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Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the best arguments for Universal Basic Income there is.

If your basic needs are met, you don't need to worry that your startup failing will land you hungry in the streets. Startup life is living mostly at work and without frills anyway, but for people with money (or if it existed, UBI), if it fails, they at least will have the basics of housing, food, and healthcare and can continue on with life.

Having UBI for everyone would unleash the talents of the entire range of the populous, not only the prosperous few. Conceivably, the expansion (Cambrian explosion) of new advances could pay for itself in economic growth for society.

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In theory, I agree with this wholeheartedly.

I have no idea if it's true in practice.

Seems like we should run the experiment

Worst case, everyone ends up with the means to be housed, fed, and have healthcare

That is a lot of hand waving for some very complex and disruptive economic and social changes.

Same goes for communism, theoretically.

I have theoretical reasons why I think communism can never work.

The reasons why I suspect communism will never work don't seem to apply to socialism/capitalism with UBI.

I think communism tends to fail at the scale of states because the end goal of capitalism is statelessness, and states being what they are use communist ideology to centralize and entrench their power, rather than liberate people from them and render themselves obsolete.

Ironically you see much the same thing with small government/libertarian ideology in the US, and "free market" capitalism, where deregulation and "reducing government waste" tend to benefit capitalists and politicians and remove rights and access from the people.

As someone not an expert in capitalism but generally curious and knowledgable across a lot of subjects, my biggest skepticism of communism is that I don't see parallels to it anywhere in nature.

When I reflect on the patterns that seem to repeat across levels of abstractions (physics, chemistry, biology, psychology...) is there any example of a mechanism that evolved towards optimal that resembles (even roughly) the basic shape of communism?

I haven't found one yet, but if there were one I would expect it to show up in how cells in complex multi celled organisms (e.g. humans) organize themselves and manage resources. In other words, it someone can make a compelling case that a system in our bodies regulating our cells at large scales has strong parallels to communism, I'll be more inclined to think communism has a role in optimally regulating human behavior at scale. What I know is far far less than what I don't know, so it's possible there are many examples I just haven't come across yet.

Whereas I can see parallels to capitalism (free market competition and cooperation) all over nature.

Note I'm not making a moral argument here. I'm trying to use an understanding of the universe and nature to get an intuition of whether communism is a hallucination or an optimal algorithm, and if it is an optimal algorithm in which contexts is it optimal?

Why don't bees or other hive animals qualify as communism for you? The worker bees aren't doing their job for money, but for the betterment of the hive.

The hive is a great example and I'll look closer at it. What stands out to me immediately is that all the bees seem the same and are doing the same jobs. There isnt the same kind of diversity in functions as there are in some other living systems or our civilization.

> The worker bees aren't doing their job for money, but for the betterment of the hive.

How do you know why they are doing what they do?

Do you think that the cells in your body do what they do for the betterment of your body? As in the cells in your body are aware of you and your well-being?

Do you know for a fact that the bees that collect the most pollen don't get additional privileges within the hive? What their biological feedback system and incentive system is exactly? I'm not sure, but this is what I'm wondering how.

Yeah I dug into this, and the hive does show some characteristics of communism, and the regulating force of their behavior is their identical genes.

So this is an interesting contrast, in this example in nature a pattern that resembles communism seems optimal when each bee/agent has identical function to all other bees/agents. I'm dramatically oversimplifying here, but it seems like a distinction that matters.

I see no reason to assume economic systems must map to physical systems or else must serve a biological imperative to be considered valid. That seems an odd requirement to have. There is no system in our bodies regulating our cells which has strong parallels to capitalism either.

Also, you're mistaken in assuming that cooperation doesn't exist in socialism (I'm going to use the term "socialism" here to refer to the more broadly defined concept rather than "communism" specifically, although to some people it's a distinction without a difference.) Broadly speaking, the entire goal is communal ownership and distribution of resources, particularly of the means of production so that workers own the rights and profits of their labor.

Animals and biological systems do use common resources and cooperate, but they don't tend to form corporate structures to exploit those resources for profit, so the thesis that nature and physics are more capitalist than socialist seems designed to beg the question for an already capitalist worldview.

> There is no system in our bodies regulating our cells which has strong parallels to capitalism either.

Sounds like you have considered every possible parallel and are confident you already know what's what.

> you're mistaken in assuming that cooperation doesn't exist in socialism

I don't assume this, and I never said this. Straw man.

Also we were taking about communism, not socialism, and there is a difference.

> but they don't tend to form corporate structures to exploit those resources for profit

Way to hold up the least respectful interpretation of my point and attack that. Lame.

The biggest impression I got from your comment is you aren't curious about this subject.

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