I don’t think “allowing you to do business” is the arbitrary motivator for taxes. Societies deem it more efficient to pool resources for common needs we all have. This is taxes.

Conventional welfare also provides for a person’s “basic needs”, usually with the condition that that person is actively searching for an opportunity to add value.

People need to add value for societies to prosper. Wealth doesn’t just appear. Bear in mind that the only reason, e.g., Sweden can spend so much on welfare is after long periods of wealth creation through Capitalism.

If enough people are on free money with no incentive to work, there isn’t enough wealth generated to pay for the people living on free money.

> And for people who can't or won't produce value, fine, here is basic income for you so that you can still fulfil your basic needs.

Who gets to decide what a basic need is, anyway? Since I’m paying for it through taxes, I would deem your basic needs as shelter, food, and water. Warmth? Luxury. Television? Luxury.

> So its not one happy person at the expense of someone else.

It really is though. There’s no other way to put it. It’s the consumption of wealth on the back of someone else’s labour.

Yeah, that's why they should pay you in cash. Every basic income discussion I've ever seen has been on that basis.

> model of taking from the productive sources and rewarding everyone else

No, you take from productive sources and reward everyone, even the productive sources. Basic income is not just for the poor.

> I spend extra effort doing something else which is harder and my earnings are taken away

Only a portion of them. I fail to see how your argument is not also an argument against all taxation, period.

> The productive people are dragged down and discouraged

The productive people produce if they want more than the minimum. If they do produce, then they get whatever they can earn, and they pay a portion to the government in taxes.

I disagree that this is generally true (all of human history shows that humans generally want to continually gain both improved material position over time and more than those they see around them if there is an avenue to do so.)

Moreover, that's a rather distant theoretical complaint, anyway, because a basic income that provides anything more than the kind of marginal existence provided by American public welfare programs now (but with fewer disincentives to work) is probably far outside the ability of the economy to sustain without enormous technological progress.

> I think we need to figure out how to empower people.

I don't think anything you've said is incompatible with something like basic income.

What could be more empowering than knowing your basic needs will be taken care of? From that position of strength you can negotiate with others based on mutual benefit rather than avoiding the consequences of not meeting your basic needs for survival. You must be enticed into a transaction rather than coerced no matter how circumspect that coercion.

If people needed to be forced to add value to the world through the threat of starvation or homelessness HN wouldn't exist. Why would people with means continue transacting? I don't believe the poor are much different, they will nurture their potential and provide what they can to the world because the trade leaves them better off.

But that happens already in the country where I live. People pay taxes, and via taxes, we are able to provide health care and university education to everyone. I like this system, and I'm one of them who pay taxes. It's good for me if everyone is well educated, and healthy.

Whether or not a basic income would work, depends on the number of citizens. Fairly few, and many efficient machines and robots that can do most of the hard work, then it'll work okay. Too many people, then basic income won't work I think. In the future, thanks to contraceptives, I think there won't be too many people.

This is a fallacy. A woman working is not going to "choose" this any more than you are going to go from being gainfully employed to sitting on your ass all day playing video games. Setting the right thresholds on both the income and the reductions removes any incentive to become a non-working drag on society. If however, you did make that choice, a basic income allows you to realize quickly how crap life is and then correct yourself, rather than slide further down the have not scale.

What's more, even if you did choose to sit around playing video games on $10K a year or whatever, you are fed and likely housed, and therefore not stealing from me, getting arrested and now costing me $75K a year in prison expenses.

> You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy

Taxation is not fucking charity. We do have every right to choose where our taxes go. They're called elections. However, considering (as I stated and you conveniently ignored) that your wealth was entirely derived from the society at large, the sustainable maintenance of said society is in your utmost interest, whether you think so or not. I have more interests than I can possibly afford to donate to. That's why I contribute to a collective fund and then hire managers to disperse said dollars with an eye to betterment of society as a whole.

No, it's "we're all paying for it". I'm in a high enough tax bracket that I wouldn't benefit (financially) from a basic income, and neither would the vast majority of my friends and relations. I'm still in favour of one, because I think it's better for society overall.

Voluntary and opt-in programs are ludicrous for taxation. The benefits produced by the spending of those tax dollars are universal; roads, healthcare, public education, law and order, etc. are critical to a functioning society and would fall apart if anyone could just choose to freeload off those of us with sense.

You seem hung up on the idea that "working" is equivalent to "producing value".

We live in a society where the system is frequently optimized to employ as many people as possible. This creates incentives to encourage a lot of work being done to win zero-sum games rather than producing value for the economy as a whole. I would argue that we are already in a situation where the majority of the population can be supported by a minority of the workers. We have long been living in a world where the limits on economic growth is consumption, not production.

If we instead have the need to encourage people to find what motivates them and provide tools to the motivated to maximize that productivity I think you will see very different social structures arise.

Beyond that, I think the removal of the lazy from the work force is actually a net positive. Employers can spend less time filtering the mostly useless to find good workers. The 10x producers among us don't have to spend as much working around the lazy coworkers and managers. Even the "lazy" among us have the freedom to discover their passions and find ways to contribute more to society than they would as a low end wage slave.

> Yes, non-workers will create music, art, will travel, write blogs, etc., but none of that generates enough income to cover even their own cost.

I think you are selling people short here, or perhaps projecting your dreams on others. There is also a great deal of work that people want to do but the value of which is not easily captureable by an employer.

> If you raise the taxes on the people left working, and let others live relatively normal lives without working, you'll get less and less of the former and more of the later.

This is actually a good thing as long as you maintain sufficient production. As production declines, the standard of living provided by basic income declines which increases the incentives of the semi-lazy to work, which then leads to increased production. As long as UBI is carefully phased in, the system should equilibrilize.

