James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote:
> This would undo one, perhaps the, primary benefit of Unconditional BI: > > Disintermediation of the government's welfare state aparatus. > This plan will gradually make the welfare state go away, along with capitalism. > In order to more completely disintermediate the government, a > liquid-valuation net asset tax would have to replace not only taxes on > economic activity, but the regulatory behemoth that intervenes in the > operation of the free market -- regulation that thereby opens the > government to regulatory capture by crony capitalists . . . > These issues will all gradually vanish as human labor becomes worthless. There will not be any "economic activity" by people, except for a few pop-music singers and movie stars. There will be no "free market" or regulated market. All production of goods and services will be done by machines. Machines do not respond to economic incentives. Nor do they care about economic freedom, opportunity, or tax structures. They just sit there churning out tomatoes, tofu, computers, cars or whatever you program them to make. The cost of these goods and services will gradually approach $0. Or, to put it the other way, everyone's buying power will gradually approach infinity. Thousands of years from now any person will be able to get any goods or services he wants, just by murmuring a few words to a robot servant. If you want a 20,000 sq. foot house made of gold, or a 10,000 acre estate on Mars, or a new supercomputer 10,000 times more powerful than the best one in the 21st century, you will tell your computer and whatever you ask for will ready a week later. No one else will know or care that you have done this. No one will tax you, or feel jealous of your sold-gold house. The whole concept of free markets, wages and capitalism will be long forgotten. > . . . as well as other forms of bureaucratic corruption. > Bureaucrats will all be replaced by computers within 100 years. Their numbers per capita has already declined. - Jed
