[jdasdf]

> Your arguments seem to be from the business perspective, of the value of labor. My arguments are from the human perspective, in terms of the value of a person.

Well, given that we are talking about the market itself, that is and should be the only thing that matters.

Ultimately this is an economic issue, and you will not get away from the economic incentive structures by appealing to emotional arguments.

>I would argue that the minimum wage is an indicator of the minimum humane value of an individual's time, in the eyes of the government. That is, if someone is paid less than that for their labor, it is humanely non-viable.

You can argue that however much you like, it will not change the fact that such a policy will only have the effect of reducing peoples options and make life harder for the very people you are claiming to want to help.

This is plain mathematics, if the value someone produces is less than the value they cost to employ, then they will not be employed.

Companies are not, and should not be, charities. And forcing them to behave like charities will simply result in those costs being passed on to their clients, and to society at large through greater inefficiencies that will result in less wealth to everyone.

>Again, this just feels exploitative. Take someone who hasn't finished highschool, for whatever reason: by your measure, likely not a very "productive" worker, and your argument implies someone like this may not "deserve" the minimum wage. But this person now has no way to rectify this situation: they have to work more than one job, beyond "full time", just to have enough to survive (because by your measure their limited productivity means they don't deserve enough money to feed and house themselves--a "living wage", as GP said above). Working multiple jobs to earn enough to survive means they don't have the time nor energy to continue to educate themselves, so they cannot raise their value as a worker, in your eyes. They are now trapped in this cycle.

How can providing someone with the best option they have available to them possibly be exploitative?

And indeed, how can removing that option be anything less than exploitative?

Adding a minimum wage does not result in those workers being paid more, it results in them being unable to legally work. And work is the primary way that they dig themselves out of that situation.

The idea that people working for low wages will remain trapped in that situation forever is plainly not true, and indeed even if it were, that is a better situation than the alternative, where they are unable to even work at all!

>Admittedly, "minimum wage" is perhaps not the best tool to address this problem. I would argue that something akin to UBI would be the best way to approach this--guarantee that every citizen has access to some minimum standard of living, with access to housing/food/education/information, and then let the labor economy exist on top of that. However, in the absence of such a system, and with intense resistance to anything like that kind of system, minimum wages are one of few tools available to address the problem of giving people options to exit living on month-to-month paycheck lifestyles.

Why do you think offloading social work to private companies is a good idea? That has costs, and they will be paid for.

Having private enterprises subsidize your pet projects is a great way to make everyone poorer.

[tenacious_tuna]

I'm going to try to illustrate my point differently.

You keep saying that businesses, in effect, ought to be the sole arbitrator of what the value of labor is, and any infringement on that ability somehow limits people's options and that said limitation is more exploitative than whatever the business is doing.

You've gone further to say that it would be better for someone to be trapped in poverty working some dead-end job that pays only the absolute minimum to get any worker, with no possible avenue out via education or entrepreneurship or whatever, than to not have access to any job at all.

This system is deeply flawed in that it allows for the potential value of a person to be "zero", in that they cannot access base necessities of life (shelter, food, water, healthcare, etc) much less the "luxuries" of equity like education.

I suggest what if the system was flipped? What if the population got to decide what was best for itself, instead of businesses. Instead of businesses setting the sole value of slices of a human life (which they've done in the past and has led to things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things. We already do this in part through public education, which even in some cases provides the "food" and "shelter" components. (This is obviously limited by the rest of the student's socioeconomic circumstances, but the point remains: this is not a foreign concept in US thinking.)

If citizens had access to this base standard, it (a) prevents the problem of human life being valued at "zero" and having such a thing as a poverty cycle, (b) removes the burden of healthcare from businesses' pocketbooks, which will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses, and (c) give a lot more flexibility to the population in the choices they can make.

To this last point: In my school district, there was a group of anonymous donors ~20 years ago who assembled a fund that would pay for the college education of any student who graduated from that district, with some minimum required GPA. In effect, free college, if you make it through the public school system. (The assumed motivations of these corporate donors being to increase the highly-educated labor pool with ties to the region, that they could then hire from.) We had a graduation rate of less than 50%, in part because most of the families of the students were so poor that they absolutely needed the added income of the student to stay afloat--and they couldn't work a job and manage school at the same time. So they dropped out, and merrily became part of the poverty cycle. UBI, or something like it, would have prevented that.