Most of these dynamics aren't possible to explore in limited studies like this one. All these types of studies can do is dispell common myths about individual bevaior and the only way to really find out what will happen is to gradually phase in a UBI.

>Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work.

I'm assuming the OP is funding basic income from the businesses since they are replacing the human labor with automation. This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something. I'm not arguing for or against this here.

The math does in fact work out if the cost of basic income is less than the productivity increase created by the increased automation.

If the idea is to give everybody money so that you can tax it more, you're engaging in economic waste. Without being able to increase productivity in other areas to cover the lost value, you will, hopefully slowly, but eventually trend towards zero, and a failure of the system overall.

Encouraging economic productivity in an environment in which nobody has to be productive may or may not be possible, I honestly haven't any idea, but its certainty doesn't seem terribly obvious to me.

I'm sure you can cite evidence of this claim from basic income pilot programs, then? (there has been a few).

> Most people are also selfish. The idea that they'll all start doing things to benefit others is a bit far fetched.

Here we agree, but it's beside the point as there's a very good reason for them to do things to benefit themselves that will have the side effect of benefiting others:

They'll make more money. The point of basic income programs is to create a lower threshold that is predictable, simple to administer and unconditional. It's not to create a ceiling on income.

> Communism (Which is what this is), has failed.

This is quite comical, because it has nothing to do with communism, and indeed the idea predates socialism by about 300 years.

It has over the centuries had supporters spanning large parts of the political spectrum. One of the important aspects of basic income is that it is not particularly ideological in its basic form:

There's no implication that the basic income is meant for widespread redistribution, though some proponents wants it to be high enough for that. Many proponents, in fact, specifically makes the argument that done properly it may potentially reduce government expenditure by eliminating a whole host of benefits programs that are expensive to run and hence cut administrative costs. This is an argument often made by liberalists (as in classical liberals by the European definition) for example.

In fact, if you were to push for a form of basic income that would be high enough to make it something most people would happily live on if they could otherwise work, it would be fundamentally at odds with Marx ideas of communism. In "Critique of The Gotha Programme" he skewered the idea that communism involved equal pay, by pointing out that this would be extremely unfair:

People have different needs. Instead, according to Marx, the goal for a communist society should be from each according to ability, to each according to need - in other words: while a basic income could fit within a communist framework, as the only source of income it would just create different problems: it would overpay people who choose to not contribute even though they are able to, and would underpay people with special needs.

This, incidentally is also the reason pretty much no proponents - regardless where they fall on the political spectrum - advocate a basic income that is particularly high. It's called basic income for a reason.

More fundamentally, in my view, is that basic income represents the citizens pro rata share of a portion of taxation that represents rents on the commons; the purpose government serves is to collect and distribute for efficiency as N:1 + 1:M interchanges involve transaction costs for N+M transactions rather than the N*M that are required for N:M direct transactions, but government has no reason to choose how the rents are spent (and there are, as you note, all kinds of pragmatic downsides when the government does that.)

No: Just because the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker all get a minimal $X per year does not mean that you've created a village of economic clones where trade is dead and currency is pointless.

They will continue to have different ways of making money, different assets, different needs/expenses, different price-preferences, etc.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Would you prefer to have poor people dying in the streets? The measure of civilization since the French Revolution has not been how a country treats its wealthy, but how it treats the poorest. As societies, we have agreed that humans have a right to life and happiness but for the most part we're still too much in love with the myth of merit to follow the consequences of this idea -- and it is certainly in the interest of the wealthy and powerful that this should continue. It flatters a man's self-love to believe that he has earned his place in life by his own sweat and toil, when the reality is that if divested of social relations and one's normal milieu very few of us would rise to any degree of prominence. We have slowly accepted the idea that hardship, debility, or infirmity should not necessarily be a judgement against a person's worth, but we are too infatuated with ourselves to believe it wholeheartedly. And so we grant a basic existence, but conditionally: only those who meet an arbitrary moral standard are permitted to live. Basic income recognizes that imposing that moral standard is itself immoral. If you agree that citizens have the right to not die in the streets, or at the least that it is unseemly for a wealthy society to permit such, then you cannot argue against a basic income with any degree of consistency.

This is exactly taxation of all kinds. And your framing presupposes that these fruits that would be obtainable without the social structure that those payments support.

Not to mention that, 'fruits of their labor' is a highly tendentious way of talking about a capitalist system. The fruits of their capital, perhaps. By and large, capital owners already extract a very large proportion of the 'fruits' of their employees labor.

I think it is a very dubious argument whether basic income would all balance out, but it is no different in kind from any other social collectivism.

I never understand this perspective. Supporting UBI is a statement that all people deserve a bare-minimum existence, even if they don't or can't work. I would expect that UBI would create a less productive workforce in the same way that 40 hour work weeks and environmental protections make a less productive workforce.

If you think the only path to righteousness is through a lifetime of toil, then it /might/ make sense to judge poor people's merit as a function of their 'productivity' (i.e., ability to make someone else money), but that is a pretty old-school stance in my opinion.

I'm always interested in these sorts of arguments and how certain some people are about how it will all end up. Could I ask how you have managed to be so certain about this?

Personally, I don't think economics is enough of a settled science to guarantee very much. The real world tests people have done so far have been intriguing, but I think a basic income requires a lot more empirical testing to know for sure.

Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work.

> If we don't need people to work,

This is at the heart of the confusion. There is no "we". Other people do not need the workers. Those workers? They need to work.

Someone still has to work to produce the food that UBI wastrels consume. Please, explain to me why we should feed everyone for free? What gives them the right to commandeer someone else's labour while they languish?

All of these schemes to shift taxes here and burdens there ultimately just have the effect of making it so that the people who do work and do produce value are shouldering the burden for everyone else. You can print money, but you cannot print calories.