Universal basic income vs government provided living utilities

We are coming to the point where society is presented with the means of giving all people the needs and even benefits for existing in their country. Some countries are experimenting with different styles of providing this. I may not be familiar with terms already established for these ideas so I will just describe it where I do not have the term.

The first idea is a socialistic means of providing government programs. You have things like fire and rescue, schools, road maintenance, and other items provided for everyone's use that are funded by tax revenue paid for by commerce and the employed. You may also have utilities like water, electric, communications, shelter, food and other things provided at a basic level just for being alive. I am not talking about luxury levels, but we have gotten to the point where these basic things could be provided for everyone in many countries. Yes, this would also be funded by commerce and the employed to alleviate common problems like homelessness, or even to provide for a government civics force to maintain government provided items. You would still have privately owned business and luxury items that wood be accessible by the employed.

Another school of thought is universal basic income. This is where everyone regardless of employment status is given by the government a survival level stipend by the government. The government decides it takes so much for a person to afford basic survival and they give this to the people as cash benefits. So if you are poor you can get the necessities, and if you are employed you can afford better accommodations because you are paying taxes and for society. In this case there is no stipulations on how the money is spent. It is up to the individual to make sure they have enough. The downfall to this is what happens when you have a group of people who continuously come up short at the end of the month or pay period.

Then you have a benefit system which is welfare like that could apply to everyone. Everyone gets a certain amount for food, rent, and utilities. However this benefit can only be spent on what it is earmarked for. You can only spend your food benefits on limited edibles, but you can spend your earned income on better food or luxury food items. You get so much for rent, but you can find a more expensive place to live where you pay the rest. This is given to everyone no matter their personal income status and is funded by taxes.

So what are the problems and benefits of these systems, and can they be mixed in a way that minimizes or eliminates the pitfalls of their methods.

In principle I'm opposed to UBI. But a social safety net that focuses on the necessities of life in a streamlined manner as opposed to our present system is probably worth looking at.

Why?

I think a UBI is inevitable, unless we go down some other catastrophic road instead.

We already provide basic social security to all citizens on some level. Turning this into a UBI would do away with the reward-for-destitution angle, and massively save on administration as well as infelicitous injustice in selecting beneficiaries.

Moreover, with the current reliance on labour we find ourselves rejecting technological progress if it reduces the need for labour, as we can't fathom the social consequences. That is ludicrous. When the labour market starts rewarding inefficiency, it has clearly run its historical course.

And I think we will eventually see a reversal on wages. If no-one is forced to, say, clean for other people in order to survive, that work will only be attractive if it is paid well. And that is a good thing, correcting the wage/value balance where it is now out of whack.

I don't have any real problem with increasing the minimum wage annually. Increased labor costs will encourage automation and thus increases in productivity.

I have the conservative tendency to believe that people should not get something they do not earn.

I agree. Automation means that there is ever less need for labour, so I think the work week will have to be shortened. Because most people like to work --- it helps shape life and generally brings you into contact with other people.

On the other hand, there are many activities that would enhance society but simply don't get done because we've been supposedly obliged to continuously cut public budgets in recent decades.
There are a million and one things out there that need doing. But nobody does them.
Therefore, even accounting for automation, plenty of beneficial work should be available.

But there will always be people who can't work, for whatever reason. And those few who are just freeloaders. Well, we can't let them starve (my view). So rather than have complicated systems of social welfare (which leave cracks through which too many people fall), a universal basic income sounds good. Then, the more you earn, the more gets taxed back. Until at some point the entire sum would be taxed back.

Yeah, even Donald would get it. It would be universal.

One complicating factor would be cost of living. I live in one of the world's most expensive cities. Rents are incredible here. Yet there are places not that far away where rents are half or a third as high. (My parents-in-law have an apartment as big as ours, but they pay peanuts for it compared with us.) Somehow this would have to be taken into account.

Then there's Modern Monetary Theory, which seems to me to make a lot of sense. It questions the very notion that government spending needs taxes to fund it. (To be precise, spending by the government that issues the currency.)