As I said before, we have systems like this in place already: public education is a powerful equalizer. Still deeply flawed, certainly, but a fine step in the right direction, and it benefits the whole population.

You (rightly) say these things have costs, and you're absolutely correct--but it's a fallacy to think that we don't have the resources to fix it. There's dozens of political platforms with plans to fund UBI and Universal Healthcare endeavors. Beyond that, even just mild increases in taxes on the ultra-wealthy would fund plenty of these endeavors. Hell, two days ago ProPublica dropped a report about how the mega-rich can legally avoid taxes on an insane portion of their wealth, and how much more weight the rest of Americans (including those in the poverty cycle) have to then carry [0].

I find framing many of these questions in terms of "is it in the population's best interest?" helps illuminate flaws in various systems. For example, is it in the population's best interest for private insurance companies to control access to healthcare? What if all the money that flowed to insurance executives instead went into funding additional research? Is it in the population's best interest for energy companies to gain access to frakking permits via lobbying? Would investment in new nuclear power systems be more beneficial in terms of environmental impact and energy production?

The attitude that businesses and their accompanying markets somehow are the best vehicle to approach and address these issues, to me, is missing the forest for the trees.

[0]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

[jdasdf]

Let's me just start by saying that I understand and respect your argument, and your motivations for them. I am sure you're a good hearted person, who just wants to help his fellow citizens, and that is a good thing, and one in which i feel we can agree as a goal to achieve.

Please do not take my arguments against your proposals, as insulting or demeaning, that is in no way my intention. I only mean to point out where their flaws lie, and why they will not work as you expect them to.

Let's break your arguments down to their core:

>You keep saying that businesses, in effect, ought to be the sole arbitrator of what the value of labor is, and any infringement on that ability somehow limits people's options and that said limitation is more exploitative than whatever the business is doing.

>You've gone further to say that it would be better for someone to be trapped in poverty working some dead-end job that pays only the absolute minimum to get any worker, with no possible avenue out via education or entrepreneurship or whatever, than to not have access to any job at all.

>This system is deeply flawed in that it allows for the potential value of a person to be "zero", in that they cannot access base necessities of life (shelter, food, water, healthcare, etc) much less the "luxuries" of equity like education.

You misunderstood the argument here. I state that the economic value of hiring someone can be less than the cost of hiring that someone. In addition, I stated that if a minimum wage is imposed, unless that minimum wage is so low that every persons value added is greater than it (in which case the minimum wage would affect no one), then such a minimum wage would merely result in those people who are affected go from X to Zero.

The problem that you're having here is you are confusing the cost of labor (and value) with peoples necessities for modern life, when the two things are not related at all.

>I suggest what if the system was flipped? What if the population got to decide what was best for itself, instead of businesses.

The population already decides what is best for itself, indeed it is a minimum wage that actively prevents them from doing so by closing off their best options and condemning them to subsisting on the public dole.

>Instead of businesses setting the sole value of slices of a human life (which they've done in the past and has led to things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things. We already do this in part through public education, which even in some cases provides the "food" and "shelter" components. (This is obviously limited by the rest of the student's socioeconomic circumstances, but the point remains: this is not a foreign concept in US thinking.)

>If citizens had access to this base standard, it (a) prevents the problem of human life being valued at "zero" and having such a thing as a poverty cycle, (b) removes the burden of healthcare from businesses' pocketbooks, which will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses, and (c) give a lot more flexibility to the population in the choices they can make.

I am going to assume that you are talking about doing so via a UBI, as you discussed in a previous comment, rather than through some central planning system of goods production and distribution?

If so, then that would actually work much better than the current system with means test, bureaucracy and other massive inefficiencies.

That being said, you need to consider the terrible incentive structure involved with the statement "we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things."

On a fundamental level this implies that the cost involved with providing these benefits are "fixed" per person, and scale with population, regardless of the economies ability to sustain such expense. What happens when the expense gets so great that it cannot be sustained?

And if you "index" it to economic performance, how do you feel that cutting everyones benefits in the middle of an economic depression will go in an election?

