Public transport made private is a joke in the countries I saw it. It was bearable when it was a public service: privatized it is the same or worse 'quality' but insanely expensive. So infrastructure indeed to me is better than BI however not if it is not clear how and within what boundaries it is handled.
But I am a proponent of BI generally. If we want post earnings wealth distributions (I don't think we can have our modern system of economy and governance without it), direct & simple redistribution is the best answer. Centralised provision of food is a terrible idea. It would destroy the economy of food production. Why do this? How is it better economically, more just or more effective to give people food or food stamps than it is to give them money to buy food?
Won't it be better instead of basic income we aim for better basic life for everyone?
Would you rather get $100 cash, $100 Amex gift card, or a $100 Home Depot gift card as a gift? (Each of those can be used to buy something later in the list, but not the other way, or at least let's pretend that's the case.) In no case are you better off holding something later in the list.
Lets assume David owns and lives in a house where the roof has a leak, one which is slowly causing damage to the structure. David can't afford to repair his room. We have the option of David 1) giving David $1,000 or 2) giving David a $1,000 credit with a roof repair company or 3) repairing David's roof for him.
For the vast majority of Davids, all three options are equal as far as getting the roof fixed, but (as you noted) 1 > 2 > 3 as far as utility (since David could find someone to repair his roof for less, or he could learn to repair it himself).
The problem is that there is some subset of David's that will just spend the $1,000 on going out to dinner instead. David enjoys going out to dinner at nice restaurants and it's worth more to him (instant gratification, etc). However, next year at this time, David's entire house structure has rotted down and now he needs us to repair the whole thing. That's going to take $50,000 of our money.
We want a solution that is the most beneficial for the general case ($1,000) while still preventing the cases where the cost to us (society) isn't negatively impact. There's a lot of factors that go into that decision
1) What percentage of Davids would spend the $1,000 on going out to dinner and let their house rot?
2) What percentage of Davids would trade the $1,000 credit for $800, go out to dinner, and let their house rot?
3) How much are we willing to be negatively impacted by Davids with poor decision making skills? If it costs us $1,000 to repair the house later, we've only wasted $1,000 by giving him the cash at the start. If it costs us $50,000 to repair the house later, that's a much bigger impact.
4) How much are we willing to negatively impact the Davids with good decision making skills (reducing the utility of what they get from us) in order to mitigate the negative impact of the the bad-decision-Davids?
5) At what point are we willing to cut off the Davids with bad decision making skills? Are we willing to say "Here's the $1,000 dollars you need. If we come back next year and your house has rotted, you get to live in a cardboard box"?
6) lots of other questions...
There's a LOT of factors that going into making the "right" decision, if there even is one.
If the analogy instead is meant to apply to general basic income topics, provided we're willing to remove more than 95% of the other enormous governmental support programs (replace, not augment), then I'm inclined to give cash and let the Davids figure it out.
I believe it's more wasteful to society and intrusive/insulting to the Davids to propose that "we know better than you" and erect even more governmental "choosing for the population" administrations. Is ketchup a vegetable? Is eating meat morally wrong? Is eating meat calorically efficient? Yes, there are Davids out there who will make poor choices with the money, but I believe there's more value in letting the individual decide than in me deciding for them (directly or via proxy).
> There's a LOT of factors that going into making the "right" decision, if there even is one.
100% agree and the second-order application of that is exactly why I favor giving cash. Because what's "right" for David-1234567 is different from David-1234568 and I'd much rather have them decide, even if it means that David-1234569 makes choices that he later regrets. (If he doesn't regret it, but we regret it on his behalf, then there is no problem other than our own over-reaching and over-controlling of others tendencies.)
I think it's reasonable to assume, an absolutely tiny percentage of them.
>If it costs us $50,000 to repair the house later, that's a much bigger impact.
In what way is this society's problem? David has already paid for the house, that means he has already done things for society worth more than the cost of rebuilding that house. If he lets it fall apart, that's his problem now.
Government doesn't know how to run anything well, because the tenets of capitalism don't apply to government. The best managers of business are in the private sector where the real money is and where they have the most control.
The director of the FBI for example has a salary that tops out at about $200K plus benefits. No business manager who is truly great would want that job, so they don't. They incestuously promote from within most of the time and don't seek outsiders to fill top jobs. So nobody treats any government service as a business, and they get complacent and lose sight of the real goals, plus they don't tend to be able to budget. When was the last time you heard of a government department tightening it's belt on it's own? Private sector companies do it often to stay efficient.
Proper decision making starts with admitting that you can't possible know every angle to a particular issue. You can't be a great economist, a great businessman and a great government worker all-in-one. This is why business people surround themselves with people who DO know what they're doing (such as accountants, lawyers, engineers, marketers, etc).
How many hours have you spent researching basic income? Because extremely back-of-the-napkin math would tell you that a basic income of $20,000 is greater than the entire current government budget. Supporting a concept that would instantly consume over 100% of the current government budget is absolute madness.
Taxing rich people won't pay for this, even if you tax them at 90%. You have to squeeze the middle class and the lower class as well. Literally every level of the population suffers because working is no longer incentivised.
Who built the freeway system, ran the Manhattan project, created CERN, put people on the moon, and sponsored the research that led to computing and the Internet?
>The best managers of business are in the private sector where the real money is and where they have the most control.
Given the number of incredibly destructive, if not downright stupid, CEOs in recent corporate history, that's simply not a reality-based argument.
>Literally every level of the population suffers because working is no longer incentivised.
Literally every level of the population is already suffering for much the same reason. Current forms of capitalism penalise long-term strategic investment in favour of asset sweating and smash-and-grab corporate raiding that provide short-term quick-fix profits but destroy long term growth potential.
Wall St will always prefer a quick buck now to a million dollar payout fifty years from now - and that's not a smart way to run a planetary economic strategy.
There's also all of the taxpayer-funded and govt-run basic medical research that the pharmaceutical and medical industries get a free ride on.
I found that one chapter almost as disturbing as the rest of the book.
Single payer provides better outcomes for the population at a lower cost per GDP.
There is now on HN enough discussions of and references to basic income that it would take half a lifetime to ponder it all.
The only take away from this huge corpus of advices, opinions and reasoning is that economists - just like everyone else - heavily suffer from biases that trickle down to the laymen and that economic science is burdened with many theories that raise so many internal and external contradictions that the only way to see if any theory holds at least a grain of truth is to implement it and then spend the next half century explaining why it should have worked and why it didn't.
In my misinformed opinion it all boils down to two problems: greed and psychopaths are ruining it for everyone else on a massive scale.
People should be greedy. There just needs to be a system in place that aligns the greed of individuals with utility for humanity. I can imagine such a system, so I'm pretty optimistic for the future.
Money is an illusion that can/is be created from nothing and one problem is for whom is it created in the first place ?
Governments do not need taxes to finance themselves they do/can create money from thin air.
Also: http://www.businessinsider.com/where-does-money-come-from-20...
Cheers !