
Universal Basic Income Is a Neoliberal Plot to Make You Poorer - kawera
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/universal-basic-income-neoliberal-plot-make-you-poorer
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jackmott
It isn't as if it is a secret that at the root, the goal of ideas like these
is to reduce income disparity.

But if the HackerNews Libertarian Army would prefer to live in a gated
communities which keep the uneducated hungry masses away from their Montessori
Schools and Gelato serveries, and fly by private helicopter over the wrecked
and broken infrastructure to their friends in other gated communities so that
they can 'keep all of their hard earned money', then so be it.

~~~
Bartweiss
I'm having real trouble working out why you're posting this here.

The article has nothing to do with the dystopia you're describing; an actual
read-through reveals that it's concerned about UBI _worsening_ inequality
compared to the existing benefits system. It's explicitly a piece about how to
reduce disparty, and whether UBI is a bad way to do so. (I note that it's
currently near the top of HN, which is awkward for that "libertarian poverty-
lover" narrative.) And Furtherfield is essentially an art collective with no
ties to HN, so it's not that they're part of the Libertarian Army.

Am I missing something here? Because I see a writer disputing whether UBI is a
good way to achieve your goal, and you replying with "see? they hate my
goals!"

~~~
tricknik
I agree that he has obviously missed the point of the article, however the
post being "flagged" (censored) seems to have proven his point about Hacker
News.

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thelamest
> Rather than alleviating poverty, UBI will most likely exacerbate it. The
> core reasoning is quite simple: the prices that people pay for housing and
> other necessities are derived from how much they can afford to pay in the
> first place.

Obviously, higher demand means higher prices - but people's need for
"necessities" (basic food, shelter) is constant! In that case, it shouldn't
rise under UBI. My intuition is that prices would only rise for more limited,
optional, luxurious goods, and that's a very good thing.

~~~
dilemma
While demand for shelter remains constant, the supply of money increases,
pushing prices higher.

~~~
bryanlarsen
If demand for shelter doesn't change, and supply for shelter doesn't change,
what's pushing the price higher? Supply of money only affects prices when it
can change demand or supply.

~~~
jerf
Think auction rather than static supply/demand curves. If we both used to have
$500/month for shelter, and our bids settle into some stable relationship
based on personal preferences, if UBI comes in and now we both have
$1000/month for shelter, we can now outbid someone else who stubbornly insists
that UBI shouldn't change the price. The stubborn person can either drop their
stubborness and bid higher, or see themselves outbid and be forced to take
something they prefer less now. The stable outcome is that the money goes to
the landowners in this _incredibly limited and isolated model_ , which I am
using only to illustrate the point in a simple way.

In a less simple way, there are many people, including me, who rather believe
that making it easy to get money for college is the root cause of colleges
getting more expensive. Having been back to my own alma mater about a year ago
and seeing the _unbelievably glorious_ meal hall they have now, which is more
accurately described as a meal _mall_ , it is abundantly clear that they have
more money than they know what to do with and are spending wildly on things
that have little to do with education. They're caught in their own trap; since
the money is free to the students (at least for now), the university is forced
to compete to be ever nicer themselves. Nobody has the power to decide to just
go to a cheaper university because they'll get outcompeted by people
anomalously flush with "free money". So college prices spiral ever upwards and
the market mechanisms can't do much about it, because we broke the market by
giving everybody "free" money, or more accurately, money whose costs were
deferred beyond most people's ability to think about the future.

One of the reasons I stand against UBI is that the same thing will happen. The
UBI will come out, but time doesn't freeze. The UBI will then affect the
economy, and people won't _quite_ get what they wanted out it as capital
owners figure out how to extract the extra funds. And the politicians will be
falling over themselves to be the ones who get the credit for raising it; who
would ever be re-elected who lowers the UBI? UBI takes a "free benefit" death
spiral we're arguably already on and throws it into high gear, and I can't see
how we'd ever escape from it short of outright collapse. Nobody will _ever_
vote against the free money. It creates a society where the short-term
incentives are always in favor of more free money, even as the long-term looms
ever more obviously in everybody's face, which would actually just make the
short term "get what I can while the getting's good" problem even worse. It's
a catastrophically broken way to set up incentives in a society.

