
Basic income vs. Capitalism - rwmj
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2013/07/basic-income-vs-capitalism.html
======
mwc
The New Zealand Treasury has conducted a preliminary assessment of a
guaranteed minimum income (GMI) in New Zealand[1]. It's worth a read.

It's conclusions were broadly:

* To be cost neutral, it would require a significant increase in taxation rates (to a flat tax of ~45% - 50%).

* Although the Gini coefficient is improved, those who currently receive government support would likely receive less under a GMI scheme, which may have the effect of distributing more money away from those most in need.

A brief discussion of the "broad ranging" effects on efficiency and economic
growth is also included.

[1]
[http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...](http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Working%20papers/Treasury-
A-Guaranteed-Minimum-Income-for-New-Zealand%20.PDF)

------
brownbat
> capitalists, who want a large labour supply...

Even Friedman argued for the NIT, noting it was less paternalistic than food
stamps or other benefits to simply let the poor allocate their money however
they see fit (and simple transfers would likely lead to lower administrative
costs).

But this implicit line that there's a secret cabal of "capitalists" all
persuaded by some idea that they never publicly proselytize, but all
coordinate action in order to pursue... it sounds a bit conspiratorial.
Cribbing lines from marxist economic theory, it's going to alienate half your
audience or more, and immediately make the argument deeply partisan, when it
needn't be.

I mean, believe that line or not, but I think the argument is stronger without
falling down the rabbit hole of pretending to know what "the capitalists" are
up to.

~~~
yk
> But this implicit line that there's a secret cabal of "capitalists" all
> persuaded by some idea that they never publicly proselytize, [...]

The way the Marxist argument for class interest works, is that there does not
need to be a secret cabal. To discuss this in the context of basic income
(BI): Some capitalists, that is some owners of capital, depend on cheap
unskilled labor. Each of them concludes independently, that a BI is against
his own interests, since it would reduce the incentive to take unpleasant jobs
and force them to pay their workers more.

Or more generally, some people have similar interests, not because they
conspire, but because they are in a similar socio-economic situation. And this
socio-economic situation generates class interests. ( Marx then goes on to
argue, that the capitalist class can more easily leverage its interests, and
therefore the workers need class conscious to counter this leverage.)

~~~
derleth
> Marx then goes on to argue, that the capitalist class can more easily
> leverage its interests, and therefore the workers need class conscious to
> counter this leverage.

And anyone who disagrees with Marx on hearing his ideas is suffering from
False Consciousness and needs to be Re-Educated, perhaps in a Camp somewhere.

~~~
ThomPete
Why the strawman?

You do not need to be a marxist to agree one some of the basic principles put
forward.

Marx was not 100% wrong, he was just wrong some very specific and important
places.

~~~
derleth
> Why the strawman?

The Gulag Archipelago.

> Marx was not 100% wrong, he was just wrong some very specific and important
> places.

Of course he wasn't 100% wrong. All modern developed countries have adopted
some of his ideas, such as public schools and laws against child labor.

His notions of an Apocalyptic struggle between Labor and Management, his
totalizing philosophy which seeks to explain all social conditions through one
dialectic, and his refusal to admit that capitalist countries could adopt some
of his ideas and stay capitalist, however, lead to some of the worst regimes
in history, and we can't forget that.

~~~
ThomPete
Do you also blame Nietzsche for Nazism?

Marx analysed quite correctly the era he lived in and the problem with
capitalism. He was just wrong to think that this would never change.

For instance today may of us are the owners of our own means of production.
You don't need your employer to buy you a machine and they can't just replace
you without having lost the knowledge that you represent.

Marx didn't live in such a world and thus his premise wasn't universal enough.

~~~
derleth
> Do you also blame Nietzsche for Nazism?

Of course not. Marx was directly responsible for Communism because he laid the
blueprints, and the USSR implemented them. Therefore, Marx is responsible for
the USSR.

~~~
ThomPete
But communism was not what happened in the USSR.

