"Take an IPhone - you find a variety of technologies - each one was created by some government grant... The collective production of wealth, which is then privately appropriated.. it's very easy to start thinking of basic income as a dividend that goes to the collective that was responsible for collectively producting the wealth."

"We need to create a system whereby society stakes a claim to the returns to aggregate capital, and this claim becomes an income stream that goes to everyone. I don't see why my children and your children have a right to a trust fund [or] why Paris Hilton has a right to a trust fund, when nobody else does, or very few people do.

Think of basic income as a trust fund for all our children - to be financed by dividends from our aggregate capital, which was after all, created collectively."

Except "collectively" is very misleading when you're taking the capital gains from say, 20k employees of a tech company and re-distributing it to 300M / 6 Billion people.

Generally I agree that being fed and housed will remove constraints on labor allocation - but its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.

> its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.

That's not correct. Communism is ownership of the means of production. Nobody has proposed that the technology company be owned or operated by the government.

What's being proposed is a reallocation of streams of income. While I understand there is some vague similarity, these are not at all the same things. The crucial difference being that market forces are still quite free to allocate capital.

In practice this doesn't actually work because the organization doesn't have freedom to re-invest. Once the government can come in and say "we deem all this money in excess, so we will confiscate it". What if that happened to Apple after the successful iMac in the early 2000's? We may have never seen the iPod or iPhone - as an example.

All the system needs to control resources is to define it as "excess capital or resources." You end up with a globally centralized economy, where the independent business owners are robbed when successful to feed the system.

Is anybody advocating arbitrary confiscation of private wealth? It seems more likely to me that BI would involve lawful taxation.

As someone on the for side for BI, I still see "lawful taxation" as an equivalent of armed robbery.

Try to dodge the tax man for enough money there will be gunmen at your door to take you to prison.

> Try to dodge the tax man for enough money there will be gunmen at your door to take you to prison.

Eventually, yes. That's also true if you try to dodge your local restaurant, after availing yourself of their services.

Of course the practical inability to refrain from "using" government is a big difference! But it needs to be included in the analysis - it is not as simple as "if you don't pay, there will eventually be force; ergo it is robbery".

I think you and I are on the same point for this so there isn't much point going further.

Probably not quite the same point - I think there's clearly some difference between paying for my meal and paying taxes, but I also think there's clearly some difference between paying taxes and paying a mugger (especially in a well-functioning society).

I just don't think the first difference is well expressed by pointing out that force is eventually involved.

That would entirely depend on how you feel about taxes and how you're government uses them.

As someone who's experienced both a muggings and police brutality I'm not really going to see much of a difference.

If it's simply a question of feelings, then I agree this isn't likely to wind up anywhere interesting. Best.

Without wishing to take sides on the controversial issue of whether taxation is morally permissable, I would like to add that what I call "lawful taxation" is different from arbitrary confiscation. I call taxation "lawful" if it is collected according to rules that are knowable at the time is incurred.

I think we're both aware, the lawful part wasn't up for debate, we're more discussing whether its moral/ethical than anything else.

I think it is a necessary evil for the most part but I still hold the opinion it isn't something you get a choice in.

In practice we have no idea if this will work. It has never been done before.

With that Apple example: For all we know, the industry could be in a much better position if it were not for the iPod/iPhone. The stuff Apple brought with the iPod/iPhone (DRM and the App Store model) have arguably set the software industry back. And an argument in favor of Apple: stuff like the RPi/VR wouldn't have been economically feasible since there was no pass production of ARM processors / high-density screens.

Point is, we don't know.

There's no way of telling if BI works without actually doing it. And that's what the point of this study is.

No, actually that's straight up hyperbolic. There is no upper bound on the 20k employees' income i.e. not communism (or socialism even).

Unless of course the governing body deems the massive revenue the 20k employees generate as "excess" and is confiscated for Basic Income in Africa - the company employing these people will have practical upper limits on what they can pay their employees as exists today - but with the additional caveat that governments can just take the money for "the common good."

It's globalism. It's socialism/communism.

What you've described is taxes.

so under your definition, all nations are today already globalist/communist/socialist.

Is this really that far from the truth?

yes, since communism has a defintion and isnt jsut some vague concept you can attach to any other system.

Do the means of production belong to the state? if not , it isnt communism.

So what happens in the (potentially short) period before the government deems that as excessive? Assume for a moment that they costed it out and it's sustainable.

This sentiment appeals to the better angels of our nature while totally disregarding the little devils that sit on most of our other shoulders.

Maybe Paris Hilton doesn't deserve that trust fund, but lots of little devils on shoulders will convince her and especially politicians that she does.

> The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society.

I agree 100%, and I must say having immigrated from Australia, it's probably the worst thing about America.

It feels like Employers have all the power in America, and therefore all the Employees are basically slaves, and are treated as such.

I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workforce over the profits of businesses.

"I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workforce over the profits of businesses" I agree. Corporate greed. That's exactly the issue being addressed in this article: https://medium.com/@LevelWorkingField/do-you-like-new-pricin...

This was the biggest move which Dr. King was calling for in his fight for civil rights, a year before he was assassinated.

>We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]

How does Australia give one the right to turn down a job?

Australia has very strong safety nets. Currently welfare pays $250AUD per week for a single person or $225 each for a couple. There is also plenty of social housing.

