The idea seems to be that you can free up a lot of the money wasted on bureaucracy and pay out to everyone indiscriminately.
The Mincome experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome) dabbled with this idea and the results were rather surprising. Most people seemed to want to work rather than loaf around and collect benefits.
Don't think you'd have to "tax the rich like crazy". Would returning to the tax rates of the 1990s be "crazy"? Would closing corporate loopholes be "crazy"? Would investigating why trillions of dollars in tax havens have somehow escaped oversight be "crazy"?
> The idea seems to be that you can free up a lot of the money wasted on bureaucracy and pay out to everyone indiscriminately.
This idea does not stand up to any scrutiny at all. The cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is minuscule compared to the cost of a BI program.
> Don't think you'd have to "tax the rich like crazy". Would returning to the tax rates of the 1990s be "crazy"? Would closing corporate loopholes be "crazy"? Would investigating why trillions of dollars in tax havens have somehow escaped oversight be "crazy"?
None of those suggestions would come anywhere near the amount of money needed for a BI program.
> The cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is minuscule compared to the cost of a BI program.
Most of the cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is in validating and enforcing the conditions on beneficiaries. Unconditional Basic Income avoids these costs quite directly.
I honestly don't think any bureaucracy would be trimmed whatsoever; it'd be replaced. All of those government jobs wouldn't be cut, they'd be moved to the new program. No matter how simple you try to make it, something like this would end up ridiculously complicated. You'd need a bureau in charge of deciding how much a person in each zip code gets, how much taxes to raise, which taxes to raise, monitor improvement, monitor areas for local government abuse (billing the federal government for fake people to get the extra cash, as an off-the-cuff example), etc.
That's probably true, but its worth thinking through. If the rich leave and take their automation capital with them, then there will again be work for people to do, reducing the need for basic income. The question is: how much other capital can the rich take with them? They should be entitled to their property, of course, but how much of it is totally theirs to take over to say China? Google's IP is its capital. It is the result of the efforts of Google's founders and investors, of course, but was also massively subsidized. It was created by Berkeley and Stanford educated engineers, institutions that receive major federal support. It was a use of the internet, a system that was created by the DOD. They of course benefited from roads, etc, and all the other public utilities. How much of an equity share in the company would Google have given out to replace these services and inputs from scratch? That's a difficult and nebulous question but I don't think the answer is zero. I think that amount, whatever it is, would be a reasonable expatriation tax.
Google's capital is its social organization. If they "leave," the social organization collapses, and all of those engineers can reorganize. Thus, google leaving creates the conditions for its replacement. No worries.
Money and business moves to where it's most welcome for the same reason people move to neighborhoods with low rates of theft (after all, taxation and inflationary monetary policy is theft no matter which way it's painted).
The reason people can't find work now is due to the failures of central planning, not the lack of it. Communist and hard-socialist countries all have tried the basic income idea and failed. The only exceptions are where the basic income is funded through resources, not confiscation of wealth - and even this takes wise, benevolent leadership.
When you confiscate wealth to provide a basic income, you create a disincentive to create wealth and an incentive to not work in exchange for basic income. This creates a rapid increase in both, which backfires because you have more people to support with basic income and less revenue because business owners scale back.
It all sounds good in theory, but in practice...
Edit: Interesting on the downvotes without the explanations. Do any of you live in the real world?
> Communist and hard-socialist countries all have tried the basic income idea and failed.
I know of a few short lived experiments, but I'm not aware of any country that has implemented a basic income, let alone failed at it. Could you let me know where you're thinking of?
> It all sounds good in theory, but in practice...
You're looking at the effect, and not the cause. What caused the global banking crisis?
1.) Cheap money via gov't Fed Policy (created the artificial boom)
2.) Government mandates in mortgage lending (caused a lot of people to buy homes when they weren't in a realistic position to do so)
I'll bite. What I mean is people were paid a basic wage to do very unproductive (even counter-productive) work. So I suppose that's a little different than getting a basic wage without working at all.
I seem to have edited my post while you were answering a point I later took out because it didn't seem relevant to the main point (which is that I don't think anyone has introduced basic income yet).
However, I don't believe in your analysis of the banking crisis, either. You seem to have missed out a lot of other reasons. From wikipedia:
> In its "Declaration of the Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy," dated 15 November 2008, leaders of the Group of 20 cited the following causes:
During a period of strong global growth, growing capital flows, and prolonged stability earlier this decade, market participants sought higher yields without an adequate appreciation of the risks and failed to exercise proper due diligence. At the same time, weak underwriting standards, unsound risk management practices, increasingly complex and opaque financial products, and consequent excessive leverage combined to create vulnerabilities in the system. Policy-makers, regulators and supervisors, in some advanced countries, did not adequately appreciate and address the risks building up in financial markets, keep pace with financial innovation, or take into account the systemic ramifications of domestic regulatory actions.
i.e. Though it was also a failure of other things, it was by large part a failure of corporate risk assessment and lack of regulation.
Communism didn't offer a basic income. People were paid for doing works at jobs. Which everyone had. The constituion of communist Poland even listed having a job as a citizens duty.
The reason people can't find work now is due to the failures of central planning, not the lack of it.
How can you ignore globalization and automation? Even if you think those things have had no impact to date, they undoubtedly will in the future, right? Particularly the latter.
Also, keep in mind that nobody is proposing communism. Milton Friedman advocated a basic income.
And where the money to pay for that will come from?
Apparently corporations will be subsidizing this:
"How would we pay for it? We could start by getting
corporations to pay their taxes. As I mentioned above,
corporate profit margins have hit an all time high, and
that money will circulate far faster if it’s placed in the
hands of consumers."
You tax everyone more and give everyone more money. The average person will receive x euros more every month and pay taxes x euros more every month in income tax. The richer than average will probably slightly lose net income and the poorer than average will probably slightly increase net income.
There are various income models, and that's just one example.
Are there any models that can prove/disprove these ideas? Like - take today's situation, plugin all the numbers starting from income taxes to welfare etc and simulate it and see? It would be very interesting to see that.
Also, these kinds of ideas should be tested on a smaller scale - may be a town of 25,000 people? That would be really interesting.
In the short term yes, but these trends are not limited to one region or country, they are global. Its likely that we will see most developed countries adopt some from of basic income sometime in the future, at which point there wont really be anywhere reasonable to go to escape it.
