Nobody's talking about redistributing existing wealth, like your stock portfolio or your savings account. An UBI would be funded, like most of the rest of government spending, by an income tax. Which makes sense because what you're trying to do with an UBI is adjust incomes, so you raise some people's (at the bottom) by lowering some other people's (at the top); and the people in the middle are barely affected at all, as all incomes have just been moved closer to the middle, where those middle people already were.
That is actually the literal opposite of Gresham's law ("bad money drives out good"), and also has nothing to do with redistribution because Gresham's law is about the nominal value of coinage compared to its commodity value, and fiat currency like we have now has zero commodity value (and hey look, fiat money has driven out gold scrip, just like Gresham's law said it would).
What, you contend there's an actual radical left that emerged these past four years?
Say, a big block of people who advocate the absolution of all property (even your toothbrush isn't yours), or a total command economy (the state says who you must work for and how much you must accept for it)?
That's a radical left. And they're wrong; I don't want those people to win.
But their existence would highlight how what you're probably thinking of as a "radical" left -- like people who want a higher minimum wage, or subsidized health care, or ordinary things like that that aren't even a question in most modern Western countries -- are really, really moderate, and actually slightly right-wing even without the really radical left to compare them to by the standards of most of the civilized world.
Like all religion, it's just an irrational cover over the real motive. What people want is to not have to work and not have to give anybody else anything. Placing moral value on work gives them an excuse not to give anybody else anything unless those somebody else's work to deserve it, which in turn fulfills the desire to not have to work themselves (since they got someone else to do it). It's hard to fulfill both of those wants (until we get the robots working at least), but moralizing work lets the 'haves' pick at least one of them to get at the expense of the 'have-nots'.
If you are being given enough to survive, why would you want to work a weekend job?
Because there's more to living than just surviving.
If you already make the median income of around $25k/yr, which must surely be enough to survive, why would you ever take any steps to try to earn any more than that? Because you want to fucking live better, that's why! People will always want more.
Where do you think the money will come from to implement UBI?
Where does any money the government ever spends come from? Taxes. Around the mean income the tax and the UBI cancel out, so average people see no different. But at every other income level, the post-tax-and-UBI incomes shift closer to that mean income level, by the same percentage but a greater total dollar value the greater the distance from the mean income you start from. So people making way below the mean income get a big hand up. People making way above it pay for that hand up. People making a little below it get a little hand up, and people a little above it pay for that. People around the average couldn't care less because it barely affects them.
And everyone's still better off working than not working, both the rich and the poor and everyone in between.
This is why I often say it would be incredibly useful to have a crazy radical left, as crazy (and thereby wrong) as the radical right we've got. To renormalize where "moderate" really is. Not saying that I want such a radical left to actually win, but to have them there as a threat and a contrast to more moderate left positions, in the way that the Black Panthers, though wrong in their position, were useful in helping Martin Luther King Jr. seem more reasonable to those who might have otherwise considered him radical, if not for the Panthers' contrast.
Nobody's talking about increasing the money supply, they're talking about shuffling it around. And as the money is representative of material goods, that's equivalent to shuffling the material goods around too, which is the entire point of the exercise.
Replacement parts are made by robots. From raw materials mined by robots, from mines owned by the same people who own the robots. And robots will put hackers out of a job sooner or later too, just like everyone else.
Not sure if you think you're arguing against me, but all of that was exactly my point. Moving the money around into the hands of the poor accelerates the flow of money (and consequently economic activity). Money flows to the rich the way that water flows downhill, but when all the water has flowed down the waterfall stops turning the watermill. Redistributing money back to the poor is like pumping water uphill; it just makes more water flow back down more quickly.
Unless done in a pants-on-head retarded way, an UBI always preserves the benefit of working. You always get more from working than you do from not working. The net effect it has is to bring all incomes (after the UBI and the tax that funds it) closer to the mean income. Hardly anyone is going to want to just barely survive for free if they've got the means and opportunity to (much more easily thanks to the UBI head start) live a luxurious life with all their favorite toys and joys in exchange for a little work. It creates a center-ward pressure on incomes, giving people with the lowest incomes a boost up closer to mean income, barely affecting people near that mean income, at the expense of making it harder for people extremely far above the mean income to continue moving even further above it.
You'll note I conspicuously did not mention Republicans in my reply, but instead spoke of what people in general want. Nobody (i.e. not anybody) wants to make other people work, instead what they (i.e. anybody) wants is to not have to work themselves, etc.
You're going to have to spell out for me how vertically scaling the income distribution curve (which is all an UBI does in effect, move all points on that curve closer to the mean value, squashing it a bit in the y-axis) suddenly means nobody does any work and everything is free, and furthermore why that would entail the end of private property, and where I said anything about that sounding good to me.
Or social status and power (and with it sexual desirability) will just become ossified into whatever arrangement it happens to be in, with only inheritance shifting the wealth = power = status = sex around. Just like the way things used to be in old feudal aristocracies, where the nobles owned hordes of flesh-bots (called "peasants" in Ye Olde Englishe) to do all the work for them.
Why do the factory-owners need money to maintain their factories when they own robots who will maintain the factories for them for free? And other robots who maintain the robots. The goal is to have robots just take care of everything for you, including mowing down the angry starving hordes storming your mansion, so you don't need money, because money is just a tool you use to get things out of other people, and who needs people when you've got robots.
You're absolutely right that in the process the whole economy will come screeching to a halt, but the fat pampered robot-owning overlords will have no need for it at that point.
Still waiting on instructions rather than unsubstantiated anecdotes. How does someone living on welfare or in the projects leverage that into a big TV or a nice car?
(Possibly relevant: around where I live, "the projects" -- government-subsidized housing -- are a goddamn luxury in such short supply that most people who would qualify for them, destitute disabled veterans and mothers and the like, are on decade-long waitlists for them. Most of the poor people aren't lucky enough to live in "the projects", and instead spend the vast majority of their income sharing substandard housing at exorbitant rents with multiple other people in similar circumstances.).
Except people don't have more money "on average", for the usual sense of average (mean). Same amount of money, same number of people, same amount of money per person on average.
Doing an UBI the sane way (give everyone some x% of the GDP per capita, fund it by a flat x% income tax) doesn't even move where (i.e. what percentile) that mean income falls. Right now the mean income is about the 75th percentile. Do a basic income the aforementioned way and the mean income will still/em? be the 75th percentile, and people making that much money won't even see a different in their income after UBI and taxes (they'll exactly cancel out at that point). Just the numeric income values (post UBI and tax) at all other percentiles will be closer to what that average (mean) income is.
That would be fine, except that it's much harder (if possible at all) to mandate a one-time but permanent doubling of all wages, than it is to mandate fewer hours punishable by higher pay requirements at longer hours.
E.g. if you drop full time from 40 to 20 hours, and demand that everyone already working be paid twice as much, then the employers are going to replace everyone already working with two new hires getting paid "half as much" (i.e. what the old pay used to be) as quickly as possible.
About the only people you could save from this without the government suddenly dictating exactly what every single worker in the country must be paid are minimum-wage employees (i.e. you could double the minimum wage), which takes us back to the problem of helping the poor only at the expense of the middle class.
As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working.
I'm not clear what exactly you mean by this. Under any sane UBI, you always get more from working than you do from not working. Whether the UBI is a too-little-to-live-on $500/mo or a luxurious $2000/mo, taking that plus even a half-time minimum wage job is still better than taking just the UBI. (The $500/mo would require a tax of about 12% to fund, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $552/mo atop the UBI after that tax; the $2000/mo scenario would require about a 48% tax, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $326/mo atop the UBI after that tax).
Reducing full time will help the underemployed at the expense of only the middle class, rather than the expense of the capitalist class who really need to shoulder the burden. That in turn only further widens the gap between rich and poor, makes it harder and harder for someone to escape from dependency on the capitalists.
Nobody really wants other people to have to work. What they want is to not have to work themselves. If the most efficient way of getting what they want without having to work for it themselves is making other people work, then that's what they'll want. But if they can more easily have robots provide them with everything, and not have to pay some ugly bags of mostly water to do it instead, all the best from their perspective. The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if you need human work then you need other people and if you need them they've got leverage to demand things from you.
So work as a justification for dessert becomes a convenient narrative, an easy excuse to say why they don't have to give anyone anything: you didn't work hard enough to deserve it. Never mind that as automation displaces human labor there increasingly comes a point where there's no such thing as "hard enough" because humans are simply incapable of providing the same value as robots; work remains the justification for why the haves get to keep having it all and don't have to share at all with the have-nots.
When it comes to that point, what they really want is for all the useless have-nots to just die and stop nagging them for things. "You didn't work hard enough" becomes just the excuse for why their easily-prevented deaths are justified.
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Nobody's talking about redistributing existing wealth, like your stock portfolio or your savings account. An UBI would be funded, like most of the rest of government spending, by an income tax. Which makes sense because what you're trying to do with an UBI is adjust incomes, so you raise some people's (at the bottom) by lowering some other people's (at the top); and the people in the middle are barely affected at all, as all incomes have just been moved closer to the middle, where those middle people already were.