My favorite welfare program they've created (called NEIS) is for those who want to start their own company. You get paid the above but get to build a company instead of having to search for a job (which is very useful when there are no jobs available in your area).

That sounds....awful.

Taxpayers would basically be funding all the hackathon projects that are "Uber for X".

It's also building an educated workforce, at the end of this thing, these guys have developed more and deeper skills in a useful industry, and so what if the government paid for it instead of paying for school, during which time they also wouldn't be working?

What's the alternative, work at McDonalds and develop no useful skills in the meantime?

Additionally, _some_ of these companies will actually work out, so there's that bonus too!

Overall, it sounds like a pretty solid investment in the workforce to me. A lot better than paying people to sit home and "look for a job" in an area where jobs are hard to find, at any rate.

> What's the alternative, work at McDonalds and develop no useful skills in the meantime?

Do something useful. (FYI, someone paying you is a strong indicator of "usefulness".)

This attitude is incredibly american.

I'd rather my taxes went to someone trying to build a business than someone that "tries" to get a job only to get fired after a month every time.

> This attitude is incredibly american.

As an American, I often fear that responsibility, self-reliance, and self-determinism aren't respected by my countrymen.

So I'm rather heartened to hear that.

>responsibility, self-reliance, and self-determinism

and you feel that an employee better exemplifies these traits than an entrepreneur?

I feel that taxes do not exemplify these traits.

you feel that 'taxes' dont exemplify those traits?

taxes isnt a living person, so it cannot demonstrate self-reliance/self-determinism.

this doesnt even make any sense

I'm aware its probably not an accurate portrayal, its just the kind of thing the UK/AU/NZ hears a lot from americans and we don't quite understand the narrow minded logic.

While you're right that the doll bludger should "just get a job", you thinking that isn't going to change the fact that they won't.

And if you can't find someone (=clients) paying you, you won't have a business. And if you can't make a case that someone would very likely pay you, they won't approve your plan.

Such programs aren't VC funds, they are a way to get tiny companies off the ground and to legalize under-the-table gigs (which are worse for both worker and state in the long run).

99% of people aren't in Tech. They are starting hair dressers, restaurants, selling products or doing a trade. You also have to have a business plan and do a monthly update with a trainer who guides you ensures you're working on it.

I'd way rather my tax dollars go towards people attempting to create something useful and improve their community than giving them food stamps and leaving them to themselves, which often leads to them sitting around home feeling useless and doing nothing with their lives.

if you loved austrailia so much, move back. you have to take the 'bad' with the good. we built a system that enables people with ideas to chase their dreams and succeed. that means companies have the ability to pay people with low skills and experience less than those with.

honestly, if you are being treated like a slave, move to another company. if you cant, you don't have skills employers want. get them.

during the recession, many companies used their position of power to their advantage. the smarter companies (and now more successful) used the recession as an opportunity to get the best workers.

the ironic thing is, to try and force employers to treat everyone like stellar employees would probably result in treating everyone poorly.

You sound like some kind of redneck with that "go back to your country" bullshit. Someone is making very good points and that's the best thing you can say.

No need to begin name calling because you disagree with his point of view. Next time, try contributing to the debate instead. Follow your own lead.

theres no debate when someone starts with "go back to your country"

the other commentor rightfully pointed out that this is a deflection rather than a counter argument.

no its not. its pointing the the strong point: gee my country was worse, i moved to this other country where my situation is better, but this new country should do everything like my old country because it was so great that I left it in the first place.

enabling entrepreneurs is what makes america successful. people like them want all the success while crushing businesses. it dont work like that.

Some people like to look out for more than their own interests.

I moved from Australia to the USA because it's the world leader in technology, but if I was in ANY other profession (including starting my own company) I would have stayed in Australia.

The USA is great if you're in the top 1% or work in technology, but other than that there's little reason to migrate. That's why he's proclaiming that employees are basically slaves, general quality of life and job happiness for everyone else is far better in Australia.

And business success rates and the economy is doing just as well in Australia as it is in the USA. You can have the best of both worlds, you just have to look at the data instead of being stuck in ideology.

It's totally ok if you think the USA should favour the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else, but you're doing a disservice to yourself and your fellow Americans if you refuse to even look at the data or consider the possibility that there could be a better way.

person a says: i have a unique perspective into a part of this issue, here are my experiences and how they differ in two societys. I prefer society a's method of handling process x.

person b: go back to your own country if you hate it so much here!

yeah, we are headed for a really productive and intelligent debate here.....

But the topic of discussion at hand is a contrast of launching a business in the person's home country or their current country. In that context the response makes a relevant point that deserves a considered response (or acknowledgement).

The comment was phrased in a way that could be construed as a personal attack and that's not ideal, but it can equally be read as a genuine point if we don't jump to the immediate conclusion that it was a personal attack - The point being: if conditions are more favourable in the home country wouldn't a rational actor move back to their home country and launch there, instead?

I don't agree with the OP by the way, but I interpreted the comment first in the way I described, rather than as 'grr if you don't like it go home'.

non-sequitur. The whole topic here is about a Universal Basic Income. You're the only one who said all that nonsense about "force employers to treat everyone like stellar employees" etc. If you want to never learn anything, these sorts of straw-man statements are a good approach. Alternatively, you could actually engage fairly with what people are actually saying.

