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Is a Lack of Data Holding Back Universal Basic Income Programs? (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes MIT's Technology Review:
Silicon Valley loves the idea of universal basic income. Many in the tech elites tout it as the answer to job losses caused by automation, if only people would give it a chance.... Getting people on board with basic income requires data, which is what numerous tests have been trying to obtain. But this year, a number of experiments were cut short, delayed, or ended after a short time. That also means the possible data supply got cut off.
Back in June we declared, "Basic income could work -- if you do it Canada style." We talked to the people on the ground getting the checks in Ontario's 4,000-person test and saw how it was changing the community. Then, just two months later, it was announced that the program is ending in the new year rather than running for three years. The last checks will be delivered to participants in March 2019.
The article complains that in addition, Finland's test program ended this year after its initial trial period, while Y Combinator's experiment "has also faced more delays, pushing the experiment into 2019," saying these programs illustrate the three basic issues faced by basic income tests. First, there's political disagreements. ("The Ontario program was shut down by the province's newly installed Conservative government.") Then there's also concerns about funding -- "As you might imagine, giving away free money is expensive" -- and also fears about disrupting existing benefits "To avoid that, they've had to work with municipal and state agencies to get waivers for pilot recipients. But getting those waivers takes a lot of time and bureaucracy....
"The only way the idea can ever be embraced on any sort of large-scale, meaningful level is with more data and bigger tests. Without that, no matter how much support it gets from Silicon Valley, it seems unlikely that the public, at least in the US, will ever come around."
Back in June we declared, "Basic income could work -- if you do it Canada style." We talked to the people on the ground getting the checks in Ontario's 4,000-person test and saw how it was changing the community. Then, just two months later, it was announced that the program is ending in the new year rather than running for three years. The last checks will be delivered to participants in March 2019.
The article complains that in addition, Finland's test program ended this year after its initial trial period, while Y Combinator's experiment "has also faced more delays, pushing the experiment into 2019," saying these programs illustrate the three basic issues faced by basic income tests. First, there's political disagreements. ("The Ontario program was shut down by the province's newly installed Conservative government.") Then there's also concerns about funding -- "As you might imagine, giving away free money is expensive" -- and also fears about disrupting existing benefits "To avoid that, they've had to work with municipal and state agencies to get waivers for pilot recipients. But getting those waivers takes a lot of time and bureaucracy....
"The only way the idea can ever be embraced on any sort of large-scale, meaningful level is with more data and bigger tests. Without that, no matter how much support it gets from Silicon Valley, it seems unlikely that the public, at least in the US, will ever come around."
They've been trying UBI since the 1960s in Canada. We have the technology and resources to enable a leisure society with guaranteed minimum living conditions for everyone.
We *choose* to not do it.
Mostly random stuff.
an endless supply of someone else's money.
;)
Just my 2 cents
the ruling class not wanting to pay for it is holding it back.
I mean, we have massive amounts of data that single payer healthcare would be infinitely superior. The latest studies (real ones done by Universities) show $5 trillion savings every 10 years. We could pay off the national debt in my kid's lifetime with that and all our foreign held debt in _my_ lifetime. 70% of Americans support it.. Still no go.
Meanwhile several Democratic congressmen just exited Congress while imploring their party to abandon Medicare for All (funny that they all took big money from insurance & Phrama, I'm sure that was just them buying into their agenda).
America has a ruling class, but we like to pretend we don't. Like most things in life pretending the real world doesn't exist is bad juju.
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Industrial revolution and socialist mindset have allowed those that cannot pull their own weight to live.
Math is preventing Universal Basic Income. The problem with spending other people’s money is that at some point it runs out.
The same people that pay for welfare now.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The reason why Silicon Valley billionaires like UBI is that they know technology is creating a growing underclass who cannot afford to buy food, let alone Netflix subscriptions. What do to? I know: get the taxpayers to pay for Netflix, Spotify, YouTube Red, ... subscriptions, iPhones, FitBits, etc.
Don't get me wrong: I like the idea of UBI. The empirical, non-ideologically driven research and evidence is clear that it's superior in every way to most, if not all, alternative forms of social welfare. All I'm saying is don't take the techno-elite's support for it as altruism: it's just financial common sense for them and their shareholders. After all, they don't pay tax, so they won't have to pay their share of the UBI tax burden Talk about a win-win!
Professional Idiot
Some decisions are just not data driven, or should I say. The only way to really get all the data would be to actually implement the program.
All these small tests really are pretty pointless and a waste of money.
If I were to ask you how would a society work if all drugs were decriminalized? Would drug use go up and people become druggies. You wouldn't know. There's a million what ifs. Only by actually trying it for a substantial amount of time could you get a clue. When Portugal decriminalized all drugs (not legalized), they just did it and took a gamble.
Similarly with this. How will the unemployed behave? Will those with jobs keep working? How will this change 1,2,3... generations down. No one has any damn clue. Any small experiment is not going to answer the big questions at all.
If only we could all just know the results of decisions before trying, our decisions would just be easy. But life is not that simple.
Is a Lack of Data Holding Back Universal Basic Income Programs?
No, common sense is.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
That's rich! OP means they love the idea of UBI as long as they don't have to pay for it.
Google, Apple, Intel, Oracle, and hundreds of other tech companies set up headquarters in low-tax countries and divert billions of dollars there every year instead of paying the higher US tax rates which would benefit the US. I doubt they'll be so accommodating and willing to fit the bill to pay billions annually towards the 1M or more Californians that would gladly trade work for $15K for do nothing for $15K.
Lack of automation is holding UBI back. If too many people drop out of the workforce, society will collapse. That won't be a problem when we can automate the job of anyone who drops out, but right now we can't even come close.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The theory is that in the long term, the money should come from savings. UBI would remove the need for a bunch of expensive-to-administer welfare services, for example.
The United States has one of the least efficient social welfare systems in the world. The US famously spends something like 17% of GDP on health care in return for consistently worse outcomes than almost every other developed country that spends 9-12%.