~~~
derleth
Yes, it was. It's dishonest to claim that your system has never been tried
when it has been tried and failed.

You can go down the list of things the Communist Manifesto proposed and see
that the USSR did all of them:
[http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Marxism.html](http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Marxism.html)

~~~
ThomPete
Ahh yeah when you are out of arguments go for the persons motives right? Where
have I ever claimed to that communism was my system? Pray tell.

I think you need to read up on history my friend. And perhaps read the actual
work of Marx before being so cock sure about what you are claiming.

Then we can have an adult discussion about the many issues with communism.

~~~
derleth
Your condescension means you didn't read my cite or engage me honestly at all.
And I even picked out the easy-to-read citation, too.

------
kephra
I'm a programmer. My job is to free people from work, for more then 35 years.
An unconditional/basic/universal income or negative tax would allow those
people to enjoy the freedom I provided for them, while unemployment is a shame
in current system.

Its interesting to notice that those who promote a basic income here in
Germany are hardcore liberals/libertarians, while conservatives, socialists,
unions, communists here still follow the puritanic thinking that "Arbeit macht
Frei".

~~~
rokhayakebe
Your job was never intended to free people from work. It was simply to do what
people did, faster, more accurately, and many times over.

If your code was slower and more expensive than someone doing the work
manually, you would doing another job.

I think.

~~~
kephra
My current focus is on machine learning for industrial application. 15 years
ago my main focus was the paperless office. And before that common office
automation.

Its true, that not every coder is freeing people from work.

But in average we destroy stupid jobs, and replace them with smart machines.
Those jobs will never come back. The only kind of work that will be left are
social work, that is currently badly payed.

The result is that there will less demand for work, the wages will sink to the
botton, nobody would be able to buy things, and capitalism will destroy
itself.

The only way to avoid a communist slave state is an universal income.

------
blake8086
I suspect that basic income is a stable equilibrium given a "one person, one
vote"-type of democratic system.

It's in each person's best interests to vote for more wealth redistribution if
they're below the average, and there will always be more people below the
average than above.

Further, it's in each politician's interest to both promise and deliver such a
thing, as it helps them win first and following elections.

~~~
stdbrouw
But it's also very easy to convince virtually anyone that they're a part of
the hardworking middle class that's keeping this country afloat, as opposed to
those leeches that would use their basic income to hang around and do nothing.

~~~
runawaybottle
What middle class? The fact that we're discussing an across the board baseline
income is indicative of the state of the "middleclass". What a disaster, hate
to be so melodramatic.

Those leeches are the least of our worries.

~~~
cinquemb
When the word "leeches" is directed toward people at the "bottom", it makes me
wonder what people think of when money is created out of thin air, lended to
banks at ZIRP and who then lend to people at anything but, who then use such
money (or credit) to buy goods (created by their peers) that people at the
helm of such institutions like banks can also buy…

~~~
hkmurakami
not to mention industries whose profits are generated solely on the basis of
tariffs and subsidies (various areas of industrial farming: corn, sugar, etc)

------
kenster07
This is just describes another transitional point in human history. In any
given year, we can produce the same output with less labor. As this effect
compounds, take this pattern to its extreme -- producing all the output the
world could ever need with virtually no human labor. In such a scenario, what
is the meaning of a wage? What does it mean for a person to produce "value?"
How would humanity, whose genome has been shaped under the chisel of scarcity,
adapt to a system where such a thing did not exist?

In this thought experiment, I believe it becomes evident that the laws of
economics, as we understand them, are NOT timeless. Modern economics has gone
on a tangent, creating a system of analysis and theory that only works for
this microcosm in our existence. It is only as our economy approaches the
scenario described above that the true laws of human economics can become
evident.

~~~
userulluipeste
Not every part of human labor/involvement will be totally replaced (if your
imagination needs a hint, think about the oldest occupation if the world).
There are services that rely on human interaction and as the world evolves the
demand for such specific social-involved activities will continuously
diversify itself. I also think that the access to the limited resources (think
of space if nothing else) will always maintain in a way or another a scarcity-
based system.

