I have a two-hour Zoom ethics seminar to teach this morning as lawyers who have waited until the last minute to get their ethics CLE credits in will be counting on me to rescue them.
Please help me out by leaving some ethics treats here at the open forum.
Meanwhile, if you have access to Disney+ and haven’t seen the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” segment of the Master’s “Ichabod and Mr. Toad” since you were a tot (or ever), I recommend it highly. The first segment (an adaptation of “The Wind in the Willows”) is also excellent but not Halloween-themed.
Ethics Alarms 
Is it ethical to be destroying boats, and more importantly the people in them, operated by drug cartels suspected of running drugs into our country?
Are we targeting only armed combatants actively engaged in hostilities, or are we destroying a vessel that may carry non-combatant crew, coerced crew, or other civilians?
I’m having a hard time justifying/rationalizing these actions. I’m wondering what I am missing?
Interesting question.
First thought is, is it ethical to let the poison in when we can stop it? For anybody who’s had drugs in their family, it’s easier to see that they’re Satan in physical form. A late to our party (i.e. “step”) uncle knew he’d get a call one day his boy was dead. It took some time, but he got the call.
I think it unlikely at that level they’re innocents coerced, but even if they are, the blame lies with the Narcos.
And I get the tired argument that we’ll never stop all the drugs, true as it is, at least under our system of laws and government. But look at the streets in your city. Most of those people are going to die in the condition they’re in, however long it takes. Just like my uncle’s son.
I thought there was an Asian nation that executed drug dealers. I’d be in favor of that here. They’re guilty of murder as it is. Having willing victims doesn’t exonerate what they do.
How do those destroying the boats know which boats are running drugs? If I was on a pleasure cruise n the Caribbean carrying no drugs at all, is my boat in danger of being destroyed?
Sure, if it’s a hyper boat going on a course informants had told the Navy the boat will be headed.
Are there times in war when it is justifiable to take military action against an enemy even if the enemy is hiding behind non-combatant collateral?
Ethical or unethical decisions don’t exist in a vacuum. Under what circumstances is law enforcement destroying boats with people on them? What are the options in those situations and the consequences of those options? Is law enforcement thinking about how to create better options for the future?
Tren de Aragua has now been labelled as a foreign terrorist operation. That by itself warrants military action by the USA.
Every year about 100,000 people die in the USA die by drug overdose. The USA has a higher responsibility to the lives of its citizens that to the lives of the drug cartel members.
Does Trump break a rule, or perhaps a law. I honestly do not care. Machiavelli once said that the end justifies the means. Dealing with drug cartels is one of the situations were this dictum sounds ethical.
Not necessarily ethics, but culture related. I make my kids watch Ichabod and Mr. Toad every Halloween. My eleven year old is currently asking when we can turn that on.
Knowing that my children are 11 and younger, and my 11 year old is very easily frightened (Darby O’Gill and the Little People was too scary for the banshee), are there any other good movies that you would recommend for Halloween viewing for culture purposes?
“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”
Good to talk with your children about gullibility, imagination and issues of fairness.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow always scared me to death. Headless horseman. Yikes. I’ve always avoided horror movies as if they were the plague. I never found any pleasure in being terrified. I even hate park rides.
What about Harry Potter? Wizard of Oz? Something that evokes in the children a sense of mystery.
“The Nightmare Before Christmas”: a worthy successor to the Rankin-Bass stop-motion holiday movies
“Hocus Pocus”: Light on scares and heavy on kid-friendly comedy
“Grinch Night”: Trippy visuals, a good message about courage, if they’re not too cool for Dr. Seuss
“Casper”: The 1995 movie
For a Jack Marshall-esque film tie-together, Casper, with Christina Ricci as the child, then Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, then add Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, with Ricci as Katrina Van Tassel.
Our family (of teenaged children) just finished Mel Brooks’ “Dracula; Dead and Loving It.” Not his funniest film, but more accurate to the book than I remembered.
Premise:
The United States institutes a universal basic income of $1000 per person per month, except for people who opt to remain in existing welfare programs. (Unless anyone objects, I suggest we assume that if nothing else this will reduce the bureaucratic overhead for welfare.)
The goal is for people to be able to have enough financial stability that they can invest in themselves–their health, their education, their families, and their communities. They will also be able to walk away from abusive or exploitative jobs, creating more negotiating power for workers and forcing employers to offer reasonable wages and working conditions.
Questions:
What bad things are we concerned will happen as a result of universal basic income? (You can provide statistics if you want for clarification, but it’s not necessary. I take concerns seriously and consider them worthy of being addressed on their own.)
Are there any ways we might be able to address those concerns while keeping a universal basic income?
A thousand dollars a month? What good will that do anyone?
People who have a very low income could use the extra money to pay for car repairs, health expenses, healthier food, more durable clothing and appliances, and other things they cannot currently afford even when doing without those things costs more in the long term. Does that answer your question?
You make my point. Paying for the items you mention will gobble up in a thousand dollars a month in no time.
…And as a result of spending that thousand dollars, people will be able to trust that their car won’t break down at the worst moment. They will be able to get that weird pain checked out before it’s too late. They’ll eat healthier and save money by buying higher-quality clothes less often, rather than cheap ones that wear out quickly. A thousand dollars per person per month makes a huge difference in people’s lives. They’ve run experiments to see what people spend it on.
From your comments, I infer that neither you nor anyone you know has been poor?
You risk people treating the UBI as free money, the way they treat credit cards or even actual welfare checks, and not spend it on what they need to survive. So, not rent, not utilities, not groceries, not childcare or even diapers. They will run out and buy the first fancy phone they can get their hands on.
People who are deemed poor in this country are very often just broke. Poor and broke are not synonymous. Giving someone who is not responsible with money even more money that is not attached to being earned is like unleashing a food addict at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
“They will run out and buy the first fancy phone they can get their hands on.”
Phones are already free to those who…um…qualify; so, tats & piercings…?
PWS
Or Nikes or big screen TVs or whatever whatchamacallit or doodad suits their fancies.
Yeah, we definitely want people to learn how to be responsible with money. Living hand-to-mouth often results in people losing habits of long-term thinking, and we will need them to build those habits if universal basic income is going to accomplish the goal of reducing poverty.
I’m not sure I follow the difference between “poor” and “broke” as you define the terms. Is it a difference in how a person treats money, rather than how much money they have?
In a sense, yes. There are always going to be poor people. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny those people need help, maybe even extra help.
But a large chunk of the American population isn’t poor, it’s broke. They spend money they don’t have. They run up huge debts. They don’t have long-term monetary goals with a reasonable plan to accomplish them. Part of it is the consumer culture we have here. Part of it is our inability to delay gratification. Part of it is Keeping Up with the Joneses mentality. A lot of it is a big bag of rationalizations.
Given that those broke people already exist without UBI, I’m not sure how UBI would make the situation worse. Based on what you’re saying, it sounds like the poor people would make good use of UBI and become productive members of society, and the broke people would keep living the way they already do. Either way, I think we should have outreach programs for financial literacy, although those can be nonprofit civic institutions rather than government-funded. What do you think?
There are already financial literacy programs out there. A big chunk of poor (and broke) people have internet access. They can google financial literacy. They can listen to Suze Orman or Dave Ramsey. They can borrow a book on it from a local library for free. The problem is the attitude about money.
Look…I need to lose weight. I know how to google weight loss tips (and have). My doctor has given me printouts on good nutrition and exercise. And, yet, I have two giant bowls of leftover Halloween candy that I will not stop eating out of. I do not say I cannot stop eating out of them because I can stop. I just don’t want to.
You can’t change the habits without changing the attitudes behind them. Nothing will change until my attitude about food or broke people’s attitudes about money changes.
Sure, per the conversation above, an extra $1000 per month could pay for a much-needed car repair, catch one up on bills or provide a little emergency fund.
But, for those conditioned to see taxpayer-funded money as “free”, the entitlement comes quickly. Far too many people will use the money to eat out, buy high-end merchandize, take trips or even cut back on work hours since their broke lifestyle is being subsidized.
Look at what happens to lottery winners. Look at what happens to some people who end up with monetary settlements from lawsuits.
Kids given laptops by school systems don’t use them to go to educational websites (Heck, full-grown adults with smartphones don’t use them to educate themselves either). During the pandemic, attendance at remote classes was abysmal, despite free use of laptops and assistance getting internet connections. You would think their parents would have taught them to value the educational opportunities at their fingertips. But one school system reported not getting a single working laptop back at the end of the school year. They’d been broken, stolen, sold or usurped by the adults in the household for their own use and not returned. And that’s why those kids will become part of the cycle of poor choices that causes people to live broke lifestyles.
The pocketbooks won’t change until the hearts and minds do, regardless of how much money we throw at the problem.
I can understand taking a trip if it is tio a place one has not been to before.
And buying high-end merchandise may be useful if it makes life more convenient (even thouhg the value depreciates).
<BLOCKQUOTE>
You risk people treating the UBI as free money, the way they treat credit cards or even actual welfare checks, and not spend it on what they need to survive. So, not rent, not utilities, not groceries, not childcare or even diapers. They will run out and buy the first fancy phone they can get their hands on.
