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mkempe has written a very false description of Marx's work. It is a poor basis for a discussion of basic income programs in relation to Marxian thought.

Furthermore, mkempe has pointed to six historic nations as example of "basic income" gone wrong. None of the six examples he chose offered a basic income guarantee.

I won't dwell on this much but take for example this falsehood:

"This "research" proposal is merely a technocratic rehash of Marxism: the inexorable forces of materialism and technological improvements entail endless progress driven by a Hegelian spirit."

Marx made fun of the idea that history was driven by something like a "Hegelian spirit" (see Critique of the German Ideology).

Although Marx did use the word "materialism" in the phrase "historic materialism", it has no real relation to what mkempe describes here. (See Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)

Marx argued that competition among capitalists, not "spirit" was driving technological improvement in the productivity of labor. (Many places but Capital for example.)

One might say that "Marxism" is not "Marx" and that's fair enough. But Marxist thought, though it often wanders away from Marx, does not involve "Hegelian spirit" or "inexorable forces of materialism". The opposite, actually.

Realizing that the "forces of materialism" DID NOT entail "endless progress", both the Soviet Union and China set out to raise their level of development from agrarian to industrial. Both did so, and quickly.

> "basic income" divorced from free markets, see the Soviet Union, East Germany, Red China, Cuba, Cambodia, and more recently Venezuela.

1. There was no universal basic income in any of these places. 2. The proposal discussed here does not say anything about abolishing free markets. 3. Proof by analogy is fraud.

The 6th five-year plan of the Soviet Union had as one of its central aims a wage reform to guarantee a minimum income and simultaneously reduce hours required to be worked. Khrushchev held reduced working hours as a basic goal of the communist movement, which is entirely aligned with the vision of Karl Marx: to each according to his needs, regardless of ability or work.

The notion that one's income ought to be guaranteed regardless of the value of one's work, or even of its existence, has its origins in the Marxist claim that people should get whatever they need regardless of personal, intellectual, or capital differences (couched under a general denunciation of private property and of non-labor theories of value).

European socialists have been advocating for Basic Income --aka "social dividends"-- since the 60s at least.

Increased wages and reduced working hours apply to workers, not to everybody. The USSR was very much focused on work; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_...

Creating bullshit jobs to ensure full employment and forcing people to work in them is pretty much the opposite of what a UBI is all about.

Anecdote. My uncle (in Sweden) lived his whole adult life on the "basic income" he got from the State. He played the guitar, beautifully, wrote poetry, and never held a job in his life (why would he? the State was providing). He died in his early 40s, worn out by alcohol abuse and probably drugs. His "basic income" happened to be higher than what I had left after paying taxes as an engineer working for Ericsson.

> "Marxism has been tried, and has failed, in so many places with such bloody results."

This isn't Marxism, that's a lazy comparison. At its core, Marxism is about shared access to the means of production. Basic income has nothing to do with changing who owns the means of production (or at least, it could mean that, but it doesn't have to mean that).

Furthermore, whilst Marx had some interesting ideas, he also had at least one dangerously bad one. I'm referring to the dictatorship of the proletariat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...

... I'd argue that no attempt to achieve communism at a state level has ever got past that stage, because the path from a society controlled by power to a true communist society is beyond the imagination of many.

That said, forms of socialism that don't rely on a dictatorial intermediary stage do exist, and just because one form of socialism is misguided doesn't mean they are all misguided.

Actually, at its core Marxism is about this motto: (take) from each according to his ability, (give) to each according to his needs. The abolition of private property and other horrors of Communist implementations are simply means to that redistributive goal. The notion of Basic Income is rooted in Socialist theories intended to implement the vision of Marx and Engels.

regarding: "Actually, at its core Marxism is about this motto: (take) from each according to his ability, (give) to each according to his needs."

In a communist society there is no state to "take" or "give" in that way.

Nor is Marx's thought or marxism "about [that] motto" "at its core".

If you have arguments to make about a basic income, can you please make them without so badly misrepresenting the thought of others?