That is actually the literal opposite of Gresham's law ("bad money drives out good"), and also has nothing to do with redistribution because Gresham's law is about the nominal value of coinage compared to its commodity value, and fiat currency like we have now has zero commodity value (and hey look, fiat money has driven out gold scrip, just like Gresham's law said it would).
...and by "absolution" I meant "abolition", of course.
What, you contend there's an actual radical left that emerged these past four years?
Say, a big block of people who advocate the absolution of all property (even your toothbrush isn't yours), or a total command economy (the state says who you must work for and how much you must accept for it)?
That's a radical left. And they're wrong; I don't want those people to win.
But their existence would highlight how what you're probably thinking of as a "radical" left -- like people who want a higher minimum wage, or subsidized health care, or ordinary things like that that aren't even a question in most modern Western countries -- are really, really moderate, and actually slightly right-wing even without the really radical left to compare them to by the standards of most of the civilized world.
Thank you, though actually that 92% tax bracket comment was someone else, not me.
Yes. That is precisely how it differs from unemployment insurance.
Like all religion, it's just an irrational cover over the real motive. What people want is to not have to work and not have to give anybody else anything. Placing moral value on work gives them an excuse not to give anybody else anything unless those somebody else's work to deserve it, which in turn fulfills the desire to not have to work themselves (since they got someone else to do it). It's hard to fulfill both of those wants (until we get the robots working at least), but moralizing work lets the 'haves' pick at least one of them to get at the expense of the 'have-nots'.
If you are being given enough to survive, why would you want to work a weekend job?
Because there's more to living than just surviving.
If you already make the median income of around $25k/yr, which must surely be enough to survive, why would you ever take any steps to try to earn any more than that? Because you want to fucking live better, that's why! People will always want more.
Where do you think the money will come from to implement UBI?
Where does any money the government ever spends come from? Taxes. Around the mean income the tax and the UBI cancel out, so average people see no different. But at every other income level, the post-tax-and-UBI incomes shift closer to that mean income level, by the same percentage but a greater total dollar value the greater the distance from the mean income you start from. So people making way below the mean income get a big hand up. People making way above it pay for that hand up. People making a little below it get a little hand up, and people a little above it pay for that. People around the average couldn't care less because it barely affects them.
And everyone's still better off working than not working, both the rich and the poor and everyone in between.
This is why I often say it would be incredibly useful to have a crazy radical left, as crazy (and thereby wrong) as the radical right we've got. To renormalize where "moderate" really is. Not saying that I want such a radical left to actually win, but to have them there as a threat and a contrast to more moderate left positions, in the way that the Black Panthers, though wrong in their position, were useful in helping Martin Luther King Jr. seem more reasonable to those who might have otherwise considered him radical, if not for the Panthers' contrast.
Nobody's talking about increasing the money supply, they're talking about shuffling it around. And as the money is representative of material goods, that's equivalent to shuffling the material goods around too, which is the entire point of the exercise.
Replacement parts are made by robots. From raw materials mined by robots, from mines owned by the same people who own the robots. And robots will put hackers out of a job sooner or later too, just like everyone else.
Not sure if you think you're arguing against me, but all of that was exactly my point. Moving the money around into the hands of the poor accelerates the flow of money (and consequently economic activity). Money flows to the rich the way that water flows downhill, but when all the water has flowed down the waterfall stops turning the watermill. Redistributing money back to the poor is like pumping water uphill; it just makes more water flow back down more quickly.
Unless done in a pants-on-head retarded way, an UBI always preserves the benefit of working. You always get more from working than you do from not working. The net effect it has is to bring all incomes (after the UBI and the tax that funds it) closer to the mean income. Hardly anyone is going to want to just barely survive for free if they've got the means and opportunity to (much more easily thanks to the UBI head start) live a luxurious life with all their favorite toys and joys in exchange for a little work. It creates a center-ward pressure on incomes, giving people with the lowest incomes a boost up closer to mean income, barely affecting people near that mean income, at the expense of making it harder for people extremely far above the mean income to continue moving even further above it.
You'll note I conspicuously did not mention Republicans in my reply, but instead spoke of what people in general want. Nobody (i.e. not anybody) wants to make other people work, instead what they (i.e. anybody) wants is to not have to work themselves, etc.
You're going to have to spell out for me how vertically scaling the income distribution curve (which is all an UBI does in effect, move all points on that curve closer to the mean value, squashing it a bit in the y-axis) suddenly means nobody does any work and everything is free, and furthermore why that would entail the end of private property, and where I said anything about that sounding good to me.
