[sneak]

You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere.

The costs of what you propose are enormous. No legislation can change that fact.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Who’s going to pay for it? Someone who is not paying for it today.

How do you intend to get them to consent to that?

Or do you think that the needs of the many should outweigh the consent of millions of people?

The state, the only organization large enough to even consider undertaking such a project, has spending priorities that do not include these things. In the US, for example, we spend the entire net worth of Elon Musk (the “richest man in the world”, though he rightfully points out that Putin owns far more than he does) about every six months on the military alone. Add in Zuckerberg and you can get another 5 months or so. Then there’s the next year to think about. Maybe you can do Buffet and Gates; what about year three?

That’s just for the US military, at present day spending levels.

What you’re describing is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than that, just in one country that only has 4% of people. To extend it to all human beings, you’re talking about two more orders of magnitude.

There aren’t enough billionaires on the entire planet even to pay for one country’s military expenses out of pocket (even if you completely liquidated them), and this proposed plan is 500-1000x more spending than that. You’re talking about 3-5 trillion dollars per year just for the USA - if you extrapolate out linearly, that’d be 60-200 trillion per year for the Earth.

Even if you could reduce cost of provision by 90% due to economies of scale ($100/person/month for housing, healthcare, and education combined, rather than $1000 - a big stretch), it is still far, far too big to do under any currently envisioned system of wealth redistribution. Society is big and wealthy private citizens (ie billionaires) aren’t that numerous or rich.

There is a reason we all pay for our own food and housing.

[mcny]

> You’re talking about 3-5 trillion dollars per year just for the USA

I just want to point out that's about a fifth of our GDP and we spend about this much for healthcare in the US. We badly need a way to reduce this to at least half.

> There is a reason we all pay for our own food and housing.

The main reason I support UBI is I don't want need based or need aware distribution. I want everyone to get benefits equally regardless of income or wealth. That's my entire motivation to support UBI. If you can come up with another something that guarantees no need based or need aware and does not have a benefit cliff, I support that too. I am not married to UBI.

[listenallyall]

> I support UBI

Honestly, what type of housing do you envision under a UBI system? Houses? Modern apartment buildings? College dormitory-like buildings? Soviet-style complexes? Prison-style accommodations? B stands for basic, how basic?

[ben_w]

(Not the person you're replying to)

I think a UBI system is only stable in conjunction with sufficient automation that work itself becomes redundant. Before that point, I don't think UBI can genuinely be sustained; and IMO even very close to that point the best I expect we will see, if we're lucky, is the state pension age going down. (That it's going up in many places suggests that many governments do not expect this level of automation any time soon).

Therefore, in all seriousness, I would anticipate a real UBI system to provide whatever housing you want, up to and including things that are currently unaffordable even to billionaires, e.g. 1:1 scale replicas of any of the ships called Enterprise including both aircraft carriers and also the fictional spaceships.

That said, I am a proponent of direct state involvement in the housing market, e.g. the UK council housing system as it used to be (but not as it now is, there're not building enough):

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_K...

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house

[oinfoalgo]

The bigger issue to me is that not all geography is anything close to equal.

I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high.

To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people.

[ben_w]

> I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high.

Yes, and?

My reference example was two aircraft carriers and 1:1 models of some fictional spacecraft larger than some islands, as personal private residences.

> To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people.

Incorrect.

Currently, about 83e6 hectares of this planet is currently a "built up area".

4827e6 ha, about 179 times the currently "built up" area, is cropland and grazing land. Such land can produce much more food than it already does, the limiting factor is the cost of labour to build e.g. irrigation and greenhouses (indeed, this would also allow production in what are currently salt flats and deserts, and enable aquaculture for a broad range of staples); as I am suggesting unbounded robot labour is already a requirement for UBI, this unlocks a great deal of land that is not currently available.

The only scenario in which I believe UBI works is one where robotic labour gives us our wealth. This scenario is one in which literally everyone can get their own personal 136.4 meters side length approximately square patch. That's not per family, that's per person. Put whatever you want on it — an orchard, a decorative garden, a hobbit hole, a castle, and five Olympic-sized swimming pools if you like, because you could fit all of them together at the same time on a patch that big.