That's the theory. As with all such reforms, even if UBI worked elsewhere it's unclear that it would work in the United States because it would require a critical mass of people in charge to believe that the US system is not the greatest in the world. It's a very hard sell.
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Since I've commented already (and will comment more) on this topic, I can't mod you up, but I'm here to tell you that you deserve to be modded up because you speak the truth; hear, hear, one and all! KiloByte speaks truth!
"Any my taxes won't pay your leisure while I have any say on it."
And yet they pay for any number of wasteful government programs. You're paying for the leisure of well-connected thieves.
Mostly random stuff.
Money created without limit benefits 2 groups: the source of the money (who gets to buy with it without significant cost) and net debtors (who see their debt inflated into less real value.) Whether money that comes from the government is printed or acquired by theft, makes very little difference in the amount of damage it causes.
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That would be a yes. Trying to give basic income to dead people doesn't help anyone.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
their power comes from money. Specifically they say who lives and who dies because we're a society where if you don't work, you don't eat. And they decide who gets to work. Maybe during the cold war when they were afraid of outsourcing their factories least they be seized by the communists, but that boogieman is long gone.
And no, UBI wouldn't be the masses living in poverty. We already have enough housing to end homelessness and enough food to feed everyone and enough medicine to care for everyone. Look it up. We owe most of that money to ourselves. Only about $6 trillion is owed overseas and most of that is basically tribute. It's people buying our bounds and in doing so making the US Dollar the defacto world currency. They're not doing that out of the goodness of their hearts or because we're just so competitive, they're doing that because we have 19 air carriers and China, our closest rival, has 2, both old Soviet retrofits.
And besides, did you even bother reading my post? We could pay off our national debt in 40 years with the money saved from Medicare for All. We could do the foreign debt in 6-8 years. But again, we don't want to. We _want_ to owe those folks money because it locks them into our currency.
The puritanical myth that people won't work unless they constantly fear death by starvation, the elements or lack of medicine is just that, a myth. One created by the ruling class' propaganda and indoctrination.
You're being manipulated by the ruling class. I really wish I could get people to see these patterns. It's not like the American ruling class is doing anything special. It's the same techniques since the bronze age: divide and conquer the working class along economic, religious and racial subdivisions. We see the pattern over and over again (the US Southern Strategy, India's caste system, Britain's classes, Hell, when the Japanese didn't have any racial or religious divides they just declared everyone in "unclean" professions low-caste and kept books of their names so they could oppress them.
It's called Kicking Down, and as a method of controlling a large population it's been almost completely effective. Every now and then cracks appear and are promptly spackle over. I just don't get why folks don't see it and get angry.
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The middle class, of course. That's where the money is.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
discussing how American can afford UBI.
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Money created without limit benefits 2 groups: the source of the money (who gets to buy with it without significant cost)
This. This is why the Big Finance fights so hard to have fractional reserve lending not only legal but even preferred. Money that's produced from thin air still works same as any other money.
and net debtors (who see their debt inflated into less real value.)
This has a significant effect only on long-term debt.
Whether money that comes from the government is printed or acquired by theft, makes very little difference in the amount of damage it causes.
Printing money works exactly same as a tax on holding any assets denominated as money -- only paperwork differs. If inflation is 5%, you just got taxed 5% on the whole value of all your savings.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Well, yes. The money people need to be able to live has indeed to come from somewhere. And when there is no jobs, an UBI is currently the only available solution. Nobody that really understands the idea thinks this is "funding leisure". What it is is an emergency measure designed to keep society functioning when a majority of all jobs vanish.
Do you have any better idea for that scenario? And do not give me "the jobs will not vanish". That is just a tired old lie.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
86% of the manufacturing jobs lost in America since the 70s were due to automation and process improvement, not outsourcing. Self driving cars and frictionless checkout are coming in the next 20 years tops, probably less. Farming robots are rapidly developing. Drones are already being used to replace professional crop dusters.
Face it, we're running out of the kind of work that 90% of the population can do. We can't all be surgeons. It doesn't matter how hard you want to work if you're hands aren't steady enough. Same with being a math wizard. Study all you want, you'll hit a wall somewhere. Most hit it long before Einstein (he famously joked about it and numbnuts misread it to think he was bad at math).
The world is full of billions of people not smart enough to live in the information economy. But they _are_ smart enough to hold a gun. If you abandon them, especially in a country like America where there are more guns than people, expect nasty things...
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That is the issue though. It comes from savings. This is a basic investing issue.
Currently your wealth is either in real assets or in cash. As long as the latter is not used for consumption, both are used for capital investment into productivity either directly by carrying the risk yourself (stock market purchases) or indirectly by letting someone else care the risk for you (cash in a bank). Assets that are purchased on the secondary market (stock market) do not directly shift the funds into productivity improvements, but they fuel the larger financial economy that enables the primary market (issue of new stock) to function in the first place.
Now in comes the basic income and you take away the money from the richer people to give it to the poor. The only money you can take away is that which is already not being consumed, thus money currently going into productivity improvements. It doesn’t even matter if the money comes from a middle class server farm guy or Trump’s third nephew, because the effect on the macroeconomic allocation of capital is the same. You are not feeding the poor at the cost of some rich asshole buying a new yacht, that’s an absolutely minuscule part of an UHNWI’s cash flows, you are feeding the poor at the cost of a new factory or laboratory not being built. There’s no amount of goody two shoes hand waving that can eradicate this simple fact.
That isn't a problem at all.
In Canada the amount the government spends on unemployment benefits and welfare would, if repurposed under one UBI umbrella, cover almost all the cost of the program. The government already has the money, it's jut a matter of redistributing it differently and more consistently.
I'd also like to point out that, in the USA for example, the government could easily pay for UBI if priorities were different. There is always an extra billion for an aircraft carrier or a trillion to get the F-35 program running. But feeding people? Nope, no money for that. You could lift everyone in the USA out of poverty with about half of the country's military budget.
