Objections to Universal Basic Income
Simon Sarris wrote:
Many articles explain the potential positives of implementing such a system, but none explain quite how we’ve made the leap from “we can’t pay for people’s retirement anymore” to “let’s give everyone money and see what happens.”
The collapse of Western socialism is to be precipitated by bankrupted pensions due to the ZIRP, ideological suicide, demographic suicide, rising interest rates, and the short-dollar vortex. My Steemit archives cover these in great detail.
Price inflation of basic necessities
Indeed, UBI is actually akin to a regressive tax because prices for basic necessities (and sinful non-discretionary addictions such as alcohol, cigarettes, and recreational drugs) will experience significant inflation due to the UBI being not saved nor spent on high time preference investments nor discretionary goods.
Rent is currently eating the world. Rental income just hit an all-time high. If we adopt a UBI system and everyone is given a very predictable amount of money, it may be seen as a system easily gamed by landlords and possibly other producers of essentials.
A similar outcome occurred after the breakup of the U.S.S.R. when the unproductive poor were given title to lands and they proceeded to sell it to the rich in order to fund their low time preference priorities.
Removing all welfare to create UBI (to give everyone the same amount) is a de facto pay decrease to anyone with needs outside their control — such as diabetics, who need all the things you do to live, plus insulin.
From welfare to incentivizing failure for everyone. Socialism at its pinnacle.
There are many difficulties facing the poor in the U.S. and “not enough money” does not begin to capture the whole picture. The complexity of modern life is profound, and subsequent complications are often the most intense for the people who are the poorest and least able to understand that complexity. It is especially grim for those who have a hard time navigating financial instruments. People who are functionally illiterate, for example, could struggle. That amounts to about 11 million adults in the U.S. Even those with “below basic” literacy, which is roughly 30 million adults (14 percent of the U.S.), might find financial forms nearly impossible.
Eric S. Raymond writes about this in his recent blog The return of the servant problem:
Some people who seem dimly to apprehend what’s coming are talking up universal basic income as a solution. This is the long-term idiocy corresponding exactly to the short-term idiocy of the $15-an-hour-or-fight campaigners. UBI would be a trap, not a solution, and in any case has the usual problem of schemes that rely on other peoples’ money – as the demands of the clients increase you run out of it, and what then?
Btw, I refuted Eric’s fear mongering about high IQ splintering off from the rest of civilization, while also refuting the fear mongering about A.I.:
The generative essence of my objection to UBI is as I explain at the above link, that nature abhors highly ordered, top-down driven systems. Thus any such attempt to create such order will actually create more disorder. The general rule is it’s impossible to do just one thing. Thus nature will always force the free market of competing actors, and destroy any attempt to impart the same situation to all humans. Please read the above linked Quora post for a more detailed explanation, including some theoretical physics support for the concept.
As usual, I try to archive the linked webpages from my blogs at archive.org and/or archive.is.
Refreshing point of view
Hi I didn’t know if you were still active over here. Perhaps we will interact on the development front eventually.
UBI is the technocratic 21st century utopian dream. This is a good refutation, although it will fall mostly on deaf ears.
People who think helping the poor requires the poor getting money don't understand the problem, and they don't understand the poor.
And totally agree on throw vs high time preference. Teaching the poor to lengthen their time preference just isn't as sexy as saying "free money".
Agree but I don’t even think we could hope to teach everyone to have the same time preference. I added to my blog:
I wouldn't want too much conformity with time preference either
There is a huge amount of marketing pushing people to have a low time preference, and I think maybe some education would help some people out, at least at the margins.
One of the rationale for it To me comes from amartaya sen theories, as he lived through some famine in his youth, and studied the phenomena to come to the conclusion that famine rarely happen because of food shortage, but often because of an economic sectors collapsing leaving thousands or millions without access to food whereas food level are still the same.
The logic of everyone must work is sound when one need to work hard to already provide for himself and his familly, but in modern industrial society, one person working with modern tools and technology can provide for hundreds of persons.
This trend can be seen in farming, 50 years ago, 70% of population were farmer, now even 5% over produce, and only a tiny fraction of the population can produce enough food for everyone else.
The solution is opening new markets, new sectors of production which des easy in the 70 with all the new advances in different sectors.
But now, there is no major new market opening, and each sectors produce already more than enought employing only a fraction of the population.
The paradox of today is we dont have lot of poverty because we dont produce enough, all supermerket shelves are filled, we produce cars, plasma tv, smartphone, food, clothe and everything like never before, yet it still leave large portion of the population in poverty, and we dont really live in scarcity at global scale, we dont need to produce more, even on the contrary taking ecological factors in account, it can easily be seen we already produce too much, without requiring 100% employement.
To create more employment we need to get rid of egalitarian Google and the vulture capital Silicon Valley so the software economy can begin to produce a zillion features and experiments.
The problem is it goes against the logic of profits, seeking the more profitability for all companies in a current society of ultra productivity will always lead to situation where all market share can be filled with a fraction of population.
Otherwise need to do like in the farming industry and putting production quota to keep more people employed at lower productivity.
Incorrect. Demand is only limited by decentralization of imagination.
You French people are insane. Always have been and always will be Marxists. Please don’t reply.
And actually socialism and communism is not about giving the poor free things, that's the American view of it, but socialism and communism are motions organized by workers, for workers. Its always a misconstruction that le close to propaganda in the usa that tell otherwise.
But i think the more it goes, the less the organizing pillar of society will be how much you work and how much you produce, because high productivity is already the norm, and less and less people really define themselves entierely as their professional function in society, its more and more common to have To change career path every 5 years, and to go through period of unemployement, and yet there is more than enough things to be produced to fill everyone's need.
And large portion of economic sectors are lot of marketting and branding to produce less and less really useful things and borderline scam.
Of course not. They ultimately impoverish the poor as Margaret Thatcher explained.
A defection paradigm which backfires on the workers ultimately.
Just need to see the living condition of the working class in the 19th with unregulated raw capitalism where slave were the bulk work force in USA, and living condition of working class now to see that this not the case.
You have learned nothing from my blogs:
Geographical Cultural Ethos → science is dead (Part 2)
The Golden Knowledge Age is Rising
The industrial age was a fungible laborer, Theory of the Firm supportive paradigm. The knowledge age is nothing like that. We just need to get Google of out of the way, so the exponential growth of imagination can continue decentralized.
Again per my other comment, please don’t reply. I don’t need to waste my time refuting insane Marxist Frenchmen. And you’re a Western Millennial also, which adds to your inability to comprehend reality, economics, nature, entropy.
The therapy for at least managing Western millennialism is reading. And listening. Output really should just be turned off. Consider the effort needed to not only entirely logically deconstruct whatever shoddy framework was put there, then cauterize the gaping hole that is a non-person, only to retrigger a process that is normally started a few years after birth is an effort most are unwilling to undertake. Couple that with the ability to even do it in the first place is rare to come by, and let's just say it's certainly a reason to reasonably dismiss entirely the logic any westerner under the age 33 or so I'd expect personally. Rather id suppose we're often best served with a link to some non-paywalled article if at all.
Which is the why the West must collapse economically. There’s no fix for the West. It’s just time.
Russ Nelson on why minimum wage increases unemployment.
Eric S. Raymond on Fixing the fast-food strike. And his related post on why he loves Walmart even though he personally doesn’t shop there.
An example of what happens when top-down authorities think they can give away for free that which isn’t free in defiance of the supreme power of the free market:
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2015/sep/03/stringers-tijuanas-social-tragedy-abandoned-homes/