I happen to agree that a UBI is silly, bad goal but I'm offended at how falsely Marx is being described here.

The Soviet Union did pretty well in its early years, with GDP growth faster than that of the US for a time. Cuba is still doing pretty well compared to similar Latin American countries at the time of the Cuban revolution. Don't know too much about the others.

What are you calling the "early years"? Major famines in 1921-2 and 1932-3 killed tens of millions.

Look at real GDP growth from Chile and Cuba over the past 50 years. Chile is far outpacing Cuba. I bet adding venezuela would also be illuminating.

It's easy to do "pretty well" in the early years, the books can be cooked, the standards changed, etc. But over time you can't hide failure.

Soviet Union: 7-20 million deliberately starved to death. [1] 1.5 million people executed during The Great Purge. [2] "Did pretty well".

Cuba: thousands executed for the ideas they held; forced labor camps; and more than 1.2m fled 1959-1993 (about 10% of the current population). "Doing pretty well". Cuba was one of the wealthiest countries in the Americas, before Marxists took over.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge

USA: Extermination of natives, slavery, company towns and child labor, Jim crow etc.

England: English colonialism from Drogheda to Amristar, plus the domestic Peterloo, child labor etc. Also, how many millions did England deliberately starve to death in the 1840s?

Germany: I can list off what the Krupp/Voegler/Thyssen financed Nazi party did for a while, then go back to before that

Please stop, both of you. HN is not a site for frothing ideological rants.

Not a single comment so far has mentioned Karl Marx.

I did not mention Karl Marx, but I did, in fact, mention communism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10983248

/pedant

Thank you. I think it is important to understand that the technocratic egalitarianism advocated nowadays in Silicon Valley circles is a poor rehash of Marxist notions. While communism is a political, revolutionary movement, Marxism and Hegelianism were the philosophical underpinnings of that movement.

> I think it is important to understand that the technocratic egalitarianism advocated nowadays in Silicon Valley circles is a poor rehash of Marxist notions.

I don't think that's what they're proposing at all. And if you want me to believe it, you're going to have to do more than claim it's true.

What, specifically, do you see in either the idea of basic income or in "technocratic egalitarianism" that is inherently Marxist (as opposed to being merely superficially similar in some respects)?

Not only is it a poor rehash, it is incredibly insulting to the current Have Nots. It is very much a "I got mine, FUCK YOU." position. Perhaps, at best, a means to assuage their guilt for their imagined crime of being wealthy.

The system can change. It needs to change. I have no desire to be assigned the role of sheeple, where my only value to society is as a consumer. I cannot imagine a worse quality of life or a more effective means to disenfranchise me while telling yourself you are being "nice" to me.

> "It is very much a "I got mine, FUCK YOU." position."

Can you explain what you mean by this?

I think it's worth pointing out that implementing a basic income does not diminish the available work in an economy. If you want to earn more than your basic income, you're still free to do so.

Thank you for asking.

It operates on the assumption that because I am not wealthy yet, I am an incompetent dolt who has no hope of becoming wealthy. Giving me a basic income is highly likely to close doors, not open them.

Getting rich from your own efforts is extremely challenging, but the process changes who you are. You learn something important and you forge important ties along the way. Wealth grows out of power. Power does not grow out of wealth. Giving people money instead of a means to earn it is a means to erode their ability to access actual power. It is a means to disenfranchise people.

It may be done with good intentions, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I find it insulting. I was STAR student and a National Merit Scholarship winner in high school. I have mostly not been taken very seriously on Hacker News. I have mostly been treated dismissively. Giving me a basic income is much, much more likely to entrench the barriers I experience to trying to resolve my problems and figure out how to earn my own.

When I was homemaker, I never figured out how to make money online. I also couldn't figure it out while working for a Fortune 500 company. I didn't figure it out until I became homeless.

When people are still able to eat in spite of the fact that what they are doing doesn't work, they tend to not bother to do the very hard work involved in changing. They tend to not want to make the uncomfortable choices.