People who are deemed poor in this country are very often just broke. Poor and broke are not synonymous. Giving someone who is not responsible with money even more money that is not attached to being earned is like unleashing a food addict at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
This is one of the transitional issues that make me prefer starting with a Negative Payroll Tax, that bypasses those. It’s in fact very like the problems from emancipating slaves that Britain headed off by having a transitional period of tutelage – a period that was reduced once it became clear it was working better and faster than expected. Just as newly freed slaves did not know how to cope, you correctly see something similar here. The solution is to bring those at risk up to speed over time; think training wheels. See also John Stuart Mill on how to make liberty work for those not used to it.
This is one of the transitional issues that make me prefer starting with a Negative Payroll Tax, that bypasses those. It’s in fact very like the problems from emancipating slaves that Britain headed off by having a transitional period of tutelage – a period that was reduced once it became clear it was working better and faster than expected. Just as newly freed slaves did not know how to cope, you correctly see something similar here. The solution is to bring those at risk up to speed over time; think training wheels. See also John Stuart Mill on how to make liberty work for those not used to it.
A basic income provided by the government is welfare by another name, for people who do not need it.
Now people start panicking about SNAP payments stopping at November 1st due to the government shutdown, is it ethical to have 42 million people on SNAP which is one eight of the US population? I use the word “population” instead of “citizens”, as people from certain nationalities rely on SNAP (Afghans, Somali) for over 40%, while also illegal aliens rely for almost 50% on SNAP.
I understand that there are people that are unable to work and need assistance. I also understand that some of us may fall on hard times that requires charity. But looking at the numbers I feel that the USA has gone crazy with welfare.
Welfare fosters dependency, laziness, and entitlement. A generous welfare system cannot be reconciled with a lenient immigration policy and open borders. Welfare is a disincentive to work, and work builds virtue and character. The concerns in this paragraph are all ethical concerns.
Incentives are definitely a serious concern. Universal basic income will not be sustainable if too many people stop working. People need to have a reason to work even if they could survive without working. Do you think any such reasons exist?
There are many reasons why people should work that even apply for people who are not dependent on a salary (e.g. people who can live off a trust fund):
There are also valid reasons why people stop working for an income, such as retirement. However retirees face the challenge to spend time in a way that is meaningful. Spending time with family, volunteering, being active at church, hobbies are all meaningful activities.
That’s a great list! I think that anxiety over money has overshadowed many of those far better reasons for working, and if we can alleviate that anxiety, we can help people appreciate those other benefits that working provides them. How does that sound?
With this comment, EC sets the all time EA record with 2,381 words of commentary in a single day. And there was great quality as well as quantity.
I’d like to thank Jack for creating the community that makes this discussion possible, and my fellow commenters for their well-articulated concerns. Your civic engagement is an invigorating source of hope!
Again, that is building in the baggage you were brought up with. Let’s try to rework that without any of that:-
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Incentives are definitely a serious concern. Universal basic income will not be sustainable if too many people stop working. People need to have a reason to work even if they could survive without working. Do you think any such reasons exist?
</BLOCKQUOTE>
There are several answers to that:-
– A U.B.I. and its analogues only work when set at the right levels. When they are, enough work still gets done – because the right levels are actually NOT enough to live off, merely enough to top up wages that are not enough either, so now effectively everybody can price themselves into work at those lower wages and still get by adequately. (In the special case of hitting Malthusian limits, there is not enough “stuff” around and the floor comes up to meet the ceiling, so there are no right levels to be had.) This is also why Australia’s Greens reworking of the idea as a “Guaranteed Adequate Income” is a nonsense – it locks in levels that are too high and are bound to collapse from just these problems. But this should also highlight a serious transitional issue: what happens while people are running around trying to price themselves into the work they also need? Too many would fall through the cracks – transitionally or not. The only transition that avoids that within a U.B.I. is to start it too high and then reduce it until everything settles, say through fiscal drag, wearing the costs and waste until then (which is largely why I prefer to start with an N.P.T. or Negative Payroll Tax).
– No, people do not need to have a reason to work even if they could survive without working, they need a reason to stay right with themselves – and that only involves work if they have internalised a work ethic. To the extent that you seek to do that to them rather than let them have other values, YOU are the problem.
– There are down sides to the alternatives too, in the sense of trade offs. Ancient Greeks esteemed lives of virtuous leisure if not taken to the excess of the Sybarites who even used chamber pots, but they also allowed slavery as the only way to enable that short of machinery automated enough to do everything (it’s in Aristotle as a thought experiment drawing on myth, and Marx picked up on that). So it may be that, yes, leisure here requires misery there; but is a permanent misery class worse than misery all round, and can it instead be handled with age stratification or yet other ways as some societies have done, even in our very different circumstances?
Not quite. Rather, it is the simplest way to get it to those who do need it, even if it also gets to those who don’t. It turns out to be easier to do that and then mop up any spills than to target it just right; think how you would paint a wall with different colours at different heights – it’s easier to paint higher zones first, then carefully paint lower ones upwards but less carefully downwards, than to paint each zone just right first time at both top and bottom. This also comes down to transitional issues, as my research showed that it’s really only a big deal with a “hard start” going straight to an end stage (though I have observed that the U.S.A. does have a cultural preference for that sort of approach).
Well, no – because you are building in your own values of a work ethic sort, just like the author Sonia E. Howe who praised French colonial corvée-based taxes in Madagascar for making the natives work rather than following their lazy and unprofitable existences (see wikipedia on corvée in Madagascar).
Work builds character when and only when it pursues right ends (see Confucius and the ancient Greek philosophers). When it doesn’t, at most it builds a sort of strength that has no distinct end with separate value. Then there is a grave danger that it will indoctrinate the workers into valuing the ends of the work anyway, as that is a psychological mechanism for avoiding cognitive dissonance. I was forced into achieving the Duke of Edinburgh’s bronze award at school; the thinking behind that was to make us adopt the values behind that scheme of awards so as not to feel humiliated by the subjection, though in my case I saw it for what it was and carefully never told my parents – in case they added their praise to the scheme’s compulsion. For an extreme case of this, consider the ethos that Himmler inculcated into his SS trainees – and how he did it.
Is there anything unethical about feeding the animals at a popular nature preserve?
I happen to think that sentient life, and life close to sentience, finds purpose and happiness in growth and progression. Paradoxically, almost everything we choose to do is an effort to reduce our opportunities to grow, because growth is also extremely uncomfortable.
Providing goods or services to someone, especially repeatedly, almost always undermines that person’s growth. They either undervalue it and get nothing from it or they become dependent on it and become stagnant.
In short, I think any kind of welfare or UBI is destined to push us further down the line towards unhappiness, nihilism, and dependence on chemicals for our emotional well-being.
I agree that when people are not challenged, they become stagnant. I’m not sure that promoting challenge requires us to withhold resources from people who don’t earn them. Can we challenge people in other ways?
There are a few other questions your points raise. First, you mentioned that repeatedly providing resources tends to undermine people’s growth, but you didn’t specify “unearned” resources. I think the statement is still accurate, though. Just because someone is working for a living doesn’t mean they’re not still stagnating. People can take a routine job for granted until they become obsolete. Even if their job is challenging, they can still stagnate in other aspects of their lives. I think even without welfare we need to find ways of challenging people other beyond requiring them to earn money to live.
That leads to the next questions: How do we decide whether someone has earned resources? What happens to people who find themselves in a position where they are unable to earn resources even when they do challenge themselves?
For example, people whose jobs have become obsolete, people who cannot work due to health problems, people who did not receive sufficient education, et cetera, might need an investment of resources in order to be able to earn resources through challenge.
If we continue with this paradigm, we see that the people who own the natural resources (or the channels of commerce) tend to have the power to decide what it takes to earn the resources to live. This power imbalance leads to a corrupt society and, perhaps ironically, the stagnation of the property-owning class.
I agree that stagnation is a serious problem: it’s one the four fundamental liabilities (scarcity, disaster, stagnation, and conflict), but I think that we can better address stagnation by supplying people with the resources they need to challenge themselves (and the inspiration to do so) rather than putting those resources behind a barrier that many stagnant people can cross and many driven people cannot. Does that make sense?
It certainly does, and I agree with what you wrote, but it doesn’t address my main concern.
I may be taking something for granted here, but “supplying people with the resources they need” is exactly what causes the stagnation. Yes, there are definitely different types–physical, physiological, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional–and stagnation can be present in none or some or all of these areas, but I don’t see how creating a dependency in one area (physical/temporal needs in this case) in the hopes that it will allow someone to challenge themselves is anything more than an exercise in shooting society in the foot. Again, I’m not denying that giving a leg up to an enterprising, ambitious person can do wonders for their growth, but 1. that’s a tiny percentage of the population who will do this, and they tend to not need the leg up anyway, and 2. more importantly, the more often a need is supplied, the more likely it is to become a crutch rather than a stepping stool.
Your concerns about people who truly need help are definitely salient, but they also reveal the problem with these types of programs, and with humanity in general. Complacency almost always sets in when people begin making excuses for someone, even when those excuses are legitimate. For example, an uneducated person who loses a job due to automation is, in my opinion, much more likely to take the UBI, scrape by on minimal effort, and stagnate than someone who has no external source of support.
How do we determine when support changes from needful to debilitating? I can’t answer that question, or I’d be running for public office.
You raise excellent concerns. To address these concerns, I think we need to take a step back and look at how we’re framing the questions.
