RE: Doug Casey and I Destroying Commies On Universal Income
I have never actually looked into Bitcoin much and assumed it was just a passing, bizarre fad. But it appears to be gaining a lot of traction with people who like to virtue signal and don’t understand economics.
Does that paragraph look a little bit silly to you? Why?
Let me help. It's because I claimed to know very little about something, right before immediately making a conclusion. I used Bitcoin instead of UBI because we both know extremely uninformed people are saying the same thing about bitcoin as you are about UBI. People who like bitcoin know nothing about economics, right?
Here's the deal. You know nothing about UBI. You think you do, but you don't. And when faced with any amount of evidence, you don't even care. You already know everything you need to know, just like someone who just heard about bitcoin already knows everything they need to know about bitcoin.
You don't even understand how UBI works. It's not annual monetary expansion. Some would prefer doing it that way, but they are in the minority. UBI is a tax and transfer policy. It is essentially Milton Friedman's negative income tax, but instead of a 40% clawback, everyone gets the same amount, and the clawback is done via ordinary taxes, though not necessarily income taxation.
Oh my gosh, you scream. All taxation is theft, you whine. But the thing is we have a system of taxation and we do it in some of the worst ways possible, through a collection of hundreds of programs. We do even more welfare for the middle class and the rich through the tax code. Bureacracy galore! Strings everywhere. We give people vouchers for food instead of cash to buy food, and decide what people can and can't buy. We give people vouchers for housing instead of cash for housing, and decide where they can live. And because we target everything we punish everyone for working because people who earn money no longer need help right? The effect of that is the same as applying tax rates of 80% and above on the working poor. Does that make sense to you?
Would you accept employment if it meant keeping 20 cents out of every dollar you earn at some fast food job? What about 10 cents? What about -10 cents? Negative? Yes, negative. Welfare programs can stack, such that accepting employment can leave someone worse off than by not working.
Basic income ends all of that. Because it is never taken away, all earned income leaves everyone better off. Want to earn $2000 per month? Find a job that pays $1000 per month after taxes. With a $1k UBI, you now have a total of $2k. With welfare, and accepting that same job, it's possible to end up with $1000 per month total. Do you understand??
Meanwhile, because everyone gets the basic income, it's like a new large tax credit. If you are earning $100k, you may need to pay $40k in taxes under UBI instead of $30k right now, but you'd get $12k in return so that really, you're paying $28k in taxes. That's a 28% tax rate on a six figure salary.
The result is that 8 out of 10 households would see a reduction in their income tax burdens with UBI.
At this point you should already understand that your inflation argument is bullshit, because this is about increased circulation of existing money supply, not money supply expansion. But I imagine you still have concerns about inflation anyway, because that's just what kind of feels right to you, so in that case, please read the following link to really get into that discussion by covering all the variables in that equation.
I don't really expect you to read that though, because why would you? That would be learning something about a subject you just only recently heard about but already an expert on, right? I mean I'm sure you already know that when Alaska started providing dividends to everyone in Alaska that their CPI growth actually slowed down instead of accelerated. In other words, the opposite of inflation happened in Alaska as a result of giving everyone more money.
Markets need money. Imagine an island of 10 people where only 1 person has money. Do you think the market is working for the other 9? Do you think the invisible hand is figuring out what to supply their demand with? No, because they are unable to express their demand.
As for your imaginary thinking involving automation, it is real and we already see what it's doing. We are replacing mid-skill jobs with machines and creating new low skill jobs for people. Productivity is going up but wages aren't. Incomes are going down. People are competing against each other in a race to the bottom where it's all about accepting less money and working longer hours in more jobs that have less benefits. Does that sound like a good idea to you?
Inequality is growing as machines replace human labor because owners of machines no longer have to pay as many people. But what happens when people are less able to buy what the machines are making? Well look around because it's already happening.
We have to figure out a way of increasing incomes for the bottom 80% who are being left behind by technological progress. We have the opportunity to replace the welfare system at the same time. Why would we not do that?
Countries around the world are testing it. Are you even interested in that? Do you care at all about experiments that help reveal reality as it actually works instead of how you think it works? I care. I care about what works. I care about what really is. Do you?
If no, then I think that's sad, and you may as well burn witches and use leeches to treat your headaches. If yes, then I think should spend some time actually researching the evidence.
You can start here.
Good to see you again, Scott. I personally will give El Bucko:D Vigilante the benefit of the doubt in that he's a decent human being who truly cares about people and the planet.
The fact of the matter is we are dealing with enormous compexity within systems(Wilbers lower right quadrant) and unfortunately trust has been broken by the powers that be and the corruption they've enabled. It's not a good situation.
A UBI won't mean anything if the present misanthropic predatory mindset remains at the forefront of social structures. We need a new education system which teaches humanity to place value on other human beings and life forms rather than just seeing everything and everyone as objects of exploitation.
A UBI would work, IMO, juxtaposed to a new education model which teaches and is geared towards mastery and human potential, and then the UBI can lay the groundwork for setting up the success of such a civilization.
BTW: most of the infrastructure is already in place for such a civilization but a mafia ethos has taken over the planet.
This new education system must teach economics, ecology (a reconnection to the land), sustainability, and self-responsibilty from the earliest of age.
Kind Regards to you and Mr. Berwick!
I'm also a believer that UBI is the way to move forward, and much of your counter argument to the original post express my beliefs and feelings on the subject. Thanks for this really great reply. I've also decided to follow you!
There is no comparison and you are very uninformed. There is "no better" way to implement socialism or UBI.
Upvoted. The best source of income is a job. It is immoral to demand payment without first producing value.
And how are people going to find jobs, if robots are doing most of them?? You reject the idea of a UBI and say people should work for money, which is all fine and might work now, but in the future people are not going to be able to find jobs. If there is no UBI what are they going to do?
