We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. Giving everyone enough money to buy all those things themselves is one way to do it. Raising funds (taxes) and then providing those services for free is another way. It doesn’t really matter which way. What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it.
Right now we have a system where people must do a job, even a meaningless one, to get those things. People who are unable to do work or find work, through no fault of their own, are doomed to suffer in poverty. It’s cruel and inhumane, especially when there isn’t enough work to go around.
With our advanced technology we can sustain everyone’s lives with only a portion of the population actually doing labor. What portion, I don’t know. But we don’t expect children or the elderly to work. They are often unable, and we don’t need them to. Well, if there is a surplus in the labor supply, and there are capable adults who could work, but we don’t need them to, why put them through the indignity? Don’t force them to do a meaningless job and waste their lives. Don’t doom them to suffer and die. As long as the resources are available, let them live a decent life.
Handing out money will never make resources appear where they don't exist though. And if we want to say everyone should have access to certain resources, having money as an intermediary actually does us a diservice.
If everyone should have access to water, federalize water utilities and don't charge anyone. You will them have to deal with access rights though. How much water is enough for everyone to have access to? How do we avoid water rights issues even worse than what California has?
Defining certain resources as a fundamental right while still forcing them to operate as a free market is a risky game of chicken. If prices are still able to fluctuate in response to market supply & demand then we really aren't saying we truly believe everyone should have water, shelter, etc. A UBI is only an agreement that some amount of money is a fundamental right, nothing more.
Also conveniently, when prices are partly decided by market factors the fundamental right to a resource may be impacted. If we really think everyone should be guaranteed access to water, electricity, housing, food, etc those resources would just be available and wouldn't require the market abstraction of money.
We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. ... What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it.
Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
Second, the value, even to the end recipient, of vast majority of education and healthcare is dubious at best. Similarly to the study on which OP is commenting, there was a famous Oregon Medicaid health experiment and the benefits of healthcare services expansion were minimal. Same for education with various headstart initiatives.
> ...I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
That's fair and totally 1000% reasonable. However:
What if (whether through sudden injury or the accumulated injuries of aging) you become utterly unable to work, you've burned through your savings, all your family is dead, and you're an unlikable cunt [0] so those around you are supremely disinclined to provide assistance? Should you be cast out into the wilderness to starve?
What if you were born permanently unable to work and utterly unsympathetic? Should your fate be to die of exposure?
[0] I cannot stress hard enough that if you think I'm making comment about your character, please do remember that I absolutely am not. I don't know shit about you, so I cannot comment on your character. However, injury, illness, and prolonged bad periods can absolutely turn someone into an unlikable cunt... driving away a predicated-on-tolerability material-and-emotional support network just when one needs it most.
Yes, that’s the seemingly obviously correct way to think about it. Which is also why many people who think the sliver of population who is unable to work should be able to get welfare to avoid starving, but that the vast majority of the population who is capable of productive work should be expected to provide for their own consumption rather than have it be provided to them.
Part of the problem is that if people don't have access to those things then they don't have much incentive to support the government or things like property rights.
I wouldn’t argue that you’re responsible for anyone. I would argue more that if you value the suffering of conscious things, it is a very short logical leap to care about such in all humans, even those who you don’t directly interact with. You don’t need to feel anything about them or be responsible for them to take the alleviation of broader human suffering into account when discussing policy. Do we disagree on this?
> Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
A government that governs a nation is arguably responsible for every human in it.
This is the core of so many problems in western governments today. Governments should be there to coordinate complex problems that society doesn't have a better way to handle. Governments should not be there to be a responsible parent to everyone, whether they want it or not.
Sorry, I'm not quite sure how that ties in. What's your point here with regards to a UBI and whether a government should work for or be parent to its constituents?
Not even remotely so in practice. Adults are largely responsible for themselves and their kids/elders. Sure, with some government assistance but true state wards are fairly rare and the system would have no chance of working if they weren't.
> Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
Do you expect them to respect your right to have those things? IMO, your line of thought leads to violent revolution.
I don't think you can usefully equate 'UBI' to a single outcome of UBI.
One of the goals of UBI, as I interpret it, is to reduce the cost of living closer to zero.
And that's the literal cost of living - not the macroeconomist's use of the term. That phrase, once you contemplate it, is a ludicrous reflection of how our society has gone wrong.
Why should it cost to live?
(You can consider the answer in terms of > 11kya anthropology, or in terms of our current, advanced food production capabilities + other technologies - take your pick.)
Because that's how life works. With sufficient energy input into a system, the system can sustain complexity. Sun -> single-celled life -> plants -> animals. The food chain is an economy of energy. Money is a proxy for many different kinds of energy. It will never be cost-free to live, not for single-celled life, not for us.
A Universal Basic Income absent substantial other changes in our economy, would be a disaster because we no longer have a closed economy. It would simply flow out to other nations. UBI + open borders + bureaucratic dictatorship sends us right back into serfdom...
There used to be restrictions on the number of serfs allowed for a single geography, because the lord was expected to provide for them (schools and hospitals... etc.). We're replacing an oligarch with a bureaucracy which is just a transitive oligarchy as the bureaucracies ultimately get captured (Big Tech, Big Oil, Big you-name-it). All good intentions erode over time to neglect and malice, especially in systems where nepotism and dynasty rule instead of merit.
"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."
You're right, it does tend toward medieval when the serfs have less agency than the landed gentry.
>Why should it cost to live?
We would have to get out our slide rules, or maybe go back to them ;)
Well if previous generations productively built the richest country because of the most widespread opportunity (without taxing income) in historical times, and prevailed handily like no other when challenged by financially devastating world-wide conflict, with plenty of time to invest the surplus wisely and let it appreciate, you would expect by now everybody would be able to coast, but Nooo . . .
The government dropped the ball and it was already big enough to take away everything you had.
In complete defiance of what all those generations had in mind for us now, and everything every American had ever worked for.
That's why the cost of living is not lower, if not zero, or even negative, if only slightly better choices would have been made. Compounded over all this time !! And that's with only better stewardship of the percentage taken out of laborers' pay once that got going, without even considering the wealth of the citizens that had been built up before the quest for revenue did a 180 and turned on internal targets.
My dude, that is a despairing world view you have there.
First, no UBI proponents are suggesting that it be
a) combined with a bureaucratic dictatorship, and
b) implemented absent significant concurrent social and financial changes.
Your phrasing makes me think you're based in the USA, and so I can understand some of the societal norms that might have led you to believe we can't have a better quality of life, a better society, simply because amoeba have to hunt their prey to survive.
We -- intelligent life forms with breathtakingly advanced technologies (compared to what we would need to just live) -- can do much better.
Surely cost of living, expressed as hours of labour, remains the same regardless. Anyone can reduce their cost of living by reducing the standard of living.
No it doesn't, you can't multiply a zero income by any number and put people out of poverty. You can't redistribute wealth by multiplying everybody's income either.
But also, not it's not more feasible either. One is the government taxing money and distributing it by law, the other is a deep and complete intervention on the economy in ways that people don't even can't predict completely.
UBI equates to an assumption that the government can predict and control markets completely, effectively destroying markets that resemble anything like a free market.
Even considering an alternative to UBI like forcing all prices lower, i.e. price deflation, requires first taking that assumption as true.
The government never could allow prices to lower anyway though. Price deflation would make our national debt that much worse.
It’s the opposite. Currently governments subsidize housing, food, internet access, etc for the poor through various programs. There’s no free market interaction when government bureaucrats are deciding where to build affordable housing etc.
UBI toss those programs away saying hand people money and let the free market allocate resources. Hypothetically you hand money to everyone, but as far as the middle class is concerned there is zero difference to lower tax brackets for the first 10,000$/year of income vs 1 tax bracket + a lump sum. So estimates of how expensive UBI would be really come down to how many subsidies you remove.
Further if you believe in free markets then UBI should actually be cheaper for the same social benefit.
If you don't like how the government subsidized certain markets today, I'm not quite sure why a good solution would be to subsidize the entire economy.
Such a program is way too complex to model out and reliably predict what the impact will be. We simply don't know how much UBI is the "right" amount for specific outcomes, and we definitely don't know what the impact will be on any subset of the economy.
According to the OP author, we can't even test UBI programs before a full rollout. If we can't reliably model or predict the outcome, and we can test it, how are we supposed to actually implement it?
Subsidizing the economy is a meaningless idea, it reallocates resources.
As to being impossible to model, there’s a great number of countries in the world eventually one will likely try the experiment on its entire economy without impacting 99.9% of the global population.
That said, you can turn individual safety nets into UBI lockstep with changing the tax code and see what happens. The fear is people would spend ‘food’ money on drugs, or people in subsidized housing would move, or all the things which created these programs instead of handing out cash. That’s a political question not an economic one, are we trying to act as a parent or do we want people to have freedom to make their own choices.
Literally any economic decision is reallocated resources, that term is much too broad to be meaningful. Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically?
Someone will try it, totally agree there. I don't see any problem with that either, countries should be able to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. I wouldn't tell France they shouldn't try it, but I am absolutely saying I don't want to try it here in the US.
> Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically?
I’m saying social safety nets are already wealth redistribution. Changing the form of that safety net to UBI is an allocation of resources based on individual decisions and thus free markets where Food Stamps/Housing Subsidies/etc is allocating money based on bureaucratic decisions.
Basically nothing says UBI needs to cost more than existing social safety nets.
No that's also what I'm talking about. If implemented, a UBI will subsidize every single market in the economy with federal dollars. For every dollar a consumer spends on any product, a portion of that money is directly from the government.
For a government to build and maintain a UBI program they will have to be able to predict where prices will be and how much money everyone needs or deserves to cover the basics. Assuming the country runs on a fiat currency and partskes in monetary policies meant to control the cost of money, a UBI adds another complex layer onto that puzzle making it even more challenging to predict and control markets.
Helpful, thanks. I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have anything worth sharing.
I'd be particularly interested how you would see a program on the scale of a UBI working sustainably if the government can't predict the outcomes. Or, alternstively, if you think the government can predivt the outcomes I'd be curious if you disagree with the OP author that a UBI can't be tested before a full rollout.
The US doesn't have a centrally planned economy, so the government can't lower the prices of everything. UBI is much more feasible to implement than communism.
Not centrally planned, except the humongous federal government, the central bank, the interstate highway system, even things like corn subsidies. There are a lot of centrally-planned areas.
Right now we have a system where people must do a job, even a meaningless one, to get those things. People who are unable to do work or find work, through no fault of their own, are doomed to suffer in poverty. It’s cruel and inhumane, especially when there isn’t enough work to go around.
With our advanced technology we can sustain everyone’s lives with only a portion of the population actually doing labor. What portion, I don’t know. But we don’t expect children or the elderly to work. They are often unable, and we don’t need them to. Well, if there is a surplus in the labor supply, and there are capable adults who could work, but we don’t need them to, why put them through the indignity? Don’t force them to do a meaningless job and waste their lives. Don’t doom them to suffer and die. As long as the resources are available, let them live a decent life.