~~~
bryanlarsen
In other words, supply of money has increased demand.

~~~
jerf
It depends on your definition of "demand". It has raised the amount of
currency that people are willing to spend on the good, but it hasn't raised
the subjective value of the good in "utils".

------
mason240
I was wondering how long it would be before UBI started to be attacked by the
far left, considering it will cement capitalism the basis for the economy and
make all forms of socialism obsolete.

~~~
Kenji
UBI is quite literally the opposite of capitalism. It is a form of socialism,
so saying it makes 'all forms of socialism obsolete' is a very strange thing
to say.

~~~
nanny
>UBI is quite literally the opposite of capitalism. It is a form of socialism

How would UBI transfer the means of production from capitalists to the
workers? Don't confuse socialism with a welfare state.

~~~
_andromeda_
>UBI is quite literally the opposite of capitalism. It is a form of socialism,
so saying it makes 'all forms of socialism obsolete' is a very strange thing
to say.

I couldn't agree more. What I see here is an attempt to not so subtly sneak
egalitarianism into the right and create confusion.

The question that must always be asked when such initiatives are proposed is,
who will pay for it? Often this question reveals that it is always the case
that you'll be forcefully acquiring from a producer and giving to a non-
producer.

------
msoad
One thing UBI can not avoid is people making bad decisions. Specially lower
income people.

If we eliminate all public and often free social services and hand over the
money instead, I doubt a lot of people will save for retirement or pay for
education. Any long term investment is counter intuitive and if it's on people
they will likely avoid it.

A good example of this is 401k contributions. When employers have default
contributions people do it. Of its opt-in most people don't do it. There was a
study for the iirc

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ddexter289
Misleading title. The author makes the argument that UBI would trade off with
other vital social services and that's bad. It's fine to point this out as a
risk of UBI adoption, but it certainly isn't an argument for why UBI is
inherently bad. Plenty of people would be happy to see UBI co-existing with
long standing social benefits.

~~~
thescribe
I guess I do not see the point of UBI, if not the total elimination of other
social programs.

~~~
dragonwriter
A major point of UBI is to eliminate (or reduce) adverse incentives inherent
in means-tested social benefit programs; it can easily do this while replacing
only some existing means-tested social benefit programs, leaving other social
benefit programs (means tested and otherwise) in place.

------
bryanlarsen
It's interesting to see the term neoliberal become such an insult for so many
people.

To oversimplify, neoliberal means 'socially left, fiscally right'. The
difference between a libertarian and a neoliberal is that a libertarian
believes that markets and property rights (aka capitalism) are the end goal,
and a neoliberal believes that those are powerful tools to achieve the goals
of the social left.

I suspect that most Hacker News readers are actually neoliberals.

The strong support for Universal Basic Income on Hacker News is evidence of
such, since UBI is a very neoliberal platform. In that sense the article is
very correct.

[https://medium.com/@s8mb/im-a-neoliberal-maybe-you-are-
too-b...](https://medium.com/@s8mb/im-a-neoliberal-maybe-you-are-
too-b809a2a588d6#.h2cnvb48x)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism)

~~~
dragonwriter
> To oversimplify, neoliberal means 'socially left, fiscally right'.

No, it doesn't. Neoliberalism has never had anything at all to do with social
policy; nor is it particularly about the left/right political axis in any
domain. Neoliberalism is an _economic philosophy_ \-- the "liberal" in it
refers to classic economic liberalism, which is (in terms of the left/right
spectrum) typical of the center-left to moderate right (both the far right and
moderate-to-far left tend to diverge from economic liberalism.)

It can _coexist with_ either left or right social approaches (in the US, the
majority of the Democratic establishment is both neoliberal economically and
socially liberal, whereas the Republican establishment tends to be neoliberal
economically and socially conservative.)

~~~
bryanlarsen
You're right, but I think my oversimplification still holds. It's an economic
philosophy and it's also the philosophy that the economy/market is a tool to
be used to achieve goals.