Agreed, friend. There are many, many wasteful government programs. I would love to see those removed and the money spent on them released back to the public in the form of lower taxes. However, wasteful government programs today don't justify, pay for, or make possible a basic work-free income for everyone. Someone has to pay for that. Someone has to do the work to get us there.
We are, I suspect, at least two generations away from having the level of automation that will make what you want actually possible. We can not only foresee the possibility (like we could in the 1950's) of automation at that level, we are now at the point where we can say, yes, you know what, it just might actually be possible. And now that we've come to that stage, there are people who want it now. Like a teenager, our reach is exceeding our grasp. We have the understanding to see it's possible, but some of us don't have the understanding to realize it can't be possible today. Unfortunately, we will, without major medical breakthroughs, likely never ourselves be the beneficiaries of the type of technology that will make possible the kind of leisure that you want. However, stopping now won't get us there. Leisure now will not get us there. And I'm not willing to just pay off those that don't want to work while those of us who realize we still need to shoulder the burden for them too.
To be honest, even when that technology has arrived, it will bring a new set of issues. I don't think we ever will get "there", where no one has to work. In fact, I hope we never do. That will be a troubling society. I hope we have to work less, I hope we get to work more intelligently, and I hope we all get the time we want with our families and loved ones. I hope we develop into a society where families work together, where schooling and working is integrated into a holistic entity where there is no fine line between the two. And I hope we, as a society, have a firm grasp on the need for working and striving and have good leisure addiction awareness and counseling.
That all being said, this is where we live, and today, we all need to work.
The 1% have been getting their free money in droves for centuries for sitting on their arses and waving their genoms, so why such a resistance to giving free money to everybody? Money has to come from somewhere? Well, to 1% money comes from the rest, in droves. Do they deserve it? Why? I tend to think we all deserve a little bit of that for just sitting on our arse, too.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
The US Federal Government already spends about $1100 per month for every man, woman, and child inside the US. Add UBI; that's another $20K per person, right? So now we've tripled our Federal spending, to close to $13.3 trillion. We're now using 70% of our GDP just for Federal Government spending. The numbers just don't add up.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The world suffers from lack of goods and services, not lack of money. If production is boosted, the goods will eventually find their way to the poor. Certainly, wordwide people are still starving to death, so it's premature to declare victory of the robots. Even say in US, lack of affordable healthcare has a lot to do with shortage of doctors, as well as overregulation of medicine. Without boosting supply, giving people money will just raise prices.
Pretty clearly the idea of the UBI is hated on the right. I don't think conservatives hate the idea because it's not conservative, or because someone else will get something for nothing. I think they hate it because they seriously believe that they will be the ones to pay for it, one way or another. Looking at the question financially, it is hard to say they are wrong. They may be, but that has never been demonstrated.
Conservatives always bitch about us liberals "running out of other people's money." Often it makes me shake my head in dismay. In this case, though, I think they're right to be cautious. When you think about the scale of a functional UBI program in the US, holy crap, that's a lot of money. This is why some of us would be very interested in seeing the data from a long term experiment.
A further problem is based in the ownership of the production increases supposedly requiring a UBI. All this extra production (you know, the production that kills all of the jobs) is due to the implementation of automation - think 'lots of robots'. Problematically, we have this extra production because of the money invested by business owners, and they deserve (I think) to reap the rewards of that investment. They took a risk to make it happen.
Additionally, what happens to small businesses during the transition to automation? It is not clear to me that the majority of them will survive once the unpleasant jobs have a better, free alternative. The scale of the potential economic dislocation is astonishing.
Maybe it could work, or maybe it would just cause inflation until people's buying power reached an equilibrium at or below their previous one. No way to know without data.
Disclaimer - Socially, I am radically liberal (I should be able to buy heroin and a hooker at the corner drug store. Legally, I mean. I already could get that, realistically.) Fiscally, I am more of a moderate conservative. I think UBI is a fascinating idea, but I'm not convinced the math works out right.
The debate isn't about whether UBI would be a good idea or not. I think it would be, in that it would give people the freedom to do what they want to do, rather than they have to do. I also think that it would give families more time to spend together, leading to stronger relationships, better mental outcomes, and so on.
The debate really is about how to fund such a scheme... I doubt that the funds are available for this, and even they were, I believe that the political resistance to re-appropriating money from other sources would be so intense in many countries that the scheme would be a non-starter.
I think that the problem will really only be solved when technology enables things that people need (food, water, electricity, clothing, shelter) to be made so cheaply that the cost of funding such a program will be relatively trivial.
Till then, it's just a good subject for frequent Slashdot debates...
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
That was extremely well articulated.
Of course, I'm getting old, so...
Thats alot of planets.
[($)]
Everyone talks about wasteful government programs. What are these programs?
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
... stop the adoption of trickle-down economic policies?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
A better question would be: "if productivity increased immensely since 1970s, yet real wages have decreased, where has all that value gone to?".
Find a way to dislodge the value diverted to High Frequency Fraud, financial schemes, and other legally allowed graft, and you'll have not only money to fund UBI, but even a comfortable life for everyone.
Current proposals extract yet more money from the middle class. That's not going to work. They're only a scheme to placate plebs with a dole while diverting attention from the real cause.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Well put. Insulting, but a well-phrased insult.
Silicon Valley tech elites could bankroll a sizeable pilot, assuming it's successful, that could become permanent. If they wanted to. Take any proposed pilot area and fund an expansion.
It otherwise won't get funded because Republicans hate doing things that help other people.
If you're gonna argue that point, read some research on conservatives, fear, and empathy.
I think that's the problem, right there.
The US does NOT have "consistently worse outcomes" in medical care. In fact, when you compare similar patients, the US medical care system provides BETTER outcomes at almost every level.
Heart disease - the number one killer of first world adults - is most survivable in the US; moreso than any other country.
Cancer - the number two killer of adults - has better 5-year survival and recovery rates than any other country.
Childbirth deaths are significantly lower in the US for every category of premature birth, including a nearly unimaginable 20-week old birth.
