[notahacker]

Inherited wealth is if anything a generous comparison, since those eligible to inherit wealth are often encouraged by their parents to jump through sizeable work-ethic related hoops to ensure their inheritance, and inheritance is usually with good reason more heavily taxed than most money transfers. UBI is all about assuming that it's entirely unreasonable to set thresholds of need or effort to state handouts when we could instead deny them to people solely on more reasonable criteria like whether they had the decency to be born in a particular country.

So yeah, I actually am against UBI for the foreseeable future, regardless of how well that sits with the HN crowd. Since in the real world we're a very long way from hard AI, replicators and post scarcity economics, UBI is - at best - redistributing from each according to his ability to each according to their ability to prove they're not a foreigner. Sure, the world isn't particularly fair anyway, but let's not pretend it's a step in the right direction to removing any assumption the welfare state is supposed to be a social insurance system for people that have paid into the system and are genuinely looking for work, and replacing it with the ethos that $nationals have a fundamental and inalienable entitlement to the fruits of other's labour (mostly non-entitled foreigners') if they're not particularly interested in trying to earn it themselves.

(Of course there are plenty of arguments against UBI that don't rely on notions of "dignity of work" like the important practical question of how much you're willing to slash existing welfare or raise taxes to give state handouts to much larger numbers of people that haven't indicated they need or want them, but that's probably a tangent to this particular article)

[chrisbennet]

As far as the "wealth redistribution" goes, currently the 8 richest men have as much wealth as the poorest 50% (3.6 Billion) of the worlds population. [1] Capturing wealth is not the same as earning it. Wealth has already been "redistributed" to a wealthy few.

[1] http://fortune.com/2017/01/16/world-richest-men-income-equal...

[AnthonyMouse]

The anti-nationalist argument makes no sense given that we don't provide most existing forms of social assistance to non-citizens either, and anyway there is no inherent reason that a UBI couldn't be provided to non-citizen legal residents if people so desired it.

[notahacker]

Existing forms of social assistance in Western countries often are available to non-citizens and are usually more strongly linked to past payments into the system and/or intention to work and contribute to the system when they can. For obvious practical reasons (a suggested stipend of $10k PPP is well above the median salary internationally) if one destroys the link with work contributions, then numbers must be managed by imposing more onerous restrictions on non-citizens' entitlement to move to a country and claim subsidies higher than they presently earn. And however unjust it might already be, the existing systems that mandates employment for foreigners seeking residency generally aren't built on the concept that it's an affront to dignity to impose work requirements on citizens wanting handouts.

But the wider point is that the "nobody should be forced to suffer the indignity of having to work for their living" rhetoric behind UBI simply doesn't reflect any feasible near-term system that any person has actually proposed, and the "people should not have to work unless they were born elsewhere, in which case their continued labour to produce low cost goods for those who have chosen to become permanent UBI-dependents is fundamental to the system getting close to being affordable" reality is a bit less philosophically appealing.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Existing forms of social assistance in Western countries often are available to non-citizens and are usually more strongly linked to past payments into the system and/or intention to work and contribute to the system when they can.

Most social assistance programs in the US are not linked to past payments, the most notable exception being social security, which pays only retirees.

And limiting benefits to people who have previously paid has the effect you seem to dislike anyway -- new arrivals to the country can't collect benefits because they have no history of paying.

Moreover, redistributive programs can't work that way because their entire premise is to improve the situation of lower income people. If the money had to go to people in proportion to what they've paid then it would have no purpose or effect.

> For obvious practical reasons (a suggested stipend of $10k PPP is well above the median salary internationally) if one destroys the link with work contributions, then numbers must be managed by imposing more onerous restrictions on non-citizens' entitlement to move to a country and claim subsidies higher than they presently earn.

We already have this because the existing programs already work this way. If anyone from an impoverished country could immediately immigrate legally to the US and begin collecting food and housing assistance, an unsustainable number of people would, which is why they aren't allowed to. Even if they could find a job here in e.g. agriculture, because those jobs don't qualify for H1B.

> And however unjust it might already be, the existing systems that mandates employment for foreigners seeking residency generally aren't built on the concept that it's an affront to dignity to impose work requirements on citizens wanting handouts.

Then it's a good thing a UBI isn't built on that, since its purpose is to provide a safety net without creating the poverty trap that existing means-tested programs do by withdrawing benefits at rates approaching or sometimes even exceeding 100% of marginal income for low and middle income people.

> But the wider point is that the "nobody should be forced to suffer the indignity of having to work for their living" rhetoric behind UBI simply doesn't reflect any feasible near-term system that any person has actually proposed, and the "people should not have to work unless they were born elsewhere, in which case their continued labour to produce low cost goods for those who have chosen to become permanent UBI-dependents is fundamental to the system getting close to being affordable" reality is a bit less philosophically appealing.

The idea that one country should have to pay for social assistance for the whole world in order to have it internally is not a philosophy most people are going to mind disregarding.

[notahacker]

> Then it's a good thing a UBI isn't built on that, since its purpose is to provide a safety net without creating the poverty trap that existing means-tested programs do by withdrawing benefits at rates approaching or sometimes even exceeding 100% of marginal income for low and middle income people.

You're responding to an entire subthread revolving around the idea that the great benefit of UBI is that it allows adults (except foreign ones) to "find their own amusements and purpose" and avoid "bullshit jobs" and the social acceptability of it as a permanent and exclusive income source...

There are many ways of designing welfare systems to avoid the "welfare trap" of excessive effective marginal rates of income taxation, of which UBI is probably the least efficient.

