Quote from: merchantofzeny on August 14, 2018, 03:11:15 PM

I can already imagine...

"Oh, I'm already out of money and unemployed but I need to have an emergency surgery done. Would you really be so cruel to not help me? It's just money, I will pay you back, I swear! Don't be so heartless! Cry

"

Quote from: GlumMasterpiece on August 09, 2018, 03:10:53 PM

The more we talk about it, the more it seems like it would be much less simple than was originally proposed. The idea of just giving every person an equal amount of money every month quickly became something else. What ago should they start receiving it? What about then they're too old to work anymore to supplement the UBI? How do you determine how old is too old to work? What if somebody is married? What if somebody has kids to support? What if somebody already makes a lot of money? What is somebody is from a poor area and another person lives in an expensive city? It seems like we'd still need big government organizations to regulate it all. Cry

Right, that's why while I think that it's a good idea in principle, it'll probably never be done, and almost certainly never be done in a way which is a net positive. The point is to reduce the size of government (in number of regulations, government employees, etc.) and encourage some amount of personal responsibility (at least the responsibility to ask private charities for money if necessary), but instead you're going to end up with a huge mess of limitations and exceptions which would rival the US tax code in size.

I'd be theoretically OK IMO to progressively phase out UBI at very high income levels, but I wouldn't particularly support that because it requires the government to know your income, and I strongly favor eliminating the income tax. Taxation is theft and should be totally eliminated, but income tax is the worst type; it'd be better to replace income tax with sales tax and/or property tax. (If there is an income tax, then you can do negative income tax, a similar system to UBI supported by Milton Friedman.)

The amount should not depend on marital status. If two or more people are able to have a better standard of living by living together, then that's fine. Charles Murray suggests that his proposed $13k/year is not usually enough to live alone, and would require either marriage or rooming.

The amount should not depend on location. If costs are too high where you live, then you should move. If costs are low where you live, then that's fine. People without much money should go to low-cost areas; it's like supply & demand.

Minimum wage is basically universally agreed amongst economists to be counter-productive to everyone. The only thing that it can possibly do is prevent two people from making a deal which they otherwise would've considered worthwhile. It decreases employment and has very little effect on wages. With UBI, even the (totally false) justification for minimum wage that it's necessary for people to get enough money to live would be removed.

Quote from: GlumMasterpiece on August 10, 2018, 10:36:45 AM

You raise a really good point about how much we are working. People work so much these days, but we clearly don't need it.

This is something that also bothers me. People always frame prosperity/welfare as needing to find a well-paying 9-to-5 job, but is it really necessary for people to work so much? 100 years ago it was common for a single person to support two adults and several children on his own, but now it's common for two parents to work full-time and still feel squeezed. Standards of living have increased, of course, and materialism also plays a big factor, but the whole culture seems wrong. It's probably also due in large part to the government uselessly consuming so much of the economy.

Especially with increasing automation, people are going to have to spend more time on free-form, entrepreneurial sorts of things, and that's good. There's no need to force people into soul-sucking 9-to-5 jobs. Already, I suspect that if you're earning less than $30k/year in the US, then you could probably make more money by becoming an independent contractor of some sort, even if you're completely unskilled.

I fear that governments will create near-pointless 9-to-5 jobs as a form of welfare (like eg. the New Deal CCC) in order to guarantee a "living wage", which would be just unbelievably stupid. Just send people a check and the vast majority of them will on their own do much more useful and fulfilling work.