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RE: Should the Amount of Basic Income Vary With Cost of Living Differences?
I believe a UBI is immoral until we can become fully independent of human labor. However I believe if it is implemented it should be a flat standard. It would not be fair to give a person more only because they prefer to live in a bigger fancier city. The simple country person has as much a right to the UBI as anybody else if that situtaion ever becomes a reality.
About the morality of UBI, please read these earlier posts of mine:
https://steemit.com/basicincome/@scottsantens/the-moral-question-of-using-unconditional-basic-income-to-refuse-employment
https://steemit.com/basicincome/@scottsantens/universal-basic-income-as-compensation-for-the-creation-and-defense-of-private-property-rights
https://steemit.com/basicincome/@scottsantens/a-christian-argument-for-universal-basic-income
I see some of the points but I believe people tend to be selfish and do the minimum that is required of them. A UBI would only make that human trait worse and I believe that is more morally wrong for our future. I believe many things are worng right now in our society but a UBI is not an answer and would only aid in the short term while ruining our futures.
Of course that is unless we can become fully independent and have no scarcity of work. That os something that seems to idealistic for me and just not possible. At least not anytime soon.
It's actually an evolutionary beneficial pressure to only do the minimum of what needs to be done, unless it's fun to do or recognized by fellow people. Today, we act against these notions, creating work for ourselves that doesn't need to be done, rather than working on ourselves or community, just because we can put a pricetag on it, and because we can barely get get by with the declining earnings+EITC and who knows what.
The universal income could help to re-align work with what has purpose. People would still chose to work where they can make more money with the production of commodities, but if the money earning prospect is so little, looking at all the other work we have ahead of ourselves in community, self-creation/improvement, politics and so on, could be much more undertaken. That's the work ahead for humans, as we see an increasing decoupling of productivity in commodity production from human input. (this podcast episode does a good job at highlighting that pure manpower doesn't go as far as it used to, it's having a leadership position that goes far, it's having the network effect and consequently gating access to customers, that goes far to attract talent, that goes far to enforce a race to the bottom that ultimately only owners win. When you see an all industry spanning phenomenon occur in the past 10 years of massively increasing margins between cost of producing an additional item, and sales price, for all industry leading ventures to enjoy, but nobody else, it might hint that way at least.)
On the note of moralty, I think a strong case for it arises from the observation that we all come to this place with the ability to command and form the Land, economic opportunity, yet technology sees about its continued concentration in the hands of a few who happen to be already positioned well in their respective industries, or who happen to have inherited plenty.
Making ourselves increasingly dependent on whoever happens to already be in the field, rather than demanding an opportunity to compete, that seems not ideal to me. In a world where some speculate that 60% of GDP is due to the Land, seen as economic opportunity, maybe worthwhile to consider a universal, nonforfeitable stake in the land, for everyone, realized one way or another. Be it free advertisement from facebook/google. Be it universal income. Be it sovereign wealth funds. Be it re-organizing of the money system to not require the self-indebting to parties who you owe nothing, (or inheriting,) to access the Land, anymore. (edit: right to be represented by a bot might also go pretty far to allow people to more readily compete when it comes to platform creation. Since the bot might just pick up on new platforms automatically, representing you there automatically too. Though might be more of a long term project to really make a dent in the monopolizing force of the network effect.)
The moralty of the issue becomes clear when talking about the Land and republican freedom, freedom from domination by each other, in our relationship with each other and the Land.
Your comments are very interesting and informative. I have followed you, looking forward to your posts.