Switzerland and "Star Trek" economics: $2,800 a month for everyone?

Nope. EVERYONE gets the full $2800 unconditionally.

As quoted from the article: "But the basic idea is, no matter what you do, if you’re a resident — or in some cases, a citizen — you get a certain amount of money each month. And it’s completely unconditional: If you’re rich you get it, if you’re poor you get. If you’re a good person you get it, if you’re a bad person you get it. And it does not depend on you doing anything other than making whatever effort is involved to collect the money."

The idea is that every single adult gets $2800 a month with no conditions attached.

The rich obviously make more then $2800 a month yet they would still get it.

This is why I say it won't work in America. Already restrictions are being thought of to stifle the idea.

There are two things here:

#1 Every adult gets it. Unconditionally.

#2 If you're married you now have $5600 a month since both adults would just combine incomes. That's $69,600 a year.

Full coverage car insurance??? What...you got a new car? Freezer??? Come on dude! Storm shelter??? What? Legal services?? You got some criminal cases going? Gym membership....just stop!!

Some other things on that list are not an every month bill.

Even without a new car, full coverage insurance is what keeps you -- hopefully -- from being absolutely fucked in the event that you have a crash that totals it and can't afford replacement. And a freezer makes a lot of sense if you don't have one that works well ... it is the kind of thing where a single capital expense can save money in the long run.

I've had many cars. Some were old but good condition and low mileage. But I would never pay for full coverage an any of them. 2 yrs of full coverage would be like me buying the car again.

Good points but would have to come off the list if I ain't got the dough. I can't call these thing necessary.

I don't think you see the problem.

You ALONE getting an extra, say, $2800 a month WOULD provide you a benefit in your standard of living. But if EVERYONE gets it, that's a different story. It would jack up demand but do little/nothing to affect supply.

To give an example...Say, you live with your parents or a roommate because you can't afford your own place. Voila, the government sends you a $2800 check every month. Problem solved? No. Because every other guy living with parents or a roommate is getting the same check. So, now you all have money and go to rent your own place. But the SUPPLY of apartments hasn't changed. The DEMAND for them is hugely increased, but there aren't any more apartments to be had today than there were yesterday. So, they get very expensive because landlords have more renters than there are available flats.

Well...you think all the extra buyers will prompt the construction of more apartments, right? No. Because the cost of EVERYTHING has gone up, owing to more buyers in the market. The guy who builds apartments is now having to buy materials at a higher price. And do you think there will be more or fewer workers when everyone gets a $2800 check? So there will be fewer employees and those employees will have higher living expenses.

And where does this money come from exactly? Right now, a person has to work long and hard--or have a lucrative job--to receive $2800 in a month. But everyone's going to get that regardless of their labor input? What do you think that's going to do to incentives to work, both for those who collect and those who pay?

Best case scenario: everything stays pretty much as it was, prices are just higher. Worst case scenario: no one works, less money is invested resulting in reduced growth, stagnation.

I quit!

The apartments will sprout from the ground fueled by compost, and tofu, and songs, and love.

Sometimes the best solutions are the simple ones.

On the freezer bit, its one of those capital expenses that saves you lots in the long run. My brother in law has a big one, buys all his meat when it comes on sale at Costco. Eats it throughout the year. Got his own deli slicer* off of Craigslist so he cuts his own sandwich meat.

Guy is frugal as fuck.

He also bought his first house at the very bottom of the market. Put enough down that he could afford a 15 year loan. Which IIRC he's on track to have paid off in less than 8 years.

*this is one of those things that is useful to have in your circle. Anne got a free deli thing of turkey and pastrami (she works for a Costco broker) we gave him half for slicing it. Still took up a good eighth of our freezer after giving another half away. One of the first things we buy when we get a house is a chest freezer.

It will certainly be a fascinating case study to watch.

You're not down to your last dozen or so teeth either, I'll wager.