Do you truly believe people will be content keeping such a system as is over time? What stops the creeping increase of benefits?

Furthermore, if the benefits are sufficiently large, what sort of motivation will people have to work at all? And indeed, those who do work and generate wealth, why must they be punished for it (by being forced to sustain those who don't even try)?

Finally, a final question, you say:

>will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses

Why is this a goal of yours at all? Why do you think that interfering with the way businesses work will increase the pie? Why do you want to pick winners and losers?

>To this last point: In my school district, there was a group of anonymous donors ~20 years ago who assembled a fund that would pay for the college education of any student who graduated from that district, with some minimum required GPA. In effect, free college, if you make it through the public school system. (The assumed motivations of these corporate donors being to increase the highly-educated labor pool with ties to the region, that they could then hire from.) We had a graduation rate of less than 50%, in part because most of the families of the students were so poor that they absolutely needed the added income of the student to stay afloat--and they couldn't work a job and manage school at the same time. So they dropped out, and merrily became part of the poverty cycle. UBI, or something like it, would have prevented that.

The problem is that such benefits would have the opposite effect, because the thing that most keeps people in poverty is not lack of money, but lack of motivation and lack of options. UBI would remove motivation, like any other form of ameliorating their situation would do. And Minimum wage laws (and other restrictions) would remove their options.

I understand we're you're coming from, but I have seen first hand how those sorts of policies don't work, and how lack of cash and education isn't as much of a barrier to escaping poverty as creeping regulations are.

My grandfather was born in 1929 in a tiny village of twenty people in a poor mountainous area in interior Portugal, growing up he had to walk 20 kilometers each day to the nearest town to attend primary school, which he attended for only 4 years. This is not a rich area, and the conditions there, both at the time and today would be considered absolute poverty. For reference, electricity and running water (and sewage) only arrived to the area in the 1990s. His father was a woodchopper, and his relatives and ancestors were subsistence farmers.

At age 13 his father gave him a bus ticket to lisbon, enough money for 2 nights at a shared hostel, some food and enough cash for him to purchase a bus ticket back home. He went to Lisbon and began working in construction. He eventually resigned and started his own company building apartment buildings, single family houses, and other such construction work. He was never wildly rich, but he was able to build himself and my grandmother a perfectly respectable middle class life.

He did this with 4 years of schooling, a bus ticket and a couple of days of "runway". There was no minimum wage. There was no health and safety regulations. There was no public health service. There was no free education (beyond the 4 years of primary education).

The reason he managed to do this wasn't because he "had a leg up on everyone else".

He did this off the back of his own hard work, good decisions, a little bit of luck, and most importantly because no one was stopping him.

If there was a minimum wage back then, he would not have been able to be hired or hire people himself.

If there was restrictions and licensing requirements on construction, he would not have been able to build the houses he sold.

If there was age limitations on being able to work, he would not have been able to come to Lisbon at age 13.

Each of these limitations and regulations may individually make perfect sense, however collectively they ossify any form of social mobility.

If I were born today in that village, I would not be able to take the same path out that he took. I would have to find something else, or I would be stuck in that poverty cycle you described, and I would be stuck there not through lack of intelligence, or because the poverty is keeping me there, but because the well intentioned policies you are supporting would keep me there and prevent me from escaping.

[tenacious_tuna]

I appreciate the tonal check in—I very much enjoy conversations like this, and appreciate the effort to maintain a civil and productive discussion. Thank you very much for that effort.

We keep mixing the domain of our discussion; sometimes I'm talking about a hypothetical ideal situation, and sometimes it's a "reasonable" step we could make from the current economic structure. I haven't been clear on when I've been making those distinctions, and will attempt to be better.

I would generally agree that the humanitarian value of a person's life vs the economic value of a person's life are separate concepts, but they are intrinsically related by the fact that in our current system of resource distribution, e.g. capitalistic economy, the humanitarian-value is intrinsically associated with the economic-value.

In my ideal system, this would not be the case, or that association would at least be loosened. I believe we can make some progress towards this ideal in the ‘real world’ through the existence of ‘force multipliers’: Food and housing production have skyrocketed since industrialization. There are similar effects in terms of housing and infrastructure (water, sewer, etc) for a population. I think it is very possible for us, with our current level of industrial output as a species, to feed/clothe/house/whatever the population of the planet.

