[abathur]

Not sure I'm on-board with basic income yet, but I'll point out that business owners are only deprived of the obligatory/menial/degrading kind of cheap labor that only people who have no other options to put food on the table will do.

I think we'd expect that businesses which can still provide compelling work will have improved access to cheap labor (both due to the falling wage floor, and the ability of workers to refuse menial work in favor of the meaningful). Meanwhile, businesses that provide soul-sucking work will be less-able to rely on the almost-indentured-servitude of the poor and will have to provide more appropriate compensation for their work.

[logfromblammo]

Not quite. Basic income lowers the barriers to entry for small businesses. As "runway" goes, it isn't paved and lighted, but it is firm, flat, and reasonably free from debris. Every person who hangs a shingle on a new small business, and can keep it up indefinitely, is just more lean competition to incumbent businesses. That competition might otherwise represent employees or acquisition fodder.

You can't hire cheap labor if the laborers can always get a better deal by self-incorporating and contracting themselves out to you.

If your choice is between contracting your building janitorial services to one large firm who no longer has any employees and splitting the work among 10 owner-employees, only one selection will actually result in clean toilets.

That is a huge hit to the existing business-owner class. It is no longer possible to skim off the top as a middleman without providing actual value as a manager.

[dragonwriter]

> You can't hire cheap labor if the laborers can always get a better deal by self-incorporating and contracting themselves out to you.

Conversely, laborers can't get a better deal by self-incorporating and contracting themselves out to you if you aren't willing to give them a better terms as contractors than you would as employees. (And even if you are, they still might not be able to get a net better deal, as incorporating isn't without its own costs.)

> If your choice is between contracting your building janitorial services to one large firm who no longer has any employees and splitting the work among 10 owner-employees, only one selection will actually result in clean toilets.

OTOH, if your choice as a laborer is to work as an employee for the firm that has contracts to clean toilets or to be a firm that has no contracts, only one choice will get you a pay check.

Sure, if productivity has reached the state where society can provide a UBI that provides a reasonable living where few people need the work for the style of life they would prefer, you can just opt out. But if productivity reaches that point, the way you get the toilets clean is probably by contracting with the one big firm that owns the janitorial robots and has succeed in best optimizing the design of the hardware and software for them, so that it can undercut any competitor on price.

> That is a huge hit to the existing business-owner class.

UBI funded by a taxation system which doesn't preferentially minimize taxes on capital mitigates the degree to which automation and other capital-favoring productivity changes redistributes the gains of wealth to an increasingly narrow capitalist class; it does so by essentially granting the whole citizenry a share of the gains of capital. But it doesn't seem likely that any level at which is sustainable will actually be a meaningful blow to the existing capitalist class, its just will reduce the degree to which the top of that class rockets ahead in wealth and power of everyone else, including the bottom of that class.

[logfromblammo]

That is exactly the class of people that would complain if everyone else got 3 times as much pie this year as last year, but their slice was only twice as big--ignoring that they ate 80% of the entire available quantity of all pies last year.

They deserve all that pie~ It wouldn't be fair if they got less (to them, a lesser rate of increase is less--same as in government budget proposals)~ Without them, no one would even have any pie~ So they fund politicians to vote against proposals that would result in more pie for everyone.

It wouldn't be an actual blow to the wealthy, who would still get objectively more stuff, but it is a significant psychological injury to someone who may measure their self-worth relative to other people. If they can only buy everything you have ever owned 500 times, rather than 1000 times, they feel less rich, even if you have 3 times as much stuff as you had before.

By my perception, the more wealth you have, the more likely you are to measure its worth relatively rather than absolutely. Small-time investors own $X in stock. Big-time investors own Y% of the company. Small-time workers earn $X per year. Big-time workers earn $X plus Y% of company profits. People from opposite ends of the wealth spectrum don't even calculate with the same math.