I don't have the money to pay the bills for that long, I can't afford to become an enterpreneur. BI could change my life overnight.
Switching from salary to contract can be a big stepping stone for creating the career and life you want :D
I've learned how that if you can't make a business that's generating 10k / month in 3 months it's probably the wrong market. You could keep iterating through markets until one of them sticks.
That's what I'd recommend, anyway.
In my life I'm not ashamed to say it was the hunger of having nothing, no safety net, and having no job that STILL drives me today. That fire that got started when I had bills and no money is still burning strong today.
But I worry if theres too mucb cushion perhaps I would have not hurt as bad, and ever achieved what Ive accomplished since then.
If you're some sort of titanic corporate entity, you're almost compelled to deliver constantly growing earnings for the next quarter. If you're a sole proprietorship but driven by these deeply personal motivations, you might be stuck in similarly self-defeating attitudes. Compare to Elon Musk, who barely seems to register the concept of money and is only interested in the specific things he's doing. Without the money, he'd be much the same person, I think.
Canada is a first-world country, and like all first-world safety nets, hasn't had "no safety net" for quite a long time (even the US, which has a fairly weak safety net for a first world country, especially given its relative per capita wealth and income, has had significant social safety nets for a long time.)
You can be sure that by creating a legal veneer, your home and other property will be safe, while the rest of society pays for the losses accrued by your experiment. That's potentially a much larger welfare transfer than any BI.
Canada has had health care provided to you since 1984. So to say you have "no safety net" is factually wrong. Did the existence of public health care make you decide to leave and build your business somewhere else? It seems it did not.
I am glad if I went to the doctor I could have been seen without a cost to me. I didn't NEED a doctor, I needed food to eat, and money to pay bills to keep collections off my back.
What's more likely: someone takes a risk knowing that if they fail their kids won't be homeless, or knowing that if they fail, they will be?
If you want interpret my response at the extremes I'm more that glad to dance.
Are you suggesting that compelling people to work by force is an appropriate modern economic system?
Hence my point.
If enough people decided 'the best people are those who bite other peoples' fingers off and keep them in a jar', that would be where the money was, and you'd be firing people who don't have human blood on their lips. There's no correlation between 'earning more money' and anything useful, societally or personally.
Consider: a project is floundering. You put your best engineers on it to try and save it. It fails anyway. They get fired! Yay stack ranking.
- a chair
- a table
- electricity
- any computer
- internet
- coffee (for food)
- bathroom
If you can bring your own laptop to a starbucks, they have plenty of the rest of those. A laptop can cost as little as 230$ USD, so thats really the only barrier and I beleive its an attainable goal for anybody in North America. If your life depending on having a laptop, thats something anybody could find.
My point is that business will leave. Those with the most means (Google, etc) would be out of the coutry by the end of the week! It would take longer for the small guys to pack up and move, but the point is that knowing how I would respond surely must be an attitude others have too. Just had to get that out there while we're talking about mincome yet again.
I didn't say "everybody can do it because everybody has a starbucks" I just gave one example of type of place that provides many of those resources free of cost. Name 3 coffee shops in your town that don't have electricity?
So here's a slightly more complete list for those who can't extrapolate:
- libraries often have electricity, bathrooms, wifi, chairs, and tables
- mall food courts often have electricity, chairs, and tables, many have wifi
- cafés, restaurants, and pubs nearly always will have some kind of seating and tables (correct me if I'm wrong)
- friend's houses come with electricity more often than not
- many schools are open to the public that you could probably just walk in and sit in the cafeteria and get some work done
I know some people live in amish country and don't have access to electricity, but I believe most North Americans are 'on the grid' so to speak.
The difficult circumstances of your life drove you to work hard, to hopefully succeed, to be a better person, to become who you are today.
But did it/should it have to be that way? Did it have to be so hard?
Maybe. Maybe not. I wish it didn't have to be that way - for anyone.
But such difficulties in life are what make our accomplishments so spectacular...
Not to mention that if the laptop breaks you have to know how to fix it yourself or pay $100+ to fix it (or buy another new one for $230). If you don't know enough about computers to transfer data off a "dead" machine then you have to pay $100+ for someone to do that even with the new one.
The question I have is: should someone be required to work in order to live reasonably well?
One entrepreneur, JK Rowling, is worth USD 1 bil. She did not require many resources to attain this; a savvier setup could have allowed digital-only publishing. Value can literally be created from the mind.
Given this, should it not be an acceptable profession in society to provide mind-workers the space and time they require to produce works unique to them? Should they not have comforts if required?