I do not think it is possible for us to do that with indefinite population growth, to your point:

> What happens when the expense gets so great that it cannot be sustained?

In the maximally-ideal world, the population would self-regulate to stay below the carrying capacity. We see this even now in effects of education suppressing birth rates, so this doesn’t seem like an impossible goal.

In summary,

1. I believe our current technological and industrial capacity would support a UBI-like system for everyone, right now

2. I do not believe that it it would be sustainable to do so with unchecked population growth

3. I do not know what the best real-world avenue to prevent outgrowing the capacities of such a UBI-like system would be, but suspect there are tools we have now (education) that we could explore that may help.

4. The fact that such a UBI-like system would be difficult to impossible in our current economy is not an indictment of the concept of UBI, but of our current system of resource distribution.

Onto the core of our disagreement:

First:

> The population already decides what is best for itself [ ... ]

and second:

> The problem is that such benefits would have the opposite effect, because the thing that most keeps people in poverty is not lack of money, but lack of motivation and lack of options.

I fundamentally disagree on both points.

While the USA does exist in a democratic system, there are many examples where businesses have overpowered the general population, or where those interests have turned groups of the population against each other. As far back as the founding of the US, white businessmen fought to restrict voting power away from the general population, and worked to pit working whites against enslaved blacks. In the Mexican-American war in 1846, business interests sought to clear a path across the continent to California, bulldozing Mexico in the process, using conscripted forces. Recent examples include nuking Japan to secure economic control under the USA, despite strong indications that Japan wanted to surrender, or the false-WMD pretense to invade Iraq for control of the region’s natural resources.

Less extreme but still insidious examples include Citizens United, the slipshod state of campaign finance regulation, or modern tax code being fundamentally friendlier to the ultra-rich than the far larger middle- or lower-classes.

Notably, “the population” is not a homogenous group, and can have flawed reasoning for reasons beyond conspiratorial interference. It’s still clear that “the population” has not been able to “self determine” in many ways, due to the interference of the wealthy elite.

Secondly, I fundamentally disagree that a lack of motivation keeps people in the poverty cycle, and that providing UBI-like benefits would reduce their options.

I find the notion that people exist in poverty due to lack of motivation to be naive at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst--especially when juxtaposed with the motivations present in the adversarial system that is our economy. Businesses' core interest lies in maximizing profit, which in turn means minimizing cost-of-goods-sold: primarily, labor. This means widening the labor pool as far as possible, limiting the amount paid to labor, and preventing labor from ever gaining real power. To ignore the actions the wealthy elite have taken to achieve those goals and instead blame the poverty cycle on a lack of motivation for those trapped in it is, again, disingenuous.

Are there people who will choose not to put in effort to take advantage of opportunities? Yes. Are there people who will 'exploit' e.g. unemployment benefits when they don't need them? Certainly.

Is motivation the primary reason people exist within the poverty cycle? Absolutely not.

How would those trapped in the poverty cycle work multiple low-paying, high-effort jobs where they have to deal with angry, entitled customers day after day, with little to no opportunity for advancement, and an entire economic system arrayed against them, if not for motivation?. I guarantee you that my middle-school video production teacher, who worked at Lowe's in addition to her job teaching at the worst school in our district, spends more of her time doing 'work' than any of the Walton family.

None of the dozen or so homeless people I see along my walk to work are "unmotivated" to address their situation, or "unwilling" to do work. But how many jobs require an address to run a background check? Or banks to open a checking account? How are they supposed to interview for work when they haven't had access to a shower in days? And that's assuming they're not also dealing with mental health issues, or addiction, or medical issues, or any of a dozen other things that could complicate their life.

There are certainly anecdotes about people who have overcome these circumstances, as there are outliers in any case, but focusing on them and ignoring the majority who cannot escape is a mistake.

> UBI would remove motivation, like any other form of ameliorating their situation would do.