~~~
kenster07
You never know.

I think the frailty of the human ego is more likely to manufacture scarcity
than anything else.

------
od2m
So sick of non-economists advocating economic policy which they don't
understand.

Welfare programs of any type are only viable when the ratio of payers to
payee's is high. They're desirable at this level. However, entitling every
citizen to money which for he does not have to work for exposes the government
to UNLIMITED liability as humans are free to create more humans at any time
they choose. We cannot expand the GDP any time we would like, in fact paying
people not to work removes the excess value of their labor from the GDP
(assuming there was a job for them).

When you total up Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid debts the United
States is completely broke. Something on the order of 100 trillion dollars of
future liabilities. We can't even afford our modest socialism we have now.

TLDR? The numbers don't work.

~~~
fleitz
'basic income' or 'negative income tax' is an idea supported by Milton
Friedman, who is generally regarded as a knowledgable economist of the Chicago
school and a critic of many aspects of the Keynesian welfare state. You may
know Milton Friedman from such economic ideas as 'fiat currency' which has
been the dominant monetary policy globally for the last 40 years.

Since non-economists should not be critiquing economic policy according to
you, may I ask what your credentials are in this field?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax)

~~~
argonaut
Uhh.... fiat currency is not monetary policy. You meant monetarism, which has
most certainly not been the dominant monetary policy for the last 40 years.
It's been influential, yes. There have been periods of time in which it has
been in vogue, yes, but you certainly cannot call it _the dominant monetary
policy globally for the last 40 years._.

------
johnohara
Last week Breitbart threw a number of 144,000,000 as the current number of
working adults in the United States. It sounded about right.

Let's use 150,000,000 instead and pay them a basic income of $20,800 per yr
($400 per wk, $10 per hr). That's $3.120T with a "T", just south of scheduled
2013 U.S. federal expenditures of $3.803T -- with a $900B deficit.

A BI would double federal expenditures. Honestly, how likely is it for a
guaranteed basic income to pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the
POTUS in the next 5, 10, or 25 years?

~~~
Millennium
Not double, actually, because part of the point of a basic income is to
replace much of what we currently think of as welfare. For example, Social
Security as we know it could simply vanish, its function completely replaced
by the basic income. In theory, salaries for government employees of all types
could also be reduced by an amount equal to the basic income, leading to no
change in take-home pay but saving money within the programs which employ
them.

Nevertheless, as you point out, it would necessarily represent a massive
expansion in federal spending: on the order of 50% or more.

------
fnordfnordfnord
I wonder what we'd all pay to have garbage hauled away if we didn't have a
ready supply of ex-convicts for whom this was one of the higher paying jobs
available to them?

~~~
drblast
That's a really good question. There are all manner of dirty jobs that people
only do because they have no other option except starve or steal. How that
differs qualitatively from slavery is beyond me, but I do get the feeling that
we aren't paying the "real price" for these services simply because we have
plenty of ex-cons in the U.S. and seem happy to keep making more.

But aside from that issue, I think a basic income is the only truly fair way
to operate a fiat currency. We know a few things for sure, and one of them
seems to be that a small amount of inflation is good for an economy.

One way to inflate is to print money, and the way we do distribute "new money"
in the form of debt is essentially a regressive tax. Much fairer would be to
give everyone the same amount in cash form.

This system would be so simple it would prevent a lot of the abuses and
favoritism of the current system. Imagine if the inflation rate were fixed;
say a 2-3% increase in money supply each year, guaranteed, distributed equally
among all citizens. It's really hard to game a system like that.

And that's probably also why it's not being seriously discussed in political
circles. What's the advantage to politicians?

