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Bailing out so easily? I guess it's long-past the point where you can make deformed arguments without spouting utter lunacy like we'd expect out of Joseph Mercola.

You didn't even suggest where I might be wrong. I was expecting you to make some argument about money being infinite and being backed by some sort of imaginary value, instead of representative of labor (time) and backed by production (output). Usually these arguments get around to someone suggesting we can solve our problems by printing enough money for everyone to be a billionaire; but I guess I cut off that line of reasoning already.

Did you finally run out of bullshit you didn't think I could counter? Am I just causing you pain and trauma by making it hard to hold your delusional world view? I've seen people have panic attacks when their extreme projections become unmaintainable--hell, I've done that to people I don't like on purpose--but I don't have enough information about you to know how to make you crack.

As for what I know about economics and psychology, I've had trouble with the field before. I started tearing apart all the economic theories they taught us in high school and college, pointing out places where they were wrong and broken, a couple years ago. Eventually, someone showed me Solow and Malthus; it turns out real economists already knew in the 90s what I was figuring out after 2010, and my "new theories" were crude versions of the currently-accepted economic literature. I'm not exactly a Nobel Prize candidate.

Psychology, on the other hand, is a joke. The field's useful when arguing in the abstract about how individual humans behave; but what you really want is statistics and behavioral economics. That's what the Mincome experiment was about: identifying how large populations react to policy changes such as a partial unconditional income, notably by identifying what economic decisions people make about it. Again, they found that only two population demographics worked less: mothers of newborn children and teenagers of low-income households. This increased the graduation rate, because the teenagers weren't under pressure to keep the household out of poverty, and could focus on school.

That's behavioral economics: most people continued working, and simply had more money to spend; people with a large trade-off made a selection between a specific cost of employment (notably, security of raising children, or strain on their education) and the benefit of employment (money). I suppose you don't like that people can make that decision, although it doesn't matter when those so-called people are 16-year-old high school students; not sure what you expect to do with mothers who can't afford daycare and elect to tend to an infant rather than search for a job.

Perhaps that would be interesting to explore further.

Before the MINCOME experiment, women aged less than 25 were more likely to have given birth. By the end of MINCOME, they were less-likely to have given birth. Total number of births to women under 25 was significantly lowered by the MINCOME experiment (i.e. free money with no oversight reduced the number of births). The study notes the same effect observed for women under age 19, but the number of births makes the measure insignificant (i.e. that effect could be random chance).

MINCOME reduced the likelihood of hospitalization and the length of hospital stays. That holds true for mental health, accidents, and injuries.

Seven years after MINCOME ended and the money stopped coming, subjects in Dauphin (the city where free money flowed to all) had re-normalized to match controls (other cities who weren't given a benefit). That means removing the free money eliminated all of the societal benefits and harmed society.

All of that, by the way, with zero statistical effect on employment of primary earners, while married women returned to work less-quickly after childbirth, and ad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Also, tell that to senior citizens in the USA who almost all get a what is essentially a basic income from Social Security. Most seniors have *not* paid full value into that relative to what they expect to get out of it, so it is not like a retirement investment plan (even if people pay a tax that goes towards it when they work for wages). Social Security in the USA is essentially an income redistribution system, originally based on ten young workers to one elderly person (original recipients had not paid into the system) and now at about three young workers per elderly person. Personally, I feel it is unfair that the elderly in the USA get Medicare and Social Security when everyone else does not and these days reflects age discrimination backed by the political power of the elderly in the USA. Many young parents, for example, have a very hard lot, often caught between caring for their young children and their own elderly parents, while also needing to hold down a full-time job with increasingly worse benefits. A basic income would make it possible for more young parents to spend more time with their own young children while also caring for their own parents. I feel the resolution to the age discrimination issue there is to make the two programs of Medicare and Social Security available to every US citizen without discrimination based on age. We can then talk about eventually expanding those programs to all residents, legal or not, and then looking at doing it globally.

Arguments for a basic income include that, because governments have privatized almost all land, citizens have some right to the fruits of the land. Also, citizens have a claim to some of the fruits of the common inheritance of ideas and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
http://www.usbig.net/
http://www.livableincome.org/

See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it? ..."

Anyway, even while I'm not especially a fan of crypto currencies (good currencies need to be backed by a social constitution controlling their production IMHO), I applaud the experiment in this direction.

