It's a slippery slope as to whom you disenfranchised to redistributed that cash: but it will inevitably be a large group of people in the middle, not the minority elite you sold the policy on.

If some people can't accumulate something they can't do bigger things as creators or create bigger markets as consumers.

You won't disenfranchise anyone, because the investment will more than pay for itself. That's the point.

It's just another form of seed funding for ambitious start-ups.

And $30bn/yr is absolutely trivial compared to the opportunity costs of an economy geared more to financialisation and regressive wealth extraction than to productive engineering and invention.

To put $30bn a year in perspective, that buys you a basic income of about $10.12 a month in the US for all adults.

If you take an extra $20k from me per year in the form of taxes, how does some kid’s invention actually pay me back? Am I a shareholder in this project? Will I get a return on that $20k? Will the government give me my $20k back plus a profit?

This silly proposal is nothing more than socialized venture capital. We have real venture capital who invest in “far fetched” ideas already — and they have willing participants who know what they are getting into — not people being forced, literally at the point of a gun, through taxes.

> Will I get a return on that $20k?

Yes you will (according the basic theory of the idea).

Unfortunately, even though you will get a return, when you get it you will believe that you haven't had the return because it will take the form of $100k of life improvements that you will believe you "would have had anyway" without the investment.

You might even get $100k of cash, in the form of your salary increasing by much more than that, and costs of quality of life things increasing by less (enough to make the difference >$20k). But when it happens you will almost certainly attribute it to other causes.

And so, today, you will argue against the investment, it won't happen, and you will end up poorer than you would have been.

While believing you are richer, because $20k cash in the hand today feels more real than $100k quality of life cost differential improvements in future whose attribution is difficult or impossible to verify.

That's the theory anyway.

From where I stand, I seems not very far from that argument to arguing in favor of trickle down economics being a success by the same mechanism.

I see parallels too, but trickle down economics is about sending capital "up" in the hope that what's produced trickles back down from wealthy people, whereas the idea of investing in lots of people is more like sending capital "down", or at least sideways.

I think a plausible factor in the failures of trickle down economics to enrich the masses as much as hoped by those who advocate it, is wealthy groups of people acting so as to keep what wealth they have in their own control, away from others. And, over generations, perhaps ceasing to be wealth generators (e.g. inventors and industrialists) and becoming wealth controllers (e.g. "old money" families).

Widespread investing in lots of people isn't subject to the same problem, by definition. (Assuming those people are paid decently, rather than indentured servants to some capital controller).

The minute you give a bunch of people $1-3MM as upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21034871), you're sending $30-90BB "up", by definition, from the perspective of the typical American (median household wealth of $97,300). It's perhaps just not as far up, so not as far that it needs to trickle down, but it seems more or less the same on a zoomed out level and puts the recipients at 10-30x the median wealth. Simply investing that sum in index equity funds would typically provide a income to place a household around the median household income over a four decade period without working.

Maybe trickle down actually works. Maybe we all got a return on it in invisible ways. Maybe things would be a lot worse for the median taxpayer than they are after the policy was enacted. How would we know for sure?

I think the proposed idea is not supposed to allow people to simply invest the money and live off the proceeds.

Just like when a VC or government grant agency gives you money, you can't simply invest it and live off the proceeds in those cases either.

With that ruled out, the $1-3MM is not really the recipient's money, and they are not really wealthy in the way you are comparing to other households.

Is great that a random made up number justifies your argument.

>Giving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse

Of course it will. Basic income is so expensive that the wealth don’t have enough to take to fund it. It’s going to require massive taxes in the middle class that result in a quality of life loss.

I think the parent is a variation on the "poor should stay poor, rich should stay rich" argument. With the poor not mentioned, and implicitly not counted.

Any cash given to the poorer classes and taken from the middle classes likely has greater quality of life value to the poorer classes - because it would be used for things that are more essential to life.

This means the quality of life loss to the middle classes is more than offset by quality of life gain to the poorer classes. And the poorer classes have many more people.

By some ethical standards, this makes it unequivocally beneficial to redistribute.

(I don't actually agree with that approach, because money in some hands is more potent for creating benefit to others, than in other hands. But I think the parent's argument, that it's bad because the middle class would suffer, is essentially a "poor people don't matter" argument.)

Shall we take a kidney from the healthy to transplant into those with need? If we don't, are we essentially saying "people with kidney failure don't matter"?

Many voters in the middle class feel like they've worked (and continue to work) very hard to get where they are and object to the meager spoils of their work being taken for redistribution. Right or wrong, it's a very real feeling. (Obviously, I'm not saying dollars are kidneys, but they will cause a similar reaction in people.)

I disagree only with the grandparent post's argument that an administrative approach would be bad because a subset of people would be worse off under it.

I think that type of reasoning is fallacious because every policy leaves a subset of people worse off (you can just choose your preferred subset to make the point). Including the status quo.

I like your kidney analogy, and I think it makes a strong counter point that is worth considering when weighing up policy ideas.

Though, the status quo in that analogy looks to me like the majority of people in the world currently are having one kidney removed during childhood, mostly to feed the middle classes and build toys for them. Some unlucky ones have two; they are sick and dying. But we couldn't take a kidney from the healthy middle class folks to give back to those, could we, because voters in the middle class feel like they've worked (and continue to work) very hard to get their kidney from some unspecified source we don't like to think about, and they object to the meager spoils of their hard-earned spare kidney being taken for redistribution back to the people they came from.

Making the middle class poor by taking away their ability to own a home, etc is absolutely not a “poor people don’t matter” argument. It’s a “let’s not destroy a stable part of society in a ham-fisted attempt to help the poor”.

Refuting dumb ideas to help the poor doesn’t mean I don’t care about helping them.

This is only if you outright ignore the second+ order effects of doing such and the incentives created.

I agree with you; that's what I meant when I said I don't agree personally with simplistic redistribution.