[muyuu]

The problem with making it unconditional is that it will completely break the ceteris paribus calculations as to what is good enough, making a lot of collateral damage on its way while being largely ineffective.

Showering money to everybody is very likely to make more harm than good to real people's economies. A transition to Friedman's proposal on a "moderate" negative income tax (it's not what the name suggests) makes a lot more sense than this. Although I'd just give conditional help as it's done in many European countries with a reasonable degree of success.

[phillmv]

The Swiss suggestion aside, it's not really meant to be a free middle-class experience.

In the minds of most people it's more of a "you will not go hungry or get cold in the winter" level of support, and I would make the argument that the majority of folks would continue to work to supplement their income beyond the bare necessities.

It depends on your base axioms here. Most people don't like living with the bare minimum, and will try to work their way out of it. Most people aren't stuck at the bottom of the income range by choice.

Think of the entrepreneurial venues now open to people who no longer have to juggle two shitty jobs just to get by. I think we'd come along way towards reducing human misery without really harming the economy - with the exception of making jobs that are shitty for no good reason obsolete.

[neltnerb]

Yes, this.

My take is that capitalism is corrupted because people are unable to meet basic needs. We pretend that capitalism is a system where everyone is able to make informed decisions. We pretend that in capitalism, a 10% chance of making $1M a year in income has the same value as a 100% chance of making $100k a year. This is just not the case.

People have two different types of risk they can take. Income risk, and personal risk. Personal risk is your shelter, your food, your health, your family. Income risk is your expected income beyond what is needed to meet those basic needs.

If your personal risk is covered for some reason, then you are able to objectively evaluate income risk. But if your personal risk is not covered, you have to be more conservative. The downside is not that you might not make as much, it's that you might lose your home, health, or starve. You can't be logical about that.

If we have a system where personal risk is largely covered, then the free market will actually pay people what they are worth because people will feel free to actually take risks and (for instance) start companies and pursue their passions.

This is some stuff I wrote on it a while back, it's better written than what I put here.

http://neltnerb.tumblr.com/post/58818804903/an-entrepreneurs...

[maxk42]

> In the minds of most people it's more of a "you will not go hungry or get cold in the winter" level of support, and I would make the argument that the majority of folks would continue to work to supplement their income beyond the bare necessities.

And that's the essential fallacy: You cannot control the prices of goods and services in the market.

Once you provide a basic income to everybody, that will create a scenario wherein the majority of people benefit from the income inversely proportionally to their level of other income. This is the intended effect: The poor benefit the most and the upper-class are largely unaffected. So it's a good idea, right? Not exactly: What are the poor going to spend their income on? Primarily food, housing -- the "not going hungry or cold" things. So they've got more money to go out and buy food and they will. And the lower-middle-class who make a bit more than that will now have enough money to buy more food and better housing and they will. And the middle-middle class have a little extra money to spend as they wish and they will. And so on. But the majority of that money will be spent. With more free cash to go around, prices will rise to capture the additional profits. When prices go up we have inflation and now the poor are back to not being able to afford food and shelter and the lower-middle-class are back to living hand-to-mouth and so forth. The market compensates for the additional influx of cash by providing opportunities to soak it up, so it doesn't wind up helping anyone in the long run.

Well we'll just peg it to the rate of inflation and the problem will be solved, right? Again -- it's not that simple.

See, only one in three Americans is working. If we determine that each American needs about $500 per month to "not go hungry or cold" then that means the average American will have to pay $1,500 in additional taxes. We'll burden the upper class with the majority of those taxes, of course, but this isn't good for the middle class either. The upper-middle-class winds up being saddled with enough additional tax burden that they join the middle-middle class. And the middle-middle class who were previously getting along fine on a household income of $50,000 just joined the lower-middle class because even with the added income they have to pay more for the basics: food and shelter because of the additional inflation.

So now we're saddled with a shrinking middle class, (sound familiar?) nobody being able to afford any more than they were before and the rich continue to remain largely unaffected by all of this. In the end it accomplishes the exact opposite of what you set out to do.

[brazzy]

You're making a lot of completely unsupported predictions there...

[muyuu]

It's not possible to effectively predict in scenarios like this, which is why you don't go overboard.

[yetanotherphd]

so did the parent, and everyone else in this thread.

[abraxasz]

... and this is why, selfishly, I would like to see the system implemented somewhere, albeit not necessarily where I live. People keep throwing peremptory statements here and there (on both sides of the argument), even though we really have no way to know what's going to happen. So let the Swiss implement it, and let the whole world see how it's gonna play out. If it works (which I sincerely hope, from the bottom of my heart), then that can give ideas to the rest of us. If it fails, we can draw the adequate conclusions too.

[spectre256]

It's always refreshing to find someone who wants a good debate to be settled by experiment. Hopefully that would be enough. Portugal famously had great success with decriminalization of nearly all illicit drugs, but unfortunately I don't think too many countries have changed their own laws as a result. There's almost always too much politics involved, and it's usually easy to find a reason that is at least superficially convincing as to why what works elsewhere will not work at home.

[dllthomas]

There have been a few trials of related things on a small scale. Certainly nothing approaching the amounts or number of people in the Swiss proposal.

Some instances here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax#Implementat...

[neltnerb]

I wrote on this a while back (http://neltnerb.tumblr.com/post/58818804903/an-entrepreneurs...), and it is useful to note that mathematically a guaranteed income is completely identical to a negative income tax.

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

That article contains a lot more information than most articles about stipends. Note that the US Earned Income Credit is a negative income tax, yet it doesn't seem to even make a blip on anyone's radar as communism.