> It feels like Employers have all the power in America, and therefore all the Employees are basically slaves, and are treated as such.

How is it a non-sequitur when it was in direct response to this quote?

Because the implication was that the solution was allowing employees to more easily say no to employers (due to UBI), thus tilting slightly the balance in the direction of workers. A balance that has shifted in favor of employers for the past ~40 odd years or so.

No UBI proposal has ever said anything about "treating everyone like stellar employees" - it's an irrelevant point.

UBI is not 'tilting slightly the balance in the direction of workers'. its ripping the balance strait the f off the scale.

'treating everyone like stellar employees' is not irrelevant. we are not in the utopian world where technology has made resources so abundant that everyone can have what they want without working extra hard for it. maybe in 35+ years, but this PRECONDITION is necessary to even begin to think UBI would work.

SO when an employer is forced to pay all employees a basic income, they have to start paying uneducated / unskilled / low performing employees more. when revenue has not increased, this means taking pay raises / income / benefits from the other employees.

#2 if all of your needs are GUARANTEED you might be surprised to find nobody would be willing to do many jobs.

> SO when an employer is forced to pay all employees a basic income

Wait, I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Employers don't pay a basic income, the government does (so by extension we all do, through taxes).

I'm not sure how it will shake out, but there are pressures to both reduce and increase pay in a BI system. Everyone is getting a base level of income, so wages across the board will drop (but companies will be paying more in taxes, so it's offset somewhat). On the other hand, there will be less applicants for crap jobs, so the wages for those will likely go up. Then again, maybe a crap job isn't so bad if you don't have to do it 40 hours a week, and since people won't need the work as much as want it for increased spending power, maybe you can fill what was a single position with 2-3 part-time positions, and people will accept less pay because they aren't doing it all week long.

The biggest problem with moving to BI is that there are so many variables that are affected it's impossible to say with any confidence how it would settle. Experiments like this help with that, but even they can only go so far when the people are interspersed with others that are not on a BI system.

> SO when an employer is forced to pay all employees a basic income

BI is not paid by employers to employees. You seem to be confusing Basic Income with some kind of minimum wage.

> this means taking pay raises / income / benefits from the other employees.

Or it means reducing returns to capital; this is fairly expressly the case in UBI funded by increases in taxation of capital income.

> BI is not paid by employers to employees. You seem to be confusing Basic Income with some kind of minimum wage.

Although, raising the minimum wage would be a good thing. Here is an article that shows how the lowest paying companies are effectively ripping off the rest of the economy:

http://prospect.org/article/confronting-parasite-economy (Confronting the Parasite Economy)

The articles is written by Nick Hanauer who is co-chair board of Pacific Coast Feather Company, his families business.

Here is a excerpt from the article which explained what happened when minimum wage was raised to $15 an hour in Seattle.

In 2014, Seattle took its high-wage model one step further, passing the first $15 minimum wage in the nation. Restaurateurs and right-wing think tanks warned of ruin. Businesses would close. Workers would lose their jobs. The invisible hand would punch us in the mouth. But it never happened.

As the Puget Sound Business Journal recently reported in a front page story titled “Apocalypse Not: $15 and the cuts that never came,” six months after the first wage increase went into effect, Seattle’s restaurant industry is growing faster than ever. Even celebrity chef Tom Douglas, who had warned that Seattle could lose a quarter of its downtown restaurants, has continued to add restaurants to his local empire. “Douglas has now changed his mind about the law,” the PSBJ reports, “saying he was ‘naïve’ to think that restaurants would raise pay on their own.” That he was. And then on February 15, 2016, The Seattle Times reported that ADP’s national survey of economic vitality ranked Washington state number one in the country for both wage and job growth. And you thought higher wages killed jobs. Not hardly.

basic income and minimum wage is about the same thing, its just a matter of how it gets taken out of our paychecks.

seatle is successful because of a tech boom and subsequent real estate boom, not because of minimum wage, that started just over a year ago.

I disagree that basic income and minimum wage is about the same thing.

I would be interested in where you have got the data from for that assertion that it was because of a tech boom and subsequent real estate boom. At the moment I believe the person who actually employs people as a large manufacturer than what is mentioned here in a comment.

If you would like to give your sources, I would be interested.

let me get this strait kbenson, you are saying: take money from (tax) people who are skilled / educated / work harder to better themselves and give it to those who don't. they will have increased spending power now and purchase things that the skilled/educated workers where buying so the skilled people will face a double whammy of both loss of wages and loss of buying power.

no (though I'm not kbenson), because your entire premise that wealth today is strictly correlate with "skilled / educated / work harder" is bullshit.

Yeah, I know some people think that we live in a meritocracy where if you have wealth, you deserve it, and there's no luck or dishonesty or cheating or inherent unfair inequalities — but it's obvious you don't come to that view by looking at the evidence, you come to that by something along the lines of reading Ayn Rand and just believing that nonsense or something similar.

In reality, lots of wealth is captured by those whose action provide no positive value to the world. Lots of success involves luck. And lots of people working shitty not-so-productive jobs have the potential to be far more effective and UBI would assist that in ways other approaches do not.

