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Comment by vlasev | Hacker News Reader

The idea of Basic Income goes hand in hand with the process of automation. There are millions of jobs that will go away due to automation. The counter-argument to "will basic income lead more people to stop working" is not "people are working too hard anyway" but rather "most people won't have a job...coming soon". What are all those people going to do once this happens? Find another job? Yeah right. Here [1] is an article discussing this very problem.

Also, I don't think the second risk you mention is really applicable. What's to stop a nation implementing BI from capping the number of immigrants it admits? Or am I misunderstanding you.

[1]: https://medium.com/basic-income/should-we-be-afraid-very-afr...

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On your first point this is not a new problem. Machines replaced most humans in most factories decades ago. What is new is that the few humans left operating the machines or doing complex work too expensive to build a machine for, might get replaced by robots too. We absorbed the first wave of mechanisation. There is no reason we can't absorb a second wave. In fact the second wave already happened in western countries since these manufacturing jobs went to asia. It created mass unemployment for uneducated people that will remain a problem for a while (and which I believe is the primary reason for any rise in income inequality). And the only solution is more and better education. Not financial incentives.

On your second point, an open country only has limited control over its immigration. First illegal immigration is massive and difficult to control, and when people have lived in a country for many years it is hard to not give them documents. But the main reason is that the majority of immigration is an immigration countries have no control on. People marrying foreigners or legal immigrants bringing their family. These are rights that should certainly exist but are easy to abuse, particularly for originating countries where there is little vital records.

The question I want answered is what's to stop the people who own the automation technology/patents/natural resource rights from leaving the country so they don't have to pay the taxes for everyone's minimum income?

That would be interesting. They'd be considered foreigners, and it'd hopefully erode the social relation of "property rights" to capital the government grants them.

One problem of minimum income is that it will make it very expensive to find people willing to do "dirty" work. Unless you think robots will take care of nursing (which is grueling and dirty when dealing with disabled people and it doesn't pay well), farm work (they already have trouble finding workers), cleaning, etc.

Automation isn't nowhere near to eliminating those and I'm guessing it would increase labor costs very disproportionately - diminishing marginal utility of income and all that. This would then make related products/services more expensive and further lower your global competitiveness.

This can be mitigated by immigration (ie. not granting minimum income to immigrants) but that has a bunch of issues on it's own.

On the flip side, there is lots of dirty work carried out that is not recognised by the current economy today.

Maybe the "dirty" work should be better paid. It is convenient to have a large supply of workers that have to take any work to survive, so the "dirty" work gets done cheaply, but that doesn't make it right.

It depends on how you look at it I guess - a large supply of low skilled workers is what allows you to have access to many things you take for granted and removing that means that a lot of products and services aren't going to be accessible to general population.

Overall it would lower the standard of living for anyone not at the bottom of income bracket and not change much for the top.

Yes, automation.[0,1] We're approaching the knee in automation uptake. It can take decades to implement policies like this. Time flies.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555295

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9561068

  What's to stop a nation implementing BI from capping the 
  number of immigrants it admits?

Such an action is pretty difficult in say the EU on a country basis. European residents (currently) have a right to live and work where ever they want in the EU. Countries can't block that without major changes to Tue EU rules.

Rule changes are not even enough. European borders are impossible to secure against "illegal" or "unwanted" migration of individuals. They always have been. Even the GDR wasn't able to stop its people entirely from leaving for the west. And nobody wants to use their methods.

Of course, "illegal" immigrants can't apply for UBI. They would form a permanent underclass, who work for minimal wages, don't have any representation, no social security, and no social mobility.

> What are all those people going to do once this happens? Find another job? Yeah right.

Yeah, right, exactly. Remembers farmers? You know that almost everyone was a farmer like 150 years ago in the now developed countries? When we started to automate farming jobs, people did not simply become unemployed and started dying off. They MOVED on, you know. And found opportunities to learn new skills and apply them elsewhere, which massively benefited society in the end.

It's the same VERY old story again. Yeah, the "wheel killed the jobs of slaves", but then humans started doing more stuff in the end and progressed on to greater things. Please stop with the old, overused rhetoric.

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