Traumatic wounds are treated better and have better survival rates in the US.
HIV/AIDS survival and 'recovery' rates are better in the US.
Yes, the US spends more money on health care than the rest of the world. But it also gives the best quality care.
It was tried in Dauphin, Manitoba with pretty good results. Most everyone kept working, the exceptions were young mothers spending more time raising their children and young people staying in school to get a better education rather then quitting to help support their family.
Funny enough, this seems like results that right wingers would like, more family friendly and people trying to lift themselves up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Targeted benefits are almost always better.
Or a properly-funded universal healthcare system.
Or making sure the ice shelves stopping Antarctica sliding into the sea remain intact.
What more do you need to say, where does all this magical money come from and what happens when it runs out?
Its serfdom V3.0, people dependent on the new feudal overlords, rent your computer power, you dont own the stuff you bought its licensed, you can't fix your stuff its restricted, rent your place to live, bend the knee to get your 'income', dont complain we are tracking everything you say online.
I still prefer the ladder we build ourselves over the rope they dangle down for you at their whim.
Back in June we declared, "Basic income could work -- if you do it Canada style." We talked to the people on the ground getting the checks in Ontario's 4,000-person test and saw how it was changing the community. Then, just two months later, it was announced that the program is ending in the new year rather than running for three years. The last checks will be delivered to participants in March 2019.
Oh. so I guess it can't work if you do it Canada style after all?
The article complains that in addition, Finland's test program ended this year after its initial trial period,
No! Not the nordic paradises too?!?! How could you?
Could it be that maybe, just maybe, there are some actual challenges here, beyond just those obstinate mean old right wingers? Or did obstinate mean old right wingers torpedo it in Canada and Finland, those noted hotbeds of obstinate mean old right wingers?
I'm a millennial and I agree with that - I'm not paying for it. I make what elitists would consider a meager six-figure salary, but I worked fucking hard to get it and I don't accept I got it because I'm white. Fuck that, I grew up below the poverty line and that was enough motivation to pay my dues, miss the parties and birthdays to study and work late.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Nations can only pay for some many people doing nothing. And health care. And a mil. And pensions. And roads. And...
Giving everyone free money including the tax payers will take too much money from all other services and gov sectors.
What money for citizens not working, not in education? Use means testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Is the person a citizen? Not an illegal migrant?
Got a bank account? Photo ID?
Not working? Then they can a nice support payment.
Start education? Thats a better payment.
Found work and become a productive tax payer again? The payment stops.
No UBI needed as people move from work to not working, to education.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
How much would the USA have to spend of that "17% of GDP" on working tax payers getting UBI money for nothing?
At some point working people are going to have to work and pay taxes.
Taxes that support the "free" stuff for everyone not working.
Re "expensive-to-administer welfare services" are limited to people not working.
What happens when everyone gets a UBI and no more government services are offered?
Suddenly the poor and people with medical problems have to spend all their UBI on services they once got from the gov?
What to do then? Make the UBI bigger to support the poor again?
Then the money runs out.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I think we could calculate "how much" support it would cost to have UBI in the USA. I just don't think Sillicon Valley is willing to pay that much.
Multiply a UBI which is just barely over the poverty level ($12,000) by the adult population of the US (300 million), and you get a price tag of $3.6 trillion per year. How much "data" do you need to collect before you figure out that this is a non-starter?
Go read Manna by Marshall Brian. I think they have the right idea. We should automate and create robots to do everything possible leaving people to be creative and collaborative or just chill on a beach somewhere. Our monetary system is holding us back in so many ways itâ(TM)s getting dangerous. Would we be having arguments about global warming if nobody had to spend more to solve it? The only reason we managed to tackle the ozone hole was the industry impacted was not big enough to fight it off like the oil industry was able to.
Oh, forgot a couple points:
A: We are currently spending somewhere over $50k per family under the poverty line in welfare. We could literally eliminate poverty by just giving them the money we're already spending. The overhead is insane.
B: Current welfare schemes end up creating "welfare cliffs", where the family unit in question can be penalized, have lower total income, by earning more money. IE earn $1 more and lose $10k in benefits. A large part of my support for UBI is eliminating that.
C: I would prefer to pay for this via a sovereign wealth fund. Basically, a smallish amount of taxes goes into the fund. The UBI is paid for out of the fund, like what Alaska is doing. It'd take years, but would create a self-balancing situation.
D: Payouts should be "managed" similar to how interest rates are managed by the Fed. If you're seeing excessive wage inflation due to not enough workers(at the lower end), keep the UBI payment low. If you're seeing plenty of employment but wages are stagnant or dropping at the low end, increase the UBI some.
I don't read AC A human right
I think most good parents would agree that self sufficient children make for healthy and happy members of society. Whether we admit it or not, I don't think we truly feel content unless we are reasonably self sufficient and contributing in some way that benefits society.
A better idea than UBI or welfare would be providing a basic level of shelter, food, medical care, safety, and guidance with strict rules and structure. So if you are willing to follow the rules and contribute to the community then government and society will in return provide the basics that will help you grow into a healthy contributing member of society.
At the very least I would like to see something like this tried before UBI.
You have a point regarding the productivity increases. Where have they gone indeed.
However it is not the "plebs" who will need the UBI. It is mostly middle-class jobs that will vanish without replacement.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Having the biggest / most expensive military of the world, e.g.?
What else than a mini UBI is that land army of the US?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
They repaired the Hubble telescope ... and I'm pretty sure there are plenty of other nice things they did, or why did they have 135 missions?
In hindsight it is always easy to dismiss something as to expensive or ineffective. Obviously during the planning stage they thought it was a good idea. Now we have SpaceX ... people believed it is "impossible" to land rockets again and reuse them.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
you are feeding the poor at the cost of a new factory or laboratory not being built.
Wow, how logical.
And how exactly would the factory that is not build provide the jobs, productivity and goods and taxes that are used to finance UBI?