You are talking about the principle of "boiling a frog slowly" and applying it to all of society. To me, it looks like a doomsday scenario.

> "Thank you for asking."

You're welcome.

> "Giving me a basic income is highly likely to close doors, not open them."

How so? This would be a universal basic income (UBI for short), if everyone gets UBI there's no social stigma attached to it. Furthermore, a basic income frees up your time to develop your skills, whether that be through academic study, an internship/apprenticeship, or pursuing interests in the arts. In other words, UBI gives the majority of us more options if we choose to change career or make progess in a field without sufficient short term stability.

> "I find it insulting. I was STAR student and a National Merit Scholarship winner in high school. I have mostly not been taken very seriously on Hacker News. I have mostly been treated dismissively."

If I'm honest, if you're expecting a high level of praise on HN, you're in the wrong place. It doesn't matter who you are, or what your background is. However, if you enjoy a good debate and learning new things, then it's worth it. Got to learn to take the rough with the smooth, I've made empty comments with high upvotes, and thoughtful comments with high downvotes, just be clear whether you've been honest with yourself and keep an open mind to new information and you'll be fine.

I really do not need help with my relationship to Hacker News. As best I can tell, I have the highest karma of any openly female member. But it hasn't resulted in the kinds of professional contacts I had hoped for. Getting to the position I have achieved has involved a great deal of work, most of it "behind the scenes."

The point I am trying to make is not about my relationship to HN. The point I am trying to make is that the biggest barrier to success is a million-and-one unquestioned assumptions about how someone is supposed to behave and about how people interact with them.

I spent some time reading articles about lottery winners. About 2/3s of people who win the lottery are bankrupt within 5 years. In most cases, it does not solve their financial problems. If anything, it seems to multiply their problems.

People at the top who worked for it or grew up with it know a great many things about who to trust, how to invest, how to downplay your success and so many other things that poor people do not know. Giving them money doesn't convey any of that. Furthermore, when people believe that money per se is the problem and you give them money, you demotivate them from trying to solve the actual hard problems that do exist.

Often, financial problems are clues to something going wrong and also serve as a motivator to overcome your problems. I am not in the least concerned about stigma. I am concerned about removing valuable information from the system and making it radically more difficult to figure out what is going wrong, thereby making it harder to fix the problems because we are blind to them.

People often do not bother to change bad habits if they can continue to pay the bills. Alcoholics often continue to drink if it isn't ruining them financially, even though it is ruining their health and their lives in so many other ways.

One of the hardest things in the world is to get people to change entrenched habits. You are talking about making it easier to not bother. This does not sound like a good thing to me.

Interesting, and plausible. Plausible is too weak a word - almost certainly this will be true for at least some of the recipients. But the other side also seems plausible to me - that there will be some recipients who already know (much of) what they need to know about personal responsibility, effort, and so on, but whose road is much harder because of lack of resources at the starting point.

So one of the points of the research project would be to find out what fraction of people are in each group (with "all" being one possible answer). And then it gets harder: If, say, 60% of people are prevented from growing in ways they need to, and 40% of people are enabled to soar, then is this a good thing to do?

I have had websites for about 14 or 15 years. I have been trying to monetize them the entire time. While I was homemaker, I could not figure it out. While I worked for a Fortune 500 company, I could not figure it out. I only began making in-roads after I became homeless.

My father was career military. He never figured out how to make good money as a civilian. He tried commissioned sales work. He tried wage labor. He had his own business. He often spent months at a time unemployed. I think my mother bitched less when he was unemployed than when he was doing door to sales, spending money for gas, and making nothing.

I have 6 years of college. I am far from dumb or incompetent. But being in a position where my income depended on certain kinds of behaviors was a tremendous mental block and practical barrier to me learning how to make money online.

I am out of time for today. I am not sure I explained that very well. If it needs clarification, it will have to happen tomorrow.

Hey, I think the least we can do is remove means testing so we don't penalise people for bothering.

We've got a higher effective marginal tax rate earning the first dollar of the year than the 100,000'th and I think that's a problem.

