Comment by monkeynotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkeynotes | Hacker News Reader

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> We could already have this reality today if we just implemented a universal basic income

This is at best naieve. How can you possibly reduce all of the complexities of a nation's multiple economic wants and needs to that conclusion? This is the problem with the movement, myopic and idealistic notions of being free from work. Universal income basically drives up inflation, if you give everyone a free $10 everything becomes $10 devalued. Money works partly because it is scarce and takes work to accumulate. Other people want to exchange their effort for yours. If there is no effort, there is no value.

Even if the above is not true there are surely numerous other forces at play that don't fit in with your simplistic idealism.

If you think it's the boomers keeping you down, wait until all the YouTube and social media players get into their 40s and see how they feel about giving away their wealth. People are greedy, selfish, family first, and tribal regardless of a generation.

There are already many countries with generous welfare states where one does not have to work and could theoretically live off the government, yet they manage just fine.

Even if universal basic income was a pipe dream (which I vehemently disagree with, and again point to the examples above as evidence that not needing to work does not lead to societal collapse), I don't see why enabling everyone the freedom to work on whatever they want should not be a goal.

If it were up to me, taxes would be funded via land value tax (commonly referred to as the fairest and most efficient tax since there's no deadweight loss), and the proceeds would be distributed uniformly to the population as a citizen's dividend.

Communism has never worked because the people in power who decide exactly how to divide the wealth fairly are humans and humans are greedy, selfish assholes.

Who evaluates your land value?

Also, if we all do what we want to do who is gonna pick up the garbage, who is going to slaughter cows for your burger that no one wants to flip?

I mean, these are the easy things I can think of.

Additionally any of the welfare states and experiments with UI are with small scale countries who have simpler socio-economic makeups. Try doing what you are prescribing in America where Trump, Bezos, and any number of psycho CEOs and politicians are doing very well for themselves. Not to mention the fundamental myth of America is bootstrap to individual prosperity.

Edit: to expand on "doing what you want", what if what you want to do is build a huge multi national corp and accumulate stinking piles of cash and yachts? What are you going to say to all those folks?

Who said anything about communism? UBI is just capitalism with an income floor. People can still work jobs for money and start businesses.

> and the proceeds would be distributed uniformly to the population as a citizen's dividend.

Sounds like a form of communism to me.

> There are already many countries with generous welfare states where one does not have to work and could theoretically live off the government, yet they manage just fine.

I didn’t know there were any countries like this? Would you please link to a few?

Probably alluding to the Scandinavian countries. One or two of them tried out UI for a limited time. In France they have very generous unemployment benefits, but you pay for them with heavy taxation which has its own problems .

I'm not deeply familiar with welfare policies, but anecdotally it sounds like much of Europe - the Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, along with others like Germany - have very generous welfare states, where I believe (someone can correct me if I'm wrong) one could basically live off of welfare indefinitely if they wanted to.

In Switzerland, apparently it's possible to work for 2 years, quit your job, then keep something like 60% of your old salary for 2 years until you find your next job. Yet this isn't something that many people actually do.

In Denmark, university students get paid a UBI.

Someone else mentioned taxation. Taxing land value would be the fairest tax and reduce the tax burden on labor, yet none of these countries really do that.

> if you give everyone a free $10 everything becomes $10 devalued.

Inflation happens, but the poor benefit much more, as their gains from UBI(as a percentage of their existing income) are more than the loss through inflation.

For rich people, the loss can be more, but this is how inequality is reduced.

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