Anyway, even if we disagree about tons of things, you could have productive discussions with people if you didn't insist on bullshit implications like the idea that all the people in high-paid jobs are hard-working, deserving, productive folks while all low-paid people are the opposite.

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

so your idea of a productive conversation is having someone repeat your own opinions at you. I'm sorry you don't believe your success is in your own hands. successful people create their own luck, you are pretty old to have not realized that by now.

I LOVE learning new things by engaging with people I disagree with (and sometimes change my mind!) The way to succeed at that process is to avoid asserting nonsensical extremes. Of course there's a correlation between hard-work and success, but it's not a strict one. There are lots of cases where two people worked equally hard and intelligently and one succeeds where the other fails. That luck factor is separate from all the systematic things that put people at all sorts of different privileges already.

From everything I understand about the world (from personal experience and from reading and learning from others), there's a strong correlation between success and unearned privileged that is at least arguably a stronger correlation than the one about hard work. So, the most success comes from all three factors: luck, privilege, and hard work — put together.

It seems like you think even acknowledging luck and privilege is tantamount to denying the significance of hard work.

Speaking as a native American, I cannot disagree more. The spirit and very origin of our great nation is to never accept the bad with the good, but to doggedly pursue the very best in everything.

(assuming you mean the United States as "our great nation") Our country was founded on compromise. We baked slavery and misogyny into our Constitution. We have been explicitly accepting bad with good since day 1.

one who gives up nothing, loses. That's like saying 'i want to invest in riskless stocks but make huge gains'. you cant be the best at anything if you try and be the best at everything. But really this is a whole other conversation

Basic income has a whole host of pretty interesting self-reinforcing feedback loops that seemingly would improve things overall.

For example, people would be more likely to leave jobs that were unsafe, treated people poorly, etc. Including situations where employers weren't following labor laws and regulations (which is a huge problem today). Meaning that maybe it'd be more likely that the fire code, sanitary regulations, etc. were followed consistently. Additionally, people would be more able to have the flexability to be able to train for new careers (whether on their own or through a school or program). Shifting the balance of power in the job market to labor would also generally improve the wage situation, which has stagnated for the last several decades due to the growing power of employers.

Or, if the fire code weren't followed, there wouldn't be bullshit political pressure to keep the factory open because "Think of the jobs you're killing!"

Same logic is used in free market arguments: Workers leaving jobs to go to other companies creates an incentive for employers to improve work environments.

In both scenarios the workplaces become better off, but what really happens in practice is less than ideal.

Yes but what happens if you are poor and living paycheck to paycheck? And what if there are not enough jobs? You have no choice but to stay in a job no matter how bad it is.

BI supposedly will give you a choice. You won't starve to death if you leave your job.

UBI is not an alternative or opposite to free labor markets. It simply provides a baseline level of income so that at the bottom end, the driving force behind an employee's decision to take a job or not is not driven by things like starvation.

You can only leave a job for another if there actually is another one.

Or... if the other job is literally no better... there's no positive benefit to be had, and possibly negative backlash.

Scenario: You're married with 2 kids and live in San Francisco. Is an $8,000/year UBI going to enable you to quit your $100,000/year job without another lined up?

Obviously it would. You are trying to conflate having a family with living in an over priced high demand location. Try again.

I have no idea what this means in relation to the scenario. Can you explain?

No, I'm saying that in many cases UBI is far too low to have any effect at all. Unless you put it at $100,000/year.

Yup, definitely.

The more you make the more you can save. And the more you can own. People who make that much aren't the ones you need to target to improve their bargaining power or labor mobility, but UBI is still a benefit. Some cash flow is better than no cash flow. Even if it's only enough to pay the interest on their credit cards, that's still a big deal. And might be enough to convince people to leave jobs they hate.

>The Mafia loves to give us options that we can't refuse, to make us offers we can't refuse.

Send us a fat portion of your workers' pay to fund our Utopian vision. Or else.

> Send us a fat portion of your workers' pay to fund our Utopian vision. Or else.

The freedom that UBI provides includes your freedom to refuse the oppressive burden of becoming rich and having to pay taxes in the process.

The more people who do object to the burdens of wealth, the easier it will be for the non-retarded to become rich in their place.

Paying income taxes is completely voluntary. Don't earn any/much income and you pay 0.

"Object to the burdens of wealth."

I'd rather have the burdens of the wealthy than the poor. Losing money or whatever seems less of a burden than starving or freezing to death.

>Losing money or whatever seems less of a burden than starving or freezing to death.

huh its almost as if thats the entire point of UBI

The parent comment suggested the burdens of wealth are somehow bad and we should all aspire to be BI paupers. At least, that's what it sounded like.

But paying your taxes isn't presented as an option.

Exactly.

You are replacing a decision with (according to the quote) limited flexibility, with a choice with no flexibility.

You try tell that to the individuals who claim we live in a "voluntary" society. One "voluntarily" pays his/her taxes. Really, once you start peeling past it, it's a never ending stream of contradictions and state double-speak.

It doesn't have to come from income tax. It could come from unearned sources of income, such as a tax on land, or on interest.

Or it could fall from the sky, or grow on trees...

I agree with one point: UBI will provide freedom -- the freedom of some fraction of society to live at a very low standard at the expense of the remainder.

Sure, a high-income family, burdened by UBI taxes and other monstrosities, could decide to leave their jobs, leave their home, schools, neighborhood, and live in a UBI ghetto. To pursue art...

