H LV <hveeder...@gmail.com> wrote: ​Universal basic income isn't a neo-communist proposal. >
It was first proposed by conservative economists Friederich Hayek and Milton Friedman. There is a lot of conservative support for it. See: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why- arent-reformicons-pushing-a-guaranteed-basic-income/375600/ > As far as I know Karl Marx never called for a basic income, and today most > trade unions oppose it. > It would never work in the 19th century. You need an robot-based economy where Watson-class computers are ubiquitous, so human labor has no value. We are not there yet, but we will be in a generation or two. We need to phase in something like a basic income. Perhaps I am the proverbial man who has only a hammer and sees all problems as a nail, but I think technology changes everything. A proposal such basic income would be impossible in 19th century. It would be immoral in the 20th century, because we would have to exploit people to make it work. It would also be destructive, because it would reduce incentives to work, and we needed people to do many jobs that paid poorly or were disagreeable. But, as robots increase, there will be fewer and fewer jobs like that. If many people become lazy and spend their lives doing frivolous things that pay little, or don't pay at all, it will not hurt society. We will not need their labor anymore. We will have no use for it. So we might as well let the robots support them. It will not take money out of my pocket of a machine works for you and gives you everything you need. Here is a purely imaginary example which is quite different from how the economy is likely to work, but it illustrates my point. Imagine in 2050 someone buys an all-purpose robot and some tool attachments. The person goes off to rural area with a 10 acres of land. The robot builds a house using mainly local materials. It builds and runs a small automated greenhouse/food factory. With a food factory that's more than enough to grow all the food you need. They have cold fusion power supplies. They have a 3D fabrication machine. In other words, the robot supplies the person with nearly all of the necessities of life at zero cost. The person is autonomous. Some people have said that in the future, whoever owns all the robots will monopolize power and income. But suppose everyone has a robot? After the robot is paid for, why would anyone pay pay corporations to manufacture things with robots when he has his own robot and a 3D gadget to make most things? Robots will be cheap because there will be competition. The isolated person in a rural area is not how it would actually work. Most people will probably live in suburban or urban areas. But the principle is the same. If people have a guaranteed basic income and access to robots, autonomy will likely increase, and large corporations are likely to lose political and economic power. Also bear in mind that patents run out and technology gets cheaper over time. In the 19th century, railroads monopolized transportation and exploited farmers who needed to ship goods to markets. With automobiles, the railroads lost their monopoly, and faded in importance. In the 20th century, AT&T was given a telephone monopoly, because the technology did not allow multiple phone companies in the same community. Microsoft developed a "natural monopoly" because computers only work well when they are exactly alike, and there can only be two or three standards (PC and Mac). Facebook presently has a near-monopoly on social media, and Amazon on retail sales. These monopolies are caused by technology, and as technology changes or enters the public domain they tend to gradually fade away. Ownership of robots and Watson-class computers may be concentrated at first, but eventually we will all have Watson computers costing a few hundred dollars each. IBM is developing an MPP computer on a chip with 50,000 processors. - Jed