Forget "capitalists," this kind of thing is the worst nightmare for everyone
who is currently a winner in the current system. If I were to propose to
devalue EVERYONE's wealth by 2-3% a year so that I can distribute an equal
amount to everyone, I could expect a huge fight from anyone with any
accumulated wealth.

But as for me, I can't think of a more fair and humane way to operate a system
of money.

~~~
nickik
People would still do those dirty jobs, those jobs would just have to over a
higher overall payout then just BI. Services that are largly based on low
skilled laber would probebly be more expensive.

> But aside from that issue, I think a basic income is the only truly fair way
> to operate a fiat currency. We know a few things for sure, and one of them
> seems to be that a small amount of inflation is good for an economy.

It is not clear that a small amount of inflation is good for the economy. Also
alternative montary transiation mechanism are not really unfair in any
meaningful way. Also inflation is driven by expected montary growth, if the
central bank has a credible target the would have to do very little or nothing
to reach that goal.

You can not fiance any goverment programm by montary expention. Exept when you
increase the speed of expantion but thats a bad idea.

Also giving money directly to people as a montary mechanism has a huge flaw,
if you overshoot your targed you can not go back easly. The Central Bank buys
and sells bonds/stocks instead of dropping money from airplanes because the
must have a way to get money out of the system again. You could of course do
that by equally taking from everybody bank account but that is not something
goverment should have the power to do.

Also having 2/3% inflation does absolutly not mean that everybodys wealth is
now 2/3% less.

I would really, really suggest to to first understand some montary theory
befor you come up with your own montary system, its harder then you might
think.

~~~
drblast
I'm not suggesting the government's sole function is to print and hand out
money and call it a day. There are other methods of taxation and spending
(income tax over basic income amount, or directly spending money on
infrastructure, for example) that could reign in an overly inflationary
economy.

The current method of injection of money into the economy via debt is broken,
benefits mostly banks, and requires that a percentage of people continually go
bankrupt due to lack of available cash in the future.

Basic income is an alternative means of monetary expansion that would fix
this.

Not that you have to inflate with basic income, you could simply redistribute
wealth. But that requires people decide who takes how much from whom, and is
ripe for favoritism. Inflating via basic income is the most egalitarian method
I can think of.

~~~
nickik
> The current method of injection of money into the economy via debt is
> broken, benefits mostly banks, and requires that a percentage of people
> continually go bankrupt due to lack of available cash in the future.

Sorry where did you come up with this? The CB can buy any asset with newly
created money, this includes bonds. How does this in any way require a
percentage of people going bankrupt?

If you really belive that the amount of cash in the economy is bound to
goverment dept and that leads to a lack of cash I would strongly suggest you
pick up a book on montary theory because that makes absolutly no sence.

> Basic income is an alternative means of monetary expansion that would fix
> this.

Have you even read what I wrote?

> Not that you have to inflate with basic income, you could simply
> redistribute wealth. But that requires people decide who takes how much from
> whom, and is ripe for favoritism. Inflating via basic income is the most
> egalitarian method I can think of.

Again. Have you actually read why montary transmission is not done in a direct
the people way? Its not like you came up with something new, the idea was
around but its simply not workable because its a one way transmission. Its
like you are saying that if a ship has to turn to the left its okay to have
steering wheel that can never steer to the right. What happens if you steere
to the left to much for a time, what if you have strong current from the right
(witch in this analogy would mean for example a change in money demand).

If you really want BI, and to it in a natural way. Make one basic tax, flat or
prgressiv does not really matter as long as it is one clear function and stop
any exeption people can take (alternative is a consumtion tax that applies
equally to everything), and set a number of BI you want to pay out.

Montary policy should just be conducted in the usual way to hit its target,
your big error is to assume that if the central bank has a 2% inflation target
it has to print money, look at australia they have relativly high inflation
but the montary base is very low. The market ajusts to your target and if you
have a credible target you dont actually have to print any money.

~~~
drblast
[http://tranzitioning.com/index.php/money-creation-
destructio...](http://tranzitioning.com/index.php/money-creation-destruction-
bankruptcy-and-default)

------
steveklabnik
I will say that 'vs' isn't strictly needed here; no reason the means of
production can't be privately owned while BI is implemented.

Now, that would put a bit of hurt into the reserve army of labor, as the
article mentions...

------
EGreg
Actually BI is gradually coming in the form of social safety nets for
everyone. Once we disrupt college education with courses anyone can study at
home at their own pace from the best professors, lots more people will be able
to educate themselves for the new economy.

That said, there will be a growing unemployed class, and many are are already
perpetually on government subsidized programs such as housing, etc. The
question of whether this is worse than a negative tax is unclear.

What IS clear is that capitalists will want people to remain consumers, even
as they automate everything. So redistributing money to them by taxing the
machines is inevitable. The real question for me is, what will happen to all
the restless, disaffected people whose services are no longer required, and
whose blogs are rarely read? Especially men.

[http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=97](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=97)

------
gw
Murray Rothbard called this "probably the single most disasterous economic
idea ever invented". He spoke on this topic during a speech on Milton
Friedman. It's worth a listen.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AenYS193mSI&t=10m34s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AenYS193mSI&t=10m34s)

~~~
mikeyouse
I'm all for differing viewpoints, but prospective watchers should know that
Murray Rothbard considered Adam Smith an anti-capitalist proto-Marxist. He
also had some very 'interesting' views on women's liberation, race,
homosexuality, slavery, etc. etc.

~~~
gw
Really an odd way to show you are for differing viewpoints, to inoculate
"prospective watchers" by opening the floodgates to a host of disparate
subjects that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, all the while winking
and nudging that he is a bigot regarding said subjects.

------
rogerthis
AFAIK, the biggest experiment in Basic Income is happening in Brazil. Come and
ask us in 2030 how it did go. Today, all I can say is it serves the
politicians in power to keep their power. People who receive state BI seldom
vote different, afraid of losing the benefit.

~~~
emiliobumachar
What's happening in Brazil is not BI because it's not for everyone. Recipients
have to prove they are poor enough (at least state that they are)

------
DanielBMarkham
Hmmm. I am beginning to believe any author who writes essays with the word
"capitalism" in it neither understands capitalism or is able to work with the
concept in the abstract. Usually it's just regurgitated Marxist leftovers.

And let's see what we have: "A BI breaks with a fundamental principle of the
welfare state. This, wrote Beveridge in 1942, is "to make and keep men fit for
service.*" One function of the welfare state is to ensure that capital gets a
big supply of labour, by making eligibity for unemployment benefit conditional
upon seeking work. BI, however, breaks this principle.In its pure form, it
allows folk to laze on the beach all day."

Okey dokey now. The welfare state is a product of the voters, not the result
of one particular report in the 1940s in the United Kingdom. I can quite
assure you that the voters were not interested in "providing labour to
capital". They were interested in being compassionate to their fellow man,
just as they were in the States. The welfare state is a lot bigger than
wartime England. If anything, the modern welfare nation has its roots in the
late Victorian period, as large groups of people realized that they were being
significantly mistreated by the system.

This is an important point, because if you miss it you miss the rest of it.
The social safety net, as most voters understand it, is to provide a lift up
to those in need, and some sort of permanent assistance to those who are
incapable of leaving their present circumstances. This means that any welfare
state has as its primary mission the determination of the difference between
those who are temporarily downtrodden and those who will not work, either
because of physical or attitudinal reasons. Voters feel differently about
these different groups of people. Therefore the policies towards them are
different.

"capitalists, who want a large labour supply" \-- no, capitalists want to
trade stuff. Sometimes, like in the 1800s, this required a large labour supply
busy as beavers in the sweat shop making widgets. Sometimes nowadays it might
involve really expensive robots and 5 laborers. Or 3 web programmers and some
space on AWS. These old ideas of capital and labor are dead. Please let them
rest in peace without digging them up so often.

Minimum wages and basic income policies all do the same thing -- raise the
floor at which most folks can enter into productive trade with others. This
raises prices and increases unemployment. These kinds of ideas sound great.
Who wouldn't want $25 per hour wages and guaranteed income for all? But all
you'd end up with is $15 hamburgers and $34 gasoline. You don't do anything
but raise the table stakes for people, like certain homeless, just don't want
to participate in society. It increases poverty and suffering. Counter-
intuitively, it does not make things better.

People need to pay special attention to those ideas which produce an emotional
gut-feeling of "hell yeah! Why haven't we done that?" There's usually a really
good reason that does not involve economic theories from the 1890s.

