Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

Re:Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work by JoshuaDavid on Tuesday January 18, 2022 @05:45PM (#29987212)

We do ask the general question of "what costs are we willing to bear to reduce the amount and human toll of actual slavery". Actual slavery is illegal, certainly, but there are still instances of it happening, even today[1,2,3]. We could spend more resources to further reduce the number of cases where this happens, and there are plenty of people saying we should. In theory, a complete enough surveillance state, where the movements of all people and all monetary transactions are tracked and analyzed, might even be able to get the number of such instances all the way down to zero, but that seems a lot less likely to be a good tradeoff.

So yes. We do the same for non-wage slavery. We do the same for any bad thing that trades off against a different bad thing.

[1] https://www.ajc.com/news/this-has-been-happening-for-a-long-...

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/migrant-worker-lured-to-...

[3] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/usadom/usadom0501-04.htm#P3...

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Re:Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work by laserlight on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @01:58AM (#29990769)

Not only bad things, but also everything can be traded off against some other thing. That doesn't mean we should. There's an economic value assigned to human life, but we don't let someone kill another one by paying a markup.

We should get rid of wage slavery. We can then work on the economic consequences.

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