>Distributing money indiscriminately devalues work and effort.

This is a poor understanding of the concept. The idea behind a Basic Income Guarantee is that it is received equally by every citizen in the country. It's an idea linked to Negative Income Tax and other like proposals, and shares support of many with a more libertarian/economically conservative bent.

In most areas of North America where Basic Income experiments have occurred, the overall workforce does decline, but in very specific ways: mainly with single mothers and teenagers. Mothers choosing to stay at home with their children, and teenagers graduating high school are more positive impacts on the society at large than the greater retention of wealth by the highly motivated.

Wealth can only be created in societies, and therefore the overall health of a society should be of paramount concern to those interested in creating wealth. While I do not advocate for many socialist principles, a certain baseline ensures the society remains sustainable in the long term, thus allowing its members to grow wealth.

Both too much (Communism, socialist Europe) and too little (Argentina, Venezuala, the US) will lead to inevitable social collapse and the reduction of wealth (or the ability to create more) for all.

You do not live in a self created bubble.

I apologise if a simple search should find this and I just such at searching, but I'm intrigued after your comment. There seems to be little information about the Manitoba experiment and what Alaska calls "Basic Income" doesn't seem consistent with what is being discussed. Where else in North America have people experimented with this?

Check wikipedia for Negative Income Tax schemes, which are extremely similar and were experimented with in the US under Nixon in the 70's.

This is also interesting: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-new-approach-to-...

run4yourlives: Well stated. Warren Buffet, I believe, has often emphasized the fact that the growing wealth disparity is not good for long-term economic growth in U.S.

So why should I want to subsidize single mothers? Why should I disincentivize teenagers from gaining their first work experience?

I agree that there are some people who deserve financial support, but it should be up to the individual to decide who that is and how much they should receive.

This sort of economic blind spot is shockingly common, and presumably stems from the belief that economics is zero-sum. The idea behind subsidizing single mothers and keeping teens in school (which is the case that your parent comment was describing) is that the cost of this subsidy is theoretically lower than the expected cost of losing productive members of society or even worse, losing them to gang activity, which has further costs (single-parent households and high school dropouts are both _strongly_ linked to gang activity).

You may as well be saying "Why should I be paying taxes to put out a fire at the house down the street"? Well, if/when the fire spreads, you're going to be paying for it like it or not, so it seems like common sense to address the problem before the total cost is far higher.

The relationship between gang activity and dropout rates is something of a chicken-and-egg problem, but given that "stopping gang activity" is damn near impossible through enforcement alone (this is basically the tactic we've been trying), it's strange that our culture is such that attacking the problem from the other side is anathema.

Don't forget the moral hazard. Women could choose to get a child instead of working. I personally don't think that it is a good idea to grow up in a family where no adult is gainfully employed.

These are complex issues and should be evaluated by each individual. You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy. If I was interested in reducing US crime and poverty, I'd donate to http://www.projectprevention.org/

>Women could choose to get a child instead of working.

This is a fallacy. A woman working is not going to "choose" this any more than you are going to go from being gainfully employed to sitting on your ass all day playing video games. Setting the right thresholds on both the income and the reductions removes any incentive to become a non-working drag on society. If however, you did make that choice, a basic income allows you to realize quickly how crap life is and then correct yourself, rather than slide further down the have not scale.

What's more, even if you did choose to sit around playing video games on $10K a year or whatever, you are fed and likely housed, and therefore not stealing from me, getting arrested and now costing me $75K a year in prison expenses.

> You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy

Taxation is not fucking charity. We do have every right to choose where our taxes go. They're called elections. However, considering (as I stated and you conveniently ignored) that your wealth was entirely derived from the society at large, the sustainable maintenance of said society is in your utmost interest, whether you think so or not. I have more interests than I can possibly afford to donate to. That's why I contribute to a collective fund and then hire managers to disperse said dollars with an eye to betterment of society as a whole.

> We do have every right to choose where our taxes go. They're called elections.

That just means that others decide what happens to my money.

> However, considering that your wealth was entirely derived from the society at large

This is just a false assertion. My wealth is derived from my work.