As long as human want is never satisfied, there will always be a job to do. And if that isn't right, in however many decades you are worried about, consider how much you complain while enjoying leisure, how you wish you were working - you probably don't. The point of using machines is to Decrease our labor and Increase production, making less work for ourselves. The more productive we can be while doing less work, our standard of living increases. We are made better off by increases in production, which makes goods better and cheaper, and not by work itself. So if we run out of work to do, we can all rejoice, stay home on steemit, or do other activities we find more valuable. But that won't happen.
People have been worried about this for generations but turn out to be wrong every time. Here is likely your response, already said by someone else:
"That may have been very well in the past, but today conditions are fundamentally different, and now we simply cannot afford any more labor-saving machines." - Eleanor Roosevelt 1945
Don't be this wrong. Embrace the freedom of movement and choice that are afforded to us by using machines in production.
I do think there will still be jobs around, but I don't think there will be enough. While in the past more jobs were created by automation there will come a time when most humans will be rendered obsolete in the work place. That is the logical progression. Human labour being minimised as much as possible to increase productivity and profits.
If there is no work for someone to do, how will they have enough money to survive? How will they afford the basics of living without income? This then leads to your point about leisure.
Too much leisure isn't a good thing. People need to work. It isn't always the end product that produces joy, it's the process of making/doing that does. Playing video games all day with no life goals isn't fun in the longterm. That's kind of what I do now, I have far too much free time and it isn't actually fun.
And If you can't work how can you have leisure time? You need money to provide the basics, if you don't have the basics sorted you can't really have leisure.
I also don't like the idea of having most of the control over machines in the hands of the rich. If the rich own the means of production over all goods, what power do we have? They control everything. The disparity between rich and poor will be immense.
Yes people were wrong beforehand, they didn't foresee new jobs being created. Maybe there will always be enough work, maybe it isn't going to be an issue for the next 100 years, but I still think it's worth exploring the possible negative outcomes instead of assuming everything is going to be perfect. We will just have to wait and see.
While you have plenty of leisure you are still better off because you can choose whether to work or not.
Let's just be honest. The "rich" entrepreneurs are the ones capable of arranging labor and capital goods in a way that results in products you demand. And they are rewarded for doing so with profit. If you remove their ability to do so, prices of consumer goods will skyrocket or run out and you will certainly have plenty of work to do, such as grow your own food. It is these people you are jealous of but you fail to realize you do not complain about the good products at low prices they produce. You for instance with the xbox have had hours and hours of entertainment from a piece of technology smaller than a toaster. The transaction is not zero sum, you both leave happy.
You'd rather we All be poor? No thanks. If you want to own a machine of your own, make one.
I get that automation will make things cheaper, but this doesn't address what the people with no jobs are going to do.
The only thing I'm worried about is there not being enough jobs and people starving.
If robots can one day make everything for free, then we will all be happy and fat, and who cares. I don't get how cheaper things is a bad thing? The only time there is people starving is when governments prevent markets from working. Trust me, no businessman will employ a machine to do a process that does not produce income, that is, profit from consumer demand. Entrepreneurs can only profit when they bring things to market that consumers are willing to spend their money on, and that are cost effective. If consumers do "run out of money" the machines will be scrapped in favor of cheaper production methods, that allow for the most effective use of capital. Markets adjust in this way all the time. When consumers search for the lowest prices, the market delivers. We just have no way of knowing what new products and processes that will be created in the future and just how much better off we will be. To think that this point in time is the pinnacle of civilization is to make the same mistake of thousands that came before us, who did not have near the standard of living we take for granted. As long as people are free to live and work as they please, society benefits.
If you don’t trust the rich? Why do you agree with them on UBI? (Musk, Zuckerberg)
I don't really trust them either, but it's better than starving.
It's immoral to turn the earth into a casino and create every manner of unmerited wealth!
And who will decide whose wealth was unmerited? You? Earning UBI without doing any work seems pretty unmerited. I wish manna could really rain down from the heavens, but that is not how it works. Wealth must be first produced before it can be consumed. People's freedom to spontaneously work and trade has been the biggest help to those in poverty, than any planned system.
Which casino do you own? Which mafia oligarch do you type for?
And why not me and billions of others like me who are fed up with the billionaire class and their extortions and usury and using every foul type of unnecessary exploitation and coercion to gain unfair advantage over their fellow man, women and child.
You bet a reckoning is upon us for those who espouse the plundering of the earth and its peoples!
My username is literally End Plunder. It's just that I know it is Government who plunders. And it is government who extorts us and who awards unfair advantages to special interests and companies, that they otherwise do not have in a free market.
The UBI requires theft to be funded and relies on legal tender laws to ensure their payments are usable. Both are damaging to our freedom.
it's not just guvment that plunders us; it's a toxic corporate model, and a usurous fiat/fractional system. We should have had the ability to address these corruptions but the fiat masters and corporations purchased guvment in the last 100 years. This has created imbalanced power relations and it again, is not guvment per se that is the problem. Within an anarchist society there would still need to be laws and there are laws that we all must follow ( the laws of thermodynamics/aka entropic systems) , but it would still need some type of government; but it would need to be a government which hasn't capitulated to corrupt power relations.
And BTW: Trump is the exact opposite of one who could solve these complex issues; but true, neither was O'bomber, as they both serve the fiat masters and their corporate model.
Okay we agree on: fractional banking being bad and crony govt'granted priveleges to biz as also bad?
So if it weren't for special interests, the government would be ran by benevolent do-gooders?
If the natural tendency of man is so bad that it is not safe for people to control their own lives, how is it that mwmbers of government are always good? Are they not just people with self interest too? Or are they angels?