UBI would not remove their motivation to escape from the cycle of poverty; UBI would remove them *from the cycle of poverty.* They are no longer restricted to the maximally-exploitative job you've been hypothesizing, they can go to school, go into construction, decide to become an artist. If their activities end up not being economically-valuable in the capitalistic sense, who cares? So long as we have sufficient people to turn the wheels of the systems the population depends on (which should be trivially easy between the supply of people motivated to do so and a mild incentive to engage in those systems, i.e. a reasonable wage) it doesn't matter what these people choose to do.

> If there was a minimum wage back then, he would not have been able to be hired or hire people himself.

The labor movement of the ~1910s in the US has plenty of examples of where raising the minimum wage--or in some cases, instituting one--in fact did not result in the loss of jobs, but the creation of them, and the ability for people to become more upwardly mobile in terms of socioeconomic status--at the same time that businesses were fighting tooth and nail (literally assaulting strikers and labor group organizers) to prevent people from achieving those gains.

The current state of the wealth inequality divide in the US is testament to there being money available in the system to absorb the cost of an increased minimum wage. See the commonly cited statistic of Denmark having a significantly higher minimum wage than the US, with a nominal rise in the cost of (say) a Big Mac, and with significantly less unemployment than the USA over the last 10 years.

While your grandfather's achievements are remarkable and respectable, they are a poor metric by which to decide that regulations and minimum wages and age limitations on work are problems preventing those trapped in poverty today from improving their standing. Again I'll cite the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire: without regulations and safety standards, you end up with hundreds of people burning to death in preventable circumstances. Or bridges collapsing in high winds. Or children being poisoned by the powders used in textile mills. Or buildings collapsing due to poor structural support. Or cities being poisoned by lead in their water supply pipes.

While I can understand and am aware of circumstances where "regulations" are indeed frivolous and impinge development, I am not convinced that age restrictions and licensing requirements are the core things at fault for others stuck in poverty cycles. The implication that they are somehow at fault is to completely ignore the exploitative nature of the businesses which recklessly endangered their workers--including children!--when they weren't subject to these kinds of regulation.

I suspect your grandfather’s success has more to do with the luck of being poised to enter into the industrial explosion of the time, and your extrapolation that he was able to do so because of the lack of minimum wage, regulation, etc, is simply survivorship bias.

[jdasdf]

[part 2]

>I fundamentally disagree on both points.

>While the USA does exist in a democratic system, there are many examples where businesses have overpowered the general population, or where those interests have turned groups of the population against each other. As far back as the founding of the US, white businessmen fought to restrict voting power away from the general population, and worked to pit working whites against enslaved blacks. In the Mexican-American war in 1846, business interests sought to clear a path across the continent to California, bulldozing Mexico in the process, using conscripted forces. Recent examples include nuking Japan to secure economic control under the USA, despite strong indications that Japan wanted to surrender, or the false-WMD pretense to invade Iraq for control of the region’s natural resources.

>Less extreme but still insidious examples include Citizens United, the slipshod state of campaign finance regulation, or modern tax code being fundamentally friendlier to the ultra-rich than the far larger middle- or lower-classes.

>Notably, “the population” is not a homogenous group, and can have flawed reasoning for reasons beyond conspiratorial interference. It’s still clear that “the population” has not been able to “self determine” in many ways, due to the interference of the wealthy elite.

I think perhaps you misunderstood what i meant here. What i meant was that each individual person had a choice as to whether or not they will work for someone, and for how much they will work for.

You may argue that they don't have alternative options that are better than "being exploited", but that would not change if that exploitative option were to be removed from them.

I was not making a comment on government policy.

>Secondly, I fundamentally disagree that a lack of motivation keeps people in the poverty cycle, and that providing UBI-like benefits would reduce their options.

>Are there people who will choose not to put in effort to take advantage of opportunities? Yes. Are there people who will 'exploit' e.g. unemployment benefits when they don't need them? Certainly.

>Is motivation the primary reason people exist within the poverty cycle? Absolutely not.

>How would those trapped in the poverty cycle work multiple low-paying, high-effort jobs where they have to deal with angry, entitled customers day after day, with little to no opportunity for advancement, and an entire economic system arrayed against them, if not for motivation?. I guarantee you that my middle-school video production teacher, who worked at Lowe's in addition to her job teaching at the worst school in our district, spends more of her time doing 'work' than any of the Walton family.

I have to completely disagree here, and I do not believe we will be able to find any common ground on this issue.

