[d883kd8]

> equity based social security or welfare payments

I seem to remember Bush II proposing this early in his first term. I was quite young at the time, but I remember some some stuff about "Ownership Society" and a scheme that boiled down to "let's take the social security money and invest it."

[jqm]

I wasn't that young at the time and maybe I'm a cynic, but what I heard was "let's take the social security money and let my campaign contributors skim off the top".

I also heard him talking about ownership in the sense everyone should own a home. Right at the peak of the housing bubble. Lots of people took a big hit.

[mathattack]

There was talk of turning social security into private investment vehicles. (Similar to a 401K) Lots of problems with that, but the current system isn't so great either.

What I'm trying to get at here though isn't just turning people into equity investors, but specifically capturing the upside from an environment where robots do all the work and the gains are captured mostly by an oligopoly of their makers.

If the robots (or AI) are broadly created and owned, this is much less of a problem.