Can not any individual create in such capacities, and is it not only our fear and reliance upon the tales of a dark history and historical slogans which keep us from thinking the problem through to completion and from the very consideration that such new ways of working are indeed possible at a civilization scale? Are we afraid of success?
And Im not talking about 'above living expenses'. When I bought mine I had no money for the electric bill. I leveraged the laptop purchase into paying that bill and many more after it!
Do you have a college education? Did you go to a good high school? Do you have motivated peers? Growing up, did you have enough food to eat every day and every night? Do you have two loving parents? Or even one? Did you have a roof over your head every night? How many times did you change houses, schools, districts?
These and more are the factors out of the individual's hands that can severely negatively impact their ability to grow up and become successful.
You didn't 'just have a laptop and a desk.' You had a laptop, a desk, an education, a stable upbringing. MOST PEOPLE DON'T GET THOSE THINGS AND THAT IS THE OPPORTUNITY GAP. Again -- MOST PEOPLE DON'T GET THOSE THINGS AND THAT IS THE OPPORTUNITY GAP.
This comment I am replying to is just the worst kind of ignorance -- no, dude, there are SO many people in this country that can't afford a laptop. And if they could -- do you know how fucking expensive it is to learn to code??? You need one of 3 things -- 1: lots and lots of free time 2: a $50k education 3: an exceptionally great free public education ( I say exceptionally great because <20% of american schools teach coding).
I'm not going to be that commenter that just says 'ugh google privilege and you'll get it.' You had privilege in excess, and now you have ignorance in excess. You need empathy and humility. I'm honestly disgusted by your comments. The kids I work with every fucking day don't have half the shit you grew up with and it makes ALL of the difference in their lives.
Yes! I couldn't afford fancy schools so I did community college for 3 years and paid my own tuition. Total cost <$10k and I had government loans for it that I'm still paying off 7 years later…
> Did you go to a good high school?
I went to an okay high school. It was 1/3 hilbillies from the country, 1/3 rich city folks from a nearby town, and 1/3 lower middle class folks who lived in the country. I was part of the last group.
> Do you have motivated peers?
HELL NO! We called the place where I grew up the 'death trap' because if you don't get out of there before you're 20 years old, your life amounts to nothing. You have to escape the gravitational pull to become nothing and break free.
> Growing up, did you have enough food to eat every day and every night?
Yes, we lived a very frugal life and my parents made 2 things their priority: food, and clothes. We didn't have TV, we didn't have a pool, we didn't buy pop (soda), we didn't have cool desserts in our lunches, we didn't have trendy clothes, we went without a lot of stuff my friends on welfare were able to afford because my parents were working hard to provide for us without welfare. Sometimes I wonder if welfare would have afforded us a better lifestyle, but my parents work ethic would not allow them to stop trying.
> Do you have two loving parents?
Yes, and I think there's more value in that than most want to admit. I believe a lot of the 'economic' problems we see in society are strong evidence of what fatherlessness looks like in a generation or two of people.
> Did you have a roof over your head every night?
Yes
> How many times did you change houses, schools, districts?
I changed schools (at my request) due to harassment my Grade 3 teacher, new school was in a different town.
> do you know how fucking expensive it is to learn to code???
Sure, it costs $0. I do it every day! That's been my saving grace :D I'm so excited that I was able to do this with such few tools that I am ready, willing, and in a place where I want to HELP others learn code :D
I already volunteer my time, money, and labour to help people learn the skills I've picked up, and if I could find a way to turn that into my job I would be thrilled!
> You had privilege in excess, and now you have ignorance in excess. You need empathy and humility. I'm honestly disgusted by your comments. The kids I work with every fucking day don't have half the shit you grew up with and it makes ALL of the difference in their lives.
You know, this whole time you're attacking me but I'm also the guy going wayyyyyyy outside his own comfort zone to get in front of others and help them learn. I think you've got me pegged wrong.
Soo I tell people: “This is what I did, I can show you the ropes and help you figure it out for yourself too!” and for $230, if I saw somebody was serious about learning I wouldn't think twice about affording the tool FOR them. I want to teach others how to build their own earning power and make a living (helping others) - so if it's TRUE that my success is only due to my privilege I may as well quit helping people now right?
Why bother investing in others, teaching them, helping them if all that effort is wasted because only privilege bring success.
Do you really believe that? I'm going to continue helping others because I sure don't!
You're right, I definitely did. Sorry about the assumptions and thanks for furthering the discussion despite that.
I also seem to be misunderstood -- I don't think that your success is only due to your privilege. I see that positioning a lot and it is a dangerous way to think. I think your privilege had a hand in your success, not that it is entirely responsible for your success. I also think that basic income is a way to give that privilege to a wider swath of the population without taking away opportunity from other people.