The only argument which favours UBI over more modest alternate welfare reforms more specifically targeted at reducing benefit withdrawal rates at the margin is the frequently-made philosophical argument that it's fundamentally unreasonable if not immoral to make handouts contingent on willingness to work and pressure them to take jobs. I'm simply pointing out that few, if any of the people making that argument are opposed to subjecting foreigners to similar indignities if they seek to enter the country, and moreover the sustainability of a UBI is entirely dependent on people not lucky enough to be citizens needing to work for a living for the foreseeable future.

Needless to say, advocates of systems of social assistance not built on the principle that it's entirely unreasonable to ask people to work and/or assess their fitness to do so are not guilty of the same level of staggering hypocrisy when accepting the status quo of work requirements and thresholds imposed on foreigners seeking to enter a country.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You're responding to an entire subthread revolving around the idea that the great benefit of UBI is that it allows adults (except foreign ones) to "find their own amusements and purpose" and avoid "bullshit jobs"

Because that's what a working safety net does. It prevents employers from imposing unreasonable terms on employees when their only alternative is starvation, by making that not the thing that happens if they turn down the job.

> There are many ways of designing welfare systems to avoid the "welfare trap" of excessive effective marginal rates of income taxation, of which UBI is probably the least efficient.

I'm going to describe two systems.

In one there is a UBI of $12,000/year and a flat 30% tax rate. In another there is $12,000/year in cash social assistance with a 20% phase out up to $60,000, a 10% tax up to $60,000 and a 30% tax over $60,000.

These two systems are in fact the same, the only difference is that in the second one when the government takes 20% of each additional dollar you earn they call it "phase out" instead of "tax", which leads people to the mistaken impression that increasing that rate (which applies to lower income people) is a sensible thing to do, even though it is identical to raising taxes on lower income people.

The second system is not "more efficient", it is exactly the same. And anything that doesn't look like that is going to be less efficient.

You can give people non-cash, and then you need an inefficient bureaucracy dedicated to busting people who figure out some way to divert their food assistance money into paying their insurance premiums or similar, and at the same time you create an inefficient barter system where low income people subvert that bureaucracy by converting the things that can be bought with government money back into real cash.

You can try to phase out the UBI, but as above that is completely identical to raising taxes on those people, and imposing high marginal tax rates on lower/middle income people is the poverty trap.

Nothing is going to be more efficient than a UBI because a UBI does exactly the thing it's supposed to do and nothing else. There is no inefficiency to remove.

> The only argument which favours UBI over more modest alternate welfare reforms more specifically targeted at reducing benefit withdrawal rates at the margin is the frequently-made philosophical argument that it's fundamentally unreasonable if not immoral to make handouts contingent on willingness to work and pressure them to take jobs

Really it's that if you don't have high phase out rates then you can't make it contingent on working. If two otherwise unemployed people could pay each other self-canceling payments to do each other's laundry or whatever, now they're both "employed". It's trivial to create "employment" between any number of cooperating parties that way. That doesn't happen much now because the government takes most of the "income" from that "employment" in reduction of benefits -- it invokes the poverty trap. If you eliminate the poverty trap but require employment then everyone will magically be "employed" on paper because making money creates eligibility for government benefits rather than reducing them.

And that isn't even fraud -- they really are paying each other and really are doing the thing they're being paid to do. They can even each pay each other to do the thing they each wanted to do to begin with. You don't even need another person -- create a corporation, have it pay you for whatever it is you were doing anyway and then reinvest your "wages" in the company so they have money to pay you again tomorrow. All a work requirement does is create useless inefficiency, paperwork and bureaucracy.

> I'm simply pointing out that few, if any of the people making that argument are opposed to subjecting foreigners to similar indignities if they seek to enter the country

To get in under H1B you have to be a qualified specialist. The purpose is to let in people with in-demand skills. None of those jobs are the degrading McJobs that people only take when the alternative is starvation or homelessness, and the people only qualified to do a McJob aren't "required" to do that to immigrate, they aren't eligible to immigrate at all.

> and moreover the sustainability of a UBI is entirely dependent on people not lucky enough to be citizens needing to work for a living for the foreseeable future.

It obviously isn't, because the money that funds the UBI doesn't even come from them, it comes almost entirely from other citizens in the same way that any social assistance money does.

[notahacker]

> You can try to phase out the UBI, but as above that is completely identical to raising taxes on those people, and imposing high marginal tax rates on lower/middle income people is the poverty trap.

> Nothing is going to be more efficient than a UBI because a UBI does exactly the thing it's supposed to do and nothing else. There is no inefficiency to remove.

Nonsense. The former system you've described doesn't pay out to working age economically inactive people, who vastly exceed those claiming employment-linked or disability benefits in every developed country. Unlike your hypothetical example of people paying each other to do each other's laundry, these people actually exist, and needless to say transforming the system to pay out $12000 per annum to tens of millions more largely non-taxpaying people has a net cost orders of magnitude more than state bureaucracy. Most reasonable definitions of efficiency would regard it as less efficient to pay out to millions of people whose actions indicate they don't particularly want the money. (Most reasonable definitions of efficiency would also argue that it's often better to divert some of that cash towards providing additional support to people that can demonstrate a genuine need for support costing >$12000 per annum if purchased from the private sector)

So on practical grounds, it's a much, much more expensive social system than any real or feasible system with a work requirement. If you want to argue that this is justifiable because it's morally imperative that people ought to be free to choose not to work or subject to any form of state assessment unless they're foreign, feel free to make that argument. Just be aware that's the true nature of the argument you're making, and that those UBI dependents' access to the affordable consumer goods (and probably food) on a state stipend is entirely dependent on the rest of the world not being able to afford such a system to retire their own menial workers.