Obviously they are not NECESSARY in the sense of a roof and food, but they are things that the big majority of the population takes for granted.

as for whether or not full coverage is necessary...well, all i know is that if I - for example - have a blowout and total this car, I'll be walking. My budget doesn't have room for a car payment, particularly the sort you find at the "we tote the note" lot which is the only option when your credit is shot.

and when your job is 20 miles from home....

I could go on...

A freezer is damn handy.

I go to a store called Delaware Chicken Farm and Seafood Market to buy chicken and fish that isn't loaded with crap and the prices are good as well.

Freezer takes it all. In addition to anything else that needs a freezer. Glad I've got one.

Mewa is in New York so he's got no room for one.

Same argument is made in discussion of the minimum wage, whereas in reality it benefits people on the lower end.

Take the Big Mac index as an example. Australian wages on the lower end are higher than in America, so in us dollar terms an Australian Big Mac costs more than an American one. However an Australian on minimum wage takes less time to earn money for a Big Mac than an American on minimum wage does.

In reality these things all depend on how well things are balanced.

As a full time student I work around 20-25 hours a week, I even did so when I was receiving benefits because there was still financial incentive to so. If I had a base income though where up to 20 hours or so I earned nothing, then I wouldn't work part time and would instead spend that extra time on study.

In some areas what you say would be the case (as can be seen with people who work unpaid internships etc), however the part time job market would be decimated.

Free money always benefits those who receive it. It's hard to make someone more than $1 worse off by giving them $1.

Good for the guy on minimum wage, lousy for everyone else who buys Big Macs.

A bad idea gets worse the further it is taken. If the minimum wage appears to have no effect (its effects are invisible, so this often appears to be the case), push it further and the distortions will become evident.

If you don't think so, mandate a $50/hour minimum wage and eliminate poverty.

Even assuming there is no distortion of prices by giving everyone a base income, there's the rub: you wouldn't have to work for the money, so you (and many others) would choose not to. This scheme doesn't create wealth, so society as a whole doesn't get richer by doing it, and the incentive to work is reduced, which means society as a whole actually gets poorer.

Of course. And the value created by the part time workforce would never be created.

If Switzerland were a closed economy, you'd be right. But the kind of stuff somebody getting the $2,800 buys is imported. Swiss contributions to the world economy are high end services. So demand for imports goes up a bit, but not enough to impact world market prices. Switzerland can get away with this, only taking a hit to the treasury.

I already said it's all about balance. Too high a minimum wage would be devastating.

If we want to take things to extremes though, let's go on the no minimum wage side. A country ends up dominated by megacorps, who collectively own 99% of property and rights to resources. Since there is nowhere else to work the market rate for people working for them is essentially working for board and food. In that economy there are 5% of people who own shares in the megacorps, and 95% of the people who work for them earning board and just enough food to live. Is that really a better economy?

I'm not understanding you $0 = $2800 point.

You are assuming that prices will rise directly proportional to the $2800. Not only is that unproven, but illogical. As most consumer products are imported there should be little effect. I know in the EU trucking has been opened up across borders, if the Swiss are part of that system then the only part of the supply chain effected would be retail.

Also just b/c $2800 a month there isn't enough to live well doesn't mean it won't have a positive effect on the poor who receive it.

One of the arguments brought forward for an unconditional basic income is that it lessens the marginal worth of holding a job. If you only have your current daily work as a way to eat (deliberately showcasing a theoretical extreme case), you will accept almost any job conditions. You can hardly negotiate at all -- whereas a corporation always can. It's like the marginal value of water in the desert: Right here, right now, you will exchaneg everything you own and ever will own for one drink of water. But if you get a small flask free, i.e. a conditionless basic income, you aren't desperate. If it's small enough you'll still be highly motivated to work; but you and your employer will also know that if things come to the worst, you do always have the realistic option of leaving.

Of course, basic social services do this to various extents in many countries. Which is another way of looking at the UBI: Just add up everything to which any citizen already holds an entitlement, and give it to them in one lump sum.

I'm not sure I buy into either argument completely, but I'm just putting this out there.

