Comment on Open thread, 11-17 August 2014

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 19:27:08 GMT

I came up with the idea of a Basic Income by myself, by chaining together some ideas:

Capitalism is the most efficient economic system for fulfilling the needs of people, provided they have money.

The problem is that if lots of people have no money, and no way to get money (or no way to get it without terrible costs to themselves), then the system does not fulfill their needs.

In the future, automation will both increase economic capacity, while also increase the barrier to having a 'valuable skill' allowing you to get money. Society will have improved capacity to fulfill the needs of people with money, yet the barrier to having useful skills and being able to get money will increase. This leads to a scenario where the society could easily produce the items needed by everyone, yet does not because many of those people have no money to pay for them.

If X% of the benefits accrued from ownership of the capital were taken and redistributed evenly among all humans, then the problem is averted. Average people still have some source of money with which they can purchase the fulfillment of their needs, which are pretty easy to supply in this advanced future society.

X=100%, as in a strict socialism, is not correct, as then we get the economic failures we saw in the socialist experiments of the past century.

X = 0%, as in a strict libertarianism, is not correct, as then everyone whose skills are automated starve.

At X = some reasonable number, capitalism still functions correctly (that is, it works today with our current tax rate levels, and hopefully in our economically progressed future society, it provides sufficient money to everyone to supply basic needs).

Eventually I found out that my idea was pretty much a Basic Income system.

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