The ratio (and consequently land per person), would be even bigger if I didn't disregard currently unusable land (such as mountains, deserts, glaciers, although of these three only glaciers would still be unusable in the scenario), and also if I didn't disregard land which is currently simply unused but still quite habitable e.g. forests (4000e6 ha) and scrub (1400e6 ha).

In the absence of future tech, we get what we saw in the UK with "council housing", but even this is still not as you say. While it gets us cheap mediocre tower blocks, it also gets us semi-detached houses with their own gardens, and even the most mediocre of the widely disliked Brutalist architecture era of the UK this policy didn't create a new underclass, it provided homes for the existing underclass. Finally, even at the low end they largely (but not universally) were an improvement on what came before them, and this era came to an end with a government policy to sell those exact same homes cheaply to their existing occupants.

[sneak]

Some people’s idea of wealth is to live in high density with others.

You bump up against the limits of physics, not economics.

If every place has the population density of Wyoming, real wealth will be the ability to live in real cities. That’s much like what we have now.

[listenallyall]

I appreciate your perspective but clearly most UBI advocates are talking about something much sooner. However my response to your vision is that even if "work" is totally automated or redundant, the resources (building materials) and the energy to power the robots or whatever, will be more expensive and tightly controlled than ever. Power and wealth simply wont allow everything to be accessible to everyone. The idea that people would be able to build enormous mansions (or personal aircraft carriers or spaceships) just sounds rather absurd, no offense, but come on.

[mcny]

I think we are talking about two different things. The UBI I'm talking about won't allow you to have an enormous mansion, maybe just enough to avoid starving. The main plus point is it doesn't do means testing. The second plus point is if you really hate your job, you can quit without starving. This means we can avoid coworkers who really would like to not be there.

I think it is a solid idea. I don't know how it fits in the broader scheme of things though. If everyone in the US gets a UBI of the same amount, will people move somewhere rent is low?

From wikipedia:

> a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a minimum income in the form of an unconditional transfer payment, i.e., without a means test or need to perform work.

It doesn't say you aren't allowed to work for more money. My understanding is you can still work as much as you want. You don't have to to get this payment. And you won't be penalized for making too much money.

[ben_w]

> I think we are talking about two different things. The UBI I'm talking about won't allow you to have an enormous mansion, maybe just enough to avoid starving.

We are indeed talking about different things with UBI here, but I'm asserting that the usual model of it can't be sustained without robots doing the economic production.

If the goal specifically is simply "nobody starves", the governments can absolutely organise food rations like this, food stamps exist.

> If everyone in the US gets a UBI of the same amount, will people move somewhere rent is low?

More likely, the rent goes up by whatever the UBI is. And I'm saying this as a landlord, I don't think it would be a good idea to create yet another system that just transfers wealth to people like me who happen to be property owners, it's already really lucrative even without that.

[listenallyall]

The response you're responding to here was to "ben_w", he discussed better-than-a-billionaire housing. My original reply to your earlier comment is above, basically just asking what type of housing you anticipate under a UBI system.

To me, "just enough to avoid starving" is a prison-like model, just without locked doors. But multiple residents of a very basic "cell", a communal food hall, maybe a small library and modest outdoors area. But most of the time when people talk about UBI, they describe the recipients living in much nicer housing than that.

[ben_w]

> the resources (building materials) and the energy to power the robots or whatever, will be more expensive and tightly controlled than ever.

I am also concerned about this possibility, but come at it from a more near-term problem.

I think there is a massive danger area with energy prices specifically, in the immediate run-up to AI being able to economically replace human labour.

Consider a hypothetical AI which, on performance metrics, is good enough, but is also too expensive to actually use — running it exceeds the cost of any human. The corollary is that whatever that threshold is, under the assumption of rational economics, no human can ever earn more than whatever it costs to run that AI. As time goes on, if the hardware of software improves, the threshold comes down.

Consider what the world looks like if the energy required to run a human-level AI at human-level speed costs the same as the $200/month that OpenAI charges for access to ChatGPT Pro (we don't need to consider what energy costs per kWh for this, prices may change radically as we reach this point).

Conditional on this AI actually being good enough at everything (really good enough, not just "we've run out of easily tested metrics to optimise"), then this becomes the maximum that a human can earn.

If a human is earning this much per month, can they themselves afford energy to keep their lights on, their phone charged, their refrigerator running?