Neoliberalism doesn't specify what those goals are. It's vaguely "make the
world better". That gets associated with the social left because the social
right's goals are basically "keep the world the way it is and/or roll back
changes made".

~~~
dragonwriter
> You're right, but I think my oversimplification still holds.

No, your "oversimplification" is an overcomplexification: neoliberalism has
_nothing to do with_ the social left/right axis.

> and it's also the philosophy that the economy/market is a tool to be used to
> achieve goals.

Only in a very narrow, utilitarian sense.

> Neoliberalism doesn't specify what those goals are.

Actually, it does; neoliberalism rests on the theoretical optimality of ideal
markets in maximizing experienced utility.

> That gets associated with the social left because the social right's goals
> are basically "keep the world the way it is and/or roll back changes made".

Insofar as that is an accurate description of the social right's goals, its
because the social right consists of people who believe that rolling back
(negative) changes is a way to "make the world better", often (though not
always) in utilitarian terms.

~~~
bryanlarsen
"Actually, it does; neoliberalism rests on the theoretical optimality of ideal
markets in maximizing experienced utility."

Huh? Neoliberalism started as the rejection of the pure laissez-faire policies
of Mises. It promotes state intervention in the markets.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Huh? Neoliberalism started as the rejection of the pure laissez-faire
> policies of Mises.

I think you are confusing the mid-20th-century (1930s-1960s) use of
"neoliberal" with the late-20th-century-to-current (1980s-and-later) use. The
term basically fell out of use and was resurrected with a completely different
meaning.

~~~
bryanlarsen
The 80s resurrection was associated with Bill Clinton and The New Republic,
both highly interventionist.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The 80s resurrection was associated with Bill Clinton

It was associated more with Pinochet in Chile and the US policy preference
which favored Pinochet-like figures.

(Clinton in the 1990s saw the adoption of the new term "Third Way" for
something which was somewhat similar to the mid-20th-century use of
"neoliberal" \-- and quite distinct from the then-recent resurrection of the
term -- though the contemporary left-wing social and right-wing economic
positions it was synthesizing -- particularly the left-wing social positions
-- were somewhat different than those of mid-20th Century neoliberals; though
there is a connection to the 1980s definition of neoliberalism, since the
then-current right-wing economic position that was key in the 1990s Third Way
_was_ the _new_ , 1980s-definition, neoliberalism. But 1990s [and later] Third
Way-ism isn't the defining instance of 1980s-and-later neoliberalism, its just
the most politically left-wing movement incorporating some elements of
1980s-and-later neoliberalism.)

------
skrowl
All welfare (direct payment from a government to an individual) systems are
designed to make you poorer and more controllable. Universal basic income is
no different in this regard.

~~~
ahoy
An odd assertion - "having more money makes you poorer".

~~~
socialist_coder
Well, the argument in the article is that basic necessities are priced based
on what people can afford. So, if everyone is getting UBI, in theory they
could all afford more, and so prices would just go up; bringing everyone back
to where they used to be before UBI, but now without the non-UBI based
benefits (food stamps, welfare, etc).

But, the article does not provide any evidence (simulations or studies) to
back up that claim and, in my opinion, it is not very convincing.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
In regions where housing supply is constrained it seems very likely those
costs would increase in line with any increase in incomes from UBI.

This makes me think the state getting involved in housing provision would have
a much greater impact than UBI.

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tricknik
By the way, what does "flagged" mean above?

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Aelinsaar
Wow, that's a strong claim backed up by... absolutely nothing of merit.

~~~
socialist_coder
That was my take away too. There are no mentions of studies or simulations to
back up the primary claim that inflation would eat away any UBI based
benefits.

~~~
tricknik
Do you mean no studies other than the citation to Minsky who extensively shows
just that? Here is the original paper:
[http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm_archive/429/](http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm_archive/429/)

------
basicplus2
articles stating Universal Basic income is a Neolibral plot to make you poorer
is a neolibral plot to make you vote against Universal Income to make you
poorer

