Pfhorrest wrote:Tyndmyr wrote:Can I create a new company without somehow conveying shares of stock/dividends to the government in this hypothetical scenario? If not, there's no meaningful difference from taxation.
Of course. Though if you trade it publicly, the government can buy some of it just like anyone else. And if you end up with a huge market cap, the government will likely end up buying a lot of it, like any reasonable index fund would.
As far as that making the government indifferent to the wellbeing of its citizens who are no longer its source of income: is a mutual fund indifferent to its investors? Is a business indifferent to its owners? We're talking about a scenario where an organization that belongs to the people, a democratic government, owns shares of lots of businesses, and uses the proceeds from those businesses to benefit the people to whom the organization (the government) belongs. How does that lead to the government finding the people irrelevant?
Ah, this is far more interesting, then.
There might be potential problems, but they are different problems than a forcible regime would be. On the one hand, it'd give the government a direct stake in keeping the economy healthy, though the economy's effect on politics is already significant. Flip side of it is that it does provide incentives for collusion with whichever large businesses the government owns stock of. For instance, they might be inclined to draft harsher IP laws, or to erect barriers to small businesses to favor large companies they happen to own.
I have some concerns about combining the forces of corporations and government even if we can avoid property violations. In this, even the socialists and what not probably agree. Some counterbalance/division of powers is good to prevent any one power structure from becoming overwhelmingly dominant. This distrust is generally expressed as a distrust of government in libertarian circles, but in reality, power structures are power structures and people are people. Too much power flowing to a single power structure, with no alternatives/balancing powers is likely to create a bad situation.
Thesh wrote:And reason says that at least enough people will work so that all people can meet their basic needs. Most likely more. Your only real argument here is one of personal preference.
Existing data on welfare cliffs says that they will not.
Oh, I believe they'll work to attempt to meet *their* basic needs. However, disconnecting incentives from work results in people choosing not to work. Volunteering is all well and good, but most volunteering is done by people who already work(ed) for pay. If you don't lack for anything, sure, one may choose to perform emotionally rewarding work without pay.
This doesn't mean that the garbage man will pick up his garbage without pay. Charity is a tool that does not work for all situations.
Thesh wrote:And when they do, someone will do the job to make more.
If this were always true, shortages wouldn't exist in the real world, and yet they do.
Not everyone can perform every job. Not everyone will perform every job. If say, health care is needed, we cannot simply assume it will arise in the absence of paying for it. Lots of people want health care, but do not have health care.
Thesh wrote:Because there is not a single person on this planet who would work without compensation.
You don't need a single person. You need everyone.
Thesh wrote:Even if 80% of the work stops, there wouldn't be poverty. Everyone in the US would still be above the poverty line, as long as there is equality.
That is true in a technical sense. If everyone's average, nobody's below average. However, reducing everyone to a mere fraction of the current average would be impoverishing our society.
Thesh wrote:Goods and services will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever run out. That you think this will happen tells me you are a sociopath who would rather die than risk someone else benefiting from your labor without compensation.
You...realize that goods and services running out is a thing that happens in the real world, yes? And not for lack of people working? I'm not sure what kind of upbringing you had, but the world has a great many places which have shortages. Capitalism didn't invent this, either. Poverty, shortages, and barely getting by describes a fair amount of human history.
Someone not working for no pay isn't a sociopath. People who are benefiting from safety nets without working/volunteering right now are generally not sociopaths. They are simply people trying to manage their needs. If you're short on food money, it's challenging enough to fix that problem for yourself without trying to fix it for all of society.
Kit. wrote:Tyndmyr wrote:It appeared you were proposing that the effects of tax rates were discontinuous. IE, that a 99.99% tax rate behaves wildly differently than a 100% tax rate.
With a growing economy, it seems to be quite possible.
For example, consider the following scenario: due to AI revolution, per capita GDP grows 10000x, but 99.99% of the output starts to be considered basic human necessities and covered by UBI. Then the money after tax will have about the same incentive as it does now.
If you can figure out how to make GDP boom by 10000000% yearly with super-AIs, go nuts. Until then, this is pretty much speculative sci-fi. Probably roughly the same order of magnitude as entirely solving death.
That said, if you can get 99.9% as much by not working as you can by spending a third of your life...you would need to value your time exceedingly little in order to consider the latter a good deal. Regardless of what the base dollar amounts are.
Kit. wrote:Tyndmyr wrote:I don't know of any government that's tried a 100% tax on the entire population, since it's so obviously punitive.
Bolshevik Russia in its early years, for example, and it still won the civil war. But we digress again. We are not talking about punitive taxation, we are talking about an economy with 100% (or close to 100%) UBI.
And if we're considering that as a model, we have an awful lot of deaths to lay at that model's feet. There is a reason that most proponents of socialism hasten to advocate a model other than communist Russia/the USSR.
Kit. wrote:Chen wrote:Who’s going to volunteer to do shitty, unfulfilling jobs like trash pickup or random retail sales?
Robots.
I don't like the idea that the current system coerces some people into doing uninteresting jobs, and I would be personally interested in doing a job that would make uninteresting jobs gone.
By all means, make robots for those jobs. But right now, we have an awful lot of uninteresting jobs that have not yet been displaced by robots. How do you propose filling them until robots have been made for all of them? Is there a better method than choice/compensation?
Thesh wrote:A lot of people do a lot more cleaning in their homes than is absolutely necessary, because they prefer to live that way. It's the same with every job, really. People will run the stores because they are necessary for the people to live the lifestyle they want to live. People don't really require monetary compensation to work. Yeah, some jobs suck, but if they are necessary then people will do them.
So, you believe the person who likes wearing designer apparel will work retail, without pay, because of her love of the lifestyle?
The lifestyle of the customer is not the lifestyle of the retail worker. And hey, rich people could do this right now, if they wanted to.
DaBigCheez wrote:Based on my experience herding cats in MMOs, I am dubious of the claim that people will, voluntarily and spontaneously, organize themselves to cover all the proper roles needed without external incentive. It's usually more along the lines of "leadership begs and wheedles and pleads with people to cover the necessary roles, heavily incentivizes them, and then about 5% of the people finally start to pitch in out of self-interest". (And that's when there's a clear leadership and a clear list of well-defined roles that need to be filled, rather than more murky and amorphous real-life scenarios.)
This also matches my MMO experience. Without some structure, most guilds are dumpster fires. With structure...many guilds are still dumpster fires. And even the quality ones, a fair degree of effort goes into maintaining the whole thing. Even then, you occasionally get people trying to circumvent the rules for their own gain, cause drama, or god knows what else.
Real life is often similar. A lot of systems just barely work, and people, being people, will destroy them in a heatbeat in the absence of something actively working to keep stuff organized.
DaBigCheez wrote:I can see where you're going with the "people will do what needs to be done to eat" idea, but...it seems most people are much more willing to "do what needs to be done" when it has a direct, measurable impact on *their own* experience. If there's not enough food, I could see people starting up their own gardens, to have food. I have more trouble seeing people starting up their own gardens, to contribute all the food to a central fund such that their garden has next to zero impact on the food they wind up with.
Yeah, home gardens would make sense. Small scale organization, maybe. Depends on how much they like each other, but small groups can sometimes get along well enough that a charismatic or hard working person can get them to all chip in. The bigger the organization gets, and the less an individual contribution matters....the more that all breaks down.
Thesh wrote:People will do things for nothing more than social rewards, and because it's part of their culture - we grow up learning to imitate those around us, after all. You have an experience with capitalism, where people would fail to survive in the wild because they are unable to work together for the good of the group. Humans are forced to live far below their potential.
If you don't like the culture, you can change it. Japan, for instance, has a significantly different culture in many of the respects you discuss than the US does. They still have compensation, though. Having different cultural values doesn't require a UBI.