Which part of the U as in universal did you not get yet? It is not the poor that will get UBI: it is _everyone_. So obviously it only shifts every person from their income level to a level slightly higher. The government could simply cut the wages for every government employee by that amount. Every employer on the free market who did the same, would drastically increase its earnings and pay more taxes. In the end UBI is about getting rid of all the institutions and their staff that is managing unemployed and the poor.
At the moment you pay for every poor two or three times: once the money he gets, then the guy who decides if he gets money and how much and then again for everything else he needs like housing, extra cloth or equipment for his home etc.
It is really shocking that people who have no clue about anything are allowed to vote and block mankind's progress.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If inflation is 5%, you just got taxed 5% on the whole value of all your savings.
Nope.
Tax means, someone else has the money and can spent it now. Inflation means, the money is gone. But so are your depts.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Maybe.
I've read your comments going back 6 months. I'm hurt by your comments about my sig (don't worry, I'll survive) and I don't see a point in rebutting you on the examples I'm familiar with or researching the examples that I'm unfamiliar with, made by someone who gets their kicks from being nasty to other people. By engaging with you, even by this comment, I am nearly guaranteed to receive back something low on information and high on personal attack. So, I can only present you with this conversational cliff. Good night.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
So you mean to say that, knowing the plan was temporary, participants didn't decide to ditch their money-rewarding incomes which would lead to unemployment the day after the program was closed? Count me surprised.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I agree with you there. Weirdly, I discounted the military as a government program, as if it was its own entity, but it is a government program.
The military funding bothers me too, because I have seen the conditions that the enlisted live in and it isn't that great. Where is that money going?
Another example, now that you have set me on this track, is all the intelligence agencies. There is something like 17 intel agencies.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
Or perhaps due to the plan not bringing in much money, people decided to keep working rather then sitting around bored.
Unluckily there wasn't enough follow through studies and the experiment was cut short so we'll never know.
Personally, unless I became very wealthy, I'd prefer to work, though perhaps a bit less. Others seem to prefer sitting around with just enough to eat and pay the rent and only work due to force rather then the urge to do something productive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"if productivity increased immensely since 1970s, yet real wages have decreased, where has all that value gone to?".
Mainly to pay for increasingly expensive healthcare plans (quality of healthcare has increased dramatically, too), and people taking more and more days off. Total compensation per hour (including things like healthcare) has increased immensely since the 1970s.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The "laws" of biological ecosystems and real, not imaginary "calories economy" could not be defeated. The competition for a scarce resources for survival and reproduction is a fundamental and implicit constraint in any ecosystem. The only way the basic income could work is that "the privileged" (the rich) have enough money to give to the rest of us (the poor) for free. It is exactly like having a pet. Lots of them. (Or use a sugar-daddy analogy, if you prefer). This is only way it could be viewed and implemented. Everything else is an utter bullshit.
Where do you think the bulk of Federal spending goes? I wonder if you realize that 71% goes to welfare, pensions, healthcare and interest on the debt? EVERYTHING else - including the department of defense - is the other 29%. Slash that and we're still in a bad position. The numbers for UBI simply don't work out, unless you want to shut down everything but pensions, Medicare/Medicaid, welfare, and interest on the debt - and then you could give about $3600 annually per person.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I wanted to break this out separately because I think it's something so many fail to realize: we tax income, NOT wealth. If we tax wealth, then are you ready to take everything you own, and hand over 10% every year? Not what you earn - what you have. Cars, property, clothes, computers - add up that value (wealth), and then pay a portion of that every year. We tax income - not wealth.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Countries experimenting with UBI are generally not considering getting rid of their public health systems to offset it. They're considering offsetting unemployment payments, low income housing assistance, etc etc.
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The US does NOT have "consistently worse outcomes" in medical care. In fact, when you compare similar patients, the US medical care system provides BETTER outcomes at almost every level.
If you measure people who are actually treated, the US has better than average outcomes (for comparable developed countries). If you measure overall mortality rates for the same conditions, the US has worse than average outcomes.
The one exception to this is cancers, where the US has performed better than average since the mid 90s.
Of course, the mortality rates for all of these diseases is dropping everywhere in the developed world. But apart from cancers, the US started behind and is still behind the developed world average.
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“When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”
- Benjamin Franklin
Interesting position, but it isn't psychological, either. The problem is that conventional economics thinks money is more important than time, but technology has increased productivity to the point where that approach makes no sense. Time for Ekronomics 101 (again).
Consider the essential working time for such goods as the famous food, clothing, and shelter. In advanced societies, the overall average is quite small, but people still have more time. The rest of the time has to go somewhere. I suggest it is divided between investment and recreational time, and the balance is the key thing.
Anyway, I've just been called to dinner, but ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
No. A lack of common sense is. Eventually you run out of other peoples' money
It depends on what you think UBI is, whether it's a Wall-E style leisure cruise or a system where you unconditionally get the absolute basics but the vast majority of the population work for more. The first is obviously a pipe dream generations away as vast amounts of work can't be automated in the foreseeable future, but a few set it up as a straw man only to cut it down to show UBI is impossible. As for the latter you can define the basics to be anywhere from the conditions of a third world refugee camp to non-fancy first world living. That's going to have huge effect on both the income and expense side of the equation.
I mean we've pretty much done this already with world hunger, outright starvation and famine now only happen in active conflict zones where we're unable to provide humanitarian relief. That wasn't the case 30 years ago, then you had people starving to death for no other reason than being poor. As long as you're aiming for a sack of rice and not a moving target it's pretty easy to see that automation can catch up to the point where we're just handing it out regardless of whether you're earned it. If you move the goal posts to say that it means more than mere survival but also no stunted growth, vitamin deficiencies or other malnutrition that's a different and harder goal. Particularly relative measures or appeals to what is normal are forever moving goal posts.
