Posted on 04/18/2016 5:12:57 PM PDT by beaversmom
Hmmm... I wonder where the money will come from?
Why are they pretending that this is a new idea?
Welfare has been around for 50 years. The results are dreadful.
Disastrous-what could go wrong?
Just more structured ways to piss away money.
I reject white guilt and first world guilt. No one else paid my student loans but me. No one else bought my house and paid my 7.75% loan. No one else buys my vehicles or pays my insurance or gas or food,or utilities. I had no one to help me get my jobs. I fight and scrape for every dollar I bring in.
While I scoff at most rants about income inequality, I do worry about a world were only a few thousand techie elitists control all of the robots who now make everything tangible (and perform services).
And African villagers don't consider 200 cable channels and Air Jordan sneakers to be "essentials."
So there is no incentive to connive, or lie, or pretend to be sick or injured.
They just have to wait for the check in the mail.
As mentioned in the essay, Friedman advocated something like this in the form of a "negative income tax", i.e. if you make below the poverty line your "tax" will end up being just enough money to put you at the poverty line or some acceptable level above it.
This has the advantage of being easier and cheaper to manage and not encouraging lying and cheating.
However, it does have the disadvantage of encouraging sloth.
My own favorite idea is to bring back work camps. If you're able bodied then you get assigned to a camp where you get three hots and a cot and work to fill your day.
There's plenty of stuff that needs doing. The workers will get a salary that they can save up and use to establish themselves when they're ready to get out of the camp.
Even if robots could be trained to replace the humans, we should adopt the Chinese policy and keep enough jobs non-robot to make sure that every able bodied American has enough work to fill his weekdays.
Not a valid test. The money is given voluntarily, and from outside the community. Nobody is denied keeping their own money.
Valid test: take the redistributed funds proportionally according to income, under threat of imprisonment. Watch the economy collapse fast.
I expect Kenyan villagers to start hearing from Nigerian public officials who need help in disposing of several millions of dollars of funds left with them by some mysterious individual.
In that situation, the old Basic Income idea may make a comeback.
It would lead to a lot of socialism, and I wouldn't like it, but I really worry that it might be inevitable. Part of the reason it would be inevitable is because it could be ripe for social engineering. Think of it:
People with no skills could be kept quiet at home with monthly checks.
Couples could be encouraged to marry if it took 2 welfare checks to support a family.
If monthly checks actually DECREASED with children being added, then there would be an incentive for low skill poor people to not reproduce -- eugenics under another name.
Incomes could be supplemented by high skill people who could manage to get jobs. Only these people could really afford to have kids.
The Left wants to support the poor and they want to control (limit) population. This could do it.
Stupid. Where does the money come from?
The moment you give everyone $1,000, $1,000 equals zero.
Now, $1,000 is what you get for zero effort. So, a slightly bigger effort yields more than $1,000, whereas, before, it yielded just over zero.
Soon, the 1,000 becomes worthless since all prices have risen to match the increased demand, and the exercise is a failure.
That won’t stop leftists, who will say that $1,000 wasn’t enough.
There are some conservatives who support this. You’ll have to read the details, but they claim it will be better than welfare.
Well duh! The robots will make it!
Why is the Tech world driving this? Because AI, robotics and automation technology is increasingly putting people out of jobs. Without a guaranteed basic income, no one will be able to pay for the iPhones & apps.
The stipend wasn't very much, but living costs were low there, and for many, that was their only income. The result was a disaster. There was rampant crime, alcoholism, car crashes, and sickness. There were no farms, businesses (this was before casinos, if want to call them businesses), or even super markets. Free money simply doesn't work.
When you kill any form of a persons purpose in life no matter how small it leaves behind a useless human
This a thousand times. I predict inflation will eat their income quickly and they’ll be clamoring for an increase. Money is a measure of increased value. If there is no value to your efforts then the money that represents it is of no value. I can’t believe that even Friedman would overlook this basic element of economics.
No matter how you slice it, the future is looking pretty grim.
Only by your standards. The Great Society has locked in the black vote for Democrats in a way that Lyndon Johnson only dreamed of.
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