I will meet your challenge head-on and say that that UBI is a worthwhile task, even presented worse than in your imagination. Humans have the right to dignity, food and shelter, and I think even those who are lazy, angry, worthless, deserve these as much as do any other.

But your argument relies on other inherently problematic parts of the American system.

-You say that people would have to "live in a UBI ghetto". Sure, they won't be able to afford a six bedroom house or a downtown Manhattan apartment off UBI. But in cities with public transit, and with non-ridiculous building restrictions, why can't the answer be "downsize and move ten minutes away"?

-You tie high-performing schools to high-income neighbourhoods. This is true in the US, but for bad reasons. Public schools should, and already in many parts of the world do, accept people who want to come from any nearby geographic location. A particularly effective example is the city of Edmonton, in Canada. Kids can choose to go to any high school in the entire metropolitan region (of course with capacity preference for nearby students, which is rarely reached). And it works extremely well.

-You assume through the pejorative "ghetto" that life in a neighbourhood with many UBI recipients will be undesirable. But why is this true? Just because people are less monied does not mean they are worse. In countries which do not allow their poor citizens access to mental health support, sufficient food and education, etc., outcomes are worse. But a high enough UBI would allow these citizens to fix those problems themselves.

>But in cities with public transit, and with non-ridiculous building restrictions, why can't the answer be "downsize and move ten minutes away"?

if you are living off UBI, it literally doesnt matter where you live. Move to rural midwest - theres plenty of vacant housing at astonishingly cheap prices.

You could easily get a multi-bedroom house for under 500 a month

Or by reducing the financial excess/waste that goes to corruption, tax avoidance or rent-seeking companies (many of who oppose the very idea of a basic income).

... and now we jumped straight to utopia. imagining that ending corruption just like that to support this thingie... I wish to take BI seriously, but then the whole topic needs to be serious, and not start with these childish statements and assumptions.

All the simulations/proposition in Switzerland are heavily relying on increased taxation of work force. All spending saved on cutting of existing social systems is far from being enough to finance it.

Almost nobody is strictly against ideas of BI. What all opponents have against is the high potential for catastrophic failure once it hits reality. Like all other utopistic ideas that started with good intentions. or anybody considers communism a success?

I didn't say that ending corruption would "support this thingie", I identified corruption and associated crimes as an appropriate source of funding for a BI initiative, namely because there are economic studies that estimate losses to shadow economy practices to be as as high as 13% [1] to 26% [2] of a some countries' GDP.

[1] the figure by Portugal's official statistic (same article as below) [2] the figure calculated by an independent think-thank focused on shadow economy studies (https://www.publico.pt/economia/noticia/-economia-paralela-c...)

PS: these numbers are focused on Portugal for brevity, but you'll easily find similar studies if you look up Transparency International.

> "Like all other utopistic ideas that started with good intentions. or anybody considers communism a success?"

I've said this before but it bears repeating, communism has never been fully realised because it got stuck at the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' stage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...

"In Marxist sociopolitical thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a state in which the proletariat, or the working class, has control of political power.[1][2] The term, coined by Joseph Weydemeyer, was adopted by the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the 19th century. In Marxist theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate system between capitalism and communism, when the government is in the process of changing the ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership."

"Marxism–Leninism follows the ideas of Marxism and Leninism, seeking to establish a vanguard party, to lead proletarian uprising, assume state power on behalf of the proletariat, and create a single party socialist state. The socialist state, representing a dictatorship of the proletariat is governed through the process of democratic centralism, which Vladimir Lenin described as "diversity in discussion, unity in action." It remains the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, and was the official ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the other ruling parties making up the Eastern Bloc."

IMO this intermediate step was the biggest mistake of those who attempted communism, the transition from this centrally-controlled state to a decentralised egalitarian is highly unlikely to work.

UBI on the other hand is not an attempt to build a utopia, and does not interfere with the freedom for people to choose where to work and what to spend their money on. It's just a better safety net to prepare for an increasingly uncertain future.

> It's just a better safety net to prepare for an increasingly uncertain future

Honest question: when has the future not been uncertain? When times were good? I'm guessing that the collective outlook about the future has a lot to do with current conditions, which is counterintuitive. If current conditions are worse, aren't they likely to get better? Likewise, if conditions are fantastic, don't they have a greater chance of getting worse? That is, of course, assuming that there is some equilibrium we hover around, which history has suggested.

> "Honest question: when has the future not been uncertain? When times were good? I'm guessing that the collective outlook about the future has a lot to do with current conditions, which is counterintuitive. If current conditions are worse, aren't they likely to get better? Likewise, if conditions are fantastic, don't they have a greater chance of getting worse? That is, of course, assuming that there is some equilibrium we hover around, which history has suggested."

We were never able to predict the future with great accuracy, however the rate of technological change and societal change is faster today than it's been for a long time. We've already gone through a period of rapid change in the 20th century, if you compare life in 1900 with 1999 you can see that our society changed radically. The pace of technological change and societal change is not slowing down, along with increasing activity in AI, VR and synthetic biology which all have the potential to alter our society drastically, we will also have to address considerable challenges with climate change and the knock on effects on the lifecycles of the earth, political instability, economic instability, superbugs, etc...

