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Comment by gonational | Hacker News Reader

“Universal basic income” of any reasonable size in, e.g., the US, requires the creation of new money, because taxation is insufficient for its funding.

New money derives its value, subtractively, from the value of existing money (“WEALTH”), which is held by individuals who earned that money (“WORKERS“).

Some individuals decide not to work because of reasons OTHER THAN retirement, inheritance, disability, and child bearing; these individuals do not contribute directly to production (for convenience, we’ll call this group “LAZYS”).

Therefore, giving UBI to LAZYS intrinsically takes WEALTH from WORKERS, regardless of whether not WORKERS also get UBI.

In other words, universal basic income can be correctly defined as “transfer payments from WORKERS to LAZYS“.

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Your first paragraph makes a good point, but given that in the US capital (i.e, being paid for owning wealth) is taxed at a much lower rate than income (i.e., being paid to work), I'd offer the following correction:

UBI intrinsically takes wealth from the wealthy, who are generally NOT "workers" but those who have earned or inherited a large amount of capital at some point (and thus are more appropriately labeled as "the lazys [sic]"), and distributes it to everyone, the vast majority of whom are indeed "workers".

In short, UBI can be correctly defined as "transfer payments from lazys to workers".

(This is an oversimplification, but I believe a tad bit more accurate than the original.)

Sounds about right. Like everything in the US, some group is trying to figure out a way to siphon money from those to earn to those who “need it more”. I don’t care to support this, I want all the money I make, thank you very much. I’ll decide who to help with it. Or, I’ll help no one at all with the money I worked for, which according to college students and other people who have no skills and have paid no taxes, makes me “greedy”.

Now if you want to fix the screwed up healthcare system, I’m all ears.

So you'd pay for your own private guards, private fire department, pave the roads you use to drive to work out of your own pocket, and countless other things that are currently tax-payer funded resources? You'd need to be exceptionally wealthy indeed. Or maybe you still think there's some basic things the government should do, and therefore needs to collect taxes for them. In which case we're not arguing over whether or not money gets siphoned, we're just arguing over where you draw the line.

> ...from the value of existing money (“WEALTH”), which is held by individuals who earned that money (“WORKERS“).

"Earned" and "workers" seem like rather tricky words in this context.

This theory sounds like somewhat of the typical strawman (innacurate) understanding of Randian laissez faire economics.

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