Do you eat every day? Do you supply your body’s need for food every day? Would you consider regular meals a crutch? People who fast may think so.
Depending on the person, just about anything can become a habit, and any habit can become an addiction. That’s why stagnation is a fundamental liability: it’s inseparable from conscious existence. Just as scarcity is also stability, disaster is also discovery, and conflict is also choice, stagnation is also identity. It represents predictable motivations. The question is not whether people will treat something as a crutch. They will. Taking things for granted is the default. Humans are prone to developing habits that make them weaker, unless something else pushes them to develop habits that make them stronger.
But that something else doesn’t have to be a harsh environment. It can be social pressure. It can be a sense of personal pride and accomplishment. It can be a desire to emulate a role model. Eventually, it may simply be an internalized habit of challenge.
I do still argue that the greatest enemy to challenge right now is, ironically, desperation. Desperate people don’t seek challenge–it is forced upon them. Therefore, whenever they have the chance they will avoid additional challenge. They see it as wasted effort that could be conserved for future survival.
Independently wealthy people can certainly be complacent and useless, but few things drive people to challenge themselves as much as boredom. We owe a good chunk of modern science and mathematics to aristocrats who had nothing better to do and really wanted to figure things out (or to show off to other rich scientists and mathematicians). Aristocrats did also develop games and hobbies that they put considerable effort into, even if they often weren’t particularly useful. I’m not praising the concept of aristocracy or saying that aristocrats were generally admirable people; this is just to support the point that requiring people to worry about resources might be counterproductive if we want them to seek challenge.
As I said in other comments, we should not be looking at the level of support as the only variable in this situation. This aspect of the problem is cultural and must be addressed with cultural approaches. We need to help people find and pursue identities that they can be proud of. Compared to all the other problems humanity faces, I think that one’s one of the easiest. Once people learn about the basic building block concepts that describe what people want from life and how we overcome obstacles, I think they’ll agree.
(Part of it is figuring out what you want to contribute to the world. Do you want to promote prosperity? Safety? Vitality? Harmony? These correspond to successfully handling the fundamental liabilities.)
Does that make sense?
I haven’t thought through this one long enough to answer. My definition of crutch is simply something external that fulfills a function that would better serve the individual if it were filled internally or intrinsically, and I’m not even married to the idea that external/internal is a necessary part of that definition.
I’m not sure whether eating food every other day or every three days would serve me better than eating every day over the long term, either psychologically, physiologically, or both.
I think this is the heart of our disagreement on this issue. Boredom is, in my opinion, the worst motivator. I would venture to guess that independently wealthy people are the least happy group of all, assuming basic needs are being met. Pleasure is probably considerably higher among this group, but long-term happiness isn’t correlated with wealth, in my experience.
In my decidedly unexpert opinion, the aristocrats you reference were driven largely by maintaining/displaying status, and that the drive here was largely socialization, rather than any intrinsic result of boredom.
Desperation may not be the best motivator, but it’s probably one of the most effective, again assuming that basic needs are reachable. And this may be a privileged opinion, but I have little sympathy for the idea that, outside of a tiny minority of truly incapacitated people, that basic needs are out of reach for anyone in the US. No one in the United States is in a truly harsh environment, outside of those in very violent circumstances or extremely unhealthy family situations, those largely or entirely unrelated to lack of resources.
Recall Toynbee’s observations about how challenges foster civilisation. He concluded that challenge would do that, strengthening the civilisation, but only up to a point; too great a challenge would destroy the civilisation under challenge.
And recall also how the ancient Greeks both responded to virtuous leisure and tried to arrange for it; they left us much, which is more than can be said for some later Greeks, or even for all of the ancient Greeks (see what ancient Athenians, say, thought of Sybarite dissipation – which they construed as leading to fatal weakness in the face of barbarian Italians – and of Boeotians sunk in rural idiocy, and never mind what Epaminondas achieved).
That’s a false dichotomy; in the short term, there is that first alternative but the second isn’t simply not doing that, it’s falling between the cracks and perishing – and even the first alternative keeps open the possibility of rising above that over time. And, of course, some people will go straight to rising.
“Is there anything unethical about feeding the animals at a popular nature preserve?”
There are signs “Do not feed the animals” for a reason, as animals who are fed by humans loose self-reliance and become dependent, which puts their survival at risk.
The same risk exists with people. Welfare has the risk to foster dependency and helplessness. It changes peoples attitudes so they loose the will to rely on themselves to make a living.
Welfare creates perverse incentives. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations the black family structure was as healthy as the white family structure, with most children growing up in two parent households. Then LBJ’s War on Poverty started a lot of welfare programs, and these programs had perverse incentives, causing a different family structure with single motherhood as a prominent feature. Here is one of the reasons why welfare is often intergenerational.
It is often said that poverty is a mindset and not just simply the lack of money. The Vietnamese boat refugees who came to the USA with as only possession the clothes they were wearing often do well financially. But the people with a poverty mindset who happen to come into money have a tendency to loose it all. This includes many sports millionaires and lottery winners.
People become strong when they have to face challenges, just as muscles go strong when they are exercised. They stay weak when they are pampered and coddled by parents till far in adulthood, or taken care off by the government.
How is this possible?
Was it not proven the reason Black people are, on average, poorer than White people because of housing discrimination in the first half of the 20th century. They were unable to buy houses, while White people could, and as such, due to the increase in equity White families were able to build generational wealth.
How could Vietnamese people have built generational wealth when they had even fewer opportunities to buy homes than Black people? They were far less likely to be able to bvuy houses than Black people.
This does not make sense!
That is often only a secondary issue. A bigger one is that so much of that is junk food, which can be very serious in some species (from memory, Lisa Simpson: “Don’t feed the birds rice, it makes them swell up and burst”, Bart Simpson, just before running outside: “Why didn’t somebody tell me that before?”).
Ask rather two other things, at opposite ends of the spectrum: what use the will without the means? and, who among us could ever have either, let alone both, but by the Grace of God and the forbearance of other men? Then, having brought those things to mind, recall that a U.B.I. or equivalent, at the right levels, is about bringing people within reach of enough and then leaving it to them to reach it.
This worked for the ancient Greek wrestler who trained by lifting a calf off the ground every day until eventually he had a cow. For most people, though, there comes a point we cannot reach. And continually raising the bar like that makes hope deferred, which maketh the heart sick.
For more on this, you might want to read up the work of Kevin Carson and his colleagues at “Center for a Stateless Society” (C4SS), and the resources and study materials they make available.
Well, history tells us what happens without those things, even as stop gaps: Hark, Hark, The Dogs do bark, The beggars are coming to town… and then come Vagrancy Costs, Crime of Necessity, and no man with his own vine and his own fig tree.
EC, you may need to provide more details on how you envision UBI working. I suppose it could be a monthly check of $1000 regardless of employment or need, or it could be just a guarantee of $1000/mo, so if your income doesn’t get you to $1000/mo, the government supplements the rest. I’m working mostly from the latter assumption.
The biggest problems I have with UBI are first, it ignores human nature; second, it is inflationary; and third, it is ripe for fraud.
For inflation, keep in mind that by supplying this guaranteed $1000/mo (or however much it ends up being, to address Old Bill’s objection), this increases demand without doing anything to address supply issues, and that will drive prices up. This is the same sort of problem we see with increasing minimum wage, but on a much broader scale. And as prices go up, you have the problem of UBI becoming obsolete because it no longer helps people, or you have to raise UBI, and it becomes a dog chasing its tail, driving prices continually upward.
Let’s also for a moment discuss that whenever you have a free pool of money, people work incredibly hard to exploit it. I cannot believe that with estimates of 7% or greater welfare money going to improper recipients, UBI would fare any differently, or be managed any more successfully. And let’s consider the way people might try to take advantage of loopholes. Are you proposing a minimum age for UBI? If not, why not have a family of 4 rent multiple apartment suites so that each family member has a separate address? Or would you just propose a family of 4 gets $4000/mo? Would my family of soon-to-be 7 be worth $7000/mo? Hell, I could about quit work for $7000/mo. But assuming a household only gets $1000/mo, you game the system by multiplying households. Husbands and wives are legally living separately. Kids are dependents when it comes to health insurance, but completely on their own (from age 8) when it comes to UBI. I’m not very inventive when trying to devise scenarios to scam the system, but you can bet there would be plenty of incentive and ingenuity at large to bilk the program.
But the biggest factor is that free money incentives laziness and vice. Most people are not prudent enough to take that free money and use it wisely. A lot of people who are really struggling are struggling not because they can’t make the money; rather, they are very poor about managing money. Giving them money for free won’t fix that problem. And again, if I’m working fast food and only making $1000/mo, why wouldn’t I simply quit working altogether and just subsist on the UBI? I would suggest there’s a margin in there where I would judge many would take a small pay cut in order to receive the UBI and not work at all.
Some people would use UBI to get ahead, true. But that would be the minority of people, and a very small minority. Looking at a friend’s admittedly white-trash family, of five children, only one took advantage of opportunities and helping hands to make something of himself. The rest have fallen to drugs, crime, and other poor choices, when pretty much the same helping hands were available to each of them.
The problem is not that people don’t need the money; the problem is that free money, no strings attached is a huge temptation, and most people would give in to temptation rather than resist it. You can’t fix that with legislation, bureaucracy, messaging, or well-wishing. In addition, UBI assails a fundamental human need, which is meaningful work. Low wage, low skill work still carries the dignity of being able to provide someone with a means of gaining a wage. UBI strips that away. (That’s even aside from UBI stripping away those jobs altogether…)
I’d like to hear some ideas on how to confront these issues, but we’d need concrete details of how you envision UBI to start with.
“I’m not very inventive when trying to devise scenarios to scam the system, but you can bet there would be plenty of incentive and ingenuity at large to bilk the program.”
Heck, ya. Emancipate those kids as soon as they hit 15 or 16. They already do that in Hollywood to circumvent labor and education laws so that the kids can earn more money.
To clarify, universal basic income as I usually hear it proposed is a monthly check of $1000 regardless of employment or need. That way there’s still an incentive to start earning money if you aren’t already. As described to me, people wouldn’t start to break even on UBI until they’re earning somewhere between $60k and $120k per year (I forget the exact amount, and I’m sure it can be adjusted if necessary).
Universal basic income will not cause price inflation that cancels the UBI. That would only happen if supply were inherently limited. The example I’ve seen given for this is toothpaste. Let’s say 5% of the population can’t afford toothpaste. Then we give everyone UBI, so now everyone can afford toothpaste at the current price. Demand goes up, so prices go up. But retailers are still competing with each other on price! If there is enough toothpaste to go around, then any retailer who raises prices is going to lose customers to the retailers that don’t. If there isn’t enough toothpaste to go around, then manufacturers are incentivized to increase production capacity, because the market demands more toothpaste and they can pay for it.
I don’t know of any model of UBI where renting multiple addresses would affect how much a family receives; that would just be a waste of their own money. How do you think people will exploit money that doesn’t require means-testing? There are no improper recipients; every adult gets the same amount: $1000 per month. No households, no addresses, just people. Children might get less until they are of age–I’ve heard it proposed they get $500 per month; we don’t want to incentivize just having as many children as possible. I guess you could game the system if you pretended people were living with you when they weren’t. We would definitely need safeguards to make sure only real, live, physically present people were receiving the funds.
As far as incentives go, considering that a person can live perfectly well on $60k per year, what’s their incentive to put in extra effort and earn $120k per year? I’d argue that the incentive to work for that extra money will still be there even when people get $12k per year for doing nothing.
Our different positions seem to be informed in part by differences in our experiences; you might know many stagnant people, while I might know many motivated people. I’m inclined to believe that most of the reason why people wouldn’t want to work is that we end up working for idiots who don’t have nearly the sort of work ethic or conscientiousness that we expect from their employees. UBI would give people the ability to demand better working conditions. Alternatively, it would also give them the freedom to do actual meaningful work that they’d have a hard time getting paid to do, instead of menial jobs that really don’t need to exist (like certain flavors of middle management). What would you think of people living off of UBI but going around and helping their neighbors with odd jobs?
I’d argue people want to contribute to their communities, and that the reason they want to be able to quit their jobs is because rather than giving them meaning, those jobs are preventing them from seeking and finding meaningful work to do. (I expand on how to foster habits of challenge in my response to Sarah.)
Does that clear things up?
EC,
Knowing you intend a blanket $1000/mo/person regardless of income helps focus the conversation. My brainstorming scams (such as the multiple apartments) was based on the idea of supplementing income so everyone makes at least $1000/mo.
I will agree that people who desire more money will pursue more money. Where I think we disagree is the number of people who will do so. The vast majority of people try to find work they find tolerable. It would be great if everyone found work that was meaningful, but most end up with tolerable. They work the job to provide food, shelter, and luxury, not to do that specific work. Their interest is to have those times off where they can attend the things they really desire to do, which tend to be recreational. If you provide a basic income that allows people, even if they have shift their standard of living some, to live for recreation full time, most people will give into the temptation to do so. If you look at how our enrollment on government welfare programs has generally increased over time to the point that almost 20% of our nation is utilizing those programs, and that 80% of those are able-bodied people under retirement age, that makes a strong case for the propensity of people not to apply themselves when free money is simply handed out.
For your toothpaste example, one factor you completely overlook is that when there is much more money in circulation, manufacturers – often independent of each other – raise prices because they believe people can afford the higher prices. The cost of a tube of toothpaste is not the only factor at play. Advertising plays a role, as does fancy packaging, promises of whiter teeth in 5 days, cinnamon flavor, Pokemon themes, and so on. There is also the impression that a more expensive toothpaste must be a higher quality toothpaste. And companies don’t have to collude to all increase their prices at relatively the same time. We’ve seen that happen in the past with insurance, where one insurer moved from a service model to a higher profit model, and other insurance companies followed suit. If one company raises the cost of toothpaste by $0.10, other companies can raise their prices by $0.08 and still be more competitive. So this thought experiment really doesn’t support your case.
As to UBI freeing up people to pursue the meaningful work that they would do if only they could, the real question is why they aren’t doing that meaningful work in the first place. Maybe the meaningful work is being a musician. That doesn’t pay much, and it only produces a luxury that other people have to have money in order to enjoy. And it is very competitive, because there are far more aspiring musicians than there are positions for musicians. Same for any art or craft. Most people are not pursuing those dreams because they simply are not talented enough to stand out above those who are much, much more talented. UBI is not going to fix that. I would like to think that if I had the time and opportunity, I would write novels and get them published, but the truth is that I’m not that creative, not so great a writer that I would sell any books.
I would also like to point out that because people are not pursuing all these dreams because they are not lucrative enough, a UBI that frees up everyone to pursue those dreams will end up a vastly depressed tax pool. I believe Sarah B just commented that $1000/mo for adults and $500/mo for children under 18 would cost over $3 trillion annually, which cannot be covered by taxing only the ultra-rich. So you have increasing taxes on the middle class, which itself would be dwindling as people use the UBI to pursue those non-lucrative paths.
To sum up, UBI injects an addition $3 trillion annually of purchases power in the economy, which will result in companies increasing their prices. People have higher negotiating power with their employers, which will cause companies to pay far more in wages, and thus increase prices. People will be taxed at a much higher rate to cover the UBI, which will make it harder to afford the products that are at higher prices, and a significant portion of the population will move from active employment to living off the UBI, and another chunk will use the UBI to work non-lucrative jobs, which depresses the tax base, requiring higher taxes to keep up the UBI, driving companies to pay more and raise prices more, and on and on.
I will agree that there are many people who need help. I firmly believe in the principle of subsidiarity, in which those closest to the problem have the greatest responsibility to help those in need, and larger entities (municipality, county, state, nation) only step in when the lower level is unable to handle the situation. I think rather than crafting massively expensive solutions at a federal level, we should be working harder at the local levels to improve the plight of those in unfortunate circumstances. This includes working through local churches, food banks, community programs, and so on, targeting people who are in need and providing them more accurately what they truly need.
You forget, money numbers aren’t what counts, real economic activity is. There would certainly be a psychologically sickening lurch as a new equilibrium was reached, and that could even be too much to bear if the transition wasn’t handled well, but if it was things would eventually settle – only, the money numbers would change and there would be winners and losers getting there, which is why I prefer to engineer these things out with a different approach. But, short of Malthusian limits, with all the variants the economic activity would be enough to cover the end stage (it would actually go up, as all this is a Pigovian subsidy undoing a labour market external cost – Professor Kim Swales has done some relevant economic modelling on this).
That scenario fits what happens when levels are too high. When levels are right, or even if they are wrong as long as they are better than the present zero setting, the numbers in the models work out so that you do not get that sort of destructive spiral but rather an improvement – in aggregate, that is, so some people could still get hurt on the way before everything settles. Readers can go through Professor Swales’s research if they want to confirm this directly for themselves, or they can check that this really is a Pigovian subsidy and so infer that there must be some improvement – or they can stick with what they are used to, unhelpful though that is. These days we can’t trust the experts, so either we have to repeat enough of the work to check it or we face up to not being able to do that realistically, which is where rational ignorance comes from. But we shouldn’t trick ourselves into thinking it’s not ignorance.
I mentioned that the sweet spot is when levels are set right, so people can’t quite live off it but can with the low wages they could then price themselves into (ignoring transitional issues, because we can engineer those out with at least one variant, N.P.T. or Negative Payroll Tax). Those levels are close to unemployment benefit levels in countries that have those.
That wouldn’t happen like that, in that charity way, at the right levels of U.B.I. – though there would be the option of doing that sort of thing for low wages.
Some people might want that, but other people would want other things. That’s not a bug, it’s how people would need to be able to behave if they were really free to seek meaning of their own rather than from some wowser’s check list of what is not forbidden – and soon, what is not compulsory is forbidden.
For a lot of people, we already have this situation — it’s called the Internal Revenue Code.
There are millions of people whose income tax is negative. In other words, the United States is paying them back tax money which they have not paid in. The main ones are the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit/Additional Child Tax Credit (CTC/ACTC). These two combine for nearly $100 billion per year.
One other which is classified as a refundable tax credit, but works a bit differently is the Premium Tax Credit. These are the monthly subsides people get to pay for ObamaCare health insurance and run over $50 billion per year (numbers from the Peter G Peterson Foundation).
These and a few other tax credits are a main reason nearly half of Americans have a zero income tax liability. You can debate them, but they are currently part of our existing public policy.
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I am only offering one small consequence of these payments. Many people pay companies to prepare their taxes, and many of these people have those companies take their fees out of the refunds these people receive.
What I’ve observed is that these people referenced above tend to be very insensitive as to how much they get charged to prepare their taxes. Why? My theory is that, since this money is coming from the government, it is not real money until it hits the bank account so the size of the fee really doesn’t matter. If one gets a $7000 refund rather than $8000 if you did it yourself, well only the $7000 is real because that’s the only money they see.
I could be wrong, of course, but that’s what I believe.
That reminds me of a suggestion I’ve heard where people have to pay taxes to the government directly–with a check or bank deposit–instead of having the taxes automatically deducted from their paychecks. That way people can feel how much they’re actually being taxed.
I’m inclined to think that being insensitive to concealed fees is a symptom of financial illiteracy in general, and that we should address that underlying problem regardless of what else we do. Then it won’t matter as much when people are taxed or charged for tax processing. How does that sound?
I have several concerns with a Universal Basic Income. The first is that if it is really a UBI, then it must go to everyone. So how about I just keep my tax dollars instead of giving them to the government to send them back to me. I’ll get the interest too, which makes this better for me. With my husband and myself, that would be $24,000 a year, which is more that my federal income tax payment as married filing jointly. Now, considering that the amount he makes is in or almost in the top 20% of earners (depending on calculator), where is this money coming from? We already have around 40% of filers paying no net income tax. What happens with that is 80% of filers paying no net income tax? Our taxes will have to go up. Then that $1000 will go even less far.
This gets more complicated if it is $1000 per person, not per tax filer. I have a family of 7, so that’s $7,000 a month. Aside from where that money is coming from, that’s not that much less than my husband’s net take home pay. If we get that much a month for simply existing, why should my husband work a high stress, high skill job that requires him to be on call 24/7/365? Why should we give up weekends and holidays for my husband’s job? If he can work for Walmart and keep us pretty close to the same lifestyle, why would he work as a salaried (unpaid overtime) employee with long hours? There is no incentive for us. Without that financial incentive for him to work this job, which requires a lot of time, effort, skill, knowledge, etc, he would be doing something else. If he is doing something else, who is going to do this job of his, which requires such specialized and hard-won knowledge that there are relatively few people in this world who can take it on. It is actually a concern of his industry that they are getting fewer and fewer qualified people as it is. If he and people like him do not perform this job, you will lose out on the products he provides, which in this case from the concept of universality, is all petrochemical products. This explains my second concern. I am concerned that a UBI will drive people from doing the hard and dirty jobs that make society function. My husband has the job he does, with all its negatives, because it provides a great lifestyle for our family, allowing me to stay home with the kids, allowing us to have the big family we want, and allowing us to live a lifestyle that, while it requires some sacrifice, does not require us to count every penny every time we go to the grocery store and allows us to budget in a certain amount of charity for those who need help. Other jobs that would be in danger include the hard labor of farming, ranching, etc. Medical fields would probably empty out pretty quickly too. Where are we now getting our food from? What keeps us in production of goods at all? Why would people work to provide service, if they don’t have to? It seems that a UBI leads to the idea that people can live off of another person’s labor for free, and that someone, probably the government, can force me to do jobs I don’t want to do.
I also see plenty of people on government assistance who abuse the system horribly. I worked in grocery stores to help pay for college. SNAP currently reports almost $500 billion in fraudulent spending. It is estimated that around 40-50% of dollars of SNAP money is for junk food, rather than healthy meals. As a grocery store worker, I saw these “needy” families eating fancier and more appealing food than my family could afford between a truck driver for an oil company and a nurse. These kids got lots of candy and treats in their lunch boxes. I got half an apple for my sweets. This not only leads to the obesity epidemic, but also to the attitude that people deserve nice things instead of having to earn them. I know that not everyone will abuse this kind of money, but I also know that many will. This abuse is bad for them and society. Thus, my third concern is that a UBI would cause a shift in society to cause people to become less industrious as a whole, allowing more of a societal meltdown than we already have. I have a case study of a woman in my community that I have sort of befriended, in the Facebook sense. She has three kids, all by different dads, with a fourth on the way. She never got any schooling beyond high school, and frankly, didn’t do well at that. She works a job for about six months, before saying that it is too toxic and quits. Her work ethic is moderate, when doing work, but her devotion to working a normal work week is too little. She continually demands that she have the good things in life, such as eating out and fancy toys and parties for her kids, which she can barely afford to feed. She continually is begging folks to give her and the kids nice things, telling us how awful we are, if what she gets is less than what she wants. She routinely demands that people give her free childcare for her kids, or maybe would trade it for an hour of cleaning your home. Heaven forbid she gets a hand-me-down when begging for something. She lost her home because of non-payment, and it is all the landlord’s fault for not letting her stay there until she got more money…after not paying for six months. She is able to exist as she does due to government assistance. She is raising her kids to be the same, and she is encouraging other women to live in the same manner. She is hardly the only woman I know like this.
My final concern is that being given money for simply existing is a denial of our humanity. To quote the Bible, “those who do not work, shall not eat.” Humanity gains dignity through work. We need to encourage hard work, diligence, and endurance of suffering for the good of mankind in general in the form of the necessary production of goods to live off of, but also for the individuals who gain the virtues necessary to be a good member of society. Some people are virtuous by their very nature, but most of humanity seems to need a great deal of practice, and the hard work inherent in keeping a job allows people who want to grow in virtue the ability to do so, in fact, it often forces those who need the extra motivation to grow in virtue regardless of their desires.
I do not see that UBI is a very good idea in general, but as a summation, I believe that it has to be funded from somewhere, and by its very nature, would cost more than the taxes we already pay. It would either rid the market of a great many goods and services, or force people to provide those goods and services for no benefit to themselves. It would increase corruption in the overall system. It would decrease the opportunities for individuals to grow in virtue.
Here is a counter-argument I found on Threads.
https://www.threads.com/@anxious_opposition/post/DQfUnd5Dhwo
Thanks for your thoughtful response, Sarah! I’d like to address your questions point by point.
1. The major difference between UBI and a simple tax break is that a tax break can’t help people who don’t have income.
2. If a family in the top 20% of earners pays less in taxes than what they would receive with $1000 per person per month, then that money would come from higher percentiles. The wealthiest 1% have orders of magnitude more wealth. You may have seen some visual depictions to help convey how much money they have managed to accumulate by aggressively maintaining their positions of market control–it doesn’t come close to fitting on the screen. Part of the idea behind UBI is that the people who earn huge amounts of money do so by hobbling everyone else’s ability to compete, so it’s fair to tax their money and use it to help everyone else escape positions of vulnerability and desperation. Does that make sense?
3. “…why should my husband work a high stress, high skill job that requires him to be on call 24/7/365? Why should we give up weekends and holidays for my husband’s job? If he can work for Walmart and keep us pretty close to the same lifestyle, why would he work as a salaried (unpaid overtime) employee with long hours? There is no incentive for us. Without that financial incentive for him to work this job, which requires a lot of time, effort, skill, knowledge, etc, he would be doing something else.”
That is an excellent question. I would say that if the work needs to be done, a company should find a way to do it that doesn’t involve high-stress, 24/7/265 on-call working conditions. Maybe they should hire more people. If they need to raise prices, it’s not like their customers can’t afford it, with their own UBI. Part of why I support UBI is that giving workers more power to walk away from bad working conditions will force companies to look after their employees better, without needing complex bureaucratic regulations that “stifle the economy” and are full of loopholes anyway. The economy will reach a new equilibrium–it’ll just be rebalanced to give the workers less of a disadvantage.
(Maybe we can all just work less! With the level of prosperity humans have achieved and can further achieve, there’s little reason to have four people employed five days a week for $100k per year and an equally skilled person unemployed when the five of them could be employed four days a week for $80k per year.)
I agree that full UBI for children might actually be a system-breaking incentive. I’ve heard it suggested that children only get half the UBI of an adult, which might be better. There’s room for discussion about how to handle it.
4. Complacency is already a concern we have to deal with. Just because people have to work for a living now doesn’t mean they’re not already stagnating–degrading the quality of the work they do and failing to take responsibility for more important jobs. We need to address that problem anyway, finding reasons why people would want to work even if they won’t literally starve if they don’t.
That leads to a fascinating thought: Is there a shortage of medical professionals already? Welfare isn’t responsible for that, is it? Does anyone decide to become a doctor because otherwise they’d starve? Does anyone quit being a doctor because they can go on welfare?
It seems to me that the main factors in people spending the time to study medicine are things like wanting to help people, wanting to apply one’s potential and accomplish something, a fascination with the topic, personal pride, or being bullied by one’s parents. Inversely, the factors in people deciding not to study medicine are the inflated student debt, the dysfunctional academic and healthcare systems, the abusive working conditions (for nurse practitioners, for example), and compassion fatigue. Considering that anyone capable of becoming a doctor could easily get a decent and less stressful job elsewhere if they chose, no welfare required, maybe we should look at those incentives and disincentives rather than just focusing on money as the only variable.
5. I’ve heard some concerning things about the restrictions put on SNAP funds, such as how they’re influenced by food lobbyists and not designed with the health, wellbeing, or practical cooking situations of poor people in mind. That said, I’ll believe that some people are spending it in ill-advised ways. Short-sightedness can make you poor (unless you’re rich and connected), but being poor can also make you short-sighted. If the future is uncertain, you take what joy you can get in the present. That’s what it means to live hand to mouth. That’s a habit problem that we’ll absolutely have to fix, with or without UBI. UBI would make fixing it easier by creating a stable situation for people to learn habits of investing in their long-term health.
6. Regarding the woman in your case study, I doubt that she’ll learn anything if our approach is limited to turning the welfare dial up or down. What do you think might teach her how to earn a living? What do you think would prevent other people from following her path? Do you think she could meaningfully contribute to the community even if she’s not able or willing to hold down a conventional job?
7. I agree that people should try to contribute to humanity, and that challenging ourselves to develop discipline and work ethic is part of what makes life meaningful. Part of what concerns me about the current system is that people achieve positions of economic and political power and authority without having developed the virtues you speak of. Either working didn’t force them to cultivate these virtues, or they were not forced to work in order to attain their positions. If we could fix that problem so that the people in power really were virtuous, I would consider UBI to be significantly less necessary for improving society.
That said, I think the threat of starvation is far from the best motivator available to us. Starvation will motivate people to do the minimum it takes to not starve, and so we have ended up with a society full of anxiety-ridden underachievers. A functioning society needs people who will try to go above and beyond without worrying that they are jeopardizing their positions, being taken advantage of by their employers, or risking burnout.
In other words, having to earn a living is neither necessary nor sufficient for motivating people to maintain a healthy society. People need to be motivated to do their best, which the threat of destitution can only do for a short while before people just stop caring. If people are motivated to do their best, though, then no threat is required.
In focusing on the incentive working to live, we’re neglecting other methods of challenging people. Here’s my formula for it:
To sum up, UBI would effectively be funded by taxes paid by the extremely wealthy, rebalancing wealth and giving poor people a more financial stability and greater opportunities to invest in themselves, build healthier habits, and hold employers accountable for good working conditions. The need to foster a culture of challenge already exists, but the financial support would make it more possible for people to take on those challenges.
That’s my take on UBI. I’m certainly open to exploring other approaches of solving these problems of stagnation and corruption, as long as we actually make serious efforts to solve them. (E.g. If we want people to work, we need to make jobs less gratuitously torturous.)
Does that all make sense?
I’m responding to this in chunks for easier reading, I hope.
The next problem is that you are forgetting that many times, companies work on very tight margins and cannot increase overhead without going under. Oil companies, for example, make, on average, a dime (Yes, $0.10) for every 42 gallons of gasoline they sell, and, for the most part, re-invest that money in themselves. Sure, the numbers look big, given the fact that they can sell them, but when you consider upgrading costs, this starts to become insignificant. A catalyst can cost upwards of $10 million dollars. Pipes, vessels, pumps, etc costs more than that at times. Hundreds of millions of dollars must continually be put back into the production to keep what we have at the prices we offer. Then the government gets involved, with new regulations, and the cost of making petrochemicals goes even higher, reducing margins further. Increasing overhead often causes companies to have to shut down, even multimillion dollar companies that look incredibly wealthy on paper.
When you claim that a company can pay 5 people $80K rather than 4 people $100K, you are ignoring certain fiscal realities too. First is that you are accomplishing wage depression, which is, I thought, the opposite goal. That does not give the employees better bargaining power. Also, you claim that if companies raise prices, which they will have to do, people can pay for it with their UBI. This is, perhaps, a money quote against UBI. This is directly a statement that UBI will cause inflation. If UBI causes inflation, the money we get for UBI will then not be enough, which will require a higher UBI, which will require greater inflation.
To be continued.
There are a lot of unexamined assumptions in there, that have turned into asserting the very things at issue. There is little point in arguing unless and until we can agree what we are even looking at, so I will just list some of those things as food for thought:-
I can give an example of my own, drawn from life. Right now a British Building Society is threatening to seize my funds with them unless I pay about five times as much to someone else to do a notarisation for them, on the grounds that they need it to safeguard my funds and that they are entitled to demand that I pay to give them any and all identification information and anything connected to that – and never mind that it would destroy any consideration for the underlying contract. Each single thing they bring out is correct enough on its own to have persuaded an ombudsman’s investigator (who himself made his findings before receiving my submissions and lied in writing about having thoroughly read all materials, albeit in a form letter he may not have read himself, and even altered my complaint to match the Society’s misrepresentation of it), and if they succeed in the end I will be hundreds of dollars out of pocket – and I will be convinced that a game that does that is rigged, and that the fact that it allows certain remedies is all part of steering the rig that way.
Wage depression doesn’t matter, income depression does. If a U.B.I. lets someone price himself into a lower wage and still end up better off or at least no worse off, he is in work as an income top up (or you could look at his U.B.I. as a top up). Only now there is at least the fifth worker better off because now he gets a wage. Of course, that only works when the levels are properly set, and if all industry gets offshored (say) that might not be possible.
Every member of the tribes who lives on the Reservation gets an amount of money for simply existing. All you have to do to take advantage of the free money is to live on the Reservation and have a certain percentage of Indian blood. The VAST majority of people who have this advantage live in squalor. They could use this money to help them past poverty, or they could decide to waste their lives doing drugs. Very few take advantage of this system. Most who want to do something with their lives move away from the Reservation and lose the free money, having to work hard instead. This money not only encourages idleness, but in this instance, it also encourages rape. A fourteen-year-old girl of my acquaintance grew up on the Reservation. She was gang raped by legal adults and became pregnant. Everyone praised her for bringing another Indian into the world, and the men who raped her and got her pregnant were also praised, not prosecuted, because another Indian came about, which meant more money for the tribe. Also, the Indians from these tribes, as well as the tribes themselves, are well known for never paying any bills. Surrounding communities have started denying SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid benefits in the doctors offices and grocery stores because the unpaid bills have nearly bankrupted them. The hospital system has collapsed in the nearest town, and most of the medical providers have left. This free money has made everything much worse.
Your aside on medical professionals is interesting. At least in certain parts of the country, like the part where I live, there is a HUGE dearth of medical professionals. There is no OB/GYN or midwife within 100 miles of where I live. There is no orthodontist, gastroenterologist, or cardiologist either, for example. When I speak with the doctors and nurses in town and in similar towns, Welfare, specifically Medicaid, is one of the primary reasons they or their partners retired/quit, though ObamaCare was the 10,000 pound straw that broke the camel’s back. They had to provide services that weren’t paid for in a timely or appropriate manner. Medicaid requires more paperwork, and less time for patients, and the system is horribly abused, which leads to a lot of compassion fatigue. Then ObamaCare was passed. The necessary overhead to keep up a clinic skyrocketed, which meant their prices skyrocketed. Insurance has become a major hassle, and they are not allowed to perform their craft, as some 20-year-old in the big city tells them that their best choices are not approved. They feel that they went into medicine to help people, and medicine has become too commercialized, due to government influence. They also feel that the field is too unethical, driven in a large part due to programs like Medicaid.
To be continued.
So, you are talking about levels that are set too high. That might be the only way to transition to the right levels without people falling through the cracks on the way, but again that is why I prefer a different approach to U.B.I., at least to start with.
Er… subsistence farmers do NOT work hard, except perhaps briefly at harvest time (and there are sometimes even work arounds for that, like landless, hard working, seasonal migrant harvesters in Madagascar who follow the harvests from one climate zone to the next for a share of the harvest), not unless something else is putting a thumb on the scales. Pioneers in North America had to work hard, because they were pioneering to clear land to farm as well as doing subsistence farming. Irish tenant farmers had to work hard, because as well as subsistence farming they had to pay rent, which meant working on landlords’ directly farmed land for nothing or raising additional cash crops to sell. And colonialism used taxes or variants of forced labour on the natives, so subsistence farming was no longer enough for them. But, oddly enough, in all those cases their subsistence farming worked like a U.B.I. as it let them get away with taking low wages (or none, in the case of some forced labour), which suited the colonial authorities just fine as what they cared about wasn’t the money numbers of the taxes etc. but the cheapness, quality and quantity of the goods the mother country imported from there – it was a rigged game. But straight subsistence farmers? They are poor from lack of resources, and if they get more resources and work harder on those, that isn’t subsistence farming any more because it gives them a disposable surplus. Here is something from Nassau Senior’s famous early nineteenth century lecture series on “Wages”: “In the early stages of society, the rank and even the safety of the landed proprietor is principally determined by the number of his dependents. The best mode of increasing that number is to allow the land, which he does not occupy as his own demesne, to be subdivided into small tenements, each cultivated by one family, and just sufficient for their support. Such tenants can of course pay little rent, but they are enabled by their abundant leisure, and forced by their absolute dependence, to swell the retinue, and aid the political influence, of their landlord in peace, and to follow his banner in public and private war.” Note that “abundant leisure”.
At a certain level, we all ought to ask that, for the alternative is to condone the Juggernaut in its career.
I guess my strongest argument, I think, is that the math is not in favor of this. With $1000 per adult and $500 for everyone under 18, assuming around 22% of the population is under 18 (by Google). This means that the average person is going to get $890 a month. Given 340 million people in the US, that equates to around $3.6T a year. Now, consider that SNAP costs $100B a year, Medicare runs $1T a year, and Medicaid runs $870B. The Federal Government currently collects about $3T in taxes annually. If we were to cover this program, we would have to more than double what is brought in through taxes. We know that the top 1% pays about 40% of all income taxes, which amounts to around $1T. Some estimates say they pay about 26% on average on their income. That means the top 1% would have income totaling not quite $4T. In other words, to have the top 1% cover the UBI, you would have to take ALL their income. That won’t happen. So others who earn less would have to cover the cost. Following the Laffer curve, it is far more likely that you’ll ask that $3T from the entirety of the 60% that actually pays income taxes. Or the government will have to print or borrow more money, which also has an inflationary effect.
Also, I dislike any option that involves the extremely wealthy to pay for it. This is inherently unfair to the extremely wealthy, many of whom worked hard to get that wealth. Why should someone with skills, luck, and hard work be penalized. Frankly, the idea of UBI suggests idleness to me. If I do not need to work, why should I? I don’t see a benefit to me at all. Wealth has no need to be redistributed. If someone cannot keep what they earn or have received, then there is no reason for me to believe that my earned income is safe either. Many people would look at what we make with envy, which means that we are also a target of greed and envy. Wealth does not need redistributed.
See above; the numbers only don’t work out when the levels are wrong. There might be reasons for having that in a transition, but then whether the numbers work out depends on things like how long it takes and whether the opportunity cost can be covered and so on, which a static analysis won’t bring out. Don’t forget, it’s not the money numbers that matter but the underpinning real activity.
You might want to look at a few case histories of success by those measures, like Bill Gates, and also at how a few who deserved better got ripped off, like Constantinesco with his mechanical torque converter. There are even some middling ones like Calvin Mooers, Jef Raskin and Chuck Moore (though those last two overlap a bit in some ways), that I know about from the computer area. Oh, and your earned income isn’t safe either, any more than Constantinesco’s was.
Now we come to some details of the other variants.
Of course a tax break can help people who don’t have income – if you put it on the taxes of those who could hire them. That’s how a Negative Payroll Tax works: first, you find a broad based tax or basket of taxes with point of impact on actual or potential employers, then you give them a tax break set at a level matching the unemployment benefits that employee would get, for all employees, old or new, whether previously working elsewhere or not, raising the base rate to keep things revenue neutral in the short term by covering the tax breaks on existing employees (I will defer issues like part time work and how some inferior systems terminate unemployment benefits on some unemployed). There’s a mathematical invariant at work here that keeps things budget neutral in the long term by cutting unemployment benefits in step with increasing tax breaks on new employees, and I’m sure you see the applicability of Noether’s Theorem in connecting that to Pigou’s work in the field of external costs and benefits.
You are boldly going into regions where Distributists, Mutualists, and certain kinds of Anarchist have gone before (hint: prevention is better than cure). Be not afraid.
You should still bear in mind that not all plans work out, so it might not work.
It comes out in the wash with an N.P.T. or Negative Payroll Tax. The levels for children should match what they would get if unemployed.
Bah, humbug – in general, though special cases may differ for particular people. The best way to contribute to humanity, if contribute you must, is not to contribute to humanity but to get on with things you know. Charity begins at home in these two ways at least: it is where you can see what you are doing and it is a good place to start from to get to somewhere else. If you try to contribute, you will achieve a broken heart just as much as one who tries to achieve happiness; it is part of the human paradox. And once you see this, you will see how hollow are the things you list that seek to further that great emptiness.
If you do fund it that way, you are unlikely to rebalance wealth as the ringbarking would flow through before there were new saplings ready to take the old trees’ place, so to speak. There are other, less directly connected ways to address this problem, but Chesterbelloc would be a good place to start your lifelong study of these things.
You’re thinking narrowly about income tax. But even with direct government funding, that could come from a mix including other taxes, and – after a long transition – yet other kinds of funding could come into play. The Alaska Permanent Fund offers a good precedent for this, just as the Alberta Heritage Fund offers an awful warning (the politicians got at it).
There are two answers to all this, which should cover everything between them:-
Of course, a dilemma is when there is no good answer out of two choices; that could still happen here, but it’s worth looking for a way out.
No, we do NOT gain dignity through work, not as such. From time to time, some work may incidentally have dignity for some unrelated reason, and even so that will depend on the worker’s own sense of values, but work never has value in an essential way – it never has dignity “for simply existing” as that is a denial of any real dignity that is going, if I may turn your words back on you. That said, I am sure that all nurses above the level of Sarah Gamp do have values that give dignity to the work they do – for them – and I am just as sure that that would not hold of slave nurses in general, if we still had them. But I am as revolted at being forced into dignity as at being forced to be free – it is another’s dignity and freedom there, not mine. Any who come out of that and like it have been changed against the will of what they once were; their life is very death.
Ah, no, the numbers work out that everything would cost less – if done right, and if the transitions were done right; see my other comments for how you can check this. And it might make markets do yet other things, which – presumptively – would probably be better still or they wouldn’t be chosen by undistorting the market like that. As for corruption, that is a fallibility of men and government, and there are ways to engineer both out and end up with something very like Distributism in spirit (as G.K.Chesterton said of it, “the trouble with capitalism is that there are not enough capitalists”). As for that hope of virtue, the cynic in me looks around for wowsers – and fears I find them.
Those sorts of programs seem to work less well the more diverse the populace is (hello, USA). They can sort of work in the “Nordic” (or Swedish) socialism models, where most of the population is highly homogenous and can see themselves benefitting from the same programs as their very-identical-in-most-ways neighbors. Otherwise, they tend to create resentment and discord.
I can see where you’re coming from about people being able to identify more closely with the people on welfare I’m a bit confused, though. Does it only take being part of the same ethnic group for employed people to not resent people on welfare? Also, why do you think Norway and Sweden haven’t collapsed under the incentives to go on welfare and not work? I thought that was the main concern.
They are both small, unambitious, homogeneous nations. No real influence in the world, no risk-taking, no great innovation, no ambition, That’s what the socialists and social justice activists want for the United Staes. No highs, no lows, no success no failure. Just boring security and “safety” with hard limitations.
Screw that.
Not only does that not answer either of my questions in the slightest, but I think we’re getting into straight-up nationalism territory here. How do you define the “great innovation” that you assert Norway and Sweden don’t have? What sort of ambition do you think a nation ought to have? And why on Earth do you think that humans would be less willing to take risks if they have a safety net? Don’t you think humans ever get bored of safety? I find that not having a safety net is what prevents humans from striving for greatness.
Sure it’s “nationalism.” The United States, with its pluralism, individual rights and emphasis on personal responsibility, has a unique culture that is a catalyst for progress and innovation. How do I define what they don’t have? I know Norway is one of the great hypocrites among nations, boasting of its electric cars and renewable energy while depending on its oil and gas revenue. Sweden boasts of its anti-climate change measures, which haven’t had any impact on climate change at all.
Alright, so Norway and Sweden virtue-signal on climate change. I’m not sure how that’s an indictment of their welfare system.
I can see how pluralism and individual rights create a unique culture that is a catalyst for progress and innovation. I think that an emphasis on personal responsibility is a good thing for a country to have, to be sure, but I’m not sure how that factors into progress and innovation.
I’m also not sure that an emphasis on personal responsibility is the same thing as “every man for himself,” which is admittedly the extreme case of what I’m arguing against. If anything, desperation tends to make people less inclined to take responsibility for their actions. I guess the question is, what are the limits of personal responsibility? What are the things that people are not expected to handle all on their own?
There is a Texas sharpshooter fallacy at work here. You could match any country to its distinct attributes, so what counts is how those matter but others don’t (if they don’t). But progress is only good if it has a good direction, a good tendency, and innovation is as useful yet sterile as a mule (unlike invention).
This also shows cultures change.
their ancestors were very ambitious.
The attention to “innovation” is what happened when U.S. culture moved the goal posts away from actual achievement and changed the emphasis to a marketing one in which what counts is who scoops the pool, not who and what made it happen. For instance, the Zippo lighter is a U.S. innovation but a repackaged Austrian invention, the practical electric light bulb is a U.S. innovation but a British invention, and so on; here, innovation relates to bringing things to a wide market – but that only existed in the U.S.A. for a very long time.
(Speaking of the Texas Sharpshooter…)
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Questions:
What bad things are we concerned will happen as a result of universal basic income? (You can provide statistics if you want for clarification, but it’s not necessary. I take concerns seriously and consider them worthy of being addressed on their own.)
Are there any ways we might be able to address those concerns while keeping a universal basic income?
</BLOCKQUOTE>
I have been looking into this area for a long time. One thing I found was that a Universal Basic Income, a Negative Income Tax and a Negative Payroll Tax are all long run equivalent when set at the same levels, though they do have different transitional issues and need different sorts of funding and administration, with all that those imply. I concluded that a Negative Payroll Tax would be the best to start with, going to a Universal Basic Income funded by decentralised, quasi-Distributist endowments after decades of transition.
Am I unethical for wanting to warn New Yorkers against electing an Islamist, Jew hating mayor twenty-four years after 9/11? Or wanting to warn them against the problems of free public transit and rent freezes and other programs to be implemented by a Communist? They seem gleefully oblivious. Is there a duty to warn? Or are they better left to themselves?
I mentioned these things obliquely to a New Yorker friend (a non-observant Jew) and he said essentially New York is very diverse and New Yorkers all get along because they live in close proximity to each other; the only reason Israelis and Palestinians don’t get along any more is because of the British, just as the reason Hindus and Muslims don’t get along in India because of the British; and finally, New Yorkers will vote for anyone who says he will freeze their rent.
Mamdani to Katie Couric and Trump: “But if you want to pursue your promise to create the single largest deportation force in American history or your promise to persecute and punish your political enemies, then you will have to get through me to do that here in New York City. Because for far too long, what we found City Hall to be is an embassy for Washington, D.C. And what it needs to be is a shining light of what it can look like to actually fight for the people who call the city home.”
So, NYC is a foreign country? The U.S. has an embassy there? Is Governor’s Island going to be renamed Fort Sumter? Will NYC be declared part of Uganda?
Would you be unethical for wanting Mamdani to win?
Some republicans want him to win, and some democrats fear that he will…both for the same reason:
It seems entirely possible that a win and implementing his promised policies would mean that NYC will become even more of a leftist sh*thole. Businesses and honest, productive people will leave if they can. Crime will spike, its economy will tank, and everyone will see what a disaster ruinous democrat-socialist polices are in real life. TANSTAAFL …the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. should have made that obvious, but the takers never learn.
There’s that as well, Wim. Give ’em what they want, good and hard. Of course, the Cuban or Venezuelan model is what the left wants in the U.S. Single party rule. No Republicans of any stripe whatsoever. I guess they’re still strumming the old “Communism hasn’t ever really been tried” guitar. And if people think Mayor Pete was an incompetent mayor of a city of a hundred thousand, wait until this kid is at the helm in the largest city in the country.
And how deluded can Jews be to vote for an Islamist?
“Any more”? When did they ever? More precisely, when after 1948 (there having never previously been any Israel since before the Palestinians emerged from remaining Jews, save perhaps in the sense that where Jews are is Israel, nor are they out of it – if you want to argue that settlers in the British Mandate count as Israel, though that claim was inflammatory itself even then, over and above the inflammatory economic effects of the settlers, neither of which inflammations flows from the British)? In fact there were British concerns about Zionist settlement in Palestine expressed in Parliament in the early nineteenth century, before it even happened (we know this because Macaulay pooh-poohed the concerns in his “On the Civil Disabilities of the Jews”). And, um, I don’t think the British had much to do with the several rounds of Muslim invasions of India before the British Raj – you know, like what Tamurlaine did there, massacres and all.
Great day’s work, pml. Record-setting, I believe, and high quality as well as quantity. Kudos.
I remember watching this as a child and laughing until I could barely breathe. It’s been 40+ years now and memories fade, but I still recall it as one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
In my mind, it might be Disney’s finest hour.
As November 1st SNAP benefits will not go out, here is a very nice quote about the attitude of people during the Great Depression regarding benefits from Cynical Publius:
“My parents were really old when they had me—mid-40s. Old enough that they were teenagers during The Great Depression. They had so many insane stories about that time. Oatmeal for dinner. Kids sleeping 4 to a bed. My grandfather going out in the street at night looking for cigarette butts so he could pull out enough tobacco to roll his own cigarette. All the kids going to work in their late teens and giving all their money to my widowed grandmother so the entire family could survive. They were poor. One other theme that always echoed from those stories was that they “never went on relief.” (“Relief” was what they called government welfare programs back then.) They were so proud of that fact. It was shameful to go “on relief,” and they never did. What happened to that America?”
My maternal grandmother was the oldest of seven children. She had one pair of socks. She would wash them at night and hang them up to dry so she could wear them the next day.
I participate to some degree in a couple forums that are devoted to the American Civil War, and this is a repost from one of them that I thought might be of interest here as well.
I just bought a book by Bruce Catton entitled “America Goes to War”. In it he explores some of the cultural causes and consequences of the Civil War, our citizen soldiery, how democracies make war, and other topics.
——–
I just obtained a copy of this book, which is a collection of lectures by Catton and published in 1958. It’s not a long book — 128 pages — and I basically devoured it in one sitting.
His writing reminded me of the great books Catton wrote, which I first read when I was young. His prose drew me into a lifelong study of the American Civil War. He has a way of writing that draws from our shared heritage as Americans and gives you a real picture of the boys and men, North and South, who fought this war.
Catton grew up in Michigan, as I recall, in a small town. He had a unique perspective, now forever lost, in that his was perhaps the last generation to grow up alongside actual Civil War veterans. When Catton was a teenager, they would have been in their 70s and 80s, but still there for him to talk with and hear their stories of the war.
The book’s subtitle is “The Civil War and its Meaning in American Culture.” It speaks to how and why we fought, how a democracy copes (very well) with a tremendous civil war where there are subversives and actual traitors living amongst us.
Catton speaks of how our democracy recruits its soldiers, why our citizen soldiers are so different from, let’s say, the Wehrmacht of World War II or other authoritarian regimes. We bemoan the political generals that were so inept at war. One thing Catton does is explore why we had those political generals — and why he thinks they were absolutely essential to waging this war. He also points out that some of the most fearsome disasters during the war were led by the professional soldiers.
I cannot recommend this book too highly, whatever your feelings are towards the war. I would also recommend Catton’s trilogy on the Army of the Potomac — Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomattox. Those books started me on this journey and they call to me still.
Thanks, Diego! I’m always looking for a good book to read.
The big “to do” in Denver this week was involving a police officer’s use of technology to accuse an innocent woman of being a porch pirate. Without weaving you through the mystery, it breaks down like this:
Victim has package stolen by porch pirate and captures the theft on a doorbell camera.
It’s a small municipality sub-community with limited roads in and out. The officers for the area spend their days writting traffic tickets and keeping the riff-raff from neighboring cities from ruining property values.
Officer takes the doorbell video and then uses a traffic database (Flock Network presumeably) to see what cars were in the area. He surfs the registration/owner pictures and decides this one particular woman looks like the thief. He knocks on her door and wants a confession. She asks to see what he’s talking about and he says “if you’re going to deny it, I’m not going to extend you that courtesy and I’ll issue you a summons”.
So, she has a summons, but she’s actually a good corporate worker in the financial services industry. Being accused of theft and potentially convicted of it could actually threaten her job. She has to take this seriously. So she rallies her resources. She tracks down the porch pirate video on NextDoor and sees a) the thief is much younger than she is and b) the location of the incident is not on a road she travelled. She has a modern Rivian vehicle with recorded video and she assembles her full timeline and evidence of where she was and when. Ironclad proof that she is innocent.
Here’s where people have opinions: Rather than wait for a December court date, the innocent suspect packages all of her evidence and submits it to the chief of police by email. He reviews it and writes back “Nicely done, we’ve voided the summons.”
I get why she took that approach – it was in her best interest not to let this go any further; however, by not going in front of a judge, she saved that officer a lot of embarassment and perhaps allowed a bad process to remain in place. Additionally, I think this further illustrates a lot of the opinions of people in the US right now who think it is the right time and place to argue with police officers at the time of citation rather than in the proper venue of the courts. There’s a lot of extra-judicial pleadings and resisting taking place. Is this a symptom of a society that doesn’t trust the court system? Is there too much at risk in court that people will plead to anything just to make sure there isn’t a catastrophic loss?
I am curious what you would have advised that innocent women if you were her lawyer.
My first instinct would be not to trust any law enforcement officer who issues you a ticket or a summons. Instead I would invoke constitutional rights such as 5A, 6A and 7A, and have an attorney help me navigate the legal process including presenting counter evidence. She is lucky that the officer voided the summons.
Should I trust the court system? I think I would rather pursue my fate via the courts than rely on the goodness of a law enforcement officer.
JD Vance does the meme and wins the Halloween contest.
Recently, Tucker Carlson had a long interview with Nick Fuentes.
There is a lot of discussion on the right on this interview, and and on Tucker’s decision to give Nick Fuentes (who is known for his antisemitism) a platform.
As an example, here is Kevin Roberts defending Tucker Carlson’s decisions.
At the X account of Cynical Publius there are many opposing viewpoints as well including David Limbaugh which I will not link lest my post goes into moderation.
I am curious about the opinion of the Ethics Alarms commenters and host on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes.
William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection had a couple of really scathing articles denouncing this stand by the Heritage Foundation endorsing Tucker Carlson’s interview with a leading anti-semite.
Carlson has gone off the deep end since he left Fox.
I think it is time for conservative influencers like Matt Walsh to change their “no enemies to the right, only enemies to the left” stance, and start disavowing Tucker Carlson and others who whitewash true antisemitism and racism. Matt Walsh’s attitude is that the best response to leftwing accusations of racism is not to get angry but to shrug your shoulders and say “Whatever, dude”. There is that fable about the boy who cried wolf. At the end nobody paid attention anymore. And then the wolf came. Nick Fuentes (and Tucker Carlson) exemplify the wolf.
Absolutely. May I remind the assembled that I flagged Tucker for what he is years ago, and never got on his bandwagon? And it should have been obvious to anyone. But when someone says the things you are thinking with wit, force and style, its hard for most people to think, “This guy doesn’t mean any of it, he’s just playing us.”