Those are just the challenges we know about today. What we'll be facing in 20 years we do not know. However, with the challenges we face today the outcomes are too hard to predict, and aside from WW1 and WW2 all are potentially greater than the challenges we faced in the 20th century.

I think you need to review your history. After WW2 people were literally so worried about nuclear annihilation of the planet they ran weekly air raid drills in schools. Then it was the economic recession and malaise of the 70s. Then it was the rise of the powerful Japanese economy and the threat of globalization. Before WW2, well.. shit was way, way worse for most people in the world, and it just got worse the farther back you go. I really don't think increasing activity in AI and VR are going to threaten our security or way of lives in as significant a way as fascism or nuclear weapons did.

The threat of nuclear weapons is still strong. Look at North Korea, just this week we had another missile test. Thankfully it wasn't a nuclear missile, and the launch failed, but the intention to improve their missile capabilities is clear, and they've conducted 4 nuclear weapon tests in the last 10 years.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0YN5UU

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17823706

Considering the irrational leadership (and also considering the usefulness of North Korea to China if they ever wanted to conduct a proxy war), they pose a definite threat.

Another example is Pakistan. They're a country with clear links to Islamic fundamentalism, as well as one with nuclear weapons. The potential for something to go wrong in this situation shouldn't be underestimated, even if Pakistan doesn't launch the missiles themselves you could have a country like Saudi Arabia looking to get control over a nuclear weapon either by buying one or through underhanded means, and a desire to do so could be rationalised by the threat posed by Isreal and the US.

Lastly, we have the US. Despite rhetoric in line with nuclear disarmament, their continued military support of Isreal is pretty much the only thing blocking a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, and Obama has started a program for a new nuclear weapons arsenal, one focused on a larger number of small weapons. The decrease in size but increase in quantity is concerning, as it implies the US way be aiming for weapons they can use strategically in war.

As for fascism, there's a very real possibility that Trump will be elected (he's currently slightly up in the polls vs Clinton, plus Clinton is under FBI investigation and could be indicted before the elections conclude). Trump is a known liar, but if he follows through with what he's claimed then he does lean towards fascism. We'll have to wait to see how things pan out after the election.

We also have other countries which oppress democratic change in their country. Whilst you couldn't call them fascist per se, I'd argue that this oppression represents one of the worst traits of what we know of fascist dictatorships.

I could go on. The point is just because those threats aren't as prominent in people's minds doesn't mean they've gone away.

> Marxism–Leninism follows the ideas of Marxism and Leninism

Well, that's the marketing PR of Leninism, which has been uncritically accepted by those who oppose both Marxism and Leninism without really understanding either. Leninist vanguardism, in reality, rejects a number of fundamental elements of Marxism in order to bypass essential preconditions -- such as the existence of a developed capitalist society to build on -- in order to develop a theory of how to pursue goals similar to those expressed in Marxism in places where the essential prerequisites Marx saw were not present.

I don't care whether it's Marxist, or Marxist-Leninist, or whatever you want to call their approach, the point is that both Marx and Lenin saw a dictatorship as a necessary intermediary step towards communism, and that's a fundamental mistake regardless of the window dressing that surrounds it.

and that, my friend, is exactly what I meant when nice ideals hit reality. it never ends as it was intended, and extremely rarely for the better

I agree that good intentions can have bad consequences, but in this particular case I'd say the bad consequences were easy to predict before the attempt was made. It's possible to remove ideas that are obviously bad to make problems less likely.

How taxes aren't coercion?

How is democracy not coercion? There are plenty of laws passed that I didn't want passed, yet I am forced to obey them.

Because if you don't like paying them, you don't have to. You can emigrate instead or, in the case of land taxes, sell your land.

That's like saying that the Mafia's protection racket isn't a form of coercion. You can choose to shut down your business, or move to a different city after all!

We need states to wield violence on our behalf, and the development of democratic republics has done much to curb some of the excesses of other forms of state (but democratic republics have their own uncurbed excesses). But we shouldn't fool ourselves about their fundamentally coërcive nature.

Steve Martin: how get a million dollars tax free. First, get a million dollars. Then when they haul you into court and ask why you didn't pay our taxes, say to the judge, "your honor, I forgot". What can they do to you?

I'm not after workers' pay.

I'm after your 'package' and your contractually guaranteed returns and your windfalls.

I'm going to reverse a 55 year trend of ever more wealth going to a limited number of people.

I'm going to crack off as much of that as I can and redefine how we play this game for the next round.

Defining this as 'taking money from your employees' is akin IMO to claiming you're replacing unskilled labor in your fast food chain with a robot because the minimum wage went up.

So, when someone with knowledge of the fast food industry directly states that robots will be implemented if the minimum wage goes up is somehow misinformed?

you have to be pretty naive to think robots wont be in fast food places either way.

Exactly. His prediction was a pretty low number, only like double current minimum wage. The fact that he made that prediction is very scary. Think of how many things we've seen improve 2x in less than a decade.

Its a replay of something called "Enclosure" in Britain in the 1700s (actually for several hundreds of years) where the commons got fenced and contracted out. It meant laborers could no longer live for a while off the land - a brace of rabbits, a partridge for the pot. So labor had to work for an employer to live, at whatever pay the employer chose. Which essentially enslaved them. Or so the argument went.

