>With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working.
I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start working. Social security in many countries mean that it's rational to either work many hours per week or work zero hours per week. Basic income means that every hour worked or dollar earned increases your standard of living, thus creating a higher incentive to work.
>You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear.
There are countries like Finland with a social security guarantee. You can pretty much refuse to work and get $1000/month as a social security (though there are details and sanctions which make this more complex in reality). Anyway, the point is this: in Finland you can already be a "parasite" and some people do that.
Finland doesn't have a basic income guarantee. We also have a system where living on basic social security (toimeentulotuki) working 5 hours per week doesn't really make sense. The effective tax rate for working only a little is 90-100%. If you make 100 euros per week, the social security is decreased by 100 euros. With basic income the effective tax rate would be 20-30%, so working would make sense.
In Finland you pretty much have either full-time/part-time workers (20+ hours) or people who are completely unemployed.
Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more.
An unemployed person living on $1000/month basic income can increase his or her standard of living substantially by getting paid $200/month more. If someone is working full time and getting paid $3000/month, a $200 increase per month has a lesser increase in standard of living.
The current social security system has an incentive to be completely unemployed. Basic income means that it makes sense to work 1 hours, 2 hours, 5 hours, 10hours, 20 hours or 40 hours per week. All different kinds of working situations are naturally covered under basic income guarantee.
>I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start working. Social security in many countries mean that it's rational to either work many hours per week or work zero hours per week. Basic income means that every hour worked or dollar earned increases your standard of living, thus creating a higher incentive to work.
I am what in the US you would consider a "strong libertarian" - and I would say, I would be in favor of instituting a basic income if we got rid of the minimum wage.
A basic income would hardly be libertarian. Although I also tend to libertarian, I do see a role for government in addressing cases of market failure, or where the market fails to meet certain moral standards. An example would be if somebody working in the best job they can find doesn't earn enough to pay for basic accommodation and food. The government would provide the safety net in this case. However there must still be some incentive for people in this situation to try and find better work (or perhaps move to a better location). Otherwise, you have people simply taking whatever job they find the most enjoyable, living off the government subsidy, and leaving other less desirable jobs unfilled(paying slightly better, so according to the market more important, but leaving the employee no better off due to the government subsidy.)
It's particularly silly with the current system that you can legally work for nothing, be a volunteer or an unpaid intern, but you can't work for $1 per hour. If you make low paid work illegal, you make the low paid unemployed.
Perhaps some day all of this "scarcity economics" will be moot, if we could invent the star-trek style replicator, I suspect "work" would move to a volunteer model.
> Otherwise, you have people simply taking whatever job they find the most enjoyable, living off the government subsidy, and leaving other less desirable jobs unfilled
What's wrong with this, honestly? If less desirable jobs go unfilled, I'd expect that people would find ways to mitigate the need for human beings in those jobs. Let's let the market figure out what those jobs are and if we can do such mitigation. That seems preferable to the current situation, where people such as yourself say that we need people to be placed into explicitly undesirable positions.
Let's actually see this problem before we anticipate it.
> Let's actually see this problem before we anticipate it.
The problem has always existed. It's the reason that people need to be paid for most jobs, since they won't do them just for fun. If people know that they'll be paid a decent amount for doing any job at all, then there will be a lot of recreational activities which are thinly disguised to look like jobs.
That's why it's an income guarantee - so you don't have to invent an activity that looks like work in order to receive money.
So in your case under a BIG, they would get some money and pursue leisurly activities. This in contrast to someone doing a task that needs to be done (say dispose of garbage), who would get some money from the BIG and a substantially bigger sum in actual wage. The service (getting your garbage disposed) would have to be priced accordingly.
Some activities (such as musicians) would be a gray area, but it's not a problem - people can make music and if someone buys it the musicians get extra income.
If there are services needed which are very unappealing, they will be priced high. Also, the incentive to automate them (and thus reduce human suffering) will be high as well.
These sort of pensions are already available to some people, in some countries (typically the elderly and the disabled). However governments are struggling to pay for them, and the eligibility criteria tend to get tightened (in my country, the old-age pension age will increase to 67). I don't see how they could be expanded to the entire population without destroying the governments' budget, and if they tried to raise such massive sums through taxation, destroying the economy too (and causing massive flight of the wealthy to lower-taxing countries.)
The availability of BIG to people who don't actually need it is about the principle of BIG: that it doesn't care who you are. I'd find it interesting to consider how we might let people decline their BIG stipend in return for... something.
> I'd find it interesting to consider how we might let people decline their BIG stipend in return for... something.
Why would we do that? We could instead just sell the
"something", which has the same effect, without defeating the point of BIG by complicating the BIG administration.
> It's the reason that people need to be paid for most jobs, since they won't do them just for fun.
There's a huge difference between (a) not being interested in doing a job, but doing it because you're getting money for it and (b) not being interested in working and doing it because you're getting money for it.
A basic income is libertarian in that it allows individuals to actually participate in the free market as rational actors, and puts control over use into the hands of many individuals instead of in the hands of the government.