I'd say a good starting point for a UBI discussion would be something like a high functioning WoW addict. And by high functioning I mean that he maintains normal hygiene and such but has essentially no social expenses and cares very little about location. While sharing bathroom/kitchen facilities with others may be acceptable for a while I think since we're talking permanent residence for an adult I'd say a tiny studio apartment is where I'll draw a somewhat arbitrary line. Let's assume maintenance is part of the deal, you get a basic TV, computer and smartphone with basic Internet service. You get enough to buy the basics for food, clothes and hygiene. You have access to healthcare and dental care. I'll throw in a local public transportation pass so you're not totally stuck.
Apart from that, nothing. You want entertainment? Watch YouTube. Play Fortnite. Take a walk in the park. Hit Tinder, hopefully your date likes homemade mac & cheese. No coffee shops, no restaurants, no pubs, no cinema, no concerts, no trips or hotels, no hobbies or interests with more than negligible cost. I think that's a fairly non-moving target, we've automated parts (food and clothes production), we're working on many others (transport, stores, construction) but will probably be stuck with some manual labor (maintenance, healthcare, dental care). It really depends on how many would want that, it sounds very minimalist but if you could NOT spend 40 hours a week scrubbing toilets or flipping burgers is it worth it? If 5% quit, we'll manage. If 50% quit, it doesn't work.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What a depressing view of humanity. People only work because of the threat of poverty?
In reality most people would prefer to better themselves and work towards that, as long as they see a realistic prospect of it happening.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
you mean disenfranchising socialists?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Experiments on limited pop carry no sense. They are bound to have zero effect on overall inflation, for example.
You can't experiment with UBI. I do not even understand why people came up even with an idea of such experiments. Did people "experiment" in this way with minimum salary? Or with various programs?
What is wrong with good old unemployment benefits? Why do we need to pay extra money to people who already are capable to earn the money?
Is it one of the imbecile modern ideas that you can "simplify" regulation of such a complex organism as modern human society? By paying flat rate anyway.
If you are worried that people are not getting elementary necessities, give them these necessities eliminating a middle man - money.
If people are in need of housing - give them free housing, not the option to make terrible decision with the universal equivalent.
If something is minimal and obligatory, why do you give people an option of waste the money earmarked for buying it?
That's what minimum is. Enough food, housing, clothes for everyone, not the monetary equivalent of that.
If people are trading their free food, free housing or free clothes for something else, then, you guess correctly, it's not a necessity then. It's their choice.
The only reason why people need to be given money is plain vanilla simple - so they do not jilet jaune the whole society to the ground.
That's how civilization dealt with lazzaroni since Romans.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
if you think "the jobs will vanish" your understanding of economics is vastly incorrect.
improved efficiency frees up money which increases demand for other goods and services.
this effect can be observed throughout pretty much all of human history. the other effect that can be observed as a repeatable and predictable phenomena is that communism brings exponential death and misery, with the single exception being Vietnam, they managed to install communism and uninstall communism without breaking food.exe
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
anyone with a job. mainly to benefit those who sit around smoking dope
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Definitely not enough time to make the conclusions you are making
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Tax means, someone else has the money and can spent it now. Inflation means, the money is gone.
Nope -- there's no inflation without an increase of the money supply to economy size ratio. The economy expands at a very fast rate (increases of productivity due to automation, effectiveness, population size, education, etc) yet inflation keeps going.
And that's because our rulers keep printing money. The government does so literally, the Big Finance does so by fractional reserve, but the result is the same. $100 in old money is worth exactly as much as $100 in newly minted money or $100 in credit, yet only the first was actually earned. The second and third extract value from honest workers/scientists/merchants/managers/servicers without providing any benefit to the society. The actual gain (be it from directly producing widget X, getting it to a customer, organizing work, or providing for the workers) is still $100 yet it is suddenly declared to be worth "$300". And only $33 goes to people who produced/invented/distributed/organized/bartendered, while the rest gets taxed. Taxes that go to the government at least can be argued to pay for govt spending, some of which you actually want -- but that doesn't mean the money extracted from you differs in any real way from you'd pay as an explicit tax.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Give you a hint why it was ended in 1979. It's because Canada had just entered a hyperinflation phase(1978), and the costs couldn't be offset by monetary policy. Something that the wikipedia article leaves out. But to make it clear at just how bad that hyperinflation rate was, if you were making $10k/year in a union shop that had COLA(i.e. wages tied to inflation), by 1979 you were making $32k/year. By 1981 it was $39k/year. The average price for a previously owned home was around $25k-31k, the interest rate on that house was around 13.5%. By 1982 it was 21% by 1983 25-31%.
But wait, it gets better! Because Canada is on the cusp of the same thing happening again. At a prime rate of 3.95% a jump of 0.05% puts 40% of mortgages under water, since many people have taken rates that are variable rate i.e. tied +% prime meaning their borrowing rate is say 5.95% and so on instead of a long-term fixed rate. But wait it gets even better! Because all of this is a repeat of Trudeau Sr.'s "NEP" which Jr., is currently re-doing to the detriment of the prairie provinces. If you don't live in Canada, you probably aren't hearing the "Fucking Trudeau, time to GTFO out of Canada and fuck confederation." That's been going around the last year or so.
Om, nomnomnom...
The reason for my alarm clock every morning is my income. Not to say I hate my job or anything, but if the need for money wasn't there, the motivation would be much different. I'd be writing poems, painting, whatever.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The urge to do something productive may be there or not, nevertheless hunger trumps all. I have 3 kids so I *need* money, and not just for myself.
Mind you I could quit tomorrow and earn 50% more someplace else easily, so no, money isn't everything. But still, I'd probably quit in a heartbeat my current company if I didn't need to feed 5 people.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
If only the "government" would pay me to do whatever I want, instead of what is economically useful to others!!!
The economy expands at a very fast rate (increases of productivity due to automation, effectiveness, population size, education, etc) yet inflation keeps going.
Yes, because money lenders/banks demand interest. That is the only driving force behind inflation.
The rest of your post is just wacko.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... all over the posts and replies here!
Sure, it'll be given to the rich as well.
And promptly taxed away again.
The ordinary working guy to the rich won't see much difference in net income.
