Could We Fund a Universal Basic Income with Universal Basic Assets? (fastcompany.com)

Universal Basic Incomes aren't really the issue, argues Fast Company staff writer Ben Schiller. "It's how you find $2 trillion to pay for it." One answer may come in the form of "universal basic assets" (UBA). UBA can mean a fund of publicly-owned infrastructure or revenue streams -- like Alaska's Permanent Fund which pays residents up to $2,000 a year from state oil taxes. Or, it can mean actual assets that drive down the cost of living, like tuition-free education and free public broadband. There are lots of proposals going around now that fall into these two camps...

Entrepreneur Peter Barnes has called for the creation of a Sky Trust that would both limit the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and provide revenue from carbon taxes. These "carbon dividends" solve two problems at once: income inequality and climate change. He would also tax corporations for using natural resources, on the thinking that the atmosphere, minerals and fresh water around us represent a "joint inheritance." He would also tax speculative financial transactions and use of the electromagnetic spectrum. The U.K. think-tank IPPR recently proposed a similar "sovereign wealth fund owned by and run in the interests of citizens." It would finance the fund with "a scrip tax of up to 3% requiring businesses to issue equity to the government, or pay a tax of equivalent value," sales of land owned by the U.K. monarchy, and higher inheritance taxes.

Blockchain can help. Blockchain technology could offer a way to divide publicly-owned infrastructure so it's genuinely publicly-owned. We could issue tokenized securities in the assets around us giving everyone a stake in their environment. Then they could trade those tokens on exchanges, like they were cryptocurrencies, or use the tokens as collateral on loans.

Comments

Re:UBI Sounds Familiar

[stephanruby]

You didn't read the last paragraph about blockchain.

Essentially, they want to do just what Russia did with its national assets.

Privatize them, give out shares to every citizen in the country, allow those citizens to trade those shares in an open market.

A few years later in Russia, all those shares held by the common people had been traded away to buy food or luxury goods. The real winners were the people with the cash who rounded up as much as those shares as possible. They had enough shares to take over the control of those companies and now those people are known as oligarchs. They were able to rob their country blind with this system.

Re: Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

You are mistakenly equating an economy to UBI. If an economy ie the people can't support themselves by their own effort, nothing can.

But UBI is proposed as an alternative to "own effort". It's not economically or morally viable -- at best it can be described as a parasitical portion of the economy that consumes, while the others produce. So far people are managed to "live" under those conditions where the number of the paracites is low - eg under the monarchies. Unfortunately this doesn't scale. The opposite is even less viable -- that a few people would produce for the masses to consume.

Wealth requires production

[Anonymous Coward]

Wealth comes from production. You can't arbitrarily declare a certain amount of money and then expect that to hold up; that's what central banks do and EVERY time it leads to an eventual market crash. F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this analysis of the business cycle.

Money is just a tool to facilitate trade; it's "stuff" that constitutes actual wealth: food, houses, cars, clothing, electronics, etc. And creating new stuff requires production.

Socialism cannot work over the long-term because it has no price system to deal with the scarcity of "stuff."

Here's some free economic education for you:

www.BernieIsWrong.com