Domestic PV systems (or even wind/hydro if you're lucky enough to be somewhere where that's possible) will help defend against this; personal gasoline/diesel won't, the fuel will be subject to the same price issues.

> Power and wealth simply wont allow everything to be accessible to everyone. The idea that people would be able to build enormous mansions (or personal aircraft carriers or spaceships) just sounds rather absurd, no offense, but come on.

While I get your point, I think a lot of the people in charge can't really imagine this kind of transformation. Even when they themselves are trying to sell the idea. Consider what Musk and Zuckerberg say about Mars and superintelligence respectively — either they don't actually believe the words leaving their mouths (and Musk has certainly been accused of this with Mars), or they have negligible imagination as to the consequences of the world they're trying to create (which IMO definitely describes Musk).

At the same time, "absurd"?

I grew up with a C64 where video games were still quite often text adventures, not real-time nearly-photographic 3D.

We had 6 digit phone numbers, calling the next town along needed an area code and cost more; the idea we'd have video calls that only cost about 1USD per minute was sci-fi when I was young, while the actual reality today is that video calls being free to anyone on the planet isn't even a differentiating factor between providers.

I just about remember dot-matrix printers, now I've got a 3D printer that's faster than going to the shops when I want one specific item.

Universal translation was a contrivance to make watching SciFi easier, not something in your pocket that works slightly better for images than audio, and even then because speech recognition in natural environments turned out to be harder than OCR in natural environments.

I'm not saying any of this will be easy, I don't know when it will be good enough to be economical — people have known how to make flying cars since 1936*, but they've been persistently too expensive to bother. AGI being theoretically possible doesn't mean we ourselves are both smart enough and long-lived enough as an advanced industrialised species to actually create it.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogiro_Company_of_America_AC...

[dbdblldwn]

Just want to point out that any abstract intrinsic value about the economy like GDP is a socialized illusion

Reduce costs by eliminating fiat ledgers that only have value if we believe and realize the real economy is physical statistics and ship resources where the people demand

But of course that simple solution violates the embedded training of Americans. So it's a non-starter and we'll continue to desperately seek some useless reformation of an antiquated social system.

[motorest]

> You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere.

Utter nonsense.

Do you believe the European countries that provides higher education for free are manning tenure positions with slaves or robbing people at gunpoint?

How come do you see public transportation services in some major urban centers being provided free of charge?

How do you explain social housing programmes conducted throughout the world?

Are countries with access to free health care using slavery to keep hospitals and clinics running?

What you are trying to frame as impossibilities is already the reality for many decades in countries ranking far higher in development and quality of living indexes that the US.

How do you explain that?

[juniperus]

You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery. It used to be called corvée. But the words being used have a connotation of something much more brutal and unrewarding. This isn't a political statement, I'm not a libertarian who believes all taxation is evil robbery and needs to be abolished. I'm just pointing out by the definition of slavery aka forced labor, and robbery aka confiscation of wealth, the state employs both of those tactics to fund the programs you described.

[andrepd]

> Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery.

Without the state, you wouldn't have wealth. Heck there wouldn't even be the very concept of property, only what you could personally protect by force! Not to mention other more prosaic aspects: if you own a company, the state maintains the roads that your products ship through, the schools that educate your workers, the cities and towns that house your customers... In other words the tax is not "money that is yours and that the evil state steals from you", but simply "fair money for services rendered".

[juniperus]

To a large extent, yes. That's why the arrangement is so precarious, it is necessary in many regards, but a totalitarian regime or dictatorship can use this arrangement in a nefarious manner and tip the scale toward public resentment. Balancing things to avoid the revolutionary mob is crucial. Trading your labor for protection is sensible, but if the exchange becomes exorbitant, then it becomes a source of revolt.

[cataphract]

If the state "confiscated" wealth derived from capital (AI) would that be OK with you?

[motorest]

> You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery.

You're letting your irrational biases show.

To start off, social security contributions are not a tax.

But putting that detail aside, do you believe that paying a private health insurance also represents slavery and robbery? Are you a slave to a private pension fund?

Are you one of those guys who believes unions exploit workers whereas corporations are just innocent bystanders that have a neutral or even positive impact on workers lives and well being?