> "But it hasn't resulted in the kinds of professional contacts I had hoped for."

I know this is off topic but... perhaps you'll have better success at exchanging information with fellow entrepreneurs at a local Meetup group (assuming you live to a nearby group)? http://www.meetup.com/

> "Often, financial problems are clues to something going wrong and also serve as a motivator to overcome your problems. I am not in the least concerned about stigma. I am concerned about removing valuable information from the system and making it radically more difficult to figure out what is going wrong, thereby making it harder to fix the problems because we are blind to them."

I see what you're getting at now. Three points:

1. The 'basic' part of basic income is important, as it's only meant to be enough money to cover a basic standard of living (i.e. food, shelter, etc...). If someone wants to have higher material wealth, they either have to earn it, or they have to learn how to stretch their basic income further. This process of stretching the basic income further relies on frugality and creativity, the same frugality and creativity you're suggesting only those at the top have. I'd suggest being poor can teach you those same lessons.

2. Money as a source of information isn't being lost. Again, the basic income covers the basics. Even if the market for bread and rice is stable, the market for luxury goods would be just as variable as before.

3. In your opinion, what is the purpose of money? In my opinion, the purpose of money is to facilitate trade. Trade can be seen as a form of collaboration. This collaboration relies on trust that what someone can produce has value. However, sometimes even when someone can produce something of value, they're blocked from doing so due to a shortage in tokens of exchange (money). For example, when the Great Depression started, you still had the same skills in the economy as before, but fewer means to coordinate the productive use of those skills. What I'm saying is that money has value as a means of exchange, but not as a means of production. If work is an engine, then money is the lubricant. You don't produce a more efficient engine by restricting the volume of lubricant to the smaller cogs.

> "Alcoholics often continue to drink if it isn't ruining them financially"

Alcoholics often continue to drink even if it is ruining them financially. Addiction isn't curbed by logic alone.

In response to your first point, I am going to quote one of my other replies in this discussion:

One of the points you are missing is that there are two kinds of poverty: absolute and relative. Even if you could eliminate absolute poverty, there is no means to eliminate relative poverty. The minute you have a UBI, anyone who only has that is de fact poor relative to others.

Many years ago, I saw a study that asked people in different countries to define poverty in terms of things like how many meals per day a person ate, what kind of shelter they had, etc. The study concluded that less than 0.5 percent of Americans were poor by the standards of people in India at the time the study was conducted. Meanwhile, Americans routinely conclude that 12% to 14% of us are living below the poverty level.

As a homeless American, I have regular access to electricity via a public library. I have access to public toilets. I have access to cheap goods. My quality of life is likely higher than that of many people in the world who live in countries without consistent supply of electricity and other basic infrastructure that I take for granted. There are countries where women are fairly routinely raped and sometimes murdered while attempting to relieve their bowel or bladder in an open field because there is insufficient infrastructure.

My quality of life is likely higher than that of kings of old, who had no electricity or Internet or antibiotics etc.

As for your second point, the information being lost has to do with what choices and behaviors are problematic and which ones are of real value.

I agree with you that the main purpose of money is to facilitate trade. So, I find myself baffled as to why you are pro basic income. What are people trading for basic income? It makes no sense to me to create a world of consumers.

I worry that we are destroying the health of the system.

At the moment, I do not have time to discuss this further. So, I am not going to try to elaborate on that last point. Given the reception I am getting here, this is probably a waste of time anyway.

Take care.

> For examples of the atrocious consequences of "basic income" divorced from free markets, see the Soviet Union, East Germany, Red China

What are those atrocious consequences? For Russia? First satellite in space? First man in space? Or do you mean for the PRC, run by the standing committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China? Which is currently the second largest economy on earth (in some measures the first)?

What are those atrocious consequences? If you want to mention eggs broken along the way, remember to mention those of the US (extermination of the Indians, slavery, company towns etc.) or England (from the siege of Drogheda to Amritsar), Germany (Sieg Heil!?) and so forth...