Stefan Molyneux on Universal Basic Income

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxUzTW5dM4o

by MichaelBurge • 10 years ago

11 18 10 years ago

h4nkoslo• 10 years ago

UBI won't get rid of the rest of the welfare state, so it just ends up being another transfer program.

SF is not going to give up their $250M / year in "homeless services", and no government department is going to give up their special snowflake limited-eligibility programs when that is the source of all of their employment and power.

For context, in SF alone for one sector (homeless services), "Eight city departments oversee at least 400 contracts to 76 private organizations, most of them nonprofits, that deal with homelessness." I would be unsurprised if employment from administering these services was higher than the number of homeless "clients".

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-record...

scotty794• 10 years ago

tl;dw?

turtleofdeath• 10 years ago

tl;dw: Basic Income has been so thoroughly theorized and determined to be a stupid idea that we shouldn't try it or we'll end up a welfare state forever.

scotty794• 10 years ago

I don't see this guy citing any sources. I listened through some of his arguments and they are very simplistic and only compelling be because he selectively mentions some effects completely ignoring others. Nothing coming out of any research. Just few thing you can pull out of your head after hearing idea fo the first time while drunk.

wiz21c• 10 years ago

"if you tax companies more, then prices will increase." I stopped there.

That's so "let's not change anything"...

scotty794• 10 years ago

If I were a company owner I would be thrilled if I could drop salaries by 12000 dollars and/or have my customers have additional 12000 dollars of additional disposable income. I'd gladly paid some more tax for that, especially if my competition paid it too and especially if some comapnies that are stealing my customers by driving the prices down thanks to exploiting their employees would go out of business becouse their employees would finally have enough comfort too look for another job.

loorinm• 10 years ago

I don't buy the whole "Raising taxes on the rich will cause general prices to go up and inflation". He provides no explanation for why that is true. Countries such as Denmark tax the rich heavily and do not have those effects.

aminok5• 10 years ago

Molyneux is right about almost everything, but forcible redistribution programs like Yubi don't cause inflation unless they're paid for through seigniorage.

An income tax, and in particular a corporate income tax, is mostly a tax on profit. You're redistributing monies that would have been received as profit, as welfare. This is a popular idea because "the rich/corporations are too rich and don't need billions in profits etc".

The end result of robbing people of the profit that they earn from their efforts is to get less effort, and in particular, less investment. This results in a decline in the growth rate of the economy, or even a contraction in the size of the economy (if the rate of capital formation falls below the rate of capital depreciation - if this happens, then Molyneaux's statement will become correct, as there will be inflation due to lower supply of goods relative to currency units).

The last 40 years have overseen a massive increase in the scale of forcible income redistribution, and thus serve as a good natural experiment in welfare economics. The result of massively increasing the scale of forcible redistribution will likely be the same as the effect we've seen over the last 40 years: slowing productivity growth, and consequently wage growth stagnation.

Of course, people believe what they want to believe, so they ignore the lessons of history and double down on a failed ideology that is the root cause of almost all social ills.

commentzorro4• 10 years ago

The end result of robbing people of the profit that they earn from their efforts is to get less effort, and in particular, less investment.

Here's your fallacy. This is simply and factually not true.

(I'll leave it to you to not put in the effort to research this as I couldn't even put in the effort to watch the video.)

aminok5• 10 years ago

You're deluding yourself, and ignoring vast amounts of evidence, in believing that reducing the reward for effort/investment will not result in less of both.

Like I said: "people believe what they want to believe". You want to believe that welfarism works.

scotty794• 10 years ago

It's not like that new tax money will pay for a MRAP that'll be blown up in middle east or shelved in Ducksville USA PD.

It will go straight back into the market and into the hands of consumers and most of it into the hands of consumers that spend all of their money.

You tax the companies profits but you use that money to grow the market.

Companies don't grow because they earn more money. They grow when they have more customers with more money to buy their products.

aminok5• 10 years ago

The US has tried massively increasing how much "free money" it gives people.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-...

Annual inflation-adjusted spending growth on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):

Pensions and retirement: 4.4%
Healthcare: 5.7%
Welfare: 4.1%

Annual inflation-adjusted economic growth over the time frame:

2.7%

By every broad-based objective measure, the scale of forcible income redistribution has massively increased in relative and absolute terms. The only thing the US has to show for it is slower productivity growth, lower wage growth, huge trade deficits, and I would argue, an explosion in single parenthood:

http://pinetreewatchdog.org/500-rise-in-single-parenthood-fu...

You tax the companies profits but you use that money to grow the market.

You don't grow the market by giving people more currency to go shop with.

In a market based economy, the guy who buys the product is buying it with something of value that he is producing. Any trade is a two way street. Currency is an abstraction that obfuscates this fact. He might be giving you some units of currency, but really he's giving you whatever good/service he had to provide in order to get his hands on that currency. Without a productive act on his side, the money he's giving has no value to the economy at large. We are not better off just giving people currency to go shop with. The only value is in the actual production of goods/services, which people are incentivized to do when taxes are at their minimum, and they have to earn the currency they receive through trade.

In other words, economic growth is not enhanced by redistributing income from highly productive people to unproductive people to shop with.

The only process that increases the actual level of productivity is investment, which grows the capital stock (factories, gas stations, restaurants, kiosks, car dealerships, malls and IP) and forcible redistribution, by reducing income earned on investments, reduces the incentive to invest.

_blz2• 10 years ago

It looks like some alternate universe. Stefan Molyneux on the front page of HN.

Stefan Molyneux on Universal Basic Income

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