[juniperus]

No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism. But taxation is de facto a form of unpaid labor taken by the force of the state. If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery, and in the ideal situation, it is a benevolent sort of exchange, despite existing in the realm of slavery/robbery. In a totalitarian system, it become malevolent very quickly. It also can be seen as not benevolent when the exchange becomes onerous and not beneficial. Arguing this is arguing emotionally and not rationally using language with words that have definitions.

social security contributions are a mandatory payment to the state taken from your wages, they are a tax, it's a compulsory reduction in your income. Private health insurance is obviously not mandatory or compulsory, that is different, clearly. Your last statement is just irrelevant because you assume I'm a libertarian for pointing out the reality of the exchange taking place in the socialist system.

[dns_snek]

> No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism

I'd be very interested in hearing which definition of "socialism" aligns with those obviously libertarian views?

> If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery [...] Arguing this is arguing emotionally and not rationally using language with words that have definitions.

Indulging in the benefits of living in a society, knowingly breaking its laws, being appalled by entirely predictable consequences of those action, and finally resorting to incorrect usage of emotional language like "slavery" and "robbery" to deflect personal responsibility is childish.

Taxation is payment in exchange for services provided by the state and your opinion (or ignorance) of those services doesn't make it "robbery" nor "slavery". Your continued participation in society is entirely voluntary and you're free to move to a more ideologically suitable destination at any time.

[sneak]

They’re not “services provided” unless you have the option of refusing them.

[pixl97]

Good idea, lets make taxes optional or non enforceable. What comes next. Oh right, nobody pays. The 'government' you have collapses and then strong men become warlords and set up fiefdoms that fight each other. Eventually some authoritarian gathers up enough power to unite everyone by force and you have your totalitarian system you didn't want, after a bunch of violence you didn't want.

We assume you're libertarian because you are spouting libertarian ideas that just don't work in reality.

[sneak]

If nobody pays them, then in a democracy they shouldn’t exist. The government derives its power from the consent of the governed. If the majority of people don’t want to be forced to pay taxes, then why do we pretend to have a democracy and compulsory taxation? It can’t be both.

What you seem to be arguing for is a dictatorship, where a majority of people don’t want something, but are forced into it anyway.

FYI the United States survived (and thrived) for well over a century without income taxes. Your theory that the state immediately collapses without income taxes doesn’t really hold up.

[sneak]

> Are countries with access to free health care using slavery to keep hospitals and clinics running?

No, robbery. They’re paid for with tax revenues, which are collected without consent. Taking of someone’s money without consent has a name.

Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

[331c8c71]

> Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

My understanding is that your info is seriously out of date. It might have been the case in the distant past but not the case anymore.

https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/20/tracking-decline-social-mob...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

[Rexxar]

> Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

It's a common idea but each time you try to measure social mobility, you find a lot of European countries ahead of USA.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

- https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/15/social-mobil...

[motorest]

> Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

Which class mobility is this that you speak of? The one that forces the average US citizens to be a paycheck away from homelessness? Or is it the one where you are a medical emergency away from filing bankruptcy?

Have you stopped to wonder how some European countries report higher median household incomes than the US?

But by any means continue to believe your average US citizen is a temporarily embarrassed billionaire, just waiting for the right opportunity to benefit from your social mobility.

In the meantime, also keep in mind that mobility also reflects how easy it is to move down a few pegs. Let that sink in.

[juniperus]

the economic situation in Europe is much more dire than the US...

[motorest]

> the economic situation in Europe is much more dire than the US...

Is it, though? The US reports by far the highest levels of lifetime literal homelessness, which is three times greater than in countries like Germany. Homeless people on Europe aren't denied access to free healthcare, primary or even tertiary.

Why do you think the US, in spite of it's GDP, features so low in rankings such as human development index or quality of life?

[andrepd]

Yet people live better. Goes to show you shouldn't optimise for crude, raw GDP as an end in itself, only as a means for your true end: health, quality of life, freedom, etc.

[juniperus]

In many of the metrics, yeah. But Americans can afford larger houses and more stuff essentially, which isn't necessarily a good replacement for general quality of life things.

[suddenlybananas]

Several US states have the life expectancy of Bangladesh.

[andrepd]

>Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

This is not true, it was true historically, but not since WWII. Read Piketty.

[ben_w]

> You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere.

Is AI slavery? Because that's where the value comes from in the scenario under discussion.

[int_19h]

If the robots are the ones that produce everything, and you take that generated wealth and distribute it to the people, whom are you robbing exactly?