~~~
mikeash
"Minimum wages and basic income policies all do the same thing -- raise the
floor at which most folks can enter into productive trade with others."

Can you elaborate on this? Because it looks to me (only minimally educated in
economics) that minimum wage and basic income work in completely _opposite_
directions here.

With a minimum wage, a person may be willing to do some work for $X, and
another person may be willing to hire him to do that work for $X, but the law
prevents them from entering into an agreement to actually do it. Thus, anyone
not able to produce at least as much value as the minimum wage simply does not
work at all.

With a basic income, you no longer need a minimum wage. If a person is willing
to work for a penny an hour, let him. The floor drops, not rises, because
people can engage in very poorly-paid work if need be, and still be able to
survive. A person whose labor is only worth $2/hour won't have a job today,
but could very well have a job in a system with a basic income.

Did I miss something?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I believe you missed pricing pressure.

If I'm selling apples, I'm selling them at whatever the market can bear. Beats
me what that is. I label the price 1-for-a-dollar, and they sell out. So
tomorrow I charge $2. And so on. There is no certain "price" \-- price is
something that's determined by the reaction of the buyers to the offers the
sellers make.

That's the way it is with everything: food, rent, insurance, car repairs,
drugs, services, and so forth. Everything is negotiable, and it's all
dynamically determined. So if everybody in town now has an extra 10K -- or
even if the poor people now have a lot more free cash, then my apple pricing
experiment will yield a higher result. So I'll charge more. I'm not trying to
screw over anybody, that's just the way pricing works.

The only thing you get with giving everybody a new floor for the amount of
cash they have is a new floor for how much the cheapest items cost.

This is tricky to see at 5-10K, because our minds don't take into account the
thousands of tiny transactions each person makes in a year and the very small
amount of difference it would make with each one. So just pretend that it's
100K, or 500K. What would happen?

And that's just pricing pressure for _purchasing_. The same pressure would
exist for employment, dramatically increasing unemployment.

It just doesn't _do_ anything, except cause economic chaos, make all the
dollar figures higher for everything, and increase unemployment. And punish
those folks who don't want to participate in society. That's not a lot to be
proud of.

~~~
taheris
I agree that price is simply a measure of what the market will bear, but I
don't see how a basic income results in exhausting the additional supply of
disposable income through inflated prices.

To continue with your apple market example, you could try to charge $2 or more
per apple, but pretty soon other people will realise that they can employ
their own staff to run an orchard and deliver apples to the same market at a
marginal cost far less than that, and competition will drive the market price
back down.

With a basic income, people's basic needs would be met and any additional
income earned would be a supplement. If they agree to work for $1 an hour
picking apples, then that is the price the market will bear for that
particular skill and the price for a single apple will be reflective of this.

A minimum wage on the other hand works in the opposite direction. If it is set
to $50 an hour, then sure, the costs of apples, along with most other things,
will skyrocket, but there will also be a huge amount of deadweight loss as
people simply choose to forgo employing others for many skills in the first
place.

~~~
userulluipeste
"To continue with your apple market example, you could try to charge $2 or
more per apple, but pretty soon other people will realise that they can employ
their own staff to run an orchard and deliver apples to the same market at a
marginal cost far less than that, and competition will drive the market price
back down."

Unless I reinvent the market and brainwash you that my Apple is like no other
and it's worth selling your kidney for it. This way I'll grow my Apple company
to record high stock prices and I'll sue any other kind of vegetable sellers.
You'll think you'll figure out a way to beat us in the end, but the truth is
that pretty much everything (even the Jobs) will be ours eventually and
everything you ever dreamed to afford will be ours to give.

------
ChrisNorstrom
Why doesn't this article discuss the repercussions of such a plan?

These ideas of "helping everyone and feeling good" fail to understand human
behavior. Basic income would reek havoc on the real estate market as people
(of the trashy uncivilized variety) would try to move into nice neighborhoods
with their new funds that they didn't work for and earn and "fuck up the
neighborhood" basically.(This already occurs with section 8 housing) Another
consequence is that rent and housing would rise substantially.

The price of a home isn't just determined by the value of the home itself but
by the highest price the local market can afford to pay. People who are not in
real estate don't understand this.

The flawed assumption to this plan is that all or most poor people are poor
because they just haven't been given enough chances or nice things. This
emotional ideology usually belongs to young collage students who have never
worked with the public and seen the real asshole-ery and primitive baboon-ism
of humanity and believe everyone is a nice person. Or adults who grew up in
their parent's nice neighborhood miles away from reality. I know you're going
to think I'm the biggest most evil asshole in the world but after working with
the public (everyone in my family does) NOT a cool startup in a collage town I
have to tell you the truth: Quite a few poor people (not all of course) are
poor for a reason. Sitting down and talking with them will usually give away
these reasons immediately. They don't bring value, they can't hold jobs
because they have poor impulse control, they're short term decision makers,
they don't want to educate or better themselves, they're hyper-sexual, were
born with a lower IQ, they can't commit to jobs they do have, they smoke pot
like crazy. Basically they don't have nice things for a reason. And every time
you try to give them nice things they ruin them and don't appreciate them.

I used to be one of those "help everyone and make the world happy and good
feelings and gosh I just wish we could all hold hands". I have completely left
that ideology as it's a fantasy. A lie. These smart intellectual folks with
ideas on how to help the poor completely forget to include the above mentioned
human problems. All they see is numbers and an equation and they want to
balance it all out on the table. But it never works like that in real life.

I know during this recession a lot of people who deserve nice things have had
them taken away, but any attempts to correct this through government, welfare,
and basic income is just going to go in the wrong hands.

There are devastating repercussions for paying people to do nothing or giving
people something they haven't earned. Let's stop chasing pipe-dreams because
they "sound nice".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe)

~~~
wayne_h
'Basic income'? Lets start with 'Basic grading'

Currently students earn grades A-F. From now on we should have a 'basic
grade', all students will be given a 'D' \- a basic passing grade. You get
your 'D' even if you don't even go to class. and since don't go to school well
we might as well just give them the diplomas too...

I would like to see the idealistic college students and professors apply this
concept to their real world and see how it works out...

The idiocy of this becomes obvious in this context.

~~~
felipeko
You're missing the reward for those who get higher grades.

If students with higher grades got better food, chair and transport (that's
what happens in basic income), you would probably see some students trying
their best.

------
michaelochurch
Here's how I see the BI debate. The argument made against it is that it would
generate a class of parasites at the bottom of society.

We, right now, have a permanent parasite class at the _top_ of society and
that's worse. They can treat labor like shit because labor has no other
option, and this surplus generated by desperation makes those at the top
extraordinarily rich.

BI is the only solution I can come up with that makes sure labor is
_respected_.

However, any BI program should be tied to per capita GDP. Thus, if it actually
does have a negative effect on society (which I doubt it will) the payments
drop and reverse that effect.