Or social status and power (and with it sexual desirability) will just become ossified into whatever arrangement it happens to be in, with only inheritance shifting the wealth = power = status = sex around. Just like the way things used to be in old feudal aristocracies, where the nobles owned hordes of flesh-bots (called "peasants" in Ye Olde Englishe) to do all the work for them.
Why do the factory-owners need money to maintain their factories when they own robots who will maintain the factories for them for free? And other robots who maintain the robots. The goal is to have robots just take care of everything for you, including mowing down the angry starving hordes storming your mansion, so you don't need money, because money is just a tool you use to get things out of other people, and who needs people when you've got robots.
You're absolutely right that in the process the whole economy will come screeching to a halt, but the fat pampered robot-owning overlords will have no need for it at that point.
Still waiting on instructions rather than unsubstantiated anecdotes. How does someone living on welfare or in the projects leverage that into a big TV or a nice car?
(Possibly relevant: around where I live, "the projects" -- government-subsidized housing -- are a goddamn luxury in such short supply that most people who would qualify for them, destitute disabled veterans and mothers and the like, are on decade-long waitlists for them. Most of the poor people aren't lucky enough to live in "the projects", and instead spend the vast majority of their income sharing substandard housing at exorbitant rents with multiple other people in similar circumstances.).
Except people don't have more money "on average", for the usual sense of average (mean). Same amount of money, same number of people, same amount of money per person on average.
Doing an UBI the sane way (give everyone some x% of the GDP per capita, fund it by a flat x% income tax) doesn't even move where (i.e. what percentile) that mean income falls. Right now the mean income is about the 75th percentile. Do a basic income the aforementioned way and the mean income will still/em? be the 75th percentile, and people making that much money won't even see a different in their income after UBI and taxes (they'll exactly cancel out at that point). Just the numeric income values (post UBI and tax) at all other percentiles will be closer to what that average (mean) income is.
That would be fine, except that it's much harder (if possible at all) to mandate a one-time but permanent doubling of all wages, than it is to mandate fewer hours punishable by higher pay requirements at longer hours.
E.g. if you drop full time from 40 to 20 hours, and demand that everyone already working be paid twice as much, then the employers are going to replace everyone already working with two new hires getting paid "half as much" (i.e. what the old pay used to be) as quickly as possible.
About the only people you could save from this without the government suddenly dictating exactly what every single worker in the country must be paid are minimum-wage employees (i.e. you could double the minimum wage), which takes us back to the problem of helping the poor only at the expense of the middle class.
As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working.
I'm not clear what exactly you mean by this. Under any sane UBI, you always get more from working than you do from not working. Whether the UBI is a too-little-to-live-on $500/mo or a luxurious $2000/mo, taking that plus even a half-time minimum wage job is still better than taking just the UBI. (The $500/mo would require a tax of about 12% to fund, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $552/mo atop the UBI after that tax; the $2000/mo scenario would require about a 48% tax, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $326/mo atop the UBI after that tax).
No, if there is more money the money loses it's value.
If it's merely distributed differently, it retains the same value.
If you printed new money to fund the basic income, that would cause rampant inflation.
If you take the money from the rich to give it to the poor, all you do is boost economic activity (as the poor immediately spend all that money).
Oh and you know, also decrease human suffering. That too.
Reducing full time will help the underemployed at the expense of only the middle class, rather than the expense of the capitalist class who really need to shoulder the burden. That in turn only further widens the gap between rich and poor, makes it harder and harder for someone to escape from dependency on the capitalists.
Nobody really wants other people to have to work. What they want is to not have to work themselves. If the most efficient way of getting what they want without having to work for it themselves is making other people work, then that's what they'll want. But if they can more easily have robots provide them with everything, and not have to pay some ugly bags of mostly water to do it instead, all the best from their perspective. The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if you need human work then you need other people and if you need them they've got leverage to demand things from you.
So work as a justification for dessert becomes a convenient narrative, an easy excuse to say why they don't have to give anyone anything: you didn't work hard enough to deserve it. Never mind that as automation displaces human labor there increasingly comes a point where there's no such thing as "hard enough" because humans are simply incapable of providing the same value as robots; work remains the justification for why the haves get to keep having it all and don't have to share at all with the have-nots.
When it comes to that point, what they really want is for all the useless have-nots to just die and stop nagging them for things. "You didn't work hard enough" becomes just the excuse for why their easily-prevented deaths are justified.