> 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.
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...
... where has it failed in practice?