I think eliminating the minimum wage is reasonable combined with a guaranteed stipend. However, I think you will find that "undesirable" jobs are (rightfully) paid quite well. Possibly even better than now since this system would better balance the power between employers and employees.
I am what most would call a conservative and if what was being offered was a complete elimination of all social services, entitlements, and government largess, then count me in.
I would much rather a BI than having this menacingly powerful centralized vote buying machine.
Under-the-table arrangements are like the majority of BitTorrent traffic, economies that occur despite rules because there is net utility. People still pay taxes and still license (not own) retail movies.
In reality I think you'd see people moving from collecting social security/SSDI/etc. and getting paid in cash under the table to collecting BI and working in licit jobs and paying some taxes/having some employment protections.
You might also lose some people who "can't work" for economic reasons of UI/SSDI/etc. and volunteer instead to the paid workforce.
> Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more.
What in the case that the person doesn't want to get paid more? They can live comfortably enough on what is given to them and value the free time more than the extra money.
Essentially, by keeping the basic income guarantee sufficiently low that most people don't want to do that. Note that having everyone want to work is not necessary or even necessarily desirable, you just need to be able to maintain a low enough dependency ratio that the working people don't have to sacrifice much more than what they gain from such system.
I personally think that the employment market for next few decades will continue to be characterized by endemic structural unemployment. We will continue to destroy jobs faster than they are created, through automation and efficiency improvements. What's going away especially quickly are the "middle-difficulty" kind of jobs -- between highly trained specialists and burger flippers. For a simple example, self-driving cars will soon revolutionize long-distance trucking. They won't eliminate the jobs completely, but they will significantly reduce their number. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. How do you retrain a 55-year old truck driver to be a software engineer? If you can't, should he go work at Burger King for a much lower wage instead? Maybe as a society we could just allow people like him the possibility of not working at that point?
> Essentially, by keeping the basic income guarantee sufficiently low that most people don't want to do that.
Which, it should be noted, it is pretty much economically impossible not to do except in the very short term, barring vast increases in productivity (or decreases in people's expectations of acceptable living standards.)
> There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. How do you retrain a 55-year old truck driver to be a software engineer? If you can't, should he go work at Burger King for a much lower wage instead?
And, even if you can, how do you do it when he still needs to work full-time to pay his existing bills?
Right now the people who don't want to work cost us a lot of money, a large fraction of which doesn't even go to them.
To a certain degree, I see it like the war on drugs. Yes, ending the war on drugs will increase drug usage, but not as much as many people think, and the costs of dealing with that will be less than the costs we spend on prohibition.
Having some of that happen is a non-problem. It's a post-unskilled-jobs world. There are only a few workable solutions: A shorter work week, mincome, or some combination.
Some people get offended by mincome because it means someone with lower qualifications for work gets to enjoy leisure. They should get over it.
Speaking as one who could live comfortably off a Basic Income of $1,000/month (Which would be 2,000/month for my family- wife and myself and our 1 year old): If this plan were implemented, I would likely do a few things with my new found free time:
1) Develop more open source software
2) Work on my small 4.5 acre farm, growing produce to sell to locals for extra cash.
3) Spend more time helping other people with their needs and wants.
4) Do more substitute teaching, perhaps volunteering to teach a programming class or similar.
While most of the time I would not be earning any significatn income from these activities, I think the societal benefits would far outweigh the cost of providing the Basic Income.
> What in the case that the person doesn't want to get paid more? They can live comfortably enough on what is given to them and value the free time more than the extra money.
And...so, what's the problem with this?
> What would be the way to deal with this?
Why would you want to deal with this? That's a feature, not a bug.
I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start working. Social security in many countries mean that it's rational to either work many hours per week or work zero hours per week. Basic income means that every hour worked or dollar earned increases your standard of living, thus creating a higher incentive to work.
>You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear.
There are countries like Finland with a social security guarantee. You can pretty much refuse to work and get $1000/month as a social security (though there are details and sanctions which make this more complex in reality). Anyway, the point is this: in Finland you can already be a "parasite" and some people do that.
Finland doesn't have a basic income guarantee. We also have a system where living on basic social security (toimeentulotuki) working 5 hours per week doesn't really make sense. The effective tax rate for working only a little is 90-100%. If you make 100 euros per week, the social security is decreased by 100 euros. With basic income the effective tax rate would be 20-30%, so working would make sense.
In Finland you pretty much have either full-time/part-time workers (20+ hours) or people who are completely unemployed.
Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more.
An unemployed person living on $1000/month basic income can increase his or her standard of living substantially by getting paid $200/month more. If someone is working full time and getting paid $3000/month, a $200 increase per month has a lesser increase in standard of living.
The current social security system has an incentive to be completely unemployed. Basic income means that it makes sense to work 1 hours, 2 hours, 5 hours, 10hours, 20 hours or 40 hours per week. All different kinds of working situations are naturally covered under basic income guarantee.