But put that aside for a second. You also get this basic income, which is basically just printed money, so your taxes aren't helping someone else create art with UBI (but they sure are now, in actual reality). Your moral outrage about someone "creating art" as though it's less hard than your job is laughable, and oh by the way, your reward is income far above UBI, so you exist on a different financial plane for your hard work anyway.

But lower crime and happier people and less burden on courts and properly fed kids that lead to a better educated generation and less terrible schools in inner cities and every other benefit you receive from basic income and not one ounce of your "hard work" is just a step too far for you?

I oppose this, and I certainly don't fit your preconception.

Do you make a distinction between "projecting" and simply having an opinion? I do.

My sincere apologies if I've misread your intent, but it certainly seems to me that you've taken a viewpoint with which you don't identify, and assigned it to a group with which you also don't identify.

If you have any evidence that young, childless, well-off people tend to hold these beliefs, I'd love to see it.

But then your argument doesn't make any sense because it applies more to means-tested programs than UBI, because working can't cause you to lose the UBI.

This is not the case for most proposals I have seen.

That's the thing - it isn't and won't be. Basic Income is designed for, and in fact only works in, civilizations with enough excess productivity that they don't have to have their entire population working their assess off to maintain homeostasis and well-being. The USA is just about to get there. Some of the Nordic countries were there probably five or six years ago. There's a reason they're implementing it before us.

BI isn't "so that people can sit on their couches and do nothing all day while I support them". BI is so that people aren't required to have jobs to survive. Because when your civilization has sufficiently efficient per-person production, you end up with an issue where you're not just overprovisioned, but so overprovisioned that companies must start laying off large portions of the population to avoid wasting money hiring uselessly overproductive employees. At which point you end up with 30% or 60% unemployment and you have to choose between letting a third of your population starve or implementing something like BI.

That's the situation. BI isn't here to make it your responsibility to support everybody. BI is here because it's become so easy for people to support others that the economy, which up until now has assumed that there'll never be enough support to go around, has fallen apart. It's set up so that you can choose to support others instead of taking care of your family, and still have everything make sense.

Who says you need to be able to live completely off of it?

> 2. Many people oppose welfare that doesn't require a job precisely because of the societal costs to the disincentive to work.

So we're getting rid of all the programs that don't then? Requiring someone to work to receive benefits is unbelievably easy to scam anyway because two people can just hire each other to watch television and have the payments cancel.

It is possible to make the argument that there should be no social assistance at all. But that isn't the status quo, and the argument cannot be made that the status quo is better than a basic income.

I thought the argument for basic income is that it could support someone without the need for a job. If it can't, then that's not what I've been discussing.

>Requiring someone to work to receive benefits is unbelievably easy to scam anyway because two people can just hire each other to watch television and have the payments cancel.

"Illegal thing X cannot be enforced, therefore X should be legal" is an invalid argument.

The amount is independent of the thing. You could have a basic income of $5000/year and it would still work better than $5000/year in means-tested welfare. You could have a basic income of $50,000/year but that is probably inadvisable. What probably makes the most sense is to replace existing welfare at approximately the same level and then collect data on how that works to decide the best amount in the long-term. (But $12,000/year is probably in the ballpark.)

> "Illegal thing X cannot be enforced, therefore X should be legal" is an invalid argument.

How is it an invalid argument? Passing unenforceable laws is futile and stupid. It fosters disrespect for the law and gives advantage to people willing to break the law when they know they can get away with it.

But BI of $5000 costs far more, because anyone can get it. You'd need to reduce the amount to keep costs the same, at which the argument that it's better becomes weaker.

>How is it an invalid argument? Passing unenforceable laws is futile and stupid. It fosters disrespect for the law and gives advantage to people willing to break the law when they know they can get away with it.

If it's difficult but possible to break the law and get away with it, then laws and some enforcement deters breaking the law. E.g. it's pretty easy to get alcohol under 21 and cigarettes under 18 , but the age laws make it harder than if there were no laws, which reduces the amount of underage drinking/smoking. If you agree that's a good thing, then the law is good insofar as it encourages that.

