Comment by zentiggr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zentiggr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's funny that you say a class of beggars would be created, when most UBI scenarios I've read about show that people tend to try to improve their situations in whichever way makes the most sense...

some who can finally afford basic water food and housing start seeking medical/psych help they couldn't afford.

Some get more schooling to improve their employment prospects.

Some buy a car to start saving themselves hours a week on public transportation and therefore have more time to live.

And a small percentage don't get it and squander it.

You see the policy turning into a UK-style dole... I think you don't see the enormous benefits that reaching the point of 'having enough' can provide.

I've recently started making more than I have in the rest of my life... and besides finally paying down our household debt, and accomplishing the cash-starved household repairs, I'm starting to look at volunteering and truly giving to charities _because I can_.

Just providing basic services doesn't give people the same options, the mobility to do with their lives what makes sense in their circumstances.

I really want capitalism to give you a wage to do all those things. I understand it's been cronified and monopoloies have fucked over a whole lot of people.

The real fix is to fix capitalism, not write you a check every month for being born. We need to enforce fair markets, fair wages etc.

For those at the very bottom, I want dignity, a free education, and if still unsuccessful access to a low skill job that can pay basic bills.

And what about when automation makes more and more human work obsolete? And when will the power imbalance in capitalism actually produce fairness? Ever?

You are going to have to find a different way to solve those problems than wage slavery.

Should we pay people to dig ditches and then fill them just so that they're working? The relative gap between high skilled and unskilled labor will only increase. At some point, a large portion of society's labor will become worthless. What then?

Capitalism is about the accumulation and use of capital. It's amoral. It doesn't care about the unemployment rate, poverty rate, or health outcomes. It is just fine with child labor and seven day work weeks. It will offshore labor, hire contractors, and use money for buybacks before investment if the numbers make sense. Capitalism is not the answer here. Policy is. And that's fine. We can have both.

> The real fix is to fix capitalism, not write you a check every month for being born.

You write that as if it's some kind of natural law, as if the second clause is _obviously_ more absurd than the first. It's that the case and, if so, why?

When you decouple income from output or wages from work, you're essentially devaluing work and incentivizing people to work less or (more destructively) work worse.

It's not an absurd thought at all, it's a very natural solution to propose in environments like we have today. It's also been tried in many different countries in many different time periods. Leads to failure every single time.

I don’t understand why people with more money should have such outrageous levels of power over those with less. That’s all capitalism is. Coercion through artificial constraint.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com