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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

The analogy is somewhat clumsy but he really gets to the point eventually. His words:

"Does it make more sense to spend a lot of time and resources making sure that only those that absolutely require help get it? Or does it make more sense to just guarantee everyone gets help and make adjustments after the fact?

What's more efficient? All the interviewers, interview equipment, calculations, personal judgments, and spending of resources on stuff we don't even need? Or is it more efficient to just skip all of that, and cover everyone, no questions asked?"

Again, more verbose than the post you're replying to but the point is the same.

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And the answer to that question is...

I don't know? Do you have any facts or data that actually compares the cost of those two?

And the answer is: no, he doesn't. He just has a broken analogy. I've posted an article in a post (somewhere else...) which actually details _real_ costs and _real_ expenses of some welfare programs, and then compares it with a basic income. But the blog-post linked does not.

There is no hard data for the "invisible hand of the market" but people still promote it. It's just how things work, people have ideals, and they push them into the spotlight to be discussed and talked about, which leads to studies being made and people finding pros and cons.

Sigh. Here's the difference:

https://medium.com/basic-income/breaking-down-without-a-spar...

There is hard data out there for this very subject. Its called look at the costs. Our government is relatively transparent, we know the costs of food stamps. We know the cost of every single social worker on the government. We know their pay, their salary, their qualifications (these sorts of things are standardized upon the GS-levels)

http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/supplemental-nutrition-assistance...

If you refuse to discuss data that is readily available about various programs, that makes you a lazy writer.

The blog post is terrible. There are much better articles out there that discuss the pros and cons of basic income.

Author of OP's link here. Hi.

I've previously written about our present welfare system in this article here: https://medium.com/basic-income/breaking-down-without-a-spar...

Additionally, I've written about how much money we could be saving with UBI and why/how: https://medium.com/basic-income/universal-basic-income-as-th...

And here's an article that includes just how much we are spending on a whole lot of things as a society, and how UBI would reduce these costs: https://medium.com/@2noame/how-we-can-transform-americas-bro...

This particular blog post of mine was purely an analogy made to make a single point.

Interesting, you wrote both the blog post and the medium.com article. I really do think you did a good job in the article, but your blog post is just... not very good honestly.

I appreciate you getting back to me, but your blog post suffers from "false analogies". http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/falsean.htm

Its a common fallacy to make arguments from analogy. And honestly, it weakens your argument significantly compared to the article you wrote elsewhere.

Arguments by analogy "feel" good because it sounds like you're getting the point across in fewer words. But really... you're preaching to the choir at best. An argument from analogy is only as strong as the connection between your analogy and reality.

Unfortunately, talking about water jetpacks and occulus rifts break your analogy wide open. It is clear that you aren't talking about reality anymore, and the analogies barely serve their point when they're so disjointed to the reality on the ground.

If you do take this argument form again in the future, please stick to something more real.

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