I think it's an interest ebb and flow of history. The US had (and continues to have) a similar process related to grazing lands in the West (someone correct if I'm wrong).

But the broader theme of "in order to make more, we privatize this resource so that it may be exploited more efficiently" starts to become questionable in a hypothetical post-material scarcity, "we don't need more" world.

Let's say you have a person living in a remote area and they don't interact much with other people and they don't have a basic income. Are they free?

Let's say someone lives in the city without BI, is it fair to say that moving into the wilderness is an option for them, and therefore they are free? Does it change if they started in the wilderness?

Note that there is (virtually) no terra nullis any more, and likely not enough wilderness to accommodate today's world population living the kind of lifestyle one can live on without interacting with other people.

I've stated elsewhere, I don't think it is fair to say that moving into the wilderness is an option. As cheap as land is in some remote areas, it's still beyond the resources of the people for whom it would be an improvement from their current situation.

That doesn't really answer the question though: if you could live in the wilderness, is that freedom?

I kinda does answer the question. If there isn't any "wilderness" to live in, because it's all owned by people, then the question is pointless.

I live in Australia, where we actually do face this question. There are Aboriginal people living on their ancestral lands in the outback. They have dramatically shorter lifespans and worse health conditions. There are all sorts of reasons for this, not least that colonialist administrations have messed with their ability to live on their land. But the government now faces a choice:

- do we let them live out in the bush on their ancestral lands, where they have these measurably worse lives by all the standards we use to measure such things, or - do we remove them from their lands and try to improve their life choices so they live better (in all the standards we measure such things).

This question basically comes down to: if a person wants to live free in the wilderness, but the cost of that freedom is a dramatic reduction in their health, life expectancy, education, and quality of life, should we let them?

We haven't really worked out an answer yet, but it is increasingly looking like the right one is actually "no".

So, to answer your question "if a person wants to live free in the wilderness, are they free?", the answer that we're discovering is: "maybe, it depends on whether they can support themselves and their children to an acceptable standard doing that, and there needs to be government inspectors who decide whether that's the case"

I think your answer here means that "freedom" is essentially a useless word in political discussions. Your definition is radically different than mine.

It's the same freedom we're talking about in the War Against Drugs. The freedom to kill yourself with narcotics is not something that governments are comfortable granting their citizens.

I have never heard the War on Drugs framed in terms of promoting freedom. Can you give an example?

it isn't. It's a restriction on freedom imposed by governments because allowing people to kill themselves with narcotics is not a freedom that governments are comfortable with.

who gives a shit? The pedantic question of "is that freedom?" only applies to nincompoops who think that ethics or economics revolve around whether or not we achieve some singular dogmatic principle like "freedom". It's far more valuable to ask actually useful questions that have practical answers.

>"The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. And to have that right, a genuine right, to turn down a job, you must have an alternative: An outside option. Because desperate people will accept to do desperate things..."

i think it will bring downs the salary for a number of professions - why bother to pay when you can get volunteers on basic income for free?

It also increases the salary for other professions. Who wants to clean toilets for minimum wage if basic income is an alternative.

Isn't it part of the point with basic income in that it doesn't disappear if you have a job?

The choices would be "basic income" vs "minimum wage + basic income".

There is also the fact that there is no inherent reason why toilet washers should have minimum wage. It's exactly because of economic uncertainty among the lower class that they can be coerced into accepting such sub-par situations such as doing an undesired job at low wage, when it's more logical that an undesired job should offer more pay than a desirable job.

Well, from one point of view, cleaning toilet can be a very desirable job because of one fundamental property: you need no prior training!

Yes, cleaning toilet is awful, but investing years of your life into a degree before being able to apply is a considerable price, too.

You want to have your cake and eat it too.

Either the required training is enough of a disincentive to make the Job Undesirable... and pay high. Or it's not.

Required training is not likely to be so scarce when people can chose to train without risking starvation or surviving on 4 hours of sleep a night.

Which is the real problem most of those with "training" fear. It's devaluation when even poor people can get it without Herculean efforts.

I was just giving my two cents about why "undesirable" jobs usually offer low wages. By the way, I see your point with devaluation. Personally, I'm in favor of offering everybody the possibility to study, without depending on the wealth of their parent.

We all want clean toilets and most of us want to respect the health and dignity of others. Therefore we'll continue to see technological advancement in cleaning supplies, dirt resistant materails, and eventually automation. That's the whole basis of BI, at least for the techno optimists. Most janitors will just retire early, but some might discover new applications for their know-how, and we'll all benefit.

Great, so we will see highly trained people cleaning toilets, because they happen to need some money and cleaning toilets pays better than the jobs that they were trained to do.

And? What's the problem?

I see it as a net positive for society. If someone wants to clean toilets, they can do so. Right now, the people who clean our toilets might not want to do it. They are forced.

The "non-highly-trained" people can spend their time to get "highly trained", since they're not locked in to cleaning toilets anymore.

How is this a worse scenario than the one we have now?

The highly trained of today fear the devaluation of their training. They would like to keep their relatively advantaged position, they are the ones with something to lose.

> The highly trained of today fear the devaluation of their training.

Also the devaluation of training would create another disincentive that would keep some people from acquiring training in the first place. Don't know if society would benefit from this result, I think it wouldn't.