I have discussed personal finances with many people, and only a small minority as ever shown themselves to be willing to take the actions necessary to actually improve their lives, even when such actions are not particularly strenuous to them.

The idea that people are trapped in a cycle of poverty from which they cannot escape regardless of how much they try is a common one, but one that is simply not true. [4] The fact of the matter is that even when you're not exceptionally gifted or fortunate you have a good chance of moving up in income, and that chance has not meaningfully changed over long decades. It takes time, it takes effort, and sometimes it takes a bit of luck, but everyone has a decent chance to do it. Both the top and bottom quintiles in Income change regularly and dramatically over time.

[4] https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Document...

>UBI would not remove their motivation to escape from the cycle of poverty; UBI would remove them from the cycle of poverty. They are no longer restricted to the maximally-exploitative job you've been hypothesizing, they can go to school, go into construction, decide to become an artist. If their activities end up not being economically-valuable in the capitalistic sense, who cares? So long as we have sufficient people to turn the wheels of the systems the population depends on (which should be trivially easy between the supply of people motivated to do so and a mild incentive to engage in those systems, i.e. a reasonable wage) it doesn't matter what these people choose to do.

And what of the people turning the wheels? Why should they be sacrificed?

Ultimately every dollar given in benefits is taken from a productive person who could have put it to better use.

>The labor movement of the ~1910s in the US has plenty of examples of where raising the minimum wage--or in some cases, instituting one--in fact did not result in the loss of jobs, but the creation of them, and the ability for people to become more upwardly mobile in terms of socioeconomic status--at the same time that businesses were fighting tooth and nail (literally assaulting strikers and labor group organizers) to prevent people from achieving those gains.

Except unfortunately that is just not true, mathematics does not work that way and neither does the economy. [5]

[5] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965483266/-15-minimum-wage-wo...

Minimum wages always cost jobs, except if the wage is so low that no one is affected by it.

Not only that, but by implementing minimum wages you're reducing the most important tool someone has to acquire a job experience, and eventually move himself out of a poor and desperate situation. And furthermore minimum wages, and other government regulation benefits the large companies that you are complaining about, by creating meaningful barriers to competitors and reducing their competitive advantages. There is a reason why amazon wants a 15/hr minimum wage, and it's not because they are a kind hearted company.

>While I can understand and am aware of circumstances where "regulations" are indeed frivolous and impinge development, I am not convinced that age restrictions and licensing requirements are the core things at fault for others stuck in poverty cycles. The implication that they are somehow at fault is to completely ignore the exploitative nature of the businesses which recklessly endangered their workers--including children!--when they weren't subject to these kinds of regulation.

Have you ever tried to build a house?

I have, and it's almost impossible. In order for me to build a 200K€ house I would need to spent 60K€ on licenses, taxes, fees, etc...

The result is i cannot own a house.

Every regulation creates friction and additional costs. Those costs are often hidden, but they are there, and they make everything we do more expensive, slower, and less efficient.

If you would like to define a certain value for life, and apply it equality and in a standard manner to everything, then maybe we might be able to begin work on clearing regulations and implementing others. But the incentive structure simply isn't there for such a system, and neither is such a system reliably stable over long periods.

[jdasdf]

>I would generally agree that the humanitarian value of a person's life vs the economic value of a person's life are separate concepts, but they are intrinsically related by the fact that in our current system of resource distribution, e.g. capitalistic economy, the humanitarian-value is intrinsically associated with the economic-value.

>In my ideal system, this would not be the case, or that association would at least be loosened. I believe we can make some progress towards this ideal in the ‘real world’ through the existence of ‘force multipliers’: Food and housing production have skyrocketed since industrialization. There are similar effects in terms of housing and infrastructure (water, sewer, etc) for a population. I think it is very possible for us, with our current level of industrial output as a species, to feed/clothe/house/whatever the population of the planet.

Unfortunately that ideal fails when it meets with the reality that is the fact that no matter what sort of economic system you are under, whether free market capitalism, Communist, Anarchism, Feudalism, etc... There are limited resources and efficient ways to allocate them.