> That's why I contribute to a collective fund and then hire managers to disperse said dollars with an eye to betterment of society as a whole.

You also force everybody else to do the same. Those altruistic managers then spend the money on foreign wars and bailouts.

>So why should I want to subsidize single mothers?

You aren't subsidizing anything. You are allowing the mother to raise their child with more options available to them. At the very least, it increases the chances of the child's success, and overall the chances that you are not paying for programs, prisons, social services in the future.

> Why should I disincentivize teenagers from gaining their first work experience?

Because they are "gaining that experience" instead of completing their schooling in many occurrences. I don't need to explain why it's a good idea to have as many people as possible stay in school, do I?

You need to educate yourself on the monetary system. Taxes do not necessarily fund government at the local level. Non-convertable floating fx monetary regimes are self-funding. Its kind of like saying where does the score-keeper at the basketball game get points to put on the score board ? Can he run out ?

That kind of happened. AIG ?

Inflation is the constraint, not solvency. We need to find the right number between 0 and 10^10 but we are not trying to do that and so we're becoming like Japan.

Those same arguments could be made against welfare to an extent. The advantage of this system is that it would be simpler and therefor cheaper to administer and possibly harder to game.

Yes, but I also figure that anyone smart enough to effectively game the welfare system is smart enough to do substantially better than what even gamed welfare can provide.

Trust me, in the UK at least, you really don't need much to game the welfare system.

While the government is making gradual changes the requirements and checks for UK citizens to claim job seekers allowance week after week are laughable low compared to the rhetoric thrown around.

The other side of the coin is what do you do when there actually aren't jobs available in the region and there are too many people to effectively set up in self-employment? Making people jump through hoops and then frowning at their failings is fine when isolated to an individual, but at a demographic level it breaks down.

I recently spend five months out of work and unable to find a job and received welfare. I saw others like me playing the system. I saw others like me struggling to satisfy the system and more, applying for everything and getting rejections similarly. The system doesn't differentiate between the two.

To some degree it's the old 'where do you draw the line' - do you prefer to see the innocent suffer or the guilty go free?

With a basic income guarantee everyone would get money, and the same amount. There is no need to divine who needs it because everyone does. No matter the income.

True, my argument was against welfare, I misread your original comment.

Basic income still has the problem that people get my money who do not deserve it in my opinion.

What we are talking about are the basic necessities to a life in dignity. A roof over your head and enough to eat and clothe yourself, as well as enough to at least participate in society in some way (e.g. enough money to afford some sort of information gathering thingie, be it a newspaper subscription, TV or phone). The bare minimum.

I happen to believe that no one has the right to deny that anyone. It’s a basic human right. Every human deserves a life in dignity and there is no way to lose that. (And, I know, implementing that world wide right now is practically impossible. That, just like, e.g. any sort of restrictions of freedom of movement, labor, capital and goods, is a travesty but for the near future I’m hopeless about anything changing in that regard. It’s sad and unacceptable.)

Within that understanding of the world (and also the understanding that we won’t have work for everyone as time goes on) something like a guaranteed basic income seems at least like something worth trying out to me. (Many of the current welfare schemes seems broken to me, too focused on tight paranoid control and stigmatizing people.)

But then again, I’m European. (Also, not the person you were originally responding to.)

There is no redistribution. Everyone is entitled to the same benefit, just like they are entitled to fire protection.

Over a certain amount of income earned however, the benefit becomes negligible.

> There is no redistribution. Everyone is entitled to the same benefit, just like they are entitled to fire protection.

This type of thing (even when it involves fire protection) is redistribution. One set of people are taxed to pay for things, another set of people get the benefit -- even if it is the same set of people the distribution of the tax and the benefit aren't the same, and the difference is redistribution.

Note that I am not saying this is undesirable, merely that it clearly is redistribution.

>One set of people are taxed to pay for things, another set of people get the benefit

Ah, no. ALL people pay for things. How that payment occurs is a product of a progressive tax system in most cases, but there is no requirement that such a system exists to run service.

You wouldn't call a private security service employed by a gated community "wealth redistribution", would you? Although if they had an income driven progressive fee structure it would be.