Sol, sometimes a rebuke is necessary to make a person improve their practice, in this case to either be silent or research things before speaking about them. It appears to have been effective. The real vitriol comes not because of how you say things, but what you say. You Sol are polite most of the time and it doesn't stop people hoeing into you. You commit the worst sin of all: challenging their assumptions. MMM talks a lot about the benefits of being well-off is that you're now free to spend your time and money giving to others, but being able to give charity is not something which typically attracts people to FIRE, they tend to have other motivations. Thus, in having a social conscience you stand out. My own view is that a social conscience is actually not necessary to support various social welfare programmes. Objectively, however well-off I am in it is just unpleasant to have dirty streets with homeless drug addicts and mentally ill wandering about, and the threat of crime is not nice, either, still less the guerilla warfare and revolution that arise in the worst societies. And ultimately those things all cost money, since even if you have totally inhumane prisons you have to pay the guards well or you get lots of violence and drugs and prison riots spilling out into nice neighbourhoods, so keeping someone in prison will always be more expensive than just giving him a handout, even if all he does with his handout is sit around watching tv and smoking bongs. A social welfare net leads to more pleasant outcomes even for those who never use it, and is quite simply cheaper than imprisoning everyone. The question is how that should be best provided. I suppose you could go all Duterte and just have the police run around murdering everyone, but I am sure that has many indirect costs to society such as the bribes and blackmail and extortion and disruption of normal commerce and trade by police protection rackets and so on. Note that during the rule of Duterte there has not been a rush of applications to migrate to his country. Rule of law and social welfare just lead to more pleasant societies.
Society should be a meritocracy.
And as Sol said, perhaps you can engage with the larger point, which is whether the proposals sounded out in this thread (about UBI) go to equality of opportunity, or equality of outcome. I agree with the former, but not the latter.
"It is easy to confuse
what is with
what ought to be especially when
what is has worked in your favour."
- Tyrion Lannister
Those who argue for a pure meritocracy are typically those who are successful, and who like to imagine that all their success is due to their own merit, with "merit" being another way to say "hard work" - ignoring the factors of luck, family connections and so on. They also ignore that what society
values is not necessarily that which has
objective value (if it were, then prices and wages would change much more slowly than they do) making "merit" less actual merit and more about connections, ritual and virtue signalling.
I am not too concerned about whether society is or should be a meritocracy. I am concerned about grinding poverty and misery, and the crime, mass murder and revolution which follow from it sooner or later. To this end, some sort of social safety net is required. I take the economically and socially conservative position on the UBI, which is that it's a simpler and ultimately cheaper way to deliver a social safety net than all the paperwork of a dozen different kinds of pension and a hundred different kinds of tax break and subsidy. In its
effects, this happens to overlap with the socially liberal position that we should not judge people in a difficult situation, that we should not try to split people into the
deserving and
undeserving poor.
A UBI does not undermine a system of meritocracy any more than a system of roads and running water which everyone can use undermines it. There is a certain base level of goods and services which should be accessible to every person in a civilised society, and this should be in proportion to the wealth of the society. Western societies are
already spending copious amounts of money on welfare, the only question is the exact way it should be delivered.
The Commonwealth government expects to spend $191.8 billion on social welfare programmes in the 2019-20 period. Let us ignore state social welfare spending for now (eg on public housing), though it is significant. That's $7,800 for each Australian resident, or $11,800 for each of the 16.4 million registered voters (a number which we may take as a slight underestimate of the number of
adult citizens, since most proposals for UBI do not include non-citizens, and are vague on whether children are included). So, we have already decided we can afford almost $8k per person or $12k per adult citizen, the question is how we should distribute it.
By comparison, the unemployment benefit is $13,000 annually. Disability, single parent and old age pensions are higher, however if we have decided that an unemployed person of 64 years and 11 months and 29 days can live on $13k, it is not clear why the next day he needs another $9k.
Obviously someone already receiving $250k in salary does not need a $12k handout. But we could deal with this simply by adding $12k to every tax bracket (eg tax-free threshold goes from $18 to $30k) and we'd end up with much less social welfare spending than we have now. So the unemployed person is not penalised for getting work as they currently are (first their part-time work income is taxed, then they lose some of their benefit), and the well-off person receives no net benefit compared to now.
Plainly, a disabled person has greater needs, but these are essentially medical needs which is, in Australia, what we have Medicare for. Just as they get a prescription for some medicine, they can get a prescription for a small ramp into their house, or whatever.
A single parent also has greater needs, but we could toss some extra money their way from the savings mentioned above. Perhaps UBI could be in proportion to age, much as the minimum wage is, for example a 15yo currently gets 36.8% the adult minimum wage. The exact percentages could be fiddled with, but an infant or small child doesn't need $12,000 annually for its share of utilities, for food and clothing. In any case I don't believe that having a child should be without costs.
Despite being among them, I am not too interested in the needs of the well-off middle class parent and childcare, I would abolish that entirely in favour of the UBI; long day care runs at $70-$185 a day, from family daycare in some rural area to urban care with organic free range tofu and yoga classes, most is about $120 a day, giving a single parent who devoted that UBI to it 100 days a year care and a couple 200 days. I am aware that this contradicts my earlier suggestion of raising tax brackets, but again I am not too concerned - if it's all too pricey, one of you can stay at home, as I do. More men should stay at home with their children.
Again I mention that our family on an above-median household income is currently entitled to some $13k in handouts, for which we need only fill out a form online once a year, and if we're overpaid we're asked nicely to pay it back; by comparison, an unemployed person to get $13k must attend many appointments, do paperwork fortnightly, do work for the dole and endless pointless courses, and if a computer system believes they have received more than they should, cuts off their payments entirely and/or removes it from their bank accounts without telling them first.
$13k in each case. Notably, if my small business were to close, because of my wife's income I would not entitled to
any unemployment benefits - though I'd still be entitled to some childcare benefits. "We will give you $13k to not look after your children, but we won't give you $13k to put food on your table."
So it is not about
cost, it's about
moral judgements. Now, moral judgements are fun, but when applied to government processes they require a large and expensive system of administration, all those people collecting and stamping forms, having adversarial interviews with some poor unemployed or disabled guy, fixing broken software systems, hiring private investigators to follow them to see if they really have back problems, physiotherapists and psychologists to assess their official level of disability, and so on and so forth. Given the
billions of dollars involved I'd rather suspend my moral judgements, it's cheaper.
Again: the question is not whether we can afford it,
we have already decided we can afford all that social welfare spending. The question is how we'll distribute it. I am in favour of the method which leads to less administration, moral judgement, and is cheaper. Of course some people prefer more administration, more moral judgement, and greater expense, but unless they are one of those employed to collect and stamp papers I can't really see why.
Using the athlete analogy: I don't care if you get an Olympic medal or not, I'd just like you to be able to walk around without severe back pain. I don't care how many Aboriginal PhDs we have, I'd just like them all to have access to clean drinking water and eradicate trachoma and chronic kidney disease, and have them all finish high school. The purpose of a social welfare system is that the bottom should not be too low.So it's about
neither equality of opportunity
nor equality of outcome. It's about having a peaceful and pleasant society while minimising the welfare bill. A UBI satisfies that better than our current system with its huge mess of benefits and subsidies and paperwork.