>Also the devaluation of training would create another disincentive that would keep some people from acquiring training in the first place.

Then having that training, if anyone actually needed it, would be a highly valuable trait.

I don't see how this is different from the rest of society. "Cleaning toilets" sounds like it lacks dignity, but to an art history major "social media marketing" or "event planning" might feel like cleaning toilets.

We all make compromises.

Dignity is stupid anyways (https://newrepublic.com/article/64674/the-stupidity-dignity ).

What job is currently well paid that you would do for free?

and that includes the shitty parts of the job: commuting, paperwork, emails, on call rotations?, dealing with vendors, dealing with customer complaints, etc etc.

well yeah, but why is that a problem?

What a foolish analogy. The Mafia uses violence to force people to "agree" to things. If one "can't say no" to a contract because their pre-contract situation sucks and will be improved by adopting the contract, they have suffered no violence.

What difference does it make if the threat is actual violence or leaving you without an income so you end up on the street? What matters is not the particulars of the unpleasantness that awaits you if you don't accept the mafia's/corporation's offer, but the fact that the unpleasantness is a consequence of a situation that the mafia/corporation have themselves created.

> ... the unpleasantness is a consequence of a situation that the mafia/corporation have themselves created.

I don't understand how the corporation can be guilty. If someone offers you a job with a wage that you find modest, how is it his fault if nobody else is making you a better offer?

There are a lot of things that companies do to make sure no one makes you a better offer. Here is just one recent example from the tech industry:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/4-tech-companies-are-payin...

It's foolish, but that's not even the biggest reason.

It's foolish because he wants to replace one corrupt group of people that take your money and distribute it (the Mafia) with another corrupt group of people that take your money and distribute it (the government).

Contracts signed with the mafia are not free market contracts.

It's feasible to admit though that the mafia's own existence is a failure of governments in providing security for the population. Possibly a free market for police services would fix that. Otherwise, if the government would stop wasting people's money and its own time meddling with people's freedoms, it would be able to better deal with violent actions against individuals, one of its main attributions.

Regarding Greece, their lack of ability to say no is a direct consequence of their irresponsible actions of the past.

The right to turn down all work, at an evolutionary level, is granted only to photosynthetic organisms.

The right to free speech and religious expression at an evolutionary level is non-existent. What's your point?

Free speech and freedom of religion demands nothing of your neighbors except non interference. Basic income, on the other hand, demands their labor (at our current level of technology). In the future automation may change this, but right now there is a big gap between demanding free as in speech and free as in beer.

It in fact does not require their labor. It requires effective taxation of land and distribution of said taxation effectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism "... revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can reduce or eliminate existing taxes on labor and investment that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue back to the people through a basic income or citizen's dividend."

This is the second time I've seen"taxation of land" in this thread as if the dirt my house is sitting on has the ability to write checks to the local government. I might be missing something, but all tax revenue ultimately comes from profits, or the difference between our value of something and its cost. That difference requires someone's labor. Even if there's a ton of gold under my house, someone has to dig it up, process it and find buyers. You might not think I'm entitled to 100% of the profits, but it's naive to think you're somehow not taxing labor.

All taxes come from private enterprise. All of them. It may be displaced by time, so that money I made last year pays taxes next year, but there was labor. That's why money even exists - as a store of value.

I find it misleading that American enterprise can ever be wholly "private", when it depends so much on regulation, subsidies, and public resources. Taxation goes to support the common infrastructure that makes any work possible. Problem?

Unless private parties -- consumers -- buy stuff, there is no income. The government can intervene and distort things (and should -- I'm not a libertarian) but if there is no private commerce, there is nothing to tax.

In a society with no regulation, people still partake in commerce. It has lots of problems and I wouldn't want to live in, say, Somalia, but Somalis still engage in trade and the strongmen who run such places depend on that.

> I find it misleading that American enterprise can ever be wholly "private"

It can, but not if the government grabs control of resources and industries. Do you really think corporations would simply sit on their hands if government services and resources went away? They would respond by filling the demand.

What depends on those things is our cronyism system that many people mistakenly believe to be capitalism.

Enterprises would benefit if the government stepped aside and let a true free market develop.

So... let's make some solar panels and relax?

The rest of the animal kingdom doesn't have their food stockpiled behind lock and key.

What sort of organism is our society? As a group, we have granted the right to turn down all work to numerous individuals. Since before we picked up tools we have been driven to minimize unwanted labour. Perhaps we are evolving into the 0.01%

Much of the work we do is not paid employment, but rather parenting, caring, housework, slavery, unpaid volunteering, unpaid interning, etc. Even claiming welfare takes time and effort.

Comparing mafia and creditors is non-sense: mafia get their power from their choice to use unjustified violence, while creditors get their power from your choice to borrow in the first place.

Disagree with him if you want, but his entire point is that the lines between "their choice" and "your choice" are often blurred.

Creditors get their power by virtue of the monopoly they have on the creation of money. This is a right restricted to an extremely small subset of people, which are basically the government and large banking institutions. This right is backed by violence. I think the comparison between Mafia and banking cartels has merit.

Creditors also get their power from the ability to jail those who do not pay debts (threat of force). These debts are often unknown to the debtors. This is becoming an increasingly large problem in the United States.