There would be savings in not having to employ lots of people to decide who is deserving of what benefits.
Two family illnesses followed by the 2008 crash devastated me. And I'm not alone. 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. That house you have a mortgage on? You don't own it, the bank does.
If I may digress for a moment, this is one of the reasons women's rights was such a problem for the ruling class. The rulers didn't want to give the masses real property and financial security. But any fool can see that's not fair. You spend your whole life working for the lord (or the robber baron as the case my be) and have nothing to show for it. Solution? Make women property. Then at least there's _something_ you own (your wife and the children she bore). I wish all those numbskull blue haired feminists could figure this out so they could actual do something useful for a change.
Everything is about money. Things get really fucked up really fast when you give 50%+ of civilization's output to 1% of the population. The shit you have to do to maintain that craziness is, well, batshit insane.
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See here for a list of common sense things that are just plain wrong.
The real world is a stupidly complex mess that very, very often operates counter-intuitively. There's a saying in science and math: "For every sufficiently complex problem there is a simple, elegant solution that is also wrong".
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
No, it's common sense.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
"we all need to work."
No, we don't. Unless by "need" you mean a psychological need.
Mostly random stuff.
Right now by need I mean in order for society not to collapse. But in the future, when widespread leisure is an option, we may find it's a psychological need.
Tell me how toy think the list of jobs I originally gave are going to get done today if we pay for everyone to stay home and relax?
Yeah, I always find an anonymous coward citing no evidence at all so convincing...
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
An entirely made-up quote. You cannot cite a source for this because it does not exist.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I'd argue that economic systems primarily depend on the extraction of natural resources, and distribution of those products. Over the last 200 years we've got better at extracting the resources, producing the products, and distributing them, but better food and energy production have been key.
Fair enough, but you also argued...
But, ok, since you're now mantaining that you didn't intend to mean no one works, tell me, what does a "leisure society" look like? How many hours a week are we all working versus leisuring? Describe this society and how we make it work.
If someone gave you enough money to barely feed your kids, would you quit working? As far as I know, the basic income is just barely enough to survive, not survive well, so people keep working. Even you, I'm sure you like to do more for your kids then just feed them enough to survive. New clothes and shoes, cosmetic dental stuff like braces, toys, especially educational toys as well as other educational stuff like computers. Perhaps sports related stuff, in Canada, hockey is big and expensive and even playing soccer needs support.
Most people want to do more then barely survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Agreed. Worse it subjects poor folks and those out of luck with gaps on their all precious resumes to exploitation.
Could a Star Trek like Utopia exists where people do what we they want yet food and products exist to consume. Automation will help but you saw the comments here? The jobs they replace WILL NEVER get subsidized based on greed. The cycle repeats.
http://saveie6.com/
That will all have to be paid for by a UBI..
That UBI will need to be paid to every citizen.
Where is the gov going to get that large pool of tax payers money it has to pay everyone a UBI?
Existing gov support services will have to be removed as all citizens would have a UBI to fully access the same new services offered by the private sector.
More tax and fewer gov services will be the result of the UBI.
Poor people will spend all their UBI just paying new tax on food, rent, health care, their utility bills.
Need support beyond that? Try a charity?
The UBI is the "unemployment payments, low income housing assistance" but for 100% of all working and not working citizens.
Thats a lot of new taxes to raise.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Quite surprised to stumble across a constructive-solution approach on today's Slashdot. Not surprised to see it is unmoderated and the discussion is about to time out, too. I found you on the search for "unemploy".
What sort of encouragement can I offer? Perhaps to delve a bit deeper into the justification for UBI? From an ekronomic perspective these things look too simple?
For my simple new example, I'm picking agriculture. From a "big history" perspective, most people have been farmers for most of human history. (In prehistory the hunter-gatherers dominated.)
Now imagine you run a gigantic corporate cancer that focuses on producing food. Any factory farm would be an adequate example. You have to hire a new employee. Here are your candidates:
(1) An uneducated and not very bright fellow (think of a medieval French peasant or Russian serf) who can do the work adequately and produce enough food to feed himself and lots of other people.
(2) A PhD in applied agriculture who can do the production work while also developing the techniques to improve productivity, hire even fewer farmers, and increase profits.
(3) Same as (2) but he's willing to work cheaper, right down to the minimum wage (or less) because he's desperate for money because there's no UBI.
Enough time invested now, but as usual I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I could really hang with the Libertarians except that they have completely unrealistic ideas about the interplay of government and corporations.
The ONLY long-term countervailing force to corporations is government.
The natural state of an unregulated free market is domination by a series of monopolies, one per industry. This is accompanied by all of the evils associated with abusive monopolies. These industries are free from competition, allowing maximum profit extraction from the consumers. This is in no way a good outcome for the people (you know, the human ones.)
Other than that, sure, I'm with you.
Universal basic income would allow a whole lot of insufferable people to pursue their "art' when they should really be working as a stock clerk at Target.
one of the Scandinavian countries did it, I forget which one. Drug hard use went down. The catch was they treated hard drugs as an illness. If you wanted to shoot up Heroine the government paid for it. You went to a clinic, got high, and as soon as you came down you went straight to drug rehab.
Folks don't shoot up and/or take meth for kicks. They're usually doing it to cope with mental illness. Treat the underlining cause and the problem goes away. Now, for most of those folks we can't really do that, because we just don't know enough about mental illness yet. But again, we can still treat it to some degree.
That said, I don't think we can do this in America. Too many Americans would be furious over tax dollars paying for "junkies" to shoot up (the fact we call them Junkies tells you how loaded our language is.... but such is life in America). You can point out that it's cheaper than the crimes they'd commit, but I've pressed these kinda folks on that before and if you keep at them they'll either stop talking to you or support forced work camps for the drug users. I mean, prison slavery _is_ one way to keep them away from drugs and not have to pay for it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It doesn’t shift every person up the income ladder. It merely increases aggregate consumption thus reducing aggregate savings. This is not exactly a matter of dispute.