"It's REALLY hard to do! It's basically exhausting."

So true. Something I posted in 2001:
"License management tools: good, bad, or ugly?"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/gnu.misc.discuss/30tDY9VE92Y
"My question is: should software tools, protocols, and standards play a role in easing this required "due diligence" license management work (at least as far as copyright alone is concerned)?"

Also, where I hypothesized millions of US citizens arrested over copyright, same as now for marijuana: http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html

I'm thinking more and more that it is just not possible for anyone to really prove they have a legal right to have proprietary content on some specific device when you look really hard at it. Bills of sale might be forged, to begin with, so what does showing one prove? And if you not going to jail depends on some third party verifying something over and over, good luck. And many proprietary licenses are violated often if you have too many copies (including on backup media), so you really can never 100% prove you have right to the software on a device because there might be copies elsewhere, and how do you prove you don't have extra copies somewhere? A very problematical situation if someone really pushes things...

Also, border searches now occur a hundred miles or so inside the actual US border, so most US Americans (who are mostly bi-coastal) can in theory be searched at any time this way by warrant-less border-related searches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

Since, as above, people can't really prove they have legal access to anything they paid for, that makes almost everyone in the USA effectively a felon who can be arrested tomorrow by the border police if someone with some power wants to push the point. So, using only freely-licensed information might just become the safest option, even if that might also not be good enough (how do you known a statement about something being under a free license is really valid?). We'll see how all this "artificial scarcity" plays out...
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

This book has a section on why goods with low incremental costs for distribution should be free according to the authors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better

A "basic income" could fund creators rather than copyright monopolies...
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm

http://www.educationrevolution.org/

Great points; thanks! That's why I feel we need something like a "basic income" so individuals and communities have the time and resources they need to bloom.

On competition and cooperation, from: http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
=====
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
    Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource.
====

Still, it is also true that male college students are of an age where competition for mates is a big deal, whereas older males at least tend more towards cooperation. But like James P. Hogan talks about in the sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear", we can as a society at least redirect competitive urges into more socially productive ends.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

My main concern (in my sig) is that modern day technologies of abundance (biotech, nanotech, nuclear, robotics) make such formidable weapons (used to fight over perceived scarcity instead of to bring abundance) compared to the scale of the Earth that we need to create a more cooperative egalitarian society just to survive the 21st century. As well as move into space to hedge our bets. :-) And even currenltly materially wealthy individuals will be better off for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm

Which is one of the reasons a Guaranteed Basic Income would be a good idea:
http://www.livableincome.org/Intro.htm
http://www.livableincome.org/automation.htm

Which is one of the reasons a Guaranteed Basic Income would be a good idea:
http://www.livableincome.org/Intro.htm
http://www.livableincome.org/automation.htm

"I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that."

I agree, and here are some ideas I put together on that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

And:
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
"Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full.
Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources."

Lots more links on my site. See also this site on "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://anwot.org/

Sadly, this was also in the news yesterday about budget cuts to health programs:
"Report Claims Cuts Weaken U.S. Bioterrorism Response"
http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/Surveillance/30333

A great related article:

The figures you cite are just for federal personal income tax and ignore the disappearance of corporate taxes as well as the rise in regressive taxes related to sales, social security, medicare, and housing. They also ignore that we have the largest rich/poor wealth disparity than in any time since the run up to the last great depression.

"I'm not sure about others, but in my small group I work with, I know many, many people would walk away from the job if the top rates went back to 91%."

Terrific! More jobs for other people who want them or need them. :-) Other people can grow into becoming "top performers" if we need that. Right now, the rich get richer, and the tallest sunflowers shade out the small ones and suck most of the nutrients out of the soil with bigger root systems. We need to address that somehow, otherwise, frankly, beyond our democracy disappearing socially now, the whole system may just disintegrate physically (perhaps in global war with nukes, plagues, killer robots, and whatever else) as poverty increases and the income-through-jobs link breaks as the "top performers" are increasingly robots and AIs. There is little political democracy without some financial democracy.

Social security and medicare for all, regardless of age, would go a long way to addressing the problems the USA faces, including the problem that the richest Republicans are the worst socialists as far as privatizing gains and socializing costs for pollution, war, ill health, and risk.

But sure, if you'd rather a wealth tax than an income tax, see also:
    "Basic Income from a Millionaire's Perspective?"
    http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm