RE: unconditional basic income

[onceuponatime]

Garbage in, garbage out. Socialism in, failure out.

Here is a headline: This AI expert says that a robot economy will force us to give people unconditional free money. The article is in Business Insider.

In the future, giving people unconditional free money might be the fairest way to deal with a robot-powered economy.
At least, that's what data scientist and artificial intelligence expert Jeremy Howard believes.

According to Howard, the pool of displaced workers will just keep growing exponentially, and the solution is to level the playing field.

There are lots of articles like this one these days. (Are they being written by commie algorithms?)

Free Money from the Robots!
Gary North - June 04, 2016
Full article here: http://www.garynorth.com/public/15285.cfm

Comments

[pharesim]

What's your realistic alternative? Letting the unneeded starve? The only way to reply here is quoting Rosa Luxemburg: Socialism or barbary.

All this fighting between liberals and socialists seems like the old left-right-scheme rebrewn to me.
You basically want the same. A free and well life for as many as possible. To me, the disagreements seem to only be about how to achieve that goal.
The "inventor" of anarcho-capitalism, Rothbard, saw that the current distribution is based on thievery, and agreed that there's no way for anarcho-capitalism to work when that's not changed. So it's undisputed that we are in sincere need of redistribution.

As a practical matter, in terms of the ownership of land, anarcho-capitalists recognize that there are few (if any) parcels of land left on Earth whose ownership was not at some point in time obtained in violation of the homestead principle, through seizure by the state or put in private hands with the assistance of the state. [...]
Rothbard says in "Justice and Property Right" that "any identifiable owner (the original victim of theft or his heir) must be accorded his property." In the case of slavery, Rothbard says that in many cases "the old plantations and the heirs and descendants of the former slaves can be identified, and the reparations can become highly specific indeed."

His idea is to give basically all of the United States to the heirs of former slaves. That's some SERIOUS redistribution, and will probably cause a lot more trouble than a state led basic income.

And this kind of says what socialism means for many - that common property and efforts should be treated as such, and not for private profits:

Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it's hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time the way is cleared and a path forms – not through any coordinated efforts, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking by that way day after day. The cleared path is the product of labor – not any individual's labor, but all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned.

(Quotes taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism#Property )

So when we remove the unfair distribution, what differences are left?
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" may sound like someone wants to take something from you, but isn't it really how we all act with our family and friends? And wouldn't solving the main problem (again, it's all about the current distribution, which is a result of theft) make most current "socialist agendas" unnecessary?

[pharesim]

One more thing that troubles me: why do liberals care about money so much? You don't believe in the validity of that stuff in the first place (and i completely agree with you). Who's stealing from whom effectively doesn't matter any more in this screwed up game.

[pharesim]

Aaaaaaaand :D
Did you see the numbers what people would do with it?

22% of the population suddenly thinks about becoming an entrepreneur, when the burden of their current shit-job is taken away from them!
More than half can imagine to get education, which in the end also enables them to build their own life.

Ok, now I'm good :P

[onceuponatime]

22% of the population thinks of becoming an entrepreneur when they can avoid making sacrifices to accumulate capital and shift the burden of any failure onto others? That's a good thing?

[pharesim]

The burden of big failures is already on all of us. Banks, car industry, you name it. Not only are they subsidized, when they fail they get millions on top. That's where most of my taxes go to right now. I'd prefer them to be spent on enabling the small guy, instead of feeding the rich.