We don't all have **** jobs we hate. I like what I do. For a big chunk of last year I got paid very good money to do basically nothing while working from home full time. I was miserable. YMMV.

The happiest dogs are working dogs. Work is a reward in prison. Etc. I believe we are biologically driven to need to feel useful to our tribe. Not everyone is that good at filling idle time with meaningful, fulfilling activities. For me anyway - boredom is much worse than work. Creating jobs for myself, that no one cares if I do them or not, doesn't seem to work out very well.

The idea is to keep increasing salaries as the work week diminishes. To put productivity gains towards working less for the average person - rather than as straight profit to the global elite.

Based on personal experience with myself and others? No.

Btw I am all for providing free medical care, education, food an other things. I just think most people are wired to need to feel like they have a purpose in life. It's one of those biological imperatives that grand social experimenters tend to pooh pooh or ignore. Sort of like how the communists ignored personal incentives.

There's a big difference in boosting people out of poverty vs. saying "Here's a check for the rest of your life that's just enough to get you by w/o working."

I'm all for all kinds of radical Star Trek utopia ideas to stave off the inevitable lack of work due to automation. I just think UBI ignores human nature - which generally dooms social programs to failure.

How about a 3-day work week for everyone instead?

It also happens to be the only government safety net that directly benefits... young white male libertarians.

In a world where most surplus is created by machines, Humans can "work" in numerous other ways.

I know some people on dole patrol who are miserable and feckless get stoned and watch TV all day. I know some who love it, they play music and are creative all day and generally dont own a TV. They still tend to get stoned tho.

In a future with less work society and culture will probably adapt to create social arenas in which proficiency gained via practise (skill) still has a lot of value even if it is not directly monetary in nature.

Asians will make all their kids do Arts and Music degrees.

These are good points, but I also think that UBI only "works" from a libertarian perspective if, after it has been provided and x% of people **** up and blow it all, the government is willing to tell them that they're not going to get more money or government services. The "x" will not be zero, and I think the biggest reason that UBI can't really survive is that once it's in place there will be a demand for the government to "fill gaps" in the social safety net. So there is a significant risk of ending up with UBI + a bunch of government social programs eventually anyway.

Perhaps the reason human nature generally dooms social programs to failure is because someone always feels like they're getting screwed. "Those welfare queens keep pumping out kids and not working" "Old people are using my tax dollars to get a new knee and dick pills" "Those immigrants are taking my spot in line for this job or that healthcare or that school for my child".


UBI does a great job of mitigating many of those sentiments by taxing absurd levels of income and wealth and providing a baseline level of dignity for human life.

The way many of the social programs are currently structured, there really are income traps for people making near and slightly above poverty line incomes who benefit from taxpayer funded support systems. The structure incentivizes people who assume they are unlikely to substantially increase their earning potential on any reasonable timescale to give up trying.

UBI is still a concept that comes in various forms. It is currently being tested in countries all over the world with mixed results. Important to note however that the countries with the most progressive tax systems also index higher on quality of life, fewest children living in poverty, and overall happiness measures

OECD Better Life Index is a resource that allows you to rate the importance of different quality of life metrics on a sliding scale and create your own idealized vision of a modern society, then compare different countries on that index.

The also benefit from the internet's other favorite welfare program: free college. If you follow lefty thirtysomething types on Twitter you get exposed to a torrent of extremely specific love for baby bonuses.

I would say this is only somewhat true. Any tax-funded benefit is effectively means-tested, because some people are net payers and some people are net recipients and (at least if the system makes any sense) it's the people with means who are the payers. (This can be seen very clearly in negative income tax proposals, which are functionally equivalent to UBI but work by starting a regular income tax system from a base of an $x refund rather than zero.)

The big benefit from UBI from an efficiency perspective is that it centralizes all the different means-testing schedules into one rational system rather than the insane mish-mash we currently have. A hugely underappreciated problem with the current system (and I think it's especially bad in the U.S.) is that different means-testing schedules stack on top of each other and cause the working poor to face effective marginal tax/transfer rates of close to or over 100% over a pretty substantial range of income. That's a huge practical disincentive for people who are poor to increase their market incomes. (There is a trade-off, in that more gradual phase-outs under UBI mean you need higher tax rates somewhere else to pay for them, which creates deadweight loss, but it's certainly a good trade.)

It's not much different from Democrats hitting Trump on the insane security cost of the Trump family's living arrangements or their sketchy business trips. The money is trivial when you compare it to the multi-trillion dollar federal budget, but also it's a lot of money and it annoys people to see it wasted.

twitter.com/JOE_co_uk/status/840165524038377472

Fully automated gay space communism with dolphins is and will always be the goal.

To piggyback on pvn's point here, ****ing Hillary trying to flank Bernie from the "left" on free college by wanting to means test it was a low key symptom of why we're all ****ed.

One thing that ~zero political pundits who ever talk about this **** ever covers is how all these complicated eligibility systems lead to an ENORMOUS investiture of time and effort by the poor that they should be using on their ****ing lives, and essentially it sets a base line of "having your **** together enough to be able to do your taxes 6 times in a year" to get government benefits.

Thus the poorest of the poor, who often are uneducated or mentally ill or homeless, are excluded from these programs.

It's a moral outrage, and the GOP is instead focusing on them buying candy and like 6 of them who won the lottery.

Where have you lived that has a UBI? It seems like you're saying that you're the type of person who doesn't know what to do with unstructured time. Okay, well, others are different. You can collect your UBI and still have a normal job at a company.

Again, how does a UBI prevent people from fulfilling their purpose in life? Your theory is that, given a UBI, most people would just chill out on their sofas and eat Oreos? I doubt this very much. Most people have dreams, hopes, goals, aspirations, and are, as you say, innately driven toward service to the social whole. If they are "biological imperatives," these drives wouldn't disappear simply because the government ensures a certain level of subsistence.

This is a good point. UBI can replace unemployment insurance and even food stamps, but stuff like housing and medical care are still going to need to be bolstered by separate programs.

Nobody will blow their UBI monies on useless **** which is a good thing. Because if they did they'd be really hurting with no more govt assistance.

When do we start drug testing recipients of corporate welfare? Personally, I'm sick of sugar and ethanol farmers living on the dole with no accountability.

That's the thing though - some would blow it, and then the government would have to create additional welfare programs for those who did.

I agree. I was just giving my answer to that question about why UBI is more acceptable to libertarians, not my opinion on what I think is best.

For this reason and the one Suzzer has been talking about I'm skeptical that UBI would be good if it were too large anyway.

Laws that promote fewer hours worked per week, more public services including those which keep people out of the work force like free college, public support of the arts, perhaps some non military national service, and maybe some UBI as well seem more conductive to a working society than just converting it all into a cash payment.

And essentially that's what we already have and just need to fiddle with the dials in the Bernie Sanders and not the Paul Ryan direction.

It's true, the rich could certainly burn up $25k rather quickly. Then they'd come back with their hands out and their tails between their legs like always.

Many benefits should absolutely be a right and no questions asked just like public school. Health care and college could definitely fit in this category.

But the lowest hanging fruit example of what you're talking about has got to be school lunches.

Also, it's shameful that if we can't provide real care to mentally ill homeless people they can't at least have a place to go to the bathroom and to get a sandwich no questions asked without having to go through a system which many of them have a hard time dealing with.

Agree with Suzzer about work. Most people aren't going to write novels, they'll drink or get hooked on opiates or whatever.

Some time after agribusiness spends less than $126M/year lobbying.

Trump China strategy working. Just picked up the US IP work for a $10M/yr mainland Chinese mobile game developer, so I'll be repatriating some of the funds they're making. I sued them on behalf of another developer a few years ago for copyright infringement and I guess they liked my work. (The were represented by a BigLaw firm and the case settled pretty early.) I'm in So. Cal. and have seen some firms with Chinese business but most have some ties with China. I'm just a white guy from So. Cal.

This whole BBC Guest with Children thing is unfortunate because he really should have just picked his daughter up on his lap and continued. No need to be ashamed that you're a working parent, embrace it!

Libertarians have this crazy idea that life, at least in this country, is mostly a meritocracy. If you believe that life is mostly a meritocracy and that people are in the situations that their in because of their own choices, then UBI still makes sense. Like, they think the playing field is already level and UBI keeps it level, while all the other welfare programs give people unfair advantages. Of course, if they ever got out of their parents basements and met people who were different from them and had different backgrounds, they'd recognize how their views don't really make sense in the real world.

Put another way, if everyone was a young, white, male whose family had a little bit of extra money while they were growing up, then UBI would make sense while every other program would literally only be used by people taking advantage of it.

Personally, my ideal world going forward involves us recognizing that it takes less than the whole current workforce to provide everyone with everything they need, providing food/shelter/education/leisure to everyone for basically free, then directing excess labor into research type jobs which would hopefully lead towards increased scientific advancement.