Then there's the question of overpopulation. (Yes, Dayton, as you've already noted, I'm one of those.)
Perhaps six billion or so fewer people on this effing planet would solve, like, thousands of very different but interconnected problems in one stroke.

UBI is better because it's better to let the market work out the business of matching consumers to what they want to consume, than it is to have the government attempt to manage that from the top-down.

That's already gonna happen one way or the other.

There's a reason why we are no longer an agricultural society.

So I'm curious, what's your attitude towards CEO compensation?

I do not like it above a certain level unless in the form of stock.

Hell yes. My friend cleans houses and makes just about double what I make on an hourly basis...as it should be. That shit is hard on your body!

Oh alright, at least that's an internally consistent worldview. A lot of the time what you said is just code for "don't give stuff to black people."

To be clear, I disagree with you - the trouble is that 'people should not get something they do not earn' has been rendered entirely obsolete by economic development - but I do respect your view.

You guys are saying opposite things. : )

And I agree with you, that the US market pretty accurately prices domestic work. Don't know what they do in Pakcard's socialist land; don't care, their system is crumbling and their population is dying. : (

No, they aren't. But it’s now obvious why you’re so easily offended – your reading comprehension skills are dimmer than Dinner's.

He says out of whack. She says in whack. Whatever.

Nope.

I take the position that the 'value' in 'wage/value balance' is insufficiently defined and therefore meaningless.
This amounts to an observation that economics has been searching for a formal way to pin it down for decades and has failed to do so.
In my opinion pay should reflect the value that society puts on work (and to the extent that work is considered an extension of personal identity, on the person doing the work as well).
This is why I support egalitarian policies when it comes to wages. I'm an egalitarian. I believe that people should treat each other as equals and that society should value everyone on principle. Higher minimum wage, lower executive pay. Profit-sharing and employee ownership, and more importantly employee governance, wherever possible.

As long as there's compulsory gay sex for all Christians, you can do all the commie stuff you want.

That's for you, ghost of Jack Chick.

I gotcha. He's saying that it needs to get to be that way, and I'm giving an example of how it already is. The thing is: My friend is young, white, and pretty. People instantly trust her....especially older folks who, in this area, are a little hesitant of foreigners...particularly ones that don't have a good grasp on the English language. It's pretty shitty that she makes $40-50 an hour while a Hispanic lady working for merry maids or whatever makes minimum wage. They are both doing the same back-breaking labor, and the labor is what should be valued.

Agreed the system sucks, !, except that it's less awful than the left's alternative. You really have to ponder on Don Trump to appreciate how godawful bad Obama was to alienate parts of just about every segment of his support, and present Donald to America as the most significant event for which we can thank Obama, from his tenure as Head of the Free World.

Our systemn's not always fair, but plenty of times it is. My GMs make more than me (I set the salary and bonuses), and our Ops director (an American born a Mexican) made more total comp (including dividends, bonus and base) than I did the year before Obamatheft. Of course the world is rightside up again thanks to Obamatheft, and the changes we were forced to make, and I make more than our darker skinned favorite once again, though it was close the past year.

I dont think we will ever see universal basic income. I think the rich will build a robot army to hunt and kill the poor.

somebody has to maintain the killer robots - if you won't do it, the Mexicans will. And you will be ass out of a job, and poor, so you might be SOL from this deal.

so... estate taxes should be returned to pre 1970s rates ?

But what if it makes society safer and more prosperous over all?

A UBI is far from inevitable, but unless modern society collapses we will reach a point where there simply isn't enough demand for human labour to employ everyone.

When you end up with an entire class of people permanently excluded from opportunity, history tells us there is a decent chance that you one day see the guillotines rolled out.

An appropriate level of UBI may one day stir up more economic activity than it costs. Like I said I don't think it is inevitable, but if it does happen, it will spread quicker than anyone expects. A UBI has potential to make many big businesses more money through drummed up economic activity where people can afford their goods and services, and if you see big companies deciding it's good for their bottom line then you will see their big lobbyists coming out for it.

I think we're already there. That's just a belief but let's just say I'm eager to test it by experiment.

The idea that Nono and others here have promoted that "automation will make human labor basically unnecessary" is utterly ridiculous, without any historical precedent.