I think that basic income is a good strategy to lift the norm so it's not so necessary to be a mold breaker to build a high quality of life from impoverished beginnings -- raise the baseline and I think we give more people a chance at success.
For months I had negative money in my bank account and a court order against me (collections for a credit card I had been buying groceries on and no longer had). So that means whenever I did make any money, the instant I put the cheque into my account to cash it - it was gone. I still couldn't buy groceries even if you put a cheque for $5000 in my hand at some points.
I got by and survived. Dropped 70 pounds from not eating right, but you're right, perhaps I wasn't poor as some folks you know, so therefore my experience hasn't been my experience.
Regardless of all the other points brought up, what if they just have a lower than average intellect? That'll stop them in their tracks too. Regardless of anything else, it requires at least an average intelligence to be able to learn things on your own/with marginal help.
Pretending that -anyone- can do what you did is a disservice to yourself(because you are marginalizing all the hard work you put in, I read your other comment) as well as people who for whatever reason are just not capable of doing the same thing.
You're assuming giant consumer countries are obligated to just passively let equally giant multinational corporations just do whatever they want. If Apple wants to live in Ireland, let 'em sell exclusively to Irish people. If they'd like to move to Greece, let 'em build an infrastructure there since the Greek government plainly can't.
It's a symbiotic relationship and entities like Apple and Google know that far better than you do. They'd like to get absolutely as much as they can so long as they're not on crumbling sand foundations, and the less headstrong corporations don't even care about that; they'll just lobby for zero or negative taxes for themselves, even if it wrecks the markets they're in.
Business will not leave. There's literally nowhere for them to go: they're already everywhere.
"A second-class citizen is a person who is systematically discriminated against within a state or other political jurisdiction, despite their nominal status as a citizen or legal resident there." - Wikipedia
He's saying you probably did not suffer much at all because of systemic discrimination, and pointing out the glaringly obvious -- that you don't realize that majority of the people in this country DO suffer because of systemic discrimination.
Lucky guess.
> Basic income doesn't come off the backs of small business, and that is a silly reason to be so afraid of it.
What's the name of your business?
Consider three kids -- one is rich, suburban white, IQ is 170. The other is rich, suburban white, IQ is 75. The third is poor, inner city black, IQ 170.
In this situation, which lives do you think look most similar to one another? If you answered 'obviously the white kids', then great! You get it. If you answered 'the two kids with an IQ of 170' then you need to spend some time in the real world.
Let's add kid #4 -- poor, black, inner city, IQ 75. If we want to compare across QoL, opportunity, really almost any metric, we're going to group across socio-economic lines, not IQ.
If you find yourself thinking 'Well what if that young black kid catches a lucky break and gets out of poverty' you're almost there -- the need to catch a lucky break to escape is a defining aspect of poverty and it works against even the most naturally skilled people. The amount of skill needed to overcome that lack in opportunity makes it silly to bring skill into the equation when talking about opportunity.
Really, come on. That kind of 'they can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps' is ignorant enough to sound like dog whistling.
Do you have any academic literature to support your claim? The only evidence you offered was just an insistence that I should agree, which shouldn't convince any fair minded person. Here's something that I found within 15 seconds of journal searching, that contradicts it: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-1130.2011....
> The results from a series of follow-up studies indicate that the IQ score at age 13 could be viewed as a relatively good indicator for future life outcomes, defined in terms of attained education, occupational status, and material well being
Finally:
> Really, come on. That kind of 'they can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps' is ignorant enough to sound like dog whistling.
I don't think we can, and I don't think I said anything like that.
Also, what's the name of your business?
Skill can be learned with enough drive. Opportunity is required for success, there's plenty of smart, skilled people in the world who are stuck in the workforce because of lack of it.
Malcom Gladwell's book "Outliers" is a good read on the effect opportunity (or the lack thereof) has on our lives. It can come off as pretty over simplified and anecdotal so don't take my praise of the book as me touting it as something it's not, but it's worth reading (and I rarely say that of required texts from courses I've taken).
Some entrepreneurs are driven by maximizing profit margins and some aren't. If your opinion was widely shared, there would be almost no entrepreneurial success stories in countries with a much more socialist approach than even Canada (e.g. throughout Europe). I am a Canadian entrepreneur too, but I love this country and that has to do with a lot more than just how much tax I pay. If they were to raise taxes for good reasons, it wouldn't cause me to uproot my family and leave.
If you suddenly fell into a 90% taxation bracket would you still be just as happy as today?
Sorry, but I don't believe that there are many voices, in the context of the national conversation espousing such views and they certainly wouldn't get a whiff of being elected if they ran for government. It's hard to not take what you say as fear-mongering when you resort to that kind of hyperbole.
I would absolutely accept a 100% marginal tax rate on over 100K a year and be happy about it. I live in an area with extremely low cost of living compared to NYC or SV, and I can build mindshare and interact with extremely happy, encouraging customers and become authoritative in my field with or without raw capital.
Put it this way. I have personal friends who were names on the back of vinyl record albums when I was a kid. On the whole, they are not over 100k a year either, and some of the things they love and cherish most are not (to them) core businesses earning over 100k a year.
If you don't figure you can be happy and fulfilled without millions and billions of dollars, you're doing something wrong. I have no problem with overruling your opinion here, and saying 'you have it wrong, and if you don't understand marginal taxation you're not entitled to opinions about it, still less to scaremonger people over it'.
Assuming you realize it, your point must be that only having 10% effective increase in income after you reach the threshold is demotivating, and I would agree.
Its like youre in a race against every other business and country in the world, and you say: "hey, lets put these leg cuffs on! No everybody has a 3 foot stride wehn walking, so its no fair for you to walk fast. These shackles will only restrict your movement if you succeed too much and are able to take bigger strides. The most important thing is to reduce the gaps between winners and losers!"
In that race, do you think you stand a fighting chance against unshackled competitors?
Are you okay as long as basic income does not increase amount of redistribution, or do you have some specific objection to basic income as a method of redistribution?
I strongly believe in charity and social assistance, but its MY job, not the governments job to make sure my family and neighbours are fed and safe. Government needs to deal with national and international issues. What happens to my neighbour is MY responsibility and I believe citizens can organize and redistribute resources for muuuuuch cheaper than a government can.
I get that increased taxes are offputting, but what's your alternative to making sure people aren't forced to live on the street, taking into account future loss of work due to automation? And what makes you believe that mincome would deter people from innovation?
As such I'm finding your attitude impractical. Why do I, as a business owner, care whether you personally think some third person is a try-hard eager beaver? If you yourself don't want to work, you should indeed leave. I'm not at all sure you understand the math of this. Personally, I'm all for the poorer classes having spending money, because as near as I can work out, sometimes they will spend it on me. When they starve, I starve.
No amount of exceptionalism will change that simple fact, and if you're honest about the math you see that the whole point is getting rid of 'a few strong tentpoles'. Those guys are distorting the system and SHOULD leave. Celebrating them is a fool's game.
As an economist however, I may be in agreement. I have some concerns about the inflationary effects of a minimum income. I have a strong suspicion that goods strongly associated with low income will tend to get more expensive, negating much of the benefit of a minimum income. And I'm also concerned about the positive feedback in the political system where the majority continue to vote for increases to their stipends uncontrollably.
All in all I'm not sure which is going to have the bigger effect long term on the economy.
Its very hard to argue that even if every penny goes into the pocket of a couple New York Bankers, that there won't be more activity along the way than if nothing gets spent.
Something interesting to consider is there are goods and economic fields where the population has been trained to say they'll pay anything for X, Y, or Z. Medical care, Education, Real Estate, whatever. Given that we have generations of explosive inflation in those fields way beyond normal inflation rate, I don't think changing the base income would change much in the long run. If health care costs always in the past and forever in the future until rapidly approaching system collapse will increase by 25% annually, then giving a poor person $10K/yr will have basically no impact in the long run. Like arguments I had with my wife about Peapod grocery delivery vs shopping myself... the difference is (was) approximately six months of food inflation price, and I don't enjoy shopping, and I intend to continue eating six months in the future, so I don't care if it costs a little more today, its not really changing anything in my life financially.
Another interesting thing to think about is the old Dr Phil line about money problems being unable to be fixed with money. So giving 10K to poor people means in practice its all going to disappear with no improvement in standard of living, just like every other handout in the history of humanity. Such that there's almost no point in talking about that economic segment of the population WRT mincome. And its not much money for rich people, so ignore them too. mincome is a purely middle class play, its the only group that can experience any change.
I would much, much rather work hard, earn more money, and feed my neighbour - than have no hope of digging myself out of my situation no matter hos hard I worked, being taxed, and then myself being supported by taxes I lost after they've been spread around.
Rigt now I see a need and want to help by helping to educate entrepreneurs on how to make more money, when I see somebody trying really hard to succeed that makes me WANT to invest anything I can in their success. But the moment people want to pillage my profits Im finding greener pastures. I dont think Im alone in this - if mincome is a big tent that relies on a few strong tentpoles to hold it up and cover everybody - those tentpoles are hard working entrepreneurs. If mincome ever becomes a reality those tentpoles will leave and what was a tent sheltering and protecting people will collapse and suffocate all left inside.