What?!? Do you HONESTLY believe that scenario is the alternative to the minimum wage? That's just fantasy.

Most workers in the economy are NOT minimum wage workers; their wages are set by MARKET conditions not any government fiat. And they create the vast, vast, vast majority of wealth in the country. The idea that giving a teenager $9/hour is the only thing staving off some 19th Century caricature of capitalism is just absurd.

I didn't think I'd see "The Iron Law of Wages" again except in a history book. The idea that the market would drive people down to subsistence went out the window at about the same time Marx popularized the idea. It COMPLETELY neglects the rise of workers who THINK (and not toil) for a living, and it ignores that driving costs down throughout the economy enables consumption.

Yeah. And then, marekt forces drove most of the people down to subsistence.

You should really read Marx someday, if you want to keep turning him into your reference. The second point you make follows the general point directly in Kapital, and the first point is discussed in detail in Deutsche Ideologie.

Uh, no they didn't. There was a healthy, vibrant middle class long before there any significant government intervention in the economy.

The record is clear: people are much more prosperous where markets are freer. If you want real misery, look at the places that tried to "protect" people from them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah...Is Marx a marxist? and all that...

I know Marx well enough. Long story short: his predictions failed to materialize in the capitalist world. And in the few backward places where people DID put his economic ideas into effect, they engendered little but misery and repression.

That claim seems to have no relation to anything in the quote.

Really? It seems to me that the US and Western Europe are both pretty prosperous. And yet their markets, for many decades now, have been consistently less free than those in other places. The other places never last real long, but right now, Russia certainly qualifies -- unfree in a hundred other aspects, but the markets? Raving.

Of course, the other half of that equation is that markets tend to hide those parts that aren't free and aren't rich. The actual working class in your and my economy lives in Bangladesh and China.

This risks completely derailing this thread, but at some point, perhaps in some other thread, I'd very much like to hear you name one of Marx' predictions that has failed. That's Marx, not Lenin, Stalin, or Mao. (I can think of three failed predictions in Marx off the top of my head, but I'd bet they're not the same ones you'd name.)

Weren't we recently discussing the silliness of having people doing manual labor in Trek films? (I'd argued it was probably just a convention to put the audience at ease.)

Having a guaranteed baseline income that's not enough to live on by itself, but that would for many people eliminate the nightmare scenarios Nova lives with every day could have a lot of other advantages as well.

• No one left to do the menial jobs? Automate 'em.
• Eliminate the 40-hour (or, for many in the white collar sector, 60+) work week. It's nothing but a holdover from the era when workers, including children, were required to work far longer than that and, at the time, it was considered an improvement. Why must people sit at a desk for 40 hours a week "because that's the way we do it"? If they can complete their work in 30 hours and go home, there'd be an incentive to work more efficiently instead of Uncle Alberting online all day.
• People who aren't worn out from work (not to mention the ever-more-arduous commute) have more time and energy to do other things. The species as a whole benefits.

Switzerland is the ideal place to give this a shot. If it works, other developed nations will implement it. The U.S. will have to fight its "We've never tried it but we know it'll never work" naysayers, but eventually - maybe - catch up with everyone else.

Cuckoo clocks to the rescue!

You seem to be claiming that capitalism drove people to subsistence when the historical truth is precisely the opposite. Indeed, it continues to be the opposite by raising billions of people in the world OUT of poverty.

Markets in both places are still pretty free. The vast majority of goods and services in both places are produced by profit-seeking private enterprises and allocated by markets. But even among Western countries, there is a pretty good correlation of prosperity to economic freedom. Prefer to live in Australia or in Greece?

Free markets are necessary for prosperity but not sufficient.

And economic circumstances for them continue to improve. Do you think the average Chinese is better or worse off than the average Chinese of 20-30 years ago?

Marx predicted that tensions between workers and owners in the capitalist world would result in a revolution of the workers and the establishment of a socialist state.

Here's Marx in his own words: