Universal Basic Income – Insanity or Rational?

Armstrong Economics ^ | 01/03/2018 | Martin Armstrong

[Theophilus]

Slavery. State owns what it pays for.

[varon]

Seems to me that paying people not to work has failed or is failing everywhere it has been tried.

I'm certain you'll find quite a few dissenters from your opinion in segments of our agriculture sector. Many a wealthy landowner sits/sat on their a**es and collected hefty checks for not working their fields..........

[abclily]

Slavery.

[catnipman]

“Yes, but what about counterfeit coins?”

ROTFLOL!

[Chode]

insanity, writ large

[Dutch Boy]

You can’t pay employees more than they can produce and expect your company to succeed for long.

[MarkL]

Let’s do an experiment... Choose your favorite national park, and change all the signs from “Don’t feed the animals” to “Feed the animals.” After a year, shut down the park, and check out how the animals are doing the following year.

Mark

[Trillian]

It’s called welfare, and it’s already been tried.
It does not work.

[FreedomPoster]

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm

Insanity is correct. This is a Communist wet dream. Any well educated person who understands human nature all all knows this won’t work. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be turning out enough of those.

[FreedomPoster]

/all all/at all/

[rarestia]

My faith in the Lord is unwavering. My faith in America’s youth is not.

[HamiltonJay]

Its not insanity to ask in a grander context.

We have to come to grips with a reality that is coming, and that is, automation and technology is going to replace most jobs, and will there legitimately be enough work for everyone once that happens?

We aren’t there yet, obviously, and no not all jobs will ever be completely automated, but a LOT are going to be, in the not too distant future. (assuming of course we don’t figure out a way to blow ourselves back to the dark ages and have to start all over again).

Technology advancement is growing exponentially, we truly are not far off from a future where more than mundane and repetitive tasks, that easily fit within certain finite parameters, are going to be automated.

What happens after the tipping point? When there truly are more people in the work place (and a LOT more people in the workplace) than there is work to be done?

That’s not an insane question to ask at all, because we are certainly within a world where that possibility is on the horizon... when will it happen exactly? Who knows, but, it certainly a very possible reality and thinking ahead about that, and what and how to handle that, is not insane at all.

Right now, we aren’t there, no doubt, but its coming.

[unread]

What is given for free has no value... You would never be able to give enough to make a living wage for the poor... They will always be poor.....

[central_va]

I have never understood why starving college students who are self financing their way thru school are not eligible for any public assistance but have to go into debt and/or work themselves to death.

[Hot Tabasco]

The percentage of poor people will always remain the same no matter how much you give them.......

I remember my first trip to Honduras with my family back in 1984. What stood out the most was the vast number of campesinos, from young children to old adults, outside the city with their machetes in hand heading out to work the fields........They either worked or they starved.

I also remember the efforts of the hollywood elitists to shut down the garment "sweat factories" that took advantage of women and children in Honduras. Never once realizing that those were actually premium jobs for the truly poor who would be out in the hot cane fields if not for those factory jobs.

[Lizavetta]

I seem to recall a story of some tech company figuring out a novel form of circle jerking or some such nonsense that decided to pay every single employee from the lowest admin clerk to the CEO $70,000 a year. I think they failed within a year or two after getting lauded by the usual economic illiterates for their "visionary" compensation practices.

Dan Price of Gravity Payments in Seattle.

[Jim W N]

Well, then turn you faith FULLY to God and AWAY from man. Blessings and victory are to those who put their trust in God whereas putting trust in man brings curses and defeat (Jer. 17:7-8).

God is the God of the impossible. As he impossibly brought victory out of the jaws of defeat against the greatest military power on earth in 1776, so now he can do the impossible to help us defeat the Multi-Headed Beast of the Delusional Lying Left and Restore our Free Constitutional Republic.