Or in the welfare example, it's not easy to scam welfare, it takes time, organization, etc. Many people who would never try to scam welfare would sign up for basic income, because it's official and there's no risk of getting caught.

Of course, it depends on the ease of scamming, the benefit, etc, but the general argument of "unenforcable->make it legal" is invalid unless accompanied by those arguments.

Because when you decide you'd like to launch a startup, you don't want the failure mode to be “I lose my house and live out of my car”.

Because in a year when you or a family member develops a debilitating disease, you'd want there to be an option available which is better than “I go bankrupt and end up on the street”.

Because if you or a family member decides they want to switch careers, go back to school, etc. you'd like food, health care, etc. not to be a major source of stress unless you're independently wealthy.

Because if you or a family member ends up in a bad relationship and needs to leave in a hurry, the answer isn't hoping there's room at a shelter because all of the landlords in town want a deposit or there's a year delay getting the subsidized child-care needed to actually be able to get a job.

Most of the people in the United States who go bankrupt were willing to work hard and didn't think that would happen to them. That went well until they had medical bills, a major employer left the area, etc. and they either couldn't work or were unable to find a job. People like to say you should keep 6-12 months income in the bank, which is certainly great advice but even if you're one of the relatively fortunate people who can afford to save that much money it can disappear faster than expected if more than one thing goes wrong at a time.

As a society we've decided we don't want to live in a world where poor people die on the street (or are forced into terrible jobs, begging, prostitution, etc.). The problem UBI tries to solve is that the existing systems are incomplete, often create bad incentives, and require hugely expensive bureaucracies to review people at every step of the way. Providing a consistent income to everyone avoids things like someone getting the support they need to get a job, working hard and then having it all fall apart when they get a raise which is large enough to disqualify them from housing/child-care support but not large enough to replace it.

It doesn't get rid of the incentive to do more, however, unless you really think that most people in society will hit the basic minimums needed for life and never want nicer food, housing, entertainment, etc.

And the people that would sit at home watching jeopardy all day regardless -- would you really want to employ them? This probably won't be a well received idea, but not every person is actually economically useful, at least not in the current system. Unemployment is high because to a certain extent, there's probably 5-10% of the population that most companies look at and go "yeah, we probably don't need that".

I'm not saying scarcity no longer exists, but the US government literally sets excess grain on fire to subsidize farmers. When people starve to death, its not because we don't have enough food, it's because the food doesn't make it to the people that need it. Our biggest societal health problem is that people are getting too fat.

The whole "you need to work for the food you eat" system is based on a context that hasn't existed in first world countries for quite a while.

Nobody would make you do anything. You'd make exactly the same as other people. If taking care of your family for you means giving a certain standard of living, you'd certainly get a higher standard of living since you are working and getting more money than other people. Otherwise, if you're content with the bottom line you can just stop working and coast along.

> Taking more money from me to pay you to take care of your family, on the other hand, is morally wrong.

Can you stop thinking in terms of money for just one second? In the Middle Ages there were around 80-90% farmers in order to feed everyone. Now we need less than 5%. Sure, now there are new jobs, like making phones, travel, and millions of other things. But the other things nobody needs to be alive. Thus, why would we not take advantage from this huge technological advance by giving everyone enough money to eat, since making food is now so incredibly cheap? And if people stop working because of that, well, maybe they don't give enough shits about smartphones and they were there just to make a perverse economy to work. It's not about those things. It's about food and a roof - both things we can make in an incredibly cheap and automated way (we can 3d print houses, would you have ever believed it??).

Art, one could argue, is the whole point isn't it? Otherwise, what else do we as a species leave behind?

You don't feel like paying taxes so that our society can support artists, fine. You might not feel like paying taxes to maintain rural roads (after all, you never drive there) or a public education system (you can pay for your kids' schooling). And that's all fine, but you're already doing all that, just in a relatively clumsy way.

"Taking more money from" you to support my family is something that taxes and society have done from the very start.

This just shifts the bar a bit further. It's a matter of degree and not of kind.

Also you would likely pay the same taxes. Remember the system gives you (and bill gates) money too. But still taxes on income. If you're making over 150k, then yea maybe you might pay more for this system. On the other hand you already control more resources than 99% of the people in the world.

Your comment is based on misunderstanding of what actually is money. Money is just a claim for some commodity, like resources or work; it's not a commodity in itself. From microeconomic perspective it is interchangeable, but not from the macroeconomic one.

In fact, under UBI, someone may decide to pay you more money exactly because you're willing to work hard. If you really have the choice of not working, you will have to be more incentivized (with money) to actually work.

In reality, UBI is just a different money redistribution scheme (compared to capital investment), nothing changes much for people who work. It won't however make the people who invest and live from rent (capitalists) very happy, because they will get less of the pie to compete for.

No one is going to pay me more under UBI than I earn now because I work harder. I already get paid to work hard.

You don't work because it's your responsibility to make the economy function. You work because people give you incentives to do so. UBI just changes the incentives slightly: You can choose whether you want the minimum or whether you want to earn some luxuries.

You can argue about how many people are going to take the latter choice, but it's ludicrous to suggest you would be forced towards it by your "responsibility" to the economy.

>No one is going to pay me more under UBI than I earn now because I work harder.

If lots of people stop working, then those who continue to do so will become a lot more valuable, and companies will have to pay them more as a result.

That said, I think Martin Ford has made a decent case towards imposing an automation tax to fund the UBI for displaced workers. And I agree 100% that the only way this is remotely viable is in a society where there is insanely excess productive capacity such as what is likely to happen with the automation of jobs.

I look at this from a different angle: right now, startups skew heavily towards founders with significant risk-tolerance (young, healthy, good educations, family money, business connections, often partnered with someone who also has high-income career options, etc.) for whom the worst-case outcome is probably something like taking a job at BoringCorp and hanging out in cube-ville until they build up their reserves.

There's nothing wrong with that but there's an argument that society is missing out on a lot of ideas which won't grow out of that fairly homogenous subculture. If we provide a basic cushion, it makes it less intimidating for someone from a less comfortable background to take a chance. That could be particularly beneficial to society: someone coming up with some business ideas which are viable in, say, a factory town or agriculture has the potential to affect a lot of people who are largely ignored by Silicon Valley culture.

I'm not far from taking another swing these days and I think the time I've taken to develop financial cushioning has also let me develop better skills to analyze both the nature and the timing of the sort of businesses I wish to pursue.

And if you have kids, that's your startup, take 'em to IPO. They're worth far more than $$$.

It kind of is though. The cost of making failure painful is all the potential innovators who decide to get a safe job instead.

That's not a criticism of corporations, just pointing out that taking a risk and striking out on your own isn't necessarily a reckless decision.

And I don't think startups are reckless, but I think a lot of the people that join them fail to do rudimentary financial calculations as to whether doing so has a better expected return than a safe(tm) job.

Otherwise, they wouldn't accept chicken scratchings worth of lottery tickets and 20-50% lower compensation. But yet they do, over and over, no matter how many people lay it out how bad an idea this usually is.

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-y...

So, basically, your point is that you should sneakily hide your best ideas from your employers and then strike out on your own when you hit that magical amazing idea! You know, that idea that is obviously going to be an amazing success and you can know that ahead of time! People that foolishly try to succeed on their own time are rubes! Instead of accepting a check from the government, you should mail it in with a job you're entirely checked out of until you find the magical secret sauce to make yourself a billionaire. That's great for everyone right?

To some extent, but big companies are likely to be much more conservative towards new ideas. If they weren't, there would be little benefit to being an entrepreneur.

IMO the benefit to being an entrepreneur is that if you truly have a winning idea, you can own a lot more of its fruits by pursuing it from your own business. For it requires nearly the same skillset to procure VC as it does to persuade a large company to let you build something. Risk is and should be proportional to return.

To that end, I have nearly 20 patents filed from within large companies, most of them single inventor. And my salary amortized over a 4-year startup life cycle is on par with what I would have gotten as a non 3-letter title at an acquired startup that wasn't a Google or a Facebook.

So why take a chance on failure without the chance of a big payout? And except for the 3-letter titles, that's what a lot of newbies unknowingly sign up to do, risk >>>> return. I have no desire to socialize this learning experience for them.