduces the incentive to work for food, medical bills and what the bureaucracy deem the economy can already easily provide for all. It doesn't reduce the incentive to work to be better than one's peers, which is also a huge human motivator. There was a study somewhere that found that most of the people against minimum wage increases are those who are close to the minimum wage, where an increase would actually mean they're on the minimum wage themselves. Silly ideas of social status and position among peers.

2/ Yes it does, but this decision is made with the intention to raise the standard of living on the very bottom. It's a social decision, really, at the expense of utilizing important resources like food and healthcare now instead of saving them for later.

3/ Do you refer to the possibility of drought in this statement? That is, natural disasters might mean there isn't enough food to go around anyway, so no many how much money people are given for free, they'll never be able to buy it? I'm sure there could be clauses to cater for this (some national emergency storage or whatever)


Incentive to move forward where? Where are we "going" so adventurously as a species that it requires us to have no free time? If a society can completely feed, shelter, clothe, commune and entertain itself easily, as well as allow the opportunity for outstanding individual achievements and recognition, what more is there to ask for? Isn't that the win scenario for civilization?

What makes you think people won't go to school any more? Even if they don't, what does it matter? If there is no pressing need as a society to produce unnecessary farmers or doctors or manufacturers, why waste the energy?

The film Idiocracy was not about people not going to school, it was about smart people not having children and dumb people having them because the focus of society was on money, not silly things like going to Mars or Alpha Centauri.


By saying "Since less people will be working to produce, society as a whole would earn less", I think he meant "more people will be on zero income vs some income", not that the total amount earned by society is less.

To elaborate, if there are only 50 possible jobs to sustainably produce everything imaginable that 100 people need every year, what will the 50 unemployed people do to earn those things off the ones working? Innovation is really quite difficult, as is leadership in business, and people *like* working 5 days a week. If there's nothing that the 50 employed want from the unemployed, the unemployed will have a most common choice of taking by force or starving. He's proposing an agreement within society to force upon itself the total distribution of certain things, providing they are plentiful anyway. Getting everyone to work half the time would also do the job, if you can convince people already with the jobs to sit around and not work for more than half the week. If they insist on working more, then those people who aren't good at innovating or leading or stealing will starve, and each society can make it's own choices on whether they're fine with that or not.

As for the actual OP; We're doomed by the lack of phosphorus, as far I know, to continue this massive ramp up of population on easy food. If technology can keep it going, and population itself can be forced onto a globally sustainable level somehow (it will anyway, I suppose), I think this is easily achievable. Australia is actually pretty close to this right now. The only difference is here you can't get welfare unless you're actively seeking employment. It's barely enough to survive on, though, so either not enough is being produced (it is), or the culture's sentiment isn't enough to go the next step, which is huge barrier.

Don't forget that we are working as hard as we can to continue desertification and minimize that arable land area.  Go Monsanto!

To quote myself from the OP:  "the unemployment subsidies + underlying bureaucracy in Germany can be redistributed among the 80 million Germans at the rate of about 12.5k EUR per year. So 1000k EUR of basic income guarantee per month is realistic. This can be further expanded with several different approaches to taxation." I have to declare that I lifted this quote from a politician's mouth, so its veracity is not certain. But I'm sure there's at least a grain of truth in it.
Other ideas are to have a larger income tax, or a larger VAT tax.

It seems like a lots of money, who is going pay for it? (taxpayers? banks? you tax bad language? you print money? ...)
Libertarian hydra still approves it - as a replacement of the current overly complicated social system.

I once purchased a 99 cent zine at an "anarchist" cafe in north carolina that was entitled "Peer to Peer Theory" (something like that), by a fellow named Michel Bauwens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bauwens .

I remember being fairly interested as I read through its insights, which generally mirrored many insights discussed on this forum, until I got to the end where a similar "subsistence wage" was proposed as a way to finance a new post-corporate paradigm of open source programming and development. For all the problems America has, its interesting that the mainland European intelligentsia is still hung up on these old statist vocabularies and ideals that continue to plague their economies and policymaking. What more evidence does one need, what more of an argument as to the power and impetus of purely free market conformity to Nature, and to the artificiality and systemic weakness of central planning, than the incredible success of Bitcoin so far, amidst aborted alternatives, all semi-statist and laughably ill conceived?

The European academic elite need to extinguish their queasiness for the notion of natural, spontaneous order, action through inaction, wu-wei, and all the other articulations of this fundamental principle. I think it may reduce to a general fear of the ethical foundations for such a system, where actors achieve harmony by helping themselves. But really this is not the case. Any proper understanding of modern day hacker/open-source development culture, for example, will show that these people don't act directly for their own benefit, or for the benefit of others, but rather for the fulfillment of a creative objective, of which all actors benefit indirectly.

Dude, again, turn off your computer and go away because you're using the output of these people that you don't want.
You can't have it both ways and be serious about it.
Nothing you say will NOT make you look as an incredible hypocrite with double standards.
Go live in your farm with your orchad but stay the hell away from modern society because you have denounced thousands of years of development.
Show some character.

Receiving money doing nothing??  Sure, what's not to like?    

Actually I've been doing it for some time now.  I use something amazing:  it's called "shares" or "stocks".  Basically it's a part of a company and when you have some, you can get a portion of the profit of the company, even if you don't actually work in this company.  Ain't that cool?  

Go buy some and join the club!

this

Bureaucracy is growing like cancer in Germany and is already suffocating the country. Like many things the welfare system is just too bureaucratic. There does not have to be a difference in the financial result for anyone compared to the current situation, basic income would just make things much easier and probably also have some positive psychological side effects.

Of course there needs to be something (majority vote?? ??) to keep the basic income from ever increasing.

In case you think I am exaggerating: I took this picture last Saturday evening.

I will not deny there may come a time that land will be to expensive to own, but there will always be a need to harvest its resources. I consider myself an early adopter in this regard.

I do not deny global warming. I deny Man having anything at all to do with it. If I have ever spoken differently it was by mistake.

The earth has had constant temp and co2 fluctuations since its beginning, and certainly so before humans ever existed, at much higher rates and degrees than exist now. That is science. That is fact.

Aren't you the Global Warming denier? Anyway, your theories are a few cards short of a full deck. From your point of view, it all works the way you see it. In truth, the dynamics work a little bit differently. Assuming everyone was equal in ability, knowledge and tools, it still doesn't work the way you think it does.

Each additional person on this planet requires more land than the last.

Think about that. Think very hard about that.

Each parcel of land on this planet has a maximum productivity level. Those parcels with the most potential productivity typically get used first. The next parcel of land needs to be slightly larger than the last to equal the productivity of the last. And so on. True, you can be silly and point to specific examples, but that hardly changes the scenario in aggregate. Anyway, after you confessed your views on Global Warming, I realized you don't look at facts, but rather propaganda which fits how you think the world should operate. Nature doesn't need to agree with your ideology, nor does it.

This makes no sense. If society produces more, why would society earn less?

I benefit from the MONEY I PAY for the PRIVATE products and services, NOT the PUBLIC money stolen from me for the lazy and weak through proxy, under penalty of death should I resist the theft. It's called a contract. Same goes for my telephone service, cars, trucks, tractors, computers, etc.

Stop listening to the propaganda.

Your water and sewage payments pay for water and sewage infrastructure.

Your electric bill pays for electric grid infrastructure.

Your cable bill pays for tv, internet, and phone infrastructure.

Gas tax pays for roads. I get to select when I want to help improve thge roads by my choice to buy gas.

You pay for the things you need many times over.