What If Everybody Didn't Have to Work to Get Paid?

Scott Santens has been thinking a lot about fish lately. Specifically, he’s been reflecting on the aphorism, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life.” What Santens wants to know is this: “If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”

Santens is 37 years old, and he’s a leader in the basic income movement—a worldwide network of thousands of advocates (26,000 on Reddit alone) who believe that governments should provide every citizen with a monthly stipend big enough to cover life’s basic necessities. The idea of a basic income has been around for decades, and it once drew support from leaders as different as Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon. But rather than waiting for governments to act, Santens has started crowdfunding his own basic income of $1,000 per month. He’s nearly halfway to his his goal.

Santens, for his part, believes that job growth is no longer keeping pace with automation, and he sees a government-provided income as a viable remedy. “It’s not just a matter of needing basic income in the future; we need it now,” says Santens, who lives in New Orleans. “People don’t see it, but we are already seeing the effects all around us, in the jobs and pay we take, the hours we accept, the extremes inequality is reaching, and in the loss of consumer spending power.”(continued)

What you say sounds plausible. However, when I first started working as a contractor for the Government, people had a hard understanding how Word could make their job easier. If you have a 300 page document and there is one word used throughout the document, I tried to show them how to auto correct one word. They found it hard to do that. I wondered that before word processing programs, a person would have to retype hundreds of pages for a minor fix like.

That was in 1996. Computers have been with us for over 30 years, and yet there are tons of people who still do not know how to use one, how to work with them, how to use the applications that have been around for more than two decades. Most of them are otherwise smart people but just seem confused and confounded by technology.

To quote McClintock -- "The government never *gave* anyone anything!"

Also from that movie, the single best Economics 101 dialogue ever spoken:

George Washington McLintock: Gave? Boy, you've got it all wrong. I don't give jobs I hire men.

Drago: You intend to give this man a full day's work, don'tcha boy?

Devlin Warren: You mean you're still hirin' me? Well, yes, sir, I certainly deliver a fair day's work.

George Washington McLintock: And for that I'll pay you a fair day's wage. You won't give me anything and I won't give you anything. We both hold up our heads.

Actually, Milton Friedman pointed out that the only income redistribution scheme that does not create perverse incentives is a non-means-tested uniform payment, a “basic income” if you will. Anything means tested ends up subsidizing poverty, since the effective tax rate for passing through the earnings threshold to not qualify is very high, anything dependent on some other qualification (having a child as a single parent, to give a particularly baleful example) subsidizes the behavior that qualifies.

One problem is it’s hard to figure out how much such a scheme would actually cost. The total payout for a $1000/month per adult citizen scheme (gets everyone to about the Federal poverty level if living alone), but that’s not the cost since implementing it would also involve abolishing all the poverty-alleviation programs and most social service programs (not child protective services or whatever it’s called wherever you are), and cutting Social Security payments by the same amount (since it’s being replaced it doesn’t break faith with those who paid the blasted taxes all those years), and the payments would be taxable income so everyone would return whatever percent their top marginal rate represented.

“There would be no products, no commerce, no asset to purchase. “ — Texas Songwriter

That’s not true. Kuwait is a country that shared their oil wealth with the citizens. There was a time when every citizen received a huge income just for being a citizen. It is still a pretty sweet deal. (And no, I am not advocating stealing oil in the USA to redistribute to the citizens.)

It would be like if you were part of a large extended family and it was discovered that there was a billion-dollar oil field on the land of a patriarch who willed it to be divided among the family. Suddenly everyone is rich.

There is no need to work for the purpose of survival. But goods are still bought and purchased.

This goes back to my earlier statement about how wealth is created. It is not created by tax. It is not created by printing money. It is created three ways: work, innovation, and exploitation of natural resources (in the above examples that is oil).

Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating a living wage / government income. I am saying it is not automatically leftist. Nixon apparently supported the idea. He was fairly conservative.

“The problem with a guaranteed income is the ability of that income to utterly destroy the will to work any harder than minimally necessary.” — mountainbunny

Many people who are very rich keep working because they love to work. Many people who are very poor still refuse to work in spite of the consequences. But I agree that there are many people who go through life only doing the minimum required.

Kuwait does have its problems. Rich citizens do not want to do menial jobs. So what good is it to be a millionaire if you have to pay $80,000 for a fast food burger? How did they solve this? They imported labor. More than half of the population in Kuwait are foreigners / non-citizens. These people do NOT get the government pay, but do have good opportunities to make money.

But the NEED to work in order to survive may become obsolete due to technology. The kids movie Wall-E depicts the dilemma this might create. There is something in the human spirit that needs to work and innovate, but not necessarily just to survive.

Conservatives need to keep in mind that big companies like Apple benefit from the protections of our Republic which are extended by the consent of the governed. The innovators did “earn that”. The workers do “earn that”. Steve Jobs did “build that”, but it could not happen under a totally corrupt regime. It had to happen where the consent of the governed afforded them the necessary protections to innovate and be rewarded for it.

We need to quit looking at ip laws as if they are natural law. They are not. They are a social contract. Citizens need to get a fair deal for their end of this social contract.

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