Those costs you want to disassociate from the individuals responsibility still need to be paid, and just like with everything where those who receive the benefit do not have to pay a proportional share of the cost, those costs will increase because people will use and use and use because they get all of the benefit and none of the cost. If you'd like a clear cut example close to home you need only look at the U.S. Mint[1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-mint-ends-the-dollar-coin...

>In summary,

>1. I believe our current technological and industrial capacity would support a UBI-like system for everyone, right now

>2. I do not believe that it it would be sustainable to do so with unchecked population growth

>3. I do not know what the best real-world avenue to prevent outgrowing the capacities of such a UBI-like system would be, but suspect there are tools we have now (education) that we could explore that may help.

>4. The fact that such a UBI-like system would be difficult to impossible in our current economy is not an indictment of the concept of UBI, but of our current system of resource distribution.

There's a lot here so let's go over point by point:

>1. I believe our current technological and industrial capacity would support a UBI-like system for everyone, right now

No doubt about that, but the same statement could be said of any point of history. The question isn't whether such a system could be supported, its whether the cost of such a system is sustainable.

I'm in no way disputing that the US (and every other government on earth) could provide a UBI of 1 cent per month to everyone.

The question here is, is the cost of such a system going to be more, or less than our currently unsustainable system? [2]

[2] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html

If the cost of that is more, because the benefits provided are greater than what they currently already are, then clearly it is not sustainable without increasing taxes, which in turn reduces income and wealth across the board.

No doubt you will argue that tax increases are sustainable and a good way to redistribute wealth from the other team to your team, as you have in previous comments, however such a position has the following problems:

1 - Taxes in general have an effect of reducing wealth creation and income creation. This is because people are no longer able to allocate that money in the most efficient possible way to maximize their own individual wealth, resulting in less wealth overall.

2 - Non-Flat taxes, or taxes that are intended to punish/rewards to specific things are necessarily causing specific distortions in the market, which in turn causes even more inefficiencies in wealth creation. Furthermore they are extremely susceptible to being taken over for political reasons, in order to reward/punish supporters/opponents and to subsidize specific politicians pet projects, which in turn brings about additional costs and inefficiencies to the economy in general.

3 - Given that these tax increases are explicitly going to support and sustain groups that are unproductive, these negative effects are magnified because the expected return on these taxes is less than the return from say a new bridge or road.

In other words, this is the economic equivalent of taking someones worm fishing bait, and giving it to someone else so they can eat it. Had you just not done anything, there would be a fish in someones hands, rather than a worm in someone stomach.

>2. I do not believe that it it would be sustainable to do so with unchecked population growth

Why not?

Because there would be an increasing amount of unproductive people versus productive people sustaining them? What dynamic changes here?

>3. I do not know what the best real-world avenue to prevent outgrowing the capacities of such a UBI-like system would be, but suspect there are tools we have now (education) that we could explore that may help.

If we have such tools, why have we not used them against the continued and consistent expansion of welfare throughout the developed world in the past 100 years?

Let me be clear here, the tools do not matter.

The reason you cannot and will not be able to prevent the outgrowing of welfare systems is simply because the incentive structure in place encourages their continued growth until it is stopped due to unavoidable practical considerations.

No politician will remain in office for long in a democracy by cutting welfare payments. And indeed why would they want to? Such payments look good in the newspapers, and can be used to reward supporters.

The only time that those systems will be reduced is when the money to pay for it actually begins to run dry. That is why whenever social securities nest egg begins to run out, you see a whole heap of changes to reduce the benefits paid, and the doomsday is pushed back another couple of years, with the inherent issues involved.

Such restructuring of the welfare system too also bring their own problems, and often result in outright seizures of hard working peoples private retirement plans [3], showing yet another moral hazard involved in the entire welfare system.

[3] https://www.ipe.com/nightmare-in-hungary-as-government-natio...

>4. The fact that such a UBI-like system would be difficult to impossible in our current economy is not an indictment of the concept of UBI, but of our current system of resource distribution.

The problem if that it does not matter what the system of resource distribution is, when the incentive structure is such that it is filled with moral hazards and pernicious incentives. If you'll re-read my replies to the previous points, you'll note that they are applicable in every system, from free market capitalism to centrally planned communism.

The incentives will define the results.

[[continued in my next repply since this one is too long]]