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Comment by nimble | Hacker News Reader

Basic income is a good idea but you have the rationale wrong.

The right theory for a basic income should be that all people deserve a stake in the accumulated knowledge and technology of mankind, just as they deserve equal stake in the land and other natural resources. As general advancement accelerates and allows for greater production with less labor, a greater percentage of that wealth ought to be shared with everyone. So in the thought experiment where no one really needs to work and the robots take care of all of our basic needs, eventually distribution of resources should be more or less uniform.

If you view basic income as handouts then you have to answer all of the objections that you'll find in this thread: you're stealing from someone else to pay for them, you're disincentivizing work, etc. Basic income should instead be viewed as arising from principles of fairness.

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The right theory for a basic income should be that all people deserve a stake in the accumulated knowledge and technology of mankind

This is, actually, the argument for why we shouldn't have an inflationary monetary system. Normally technological improvement is deflationary (witness lowering prices for tech goods in spite of inflation - healthcare is different because it's highly regulated). Yet what we do by inflating the currency "to keep prices stable" is to steal the marginal improvement in livelihood created by technology and throw it at the financial sector.... At best. In reality we steal more than the marginal value; hence increasing income inequality, overenriched financial sector, decreased real wages in spite of increased productivity...

but with fractional banking and the like the amount of money actually in the system is always increasing, so the inflation isn't actually "destroying" anything, it's basically just the equivalent to a flat tax that goes out to banks to help fund loans

At one point I had the impression that inflation is supposed to encourage spending, but thinking about it, it probably punishes the poor (who have pretty much no savings) more than anything

if you have a fixed money supply, even with fractional banking, the amount of money in the system is limited; and to push the model further, even if you had a 0% reserve requirement, in the long run defaults and amortization of loans (deflationary) would balance out new lending (inflationary).

Ever wonder why the population is overleveraged and over-stressed about loans and what not? It's because the system needs people to go into debt to continue function. It's legalized, voluntary, fractional slavery, but the system wants you hand over ownership of your labor to someone else.

Technological progress is exactly why we have an inflationary money system. Those who invest their money in the technological progress, has a bigger pot of money to aim for so their expected ROI isn't, on average, negative after adjusting for risk and tranasction costs. The person who works to create it can push for a pay rise that keeps pace with inflation. The person that buries their money in a whole in the ground gets a smaller share of the additional wealth they've done nothing to create. Boo hoo for them.

No. That may be a post hoc justification/apologetic for the status quo, but that is definitely not a historically correct model for why we have inflation. In the roman era, there was inflation caused by the cupidity of the emperor who debauched the gold coins by cutting them with silver. In the American revolution we had inflation because the colonies desperately needed to raise funds for the war effort and the British printed fake currency to derail the economy... Something similar happened during the civil war. During the depression FDR adjusted the gold standard to cheat laborers of their value (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUvm9UgJBtg). In the 70s Nixon went off the gold standard because the French kept recalling their portion of the dollar backing, believing the us was not going to keep its word in the face of a stalling economy.

If you want to argue that it SHOULD be the justification that's fine (and morally questionable, unless you like screwing the poor) but there is no historical evidence that you model ever has been the rationale for inflation.

The reason we have inflation in developed countries today today has literally nothing to do with the historic phenomenon of monetary authorities debasing coinage to pay for stuff, and everything to do with an economic system where "money" in circulation is largely privately created credit, with monetary authorities intervening to maintain a target level of inflation. Central banks are not run by Roman Emperors, they are run by economists - who derive no benefit from inflating a currency - and one of the few things virtually all economists agree with is that inflation can be too high, but also too low. May I suggest their beliefs about the role of inflation in the current system are better understood by reading what they have to say, just as one would better understand Chinese foreign policy without focusing on "historically correct" reference to Genghis Khan, the Opium Wars or the Cultural Revolution.

one of the few things virtually all economists agree with is that inflation can be too high, but also too low

Yeah, and that's a completely retarded model of economics. It's a consequence of the field being a giant circle-jerk of professors who cut their teeth in undergraduate classes where your merit was judged by how gnarly a formula you could come up with to prove your prowess at taking derivatives (I say this having been a math tutor at the University of Chicago, and helping econ students with their homework. There was even no concept whatsoever of dimensional analysis, much less error propagation analysis).

How can I say this model is completely retarded? Because there was deflation in the US from 1860 to 1900. And the country recovered from a civil war that decimated the population (literally, 1 in 10 were killed), built up incredible amounts of industry, made several world-changing inventions, emerged as a world power, and began closing the wealth gap.

Central banks are not run by Roman Emperors, they are run by economists - who derive no benefit from inflating a currency

Let me ask you something. Has there ever been a central banker who was part of the bottom 1%? Or have they all come from the top 5%? If it's the latter, they derive benefit from inflating a currency. In any case, this is an inapt comparison. The central banker is not like the caesar, but rather the overseer of the roman mint who instructed the slaves running the coin machine to dope it with silver.

> The right theory for a basic income should be that all people deserve a stake in the accumulated knowledge and technology of mankind, just as they deserve equal stake in the land and other natural resources.

What is their contribution to knowledge and technology, so that they "deserve" a stake? What you're saying is that they deserve something for nothing.

The same reason people deserve not to be born into slavery. A basic human right that we respect now, that we didn't always.

Back when we had slavery, many people (free or slaves) fought against it. Many slaves tried to escape (and a lot of them succeeded).

Are just as many people fighting now for technology and knowledge? My impression is that they aren't, but you're advocating that they get rewarded anyway.

Do you agree that everyone deserves a fair share of the natural resources of the earth?

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