How can you test UBI without a universal test? Any test that gives money to a subset of people isn't universal, and introduces some kind of criteria that determines who gets it and who doesn't, thus invalidating the concept, and the test.
So shall we test it by giving everyone money? For how long? What if it flops? Once you start giving away things, it's really, really hard to stop. But you're still out a tremendous amount of money. Yes, YOU are the source of the government's money, which UBI people want to give away. It's not magic.
mainly to benefit those who sit around smoking dope
Well, those are the only people that matter anymore anyway it seems. There's no more real freedom from, only freedom to, so why not take this to its ultimate conclusion where we also give people as much dope as they want as well? I'm sure I'll get modded down for saying this but that's the way the smoke goes these days, if you don't tow the line and praise it as genius and better for the country and world, you're out like last month's bong water.
Not at all, although that is an interesting observation.
Conservatives always bitch about us liberals "running out of other people's money."
Conservatives (as a large, generic group) do bitch about that. Constantly. And I am a liberal, if you look at me as a whole. If you split the US-ian population into two groups (Conservative/Liberal), I'll be over there on the left.
Fiscally, I am more of a moderate conservative. I think UBI is a fascinating idea, but I'm not convinced the math works out right.
My fiscal opinions are ONE ASPECT of my outlook/preferences:
In my starry-eyed innocence, I really do believe that we can do much better as a group if we take better care of our humans, even the ones we don't really like. I want progressive social policies. I really, really want poor Americans to stop voting against their own best interests.
However, studying business at university level for six years (particularly economics, accounting, and management theory) introduces some cold, hard facts of life to the conversation. While most of the time I find objections to social programs to be spurious, some of the shit I hear from my own side of the aisle is just... not grounded in reality. Like, just a complete failure to understand very simple concepts, and a pathologically optimistic view of human nature.
the quoted statements are contradictory.
So, while I guess I can see where you're coming from, I don't think they are contradictory at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Governments have been dominated by the corporate entities and citizens have ceased to matter in public policy" true in
Yes it shifts every person up.
As every person gets that money.
This is not exactly a matter of dispute.
Exactly. So why are you disputing it?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
My theory is that your only principle is "I can and should squash the inferior peasants." Most so-called Libertarians have such a primitive and false understanding of what "freedom" means.
My theory is that you are a cunt. You are willing to take what someone says and twist it and distort it right in front of their face and then claim they are an asshole.
He didn't say shit about squashing peasants. He said he wouldn't take free money on principle. The asshole in this conversation is YOU, not him.
Shouldn't you be off somewhere trying to convince people that communism works and all the history books are full of lies?
If you [4874633] can't understand and want to, then feel free to ask questions. Here is a relevant example of a possibly meaningful question: "Do you have any idea what "communism" means?" Let me give you a hint: It is not equal to "socialism".
Of course the underlying problems there are (1) I do understand you [4874633] (and your "cunt" is rather too kind a description), and (2) I don't want to. In logical terms, F AND F = F. You have heard of logic, right? Certainly can't tell from your writing.
If I could get enough energy to care about you [4874633], I would probably say something like "bloody twit", but such people (or sock puppets) are a dime a dozen on today's Slashdot. Perhaps two dozen. Who's counting? I don't go out of my way to look under rocks, though the bugs and maggots sometimes crawl out on their own initiative. And no, I don't care enough to wonder why or worry how many get squished.
However I do believe there is one slightly remarkable aspect of your [4874633's] "thinking". That empty and worthless "reply" was how you "freely" chose to start your new year. I started mine quite differently, but I hope the rest of your new year follows exactly along the path you've chosen. If I cared enough to peek, I'm quite sure you wasted your last year, too. Happy new year and congratulations on getting one year closer to wasting your entire life. (Perhaps you're some kind of reincarnationist and think you'll get more of them?)
In conclusion, judging from your [4874633's] precious words, I think it is best that you learn to follow the easy advice: "If you have nothing to say, then you should say nothing." There's also a version using a funny story about a jackass in disguise, but the funniest idea is that people like you could learn anything.
I wasn't talking to you [4874633]. Obviously. Too bad this "discussion" was concluded before it began, eh?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Hang on, Angelo, I am going to shift myself up a little by liquidating my 401(k) and buying a Lamborghini. *insert rofl emoji here* Congrats on completely missing the point of the last two posts, Einstein.
That empty and worthless "reply" was how you "freely" chose to start your new year.
Uh.. no... nope. It's still 2018 here... The new year is still in the future.
question: "Do you have any idea what "communism" means?" Let me give you a hint: It is not equal to "socialism".
Do you communists not know you have become parodies of yourself? That is exactly what communists say.. ALWAYS. The communist believes himself to be superior than all others. Nobody else got communism right.. They all implemented it incorrectly. Only our hero knows how to implement communism correctly. The level of ego is mind boggling.
Z^-1
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Z^-2
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
... $100 in old money is worth exactly as much as $100 in newly minted money or $100 in credit, yet only the first was actually earned.
The $100 in credit was also earned; the lender earned the principle, while the borrower earned the funds needed to pay the interest, thus renting the use of the principle from the lender for a time.
Of course, that "old money" may not actually be all that old. As you suggested, under the current system where fundamentally insolvent banks are propped up by the FDIC and related regulations a significant share of the funds being borrowed fall under the heading of "newly minted money". That minting happens when the deposit is invested, however, not specifically when credit is extended. Even without making loans banks could still "double-book" customer deposits by taking that money and putting it into illiquid investments, leaving them unable to meet depositors' reasonable expectations of timely withdrawals in the event of a bank run.
... but that doesn't mean the money extracted from you differs in any real way from you'd pay as an explicit tax.
Exactly. The key metric is goods and services consumed (i.e. spending). Tax vs. printing vs. fractional-reserve has some effect on who pays (income earners, lenders, savers) and who benefits (CPAs, borrowers, bankers) but doesn't fundamentally change the amount of productivity being siphoned out of the market by political means.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat