Topic: Creating a guaranteed minimum income through crypto-coins - page 3. (Read 14970 times)

Here, as you bolded, people see increased demand, and so increase production to meet that demand and to therefore profit from it, that is a standard economic principle. But the minimum income idea is reversed. With the minimum income idea you are adding money to the system without the prerequisite work. To put it another way, some people may do some work (earning crypto) to give to everyone. But that work at earning crypto comes at the expense of any and all other productive work that those people could have done, so the net result is no real change. They are just earning something of value, which is the same as if they earn dollars, mine copper, mine gold, or mine bitcoins.



The standard capitalism approach isn't going to change one scintilla nor will basic economics be flipped on its head because these things ARE simple capitalism and simple basic economics. Nothing that has been suggested here changes the simple economic principles involved: people respond to incentives, or given a choice of two exactly equal things, people will always choose the cheapest one for them.

3D printing is no different. It just means that for some items it will become cheaper to home-produce them than it is to buy them already factory made. Trekkie utopia fails because not everyone will do as Picard says. I certainly won't, and neither will anyone that thinks as I do. That doesn't prevent you from doing it, have at it. It means that I will not participate and will deal with Trekkies as I see fit. I will be the Big Pharma that Cuba (the Trekkies) buys its drugs from.

Certainly, over time, some things become cheaper given reductions in the amount of labor and capital used to produce them. Conversely, other things become more expensive as the reverse is true, given the scarcity of all resources. But what you said above isn't an improvement on capitalism, it IS capitalism, because the economic principles remain the same. There may just come a time where most basic necessities are very very cheap, but that is directly a result of simple economics and capitalism, not some perceived sea change in how labor is used or because some people donate their money to everyone else, no matter what the form that donation takes, labor, dollars, bitcoins, litecoins, diamonds, or whatever.

if satoshi comes back and does this, it would be epic

But "more product" can't just appear from nowhere, it requires labor, therefore there is an increase in the total output of the economy, which is the intent of the minimum income--at least from my perspective.


I think Cryddit was saying that it is becoming possible to be a producer of libre knowledge and innovation. 3D printing is often alluded to as the next step, a Star Trekkian utopia is usually the final. There is no question as technology has advanced that economic output has shifted on the spectrum from being physical-labor intensive to knowledge-labor intensive. The adage of "as more robots take our jobs, we will need more robotic engineers" oversimplifies but does apply. It's no secret that more educated people tend to make more money. But if the education and the knowledge of production (and possibly even means of) becomes free or really cheap, the standard-capitalism approach is probably not going to work very well anymore. "Basic economics" will be flipped on its head. Surely you have to concede the possibility that capitalism can be improved (by a large increase of GWP per labor unit), and such things are more likely/guaranteed to happen as knowledge becomes more powerful and cheaper. Those who are "giving it away" are working to accelerate that process.

Sure. This is why Kennedy reduced the highest marginal income tax rate from 90% to 50% (which is still far too high to encourage productivity). Who in their right mind seeks to work any longer when they are only keeping 10% of their pay for any further work?

No, I don't think anyone is advocating people not producing anything, but they aren't addressing the effects these ideas have on the cost of living.

It is like people who think "we" have to pay taxes to "help" people, and corporations must pay higher taxes for the same reason. They don't address these issues:

1) Let us say you pay $100 in tax. Here in the US, that $100 is instantly worth about $60, after taking off DoD, interest on the debt, and the cost of gov't itself. It's actually worth less than that, given that there is a Social Security "Trust Fund" which isn't a trust fund at all, it is just the gov't loaning itself money. Every try to loan yourself money? Let me know how that works. So paying taxes to "help" or build roads or job training or whatever just means that for every dollar you pay, you get back a little more than 50 cents. That's just brilliant mathematics, but people line to hell up to keep spouting that line.

2) Corporations do not pay one dime in taxes, ever. Every single penny that is taken from a corporation in taxes is passed directly to the consumer because it is just another cost. Nike sells a pair of shoes for $10.00. Tax Nike 10% and the shoes are now priced at $10.10. Tax Nike 90%, and the shoes are now priced at $19.00 because the taxes are no different than the costs of the leather, laces, rubber, labor, et cetera. More importantly, that price increase hurts the poorest, the most because the price of shoes is a much higher percentage of their income.

These are not abstractions on a discussion board, these are how things work in practice. Without addressing these issues when advocating higher corporate taxes (for example) your position lacks credibility. Similarly, if you don't address the problems I've noted with "free" crypto currency skewing the system, that plan can't work either.

If people can do better by not working than they can by working, then yeah, they'll produce nothing.  I don't think anybody's been advocating that.  No matter what happens, working has to keep on showing a marginal profit, and preferably a pretty steep one, over not working. 

Still.  What is, is, what can be, can be, and what will be, will be.  It doesn't matter whether anybody believes it now.  All you can do if you believe in something, is try it.

No, I am noting the main principle behind economics: people respond to incentives. It is not a law like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but for all intents an purposes it is the same. No one here has shown any evidence to the contrary.

The predictions generally are quite simple as well, as long as they are based on valid principles. Over mathmaticalizing them is just going to make them less accurate.


I am saying "no, it won't" and providing the reason why, I have said it repeatedly: X minimum income has to be earned by someone's labor first before it can be guaranteed as a minimum to someone else. Once it is distributed, the net result is that the prices of good and services adjust accordingly.


Except every post here has been precisely to contest this. I don't know how may different ways to say that if you (your terms) increase in currency circulation at the basic necessities level, the cost/price of those basic necessities increases accordingly. Again, principle: more money means more demand, more demand means higher prices, which means more product is made available, which means prices fall, which means more demand, and this happens continuously and very quickly such that the net result no difference.


Criminy. The point was to show that the libre- or standard- are just capitalism. There is only 1 spectrum. From 100% private ownership of labor (capitalism) to 100% state ownership of labor (communism), yes, every system falls somewhere in that spectrum, including your libre-capitalism. Which likely falls closer to the communist side than the capitalist side.

I haven't ignored your conclusions, or anyone elses. I've asked them to support their conclusions, at a most basic level: how any new scheme will somehow escape the basic principles of economics? They don't show reasoning behind their idea that somehow crypto currencies operate outside of basic economics.

You *may* be right, sometimes, with Wiki or Khan-type things. Like I said, they are significantly fewer costs to sitting around at the computer than there are in creating products. But by no means is that evidence that libre- is always, or even all that often, better/more effective than standard-.

Look, it has been proven time and time again:

When you pay people to be poor, they tend to stay poor

Poverty becomes their job, my friends.  When it's raining outside and you've partied all night you can choose to

a) go out and earn some money
or
b) sleep in and party again tonight because you know working people are sending you a check

Long term poverty tends to be a choice.  We have all seen 3rd generation welfare families.  'Cmon...three generations of people couldn't make the effort to uplift themselves?  Really???

Need money - come to my place and mow my lawn, rake leaves, weed the garden.  What? No takers?  Oh, the poverty!

Get a job or make one.  It's that simple.

Hell, I know an obese "retarded" guy with a limp named Lenny who makes the rounds every day at the local businesses - he gets them coffee, donuts, lunch etc and they pay him to do it.

Are you saying most "poor" people do not have the skills and energy of a fat, physically impaired retarded guy?

Give me a break.  Long term poverty is a choice.

I said specifically "in theory", as there is some logic behind the idea. Whether or not it works in practice is impossible to say as it has never really been tested on a large scale. I am willing to entertain the notion, you are apparently not and are the one laying down economic "laws" in a notoriously difficult to predict field of study.


I'm not sure what your point is other than agreeing with me. No one here is suggesting that the government maintain this system, it is being talked about in light of cryptocurrency. When the government and/or banks screw up, credit crises would presumably have a much less disastrous effect with something like a minimum income. The availability of credit/money being reduced is the heart of every recession, a minimum income would propose to reduce the impact of those corrections. But you can go ahead and say "no it won't" with all the emphasis you like, it does not prove you correct either.


This sounds like a conclusory statement if I've ever seen one. Of course there will be variations in supply and demand. I said that it would be easier to provide the production necessary to support those unemployed with those very same people via the increase in currency circulation at the basic necessities level. You did not say anything to contest this.


An approach that is not capitalism is not necessarily socialism or communism. I made a simple conclusion that you again ignored: the labor value of the libre approach (call it libre-capitalism if you want) produces more GWP per unit than the (standard-)capitalistic approach. I might be wrong, but the paragraphs you wrote do not contest it, they only provide some wide definition of capitalism.

A lot of you like just posting conclusory statements as if that suffices for argument and reasoning. If anyone is unemployed, from tank wipe to CEO, it is because they have not found someone else who values their particular set of skills enough in order to trade with them yet. While there may be some economic fluctuations in the absence of government meddling, ANY government meddling skews peoples choices such that they do things they would not otherwise do, and as the gov't meddling changes, the corrections (the returns to equilibrium) have far more negative impact than they otherwise would have. A minimum income still has to be ~earned~ by someone in order to give it to someone else.

Even your last sentence in that paragraph demonstrates that you understand how the principle works, but you are only applying it selectively. Give everyone $1MM, give everyone $40 bucks a week, give everyone $100 value in crypto currency every week, it doesn't matter. With the $1MM, milk spikes to $40K a gallon because demand is so very high. Then, as producers ramp up the production to take advantage of such huge short term gains, the supply of milk increases, thus putting downward pressure on pressure on prices. As prices fall, people buy more, prices rise, and the system works exactly as it does now. Give everyone one of the other two mentioned above, and the system reacts exactly the same on a much smaller scale. This is a continual process with every single good and service, it happens now, and it doesn't ever stop.



What is your reasoning for the belief that x venture has spread "far more effectively than the capitalistic approach"? In actual fact, it is PRECISELY the "capitalistic approach" that spread those ventures so well—people chose to use the internet/Wiki with all their flaws instead of paying for an expensive set of far more accurate, but ever more quickly outdated books, because they were cheaper. That is very definition of capitalism: people choose to contract freely (or not) with others. In this case, they chose to stop dealing with Encyclopaedia Britannica, and to start dealing with the internet or Wikipedia. That IS capitalism.

Criminy, look at the "free healthcare" in Cuba. Where does that country get its drugs, syringes, scalpels, and CT scanners? Do they all share the work? Do the fellow travellers labor them into existence? Do people collectively create them in the Cuban Big Pharmas, big medical supply houses, or Cuban Big Technology companies? No. The country BUYS every single bit of it on the open market using Capitalism—it contracts (or not) freely with some corporations and not others to purchase what it needs.

That certainly ain't Communism/Socialism.

There are a lot of people that aren't working now. There shouldn't be any reason why a society can't support its most down-trodden, because those very people could be doing the labor that supports it, but they are unemployed. This is most often due to economic fluctuations which are typically set in motion by piss poor government policy or machinations of the banks. A minimum income would, in theory, help reduce the impact of such things by keeping currency flowing at the basic necessities level. Certainly there are a lot of subtleties involved, but it is definitely not "giving everyone $1MM". There would no doubt be inflation on luxury items, but the increased demand to basic necessities would simply require and inspire the ramping up of production (or reducing waste) which of course will require additional labor.


I think the point is that the labor put into such ventures has its value multiplied and spread across the world far more effectively than the capitalistic approach. I don't think anyone is denying the labor costs. It just means a larger increase in GWP per dollar of labor invested.

There's no such thing as free, anyone who tell you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

This certainly isn't true simply because you state it as a conclusion without any reasoning or support whatsoever. It has never been possible up to now, because it isn't possible. There are no new conditions that change the principle that the only thing of value a human has to offer in trade for money (or, in other words, in trade for the labor of others) is their own labor. They have nothing else to offer. Ever.

There are a lot of unknowns, that is true, but certainly not with the principle I just mentioned. What is actually unknown is how long people will cling to beliefs that they cannot support.

There are new conditions there haven't been before.  It's never been possible up to now, but we are moving into unknown territory. 

“In principle, the guaranteed minimum income thing can work.”

Please enumerate this principle?


“It's like a graduated wealth tax, with the lowest brackets actually corresponding to a negative tax. It'll become necessary as robotic production advances, because fewer and fewer people can be employed in production. It's in the interest of business owners because they can produce their crap with smaller numbers of employees, but they want to sell to the much larger population of people who aren't getting paid by them anymore. They can't sell their crap unless a larger segment of the population than can still be employed producing it have money to buy crap.”

There is an infinite amount of work that can be done, even if that meant building a Dyson sphere or something crazy. Which means that people can always be employed in production, even if that production changes. “Fewer and fewer people” employed in x production just means that surplus labor can be employed producing something else, as is always the case. IF there were so many robots that so many people weren’t working, that would put significant downward pressure on prices, such that more people could buy.

You see, the robots AREN’T cheaper/better generally than humans making cars (for example) but the humans beings decided to put enormous upward pressure on human labor costs. Overtime, healthcare, outrageous hourly rates for mindless work, OSHA regs, vacation, sick time, pensions, 401(k), time of day differentials, bonuses, labor disputes, et cetera, drove costs so high that multimillion-dollar machines became cheaper than all that BS. Smart plan, AFL-CIO/Teamsters, way to price yourselves out of jobs.


“But it only works that way if money itself doesn't represent debt anymore and people aren't under the spur to work slavishly to pay back their debt. And as we know, there is no form of money that isn't made exclusively out of debt -- oh wait, now there is, isn't there?”

No, there isn’t. There are mining costs, electricity costs, opportunity costs, et cetera ad infinitum. Money is just a medium of exchange for labor, period. Whether you work for dollars, or work for somefreecoin, the system remains the same. You trade your labor for value, regardless. Crypto currencies don’t change that. To earn crypto, you trade your labor for electricity and miners, and all the rest of it, just like you do for dollars.


“The free software movement is composed of people who produce value for free, just because they enjoy creating things and believe that someone *should* create the things they do. The Khan academy provides everyone who wants it and is willing to do the work with a world-class education for free. Wikipedia and online lookups have taken over from pretty much every publisher of encyclopedias and reference materials by providing a crowd-sourced free service.”

Except these things aren’t free either, you note it yourself “willing to do the work,” and there remains competition for value and for worth. 1) You have to pay for computer time, access, et cetera. 2) You have to be able to afford the time itself. 3) There are opportunity costs involved with going to school vs. any thing else you could be doing with your labor. A Khan Academy education (which may be “world-class” I don’t know) is worthless compared to a four-year degree at even a crappy accredited school. Even “I’m a Phoenix” (talk about a crap degree) is worth a LOT compared to “I’m a Khan”, and just try to get a job at DuPont with your world-class Khan chemistry classes on your resume. Should that change, then it will put downward pressure on prices at real schools and prices will come to equilibrium.

But neither Wiki or Khan are not free in other ways as well. SOMEONE has to put time, effort, and resources into creating and maintaining them, and that means labor and money and the costs associated with the other productive uses that such resources could have been put to. Servers, infrastructure, maintenance, physical spaces for machines, cooling, power, content, fact-checking, this list is endless, and Khan and Wiki and similar have all cost enormous amounts of time, effort, and money to exist and keep existing.

The point of all of this is to illustrate the issue: no matter where a money comes from, it is simply a representation of the value of your labor. If, in a society, there is x amount labor that results in y amount money, and you inject some z money, the net result is an equilibrium of y and z money for goods and services, which skews x labor as well.


“The very existence of such people and institutions demonstrates that even given a basic income, there are human beings who won't just sit on their fat asses and produce nothing, because the creative impulse is just too strong. In fact I believe such people are in the majority; working for extra income can be purely voluntary and I think most people would still do it. Maybe ten or twenty hours a week instead of forty or sixty, but more than half of them would still do it, just to avoid boredom, or because they want World of Warcraft access, Television, and more than 400 square feet of living space. And of course there'd still be obsessive types who put in sixty or eighty hour weeks building businesses, because building businesses is what they love to do, what they take pride and identity in. In fact that pretty much describes the current set of small business owners and CEOs in American business.”

No real issues here. But there are reasons why you don’t see a volunteer version of T-Mobile or Motorola, mostly because the labor involved is of orders of magnitude more intensive than sitting at your computer and marshaling others (Wiki) or writing things down (Khan), which almost anyone can do.
 

“The problem up to now is that such people haven't been able to be productive enough to provide a meaningful small income for everyone. But that's changing. Information is replicable essentially for free, and that makes the producers of free software, and the producers of the recorded lectures and interactive software of the Khan academy, and the people producing designs for automatic production shops on Thingiverse, productive enough that these new institutions are now significant contributors to the world economy. Although measuring their contribution baffles economists a little currently because the price point is zero. As automatic production facilities get better, it's not that big a stretch to imagine just downloading patterns for whatever you want to produce locally. Humans can exist in a society where the basics are provided by robotic means and professional production is restricted to luxuries, land, and things not easily autoproduced.”

Except that, of course, nothing noted here is free. And it doesn’t baffle even one economist because the first thing they learn is that everything is scarce, and therefore it is not free. EVER, for the reasons noted above.

They may not always agree on everything, but they certainly agree on that.

In principle, the guaranteed minimum income thing can work. 

It's like a graduated wealth tax, with the lowest brackets actually corresponding to a negative tax.  It'll become necessary as robotic production advances, because fewer and fewer people can be employed in production.  It's in the interest of business owners because they can produce their crap with smaller numbers of employees, but they want to sell to the much larger population of people who aren't getting paid by them anymore.  They can't sell their crap unless a larger segment of the population than can still be employed producing it have money to buy crap. 

But it only works that way if money itself doesn't represent debt anymore and people aren't under the spur to work slavishly to pay back their debt.  And as we know, there is no form of money that isn't made exclusively out of debt -- oh wait, now there is, isn't there?

The free software movement is composed of people who produce value for free, just because they enjoy creating things and believe that someone *should* create the things they do.  The Khan academy provides everyone who wants it and is willing to do the work with a world-class education for free.  Wikipedia and online lookups have taken over from pretty much every publisher of encyclopedias and reference materials by providing a crowd-sourced free service.

The very existence of such people and institutions demonstrates that even given a basic income, there are human beings who won't just sit on their fat asses and produce nothing, because the creative impulse is just too strong.  In fact I believe such people are in the majority; working for extra income can be purely voluntary and I think most people would still do it.  Maybe ten or twenty hours a week instead of forty or sixty, but more than half of them would still do it, just to avoid boredom, or because they want World of Warcraft access, Television, and more than 400 square feet of living space.  And of course there'd still be obsessive types who put in sixty or eighty hour weeks building businesses, because building businesses is what they love to do, what they take pride and identity in.  In fact that pretty much describes the current set of small business owners and CEOs in American business. 

The problem up to now is that such people haven't been able to be productive enough to provide a meaningful small income for everyone.  But that's changing.  Information is replicable essentially for free, and that makes the producers of free software, and the producers of the recorded lectures and interactive software of the Khan academy, and the people producing designs for automatic production shops on Thingiverse, productive enough that these new institutions are now significant contributors to the world economy.  Although measuring their contribution baffles economists a little currently because the price point is zero.  As automatic production facilities get better, it's not that big a stretch to imagine just downloading patterns for whatever you want to produce locally.  Humans can exist in a society where the basics are provided by robotic means and professional production is restricted to luxuries, land, and things not easily autoproduced.

 

Quite simply, I have not made the point that giving a basic income would drive your currency to zero. I have said that if you give everyone in the country $1MM, the price of milk jumps to $40K, everyone AND the poor become millionaires, and the poor, while millionaires, are no better off in standard of living than they were before your scheme. That's great that they now have millions, but they still cannot afford much beyond basic subsistence.

It doesn't matter whether you give them your currency or dollars or anything else, nor does it matter if you only gave everyone only $100 a week. Your coin value doesn't drop to zero, the prices of everything very quickly adjust under upward pressure to equilibrium via supply and demand, meaning net result to the poor is zero.


It IS trivially obvious that it cannot work, but that doesn't mean economists (or anyone else) accepts that because it ends their ignorant world view. Many economists still don't accept simple, basic principles in economics, because that isn't how they think the world should work. Think Keynes, or Paul Krugman, for example. They WANT to believe (like Mulder) and they will perform all sorts of gymnastics to do so, hence the relatively recent development of over-mathematicalizing economics. Go back to ancient Rome and see what Augustus, Diocletian, and Constantine didn't learn about taxes and economics and what few have learned since.

 
Sure it is. Think Underwriters Laboratories, no one has to get their products certified as safe by UL, yet companies worldwide line up to do so. They are not a gov't organization, nor created by law, so using the certification is entirely voluntary. You would have the YourCoin Certification Association and that is what it would do—certify that x person is who they say they are and then generate public/private keys or whatever for them.

Voluntary action just means you aren’t forced by the gov’t to do something. That you have the YCCA doesn’t mean they are “forced” to do something, they voluntarily choose to get YCCA certified in order to participate in your scheme.

Quite simply, it is not true that giving a basic income to everyone would drive the currency's value to zero.  That would only happen if the distributed coins were not withdrawn from the economy.   This proposal withdraws TheCoin at a rate such that the number of TheCoin in circulation quickly approaches a constant per capita.

Do you think so many economists would have seriously proposed a universal basic income, if it were trivially obvious that it could not work?

And the identity problem is not nearly as simple as you think,  provided only voluntary action (no government) is involved.

How will I submit my DNA proof and to whom?  And at what cost?  What if someone else submits my DNA before I do?  What if someone assigned to verify DNA uniqueness decides to charge a small fee to submit fake DNA verifications?

Anyone can generate any number of public/private keys, allowing them to generate new "identities" as often as they wish - precisely the problem we're trying to address.

In the most general sense, it is desirable. Of course. That would be really nice, like ending hunger or not squishing kittens.

However, the costs will outweigh the benefits because your biggest problem (ID aside, that could probably be done with DNA and cryptology, public/private key, PGP, et cetera) is how to hand out free money such that the net result is not exactly the same as the market result available prior to peeps gettin' their free dough.

There's no point to all this not inconsiderable effort if the net result is zero. That is far more important. How will you address that issue?

The point of this discussion is not to evaluate whether a "minimum income" altcoin is desirable, but rather how it could best be made functional.  If you don't agree that it is desirable, I would ask that you consider creating a separate discussion thread to debate that.

There is a technical issue with implementing a minimum income scheme using TheCoin, which has a potential solution at the "strategic" level, but which needs to be examined at a more tactical level.  Namely, how to prevent rampant use of multiple false identities for extra distributions. 

The strategic level solution to that, which a few have agreed sounds right, is to require a pledge to do (very light) work validating identity of other claimants, as a condition of accepting a coin distribution   (If you can think of a better approach, that would also be welcome.  Do keep in mind that this is intended to work world-wide, without government intervention.) 

The tactical element, of course, is "How would validation be done?"  with particular focus on keeping down the complexity.  And that's not a trivial problem.  As soon as one proposes some obvious method of validating identity of claimants, one also exposes fairly obvious ways to cheat that method.   

For example:  suppose the validation method was to have a randomly assigned person who lives near a claimant, go visit the latter, check that that person lives under the claimed name at the claimed address, take a photo of the person.  But if the latter is a crook, what if he offers the 'inspector' half of his weekly take under the false name?   Now there are some obvious counter moves to that - say always having two random persons check on a claim, and penalizing someone who falsely makes multiple coins or deliberately validates a false identity.  But THAT adds the complex question of how to determine whether someone merely made a mistake, or intentionally validated a false identity.  And what if the validation agent who says the identity is false, happened to know and hate the person they were asked to validate?  Take the thing to a conventional court?  What if this is in a country with a poor legal system?  Do we then add some sort of "coin court" with judges and juries and that whole mess?   Sent three random validation agents and if 1 of them says the claim is false, send another three?

I hope that illustrates the sort of problems that still need to be solved.   You are welcome to make creative suggestions for validating claimants.  Or maybe a way to avoid that requirement altogether.

Note that even once workable methods are conceived, there would still be a technical implementation effort required.

I hope that answers your question.

Agreed.
 
Okay. So can they kick out the Dutch? Black people? Women? More importantly, would those kicked out, be forbidden from dealing with members of the group, or vice versa?

So what are you waiting for?

But the larger point was that allmost universally these ideas are basically Ponzi schemes. While certainly there are economies of scale, if 10 people cannot afford the healthcare for themselves, then neither will 50 people, or 100, or a million, or in the US, 340 million, especially since the money used (taxes) loses 50+ percent of it's value off of the top.

This is one of the issues that people wanting "free money (anything)" schemes refuse to address.