Though very "Star Trekkian"

But as The National Review featured article on increasing productivity recently pointed out, increasing productivity leads to more purchasing power which stimulates economic growth and activity. Which ultimately means more jobs, higher paying jobs.

There is no historical evidence for increasing productivity and automation leading to a permanent reduction in the need for human labor. None whatsoever.

The National Review is, to put it lightly, not where you want to be going for political-economic theory. You'd be far better served by looking at the work of Karl Marx on this question, though something tells me you're going to see the words "Karl Marx" and just dismiss me as a Communist because that's easier than thinking.

In any case if you look back through history you absolutely do find precedent for human labor becoming basically unnecessary to productive processes. As Marx put it, with the entry of the machine into production the human worker steps aside, becoming a 'mere watchman' overseeing production rather than taking center stage.

As you've described it the National Review's logic is extremely flawed.
First, it's clear that increasing productivity does not necessarily lead to more purchasing power:



Though of course the National Review would simply ignore these distributional questions because that's what their ideology demands.

Second, and even more glaring, if automation is cheaper for capitalists than hiring new workers, increased purchasing power won't lead to more jobs for people, it will lead to more jobs for machines.

The historical precedent for this is of course the fact that where all societies had the vast majority of their people engaged in agriculture a few centuries ago, we now need about 2% of the population farming to feed the rest. A similar process is occurring now with manufacturing (despite all the talk about jobs lost to China, the simple fact is that US manufacturing output has continually risen with fewer people needed to produce the same amount of stuff, mainly due to computerization).

Now you are right in that hitherto the increased productivity in these sectors has simply freed up resources for other sectors. Reducing the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture freed up people and investment to be used in manufacturing. Increasing productivity in manufacturing freed up people for the service sector. Once you get to a service economy, though, you get into novel territory, because the service sector is a far less objective domain than either agriculture or manufacturing. In that sense you may be right, if people decide we want services from each other, theoretically there's no real upper limit on the amount of services we could produce for one another and this means there is functionally infinite employment opportunities in the service sector.

The trouble is that this would require a complete overhaul of our relations of production, because under capitalism the constant imperative to reduce operating costs for business enterprise will mean that whatever is cheapest will predominate, and it seems inevitable to me that machines and computers will be able to perform most if not all service tasks more cheaply than humans in the near future.
In turn this will absolutely necessitate UBI or something similar, again unless we are willing to undertake policies that would keep people employed even where it would be cheaper and more efficient to use robots instead, but capitalist production and probably private property itself would be collateral damage.
I recall a discussion on Volconvo where this topic came up, and someone made the same argument you did using the example of British cryptography in World War II. His argument was that the increasing use of computers to increase efficiency in intercepting and decoding German transmissions actually coincided with a huge increase in the number of people employed by the cryptography group, as the British went from decoding ~15% of German transmission to ~85%.

My response was simple. There are a finite number of German transmissions to decode. Assume we are decoding 95%, or 97% - the actual amount doesn't matter, just assume we've reached the point of diminishing returns. We're decoding all the German transmissions we can decode, and if we decode any more we'll suffer big decreases in efficiency. At that point any increase in the efficiency of the process will result in fewer people necessary to accomplish the same amount of work.

By analogy there are only so many pursuits and endeavors that society can engage in. As soon as an economy reaches maturity you will reach that point of diminishing returns, where new endeavors become far less efficient and small gains require disproportionate amounts of investment to achieve. Think of drilling for oil as an example - as soon as you pick all the low-hanging fruit you're stuck trying to pull the oil out of tar sands, which is a far more resource-intensive process than tapping and exploiting a liquid oil field.

At that point, society either decides we want to keep capitalist production intact, in which case there will simply not be enough jobs to go around (we've already reached that point to some extent- the private sector simply can't or won't employ everyone, which is why I think the government should act as an employer of last resort) or we will decide we want to take care of each other and won't care about efficiency in the service sector while machines and computers take care of our agriculture and manufacturing (another word for that would be 'communism.')

Significantly, that rule wasn't included in the original version intended as a critique of capitalism.