> “work should be optional and the basics of life should be provided for all [via the work of others]”

The answers to this are:

provocative: work is already optional for holders of large capital - if it works for them, why not the rest of us?

humanitarian: everyone deserves decency (and we have enough to go around)

utopian: we are/will be rich in everything we need, so we do not need to work for basics - we will only need to work for the betterment of ourselves, our culture and civilization

practical pessimist: if we don't give the poor enough to keep them on board of the system, they will oppose it and we will have civil war

practical optimist: if we give the poor what they need to live without a fight, they can focus on working on themselves to lift themselves up - it will be a win-win situation

practical realist: taxes (and exemptions) and benefits are so complex, it would be cheaper to use UBI and probably fairer as well

I'm in the practical optimism/realism camp, although my lizard brain sometimes gets angry at some of the "the poor deserve no better, it's a fair system - they just have to work"-people and will use the provocative argument.

It's not up to you to decide what to do with other people's money.

Feel free to donate all your money to the poor who deserve better; if you will use threat of violence to get someone else money (no matter the cause) I'll call you immoral.

I'm not deciding what to do with other peoples money and I am not threatening anyone with violence.

We decide these things together through the democratic process.

I know it is hard for people like you, who reject democracy and any kind of power anyone could have over them, it must feel terrible to not be able to escape a system you disagree with. But I also think that on the spectrum of systems we had, it is not really fair so scream "taxation is theft" and "social security is immoral" at democracy, if you consider what we had before.

The threat of violence enforced the system that let them get the money (with a democratic government's name printed on it, mind you) to begin with. Was violence immoral when it enforced a system that shaped wages and the returns of capital in such-and-such way?

violence only enforces contracts, which are formal promises. Violence doesn't enforce market rates for wages, demand and supply and other market forces.

Is this in your ideal system? Because that is really far from being true.

Nice overview, I'm an utopian. :) I'm trying to speedup the transition to a post scarcity society, currently building a company to automate food prep.

I would be all for the 3rd paragraph.

I'm a programmer living in a first world country (spent the first two and a half decades of my life in a third world shit hole) . I have a modicum of financial responsibility.

This means before I reach my 40s I'll have more than enough to live indefinitely off my investments. While gaining money.

I am not that smart. I am not incredibly hard working. And yet with less than 20 years of work,starting without debts and less than £1000 in my name I'll have enough to live off the money that my money makes (well, unless the world's stock market permanently crashes)

There is something deeply wrong with the financial and governamental systems if they can sustain me like that but they can't sustain most of the population.

There aren't any financial and governmental systems sustaining you, it's you offering what the market wants and can't get enough of. It may be luck in your case, it was calculated choice in my case; most people would be able to make the choice if they really cared to (and sure, let's offer welfare to those who couldn't possibly make this choice). Help other people get in your position or donate your money, but don't force others to sponsor people's resignation.

>There aren't any financial and governmental systems sustaining you, it's you offering what the market wants and can't get enough of

I use public utilities like streets, the NHS, and a stocks and shares account that I won't pay taxes on gains when I start living off it.

The main thing that will allow me to not work is having a certain amount of money that is making me money.

If I were to have a kid they would be financially independent too, simply by inheriting my wealth (as long as they were financially responsible).

Just having money is enough to generate income without having to ever work in your life.

Your parents didn't pay taxes? Mine paid unthinkable amounts of money (without even considering interest compounding) and that's what the infrastructure was built with; the government certainly didn't create it out of thin air. New infrastructure is paid for with my taxes - and my parents are still active too. If your parents never paid then be thankful to those who did, not governments.

Sure, your money makes you money - you made enough to live off capital gains, these are taxed - and capital gains are usually money taxed in multiple layers - and you can give that money to others, e.g. your children but you could choose anyone else.

I don't see how that's relevant to anything here though... Yes, your children, partner or maybe your extended family or best friend will be considered very lucky - but why does that mean that all others - most of whom aren't as lucky as you or calculating as me and have much less money - must sponsor other people's work-less lifes?

I wouldn't ask if this meant that nobody has to work ever again, but that is not the case right? The reality is that a lot of people will have to work a lot harder to make life work-less for a much smaller group of people content with merely surviving. The world isn't just rich/poor... - and simply distributing government welfare evenly among all people will never work, many people require much bigger amounts to even stay alive due to their health.

If you consider yourself overly lucky, donate to a charity or research, and your government certainly accepts excess taxes if you ask, but don't force this onto others.

I think you're reading more than there is on my comments.

Why are you so obsessed with 'luck'? I haven't even said that word once in this thread.

>Your parents didn't pay taxes?

Never said they didn't. Only that I won't pay taxes over the gains of most of my investments.

Not sure how inheritance tax works, but my hypothetical child wouldn't need to work either.

So what is up with this system where that can happen with a modest amount of money but people have to work?

>The reality is that a lot of people will have to work a lot harder to make life work-less for a much smaller group of people content with merely surviving

You sure about that? Because merely surviving is quite cheap nowadays and the vast majority of people aren't happy with merely surviving.

People don't have to work, they can do exactly the same thing you did, and then their children don't have to work just like yours. That seems perfectly fair to me - of course as I said, let's offer welfare to those who are unable to make these choices, but most people are able to.

>There is something deeply wrong with the financial and governamental systems if they can sustain me like that but they can't sustain most of the population.

No, that just means there are a lot of people below your living standard who are willing to work for you, in exchange for the resources you have accumulated over your life. You are also owning machines that make it possible to sustain yourself and some of the labor input is necessary but not the primary driver of value.

Think about how much a human tractor driver contributes to how much food is being produced vs how much the tractor contributes. Without the tractor the driver could have never possibly farmed that much food.

>No, that just means there are a lot of people below your living standard who are willing to work for you, in exchange for the resources you have accumulated over your life.

This doesn't bother you at all? Do note that if I planned to have a descendant they wouldn't have to work either (my financial independence is relying on an income instead of having so much money that I couldn't spend it in my lifetime)

I think you saving for the future rather than immediately consuming 100% or more of the value you produce is laudable and starting your descendants, if any, with the fruits of your under-consumption is therefore fine.

You could spend it all in your lifetime; you’re just choosing not to.

> they can sustain me like that but they can't sustain most of the population.

you got lucky. The skills you had was a right fit for the times.

What the gov't needs to do is to up-skill people so that they can provide for themselves. This will take a lot of effort, but i do believe that such investment is worth it. Rather than UBI, or any sort of welfare that encourages people to stop working.

In few decades there will just not be enough jobs in which humans are more convenient to employ than robots and AIs.

Up-skilling is just delaying the problem we will face when there is not enough offer to match the demand for jobs.

What do we do when automation reaches most jobs?

Create artificial jobs to keep people busy?

Now that I think about it, that seems to be what we have been doing for some 30-40 years now.

By artificial jobs, I mean jobs that if they disappeared, life would go on pretty much the same. This was in fact quite visible during all the lock-downs. Many many people no longer worked and all the essential and many non-essential things where still produced.

Probably the same thing we did when agriculture went from 70% of the workforce to under 1.5%. People will adapt to fill new demands.

If it comes to pass at some future time that machines can do all the work and everyone can live a Garden of Eden existence, goods and services will be so cheap due to their natural abundance, that UBI might be feasible but food and essentials might be almost not worth the trouble of metering.

We’re really, really far from that being a reality or concern, IMO.

But why are we forcing people to work for the essentials when the essentials (water, food, shelter) require a tiny fraction of the population and resources?

Is this the kind of society that we want to live in? Where trough automation and first mover advantage we allow people to be ridiculously rich while the rest of the population struggles to get by?

I agree with this 100%. The most effective UBI is providing water, food, shelter and all the other essentials + some cash for extra, where the cash part can be small.

As the time goes on and our society gets richer, we would include more things into the essentials (holidays, a personal vehicle, etc.)

I imagine this is an uncomfortable thought for many people on HN. How many folks are essentially creating CRUD apps of dubious value all day long and lying to themselves that what they provide is of great value to society simply because it is compensated well?

IMO modern society can easily support the needs (and wants, for that matter) of ourselves with just a fraction of the workers we have. So we create busywork for the rest so they feel useful and can participate in the economy. Maybe welfare should be reorganized like today's big corporations and the gov't can become the employer of last resort. It's not like we haven't basically done that in the past.

> lying to themselves that what they provide is of great value to society simply because it is compensated well?

high compensation doesn't require that it is valuable to society - only that it's valuable to the person paying the compensation!

And whether the person paying (aka, an employer) is getting value for money is irrelevant. If they are not getting value for money, they will eventually bankrupt. The invisible hand and all that.

> easily support the needs ... with just a fraction of the workers we have

so you would usurp the labour of those fraction of workers, so that the rest can live off it, work-free? Why would those fraction of workers agree to such exploitation? What's in it for them?

>How many folks are essentially creating CRUD apps of dubious value all day long and lying to themselves that what they provide is of great value to society simply because it is compensated well?

Well, I thought about it, my employer wants a CRUD app but is it really necessary? Is there no other way to do it? I mean, if they had to pay Silicon Valley wages it would not be very easy to justify paying that much, so it boils down to why the employer wants the CRUD app, not how much you are being paid.

Well, the first potential reason would be that it is 100% superfluous and the employer is just following a CRUD app trend and doesn't want to miss out. I somehow doubt that this is the case but things are never black and white. In this case the wage is arbitrarily high or low.

The second potential reason is that the CRUD app is replacing an alternative, presumably the problem the CRUD app is solving has to be solved and if it is not done via a CRUD app it would be done manually by office workers. The CRUD app therefore saves my employer the cost of hiring more data entry people for example. I find this to be likely. I can crank out 3 CRUD apps per year. Assuming all three CRUD apps combined increase productivity enough to cut one data entry job (technically they were never hired in the first place) and the app is good for 3 years that means I can charge up to 3 years of salary for one year of work. The benefit to society is that people don't have to waste their life on trivial problems.

The third potential reason is that the CRUD app is the only way to solve the problem, essentially the CRUD app lets us solve a problem that is otherwise impossible to solve. In this case compensation depends entirely on how much income solving the problem brings in and thus my wage is bounded by that income. In this case the wage could be arbitrary as well but it would be tied to solving a problem. I consider this a significant driver of wages in Silicon Valley but the CRUD apps I am writing are not in this category. The benefit to society is that the problem has been solved at all.

I think both three and two are similar statements: you already decided it's ok to forcefully get money from people, you may as well make it clear without hiding behind being charitable to poor people. It's a basic psychological trick.

Of course they’re similar in part. That’s why I introduced them together: to explore the spectrum.

I’ve decided that it’s ok for me to wait hand and foot and serve the every need (as best I can understand it) of my child when they’re under 1 year old but that it’s not okay to do the same when they’re 10, 20, and 30 years old.

A similar thing can be obviously reasonable in one scenario and unreasonable in another without representing a rift in cosmic consistency.