Reddit mentions of Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India

> If you reconfigure matter with your labour to make it more desirable, or perform services with your labour

I would call this value. When someone takes out a loan and turns it into a car, they have made value. Then they pay off the loan and keep the profits. However, in your model you have no driver to make profit or value because you have just given away the money. Far better to let that person make money, enjoy the profit, and then when they pass away, collect whats left. This would end the "hoarding" because they'd either need to spend it before they die or die with it.

> It would stop overall debt from increasing exponentially, it would reduce, perhaps halt, the trend towards ever higher wealth concentration in fewer hands and it would stabilize the financial system.

When people say that the debt is growing I feel like they're being very disingenuous. First off, debt is growing because we want inflation. It's a solution to a bigger problem, which is deflation. So to say that debt is this thing we want to avoid is really just to use a trigger word "debt" which is a bad word for most people. You cannot merely point at debt and call it bad. You have tried to link debt with a boom bust cycle. However, in your system debt still exists. In fact, you want the best of both worlds. You'd like the exact same levels of employment with some how lower levels of debt. Well giving individual people money isn't going to keep a business going. Maybe it helps their sales, but in order to produce products, they need capital first, which is generated by debt.

Furthermore a lot of people conflate the government debt with the debt you're talking about, and they'd like their government to stop spending. So people tend to agree if they don't understand the useful roll debt is playing in the economy.

> Piketty's argument is that the world wars destroyed alot of capital and caused social upheaval. But inheritance is an increasingly high portion of GDP. Another effect is that self made people are more proud of their wealth and flaunt it more. Rich heirs are often a lot more discrete. We hear a lot more about Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk then about the Rothchild's. But the Rothchild's are still a phenomenally wealthy family, they and many lords are the billionaires of both yesterday and today - but they keep a much lower profile than Elon Musk, for example.

Also social inequality in the US is a relatively new phenomenon, it was less severe in much of the 19th century than today.

That's why I've been advocating for my solution, which is to tax people upon their deaths. Furthermore, inequality is a real thing. It just seems unlikely that giving people money would solve their problems. I feel like the universal income tests have been failures so far. Far better to pay for their schools and healthcare. They also need a safety net and the option to live cheaply.

Also, it's fair to point out that there are people who have merely inherited their wealth, but we can't ignore that our system right now produces self made billionaires. Some people see that as a personal goal, and removing that from society is like removing hope. Don't focus there. From a psychological argument alone, that makes little sense. America has a very odd thing about it. Our poor think they're temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. Now, that's changing because people are beginning to stagnate, but that's a good thing. We should want people who are driven to succeed.

> But with money you can buy an education. Indeed the Indian basic Income pilot showed definitively that poor people in receipt of basic income tended to send their children off to be educated at higher levels then in the control villages.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Basic-Income-Transformative-Policy-India/dp/1472583108

I'll be honest, I think this issue is far too politicized to have honest data. If you search for people who are for it, you get successes, and if you search for the opposite, you get failures. One thing is for sure though, if you put that money into schools, then you will pay for people to go to school. Some people may not be able to go to school or may choose not to go to school. And in those situations I think that would require a deep dive into why that may occur. I personally think young child care might be next on the list social programs that might need to exist.

Furthermore, you need to realize that the world is changing too. Soon there may not be many jobs for people who don't hold some form of education. These people are not going to make it on $2k a year.

> With a land value tax (basically a property tax calibrated to the unimproved rental value of land) you have to pay a fixed amount of national currency to the government to hold your exclusive claim on a piece of real estate. But this amount depends on how much other people bid.


> In any case, if property taxes can only be paid in a particular currency then there will constantly be a demand for that currency.

Not sure what value a second currency necessarily adds. In fact, I'm not sure why you'd want the dollar if only one could pay off a certain thing... while I'm sure the other could pay off anything since it has greater intrinsic value.

>How are you using the term wealth?

I suppose stuff that people want. If you reconfigure matter with your labour to make it more desirable, or perform services with your labour, then your activities increase the overall desirability of the world (neglecting externalities to non-customers) but you can also hoard things that are desirable that people want and then charge them rent for it. This doesn't increase the desirability of the world. Rather it reduces it by putting up a toll on desirable public goods. Ring- fencing desirable things and charging a toll for access can be very profitable. But it isn't productive.

> This is a critique, but it's not constructive criticism. You don't have a better option.

Releasing a modest trickle of new money evenly throughout the population is a better option. It would stop overall debt from increasing exponentially, it would reduce, perhaps halt, the trend towards ever higher wealth concentration in fewer hands and it would stabilize the financial system.

That seems like a better option to me.

It's true that loans have a useful role to play in society - but we should not solely rely on lending to create all money.

> The billionaires today are not the billionaires of yesterday for the most part.

Piketty's argument is that the world wars destroyed alot of capital and caused social upheaval. But inheritance is an increasingly high portion of GDP. Another effect is that self made people are more proud of their wealth and flaunt it more. Rich heirs are often a lot more discrete. We hear a lot more about Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk then about the Rothchild's. But the Rothchild's are still a phenomenally wealthy family, they and many lords are the billionaires of both yesterday and today - but they keep a much lower profile than Elon Musk, for example.

Also social inequality in the US is a relatively new phenomenon, it was less severe in much of the 19th century than today.

> Far better to help people through the process of becoming a carpenter rather than merely giving them $2k.

But with money you can buy an education. Indeed the Indian basic Income pilot showed definitively that poor people in receipt of basic income tended to send their children off to be educated at higher levels then in the control villages.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Basic-Income-Transformative-Policy-India/dp/1472583108

> Yes, and that's exactly how it works. AIG isn't backed by the federal government. FDIC is. Here's a wiki article on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corporation

From the word "reserves" in the article it sounds like the FDIC can be maxed out.

But in any case in our current system private banks create 97% of the money and then if they give bad loans or pay out too large bonuses, the state comes in and bails them out. Because we can't afford to let them fail.

IMHO a much better arrangement would be for the state to directly control the amount of credit that banks have available to loan out in the first place. Rather than letting private banks go wild and then pick up the pieces when it all goes wrong.

> Regardless, how is this "backed" by land if you cannot redeem it for land?

With a land value tax (basically a property tax calibrated to the unimproved rental value of land) you have to pay a fixed amount of national currency to the government to hold your exclusive claim on a piece of real estate. But this amount depends on how much other people bid.

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In any case, if property taxes can only be paid in a particular currency then there will constantly be a demand for that currency.