Economic Utopian Plan

Economics Economics Questions
101

You are comitting the sin of mistaking money for wealth. Money is a common mean of exchange. People need to work, produce stuff to money have an use as money.

So, you want to give 20k to people not working, and more to people working. But hey, how can zero work can entitle someone to wealth if zero multiplied by any value is still zero? No major incentive to produce anything, it ends up with like Zimbabwe, where there amount of money is much higher than the amount of service and products so the money ends up not being worth anything.

102

“This is monetary theory 101, the foundation of our modern monetary system and the reason why we no longer have constant booms and busts, bank failures, and money value volatility, like we did before we had a central bank with fiat currency.”

LOL. Are you living in a cave? Because we had the dotcom buble busting , right now we are facing a tremedous bust of the real state market, banks being bailed out around the globe and all that jazz that the “modern monetary system” was supposed to avoid.

Please, educate yourself on austrian economics, which you clearly has demonstrated to know very little about.. No need to read Human Action or Man, Economy and State. Just read some Bastiat, Economics in One Lesson and the articles of Mises Daily and you will be fine.

103

Is this that nutty “Twelve Visions Party” guy that has been single-handedly supporting Reason magazine with dozens of fullpage ads every month for the last half year?

104

So all “jobs” would be automated away while all people would be sitting at the beach sipping cocktails except when they’d get bored and decide to play a game of chess or write a poem once in a while? Are you sure that your $20k/$50k/etc. pieces per adult would be coming in from this GDP pie? You’ve just beat the communists in ultra-utopianism. To paraphrase: “Everyone ‘works’ according to their wishes (forget abilities), and to everyone according to their needs.”

I see. So each adult should be able to sell his “asset” (rights to $20k/yr) on the open market for about $1m, I presume. If $1m per adult is impossible, there’s a smaller amount that can be distributed to each adult by taxing it away from the ones worth, say, 3 times $X. You call these “dividends”. Under what premise do you acquire this ownership claim on the productivity results of others (much less everyone else?).

Your manifesto has holes the size of a jumbo jet.

Z.

105

Dustin said: “If your guaranteed $20k, which is no small sum, why save at all?”

Your facts are all wrong. People do not save already. The savings rate is less than zero.

And I still do not see how my willingness to save eliminates the risk I take when I invest.

“Nothing, other than you taking our flawed system and giving it steroids.”

Our system is flawed because it creates poverty, enormous income disparity, forces most people to work jobs they hate, and pays most workers just barely enough to survive. This economic plan does not increase those problems, it eliminates them.

106

z1235 said: “So all “jobs” would be automated away while all people would be sitting at the beach sipping cocktails except when they’d get bored and decide to play a game of chess or write a poem once in a while?”

The goal is to eliminate all jobs, not eliminate all work. If you enjoy cocktails on the beach, you should have the freedom to do that. If you want to spend your entire life doing that, you can, just like some people today already do.

But there is plenty of work that needs to get done and most people do not want to sit on the beach all day. They want to work and earn more money.

“Are you sure that your $20k/$50k/etc. pieces per adult would be coming in from this GDP pie?”

It is based on a national income of $18 trillion, which we would have reached in about 4 years if we did not have the recession.

“You’ve just beat the communists in ultra-utopianism. To paraphrase: “Everyone ‘works’ according to their wishes (forget abilities), and to everyone according to their needs.””

This is not communism. And I don’t know why you are against trying to improve people’s living conditions.

“I see. So each adult should be able to sell his “asset” (rights to $20k/yr) on the open market for about $1m, I presume.”

You can use your dividend as collateral, but you would not be able to sell it. On the open market, however, a $20k income stream would fetch about $1 million.

"Under what premise do you acquire this ownership claim on the productivity results of others (much less everyone else?). "

Under the law. Taxes require an act of law.

But if you want the philosophical answer, that dividend is your compensation for your ownership share in the planet nature gave to humanity.

All economic activity relies on use of the planet. If you are part owner of the planet, you are part owner of its profits.

107

This guy is a real trip. I think it is really cool that he found his plan on the Mises forum and is here defending it. The plan is totally out of touch with reality, but I can tell he is a sharp guy nonetheless.

108

Alternatives Considered said: “Is this that nutty “Twelve Visions Party” guy”

This plan has nothing to do with him or the venus project or zeitgeist or any other wacko.

It is based on the concept of a basic income which is a sound economic idea advocated by Founding Father Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, a declaration signed by 1000 economists, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and millions around the world who recognize it as the only way to put an end to the cruel existence of poverty and financial struggle.

109

People haven’t been saving because instead of putting money into a low yielding saving accounts, they put it all in into the housing market. The government induced boom made saving money unpalatable. Also, saving does not eliminate risk however, savings do create a cushion in case investments go sour. When the housing market crashed, nobody had any savings to rely on.

Those are symptoms of the problem. The problem is government.

110

Poverty is the lack of wealth, the same way cold is the lack heat, not “negative heat”. You can’t really create poverty, what you can is to disrupt the production of wealth. Just go to the middle of the woods, and there you will be extremely poor, will have to struggle to find something to eat, won’t have the capital to build a decent shelter and the best part you will have no one to blame, but nature itself. You are confusing he reality of the world by “our system”. We live in a world resources are scarce, nature is not kind, life is fragile.

111

haha, I would argue, that the government is a symptom, the real problem is people.

112

vitor said: “Poverty is the lack of wealth, the same way cold is the lack heat, not “negative heat”. You can’t really create poverty, what you can is to disrupt the production of wealth. Just go to the middle of the woods, and there you will be extremely poor, will have to struggle to find something to eat, won’t have the capital to build a decent shelter and the best part you will have no one to blame, but nature itself. You are confusing he reality of the world by “our system”. We live in a world resources are scarce, nature is not kind, life is fragile.”

We don’t live in the wilderness any more. We live in a modern country with the tech and resources to make everyone wealthy. The problem is the distribution of wealth, not production.

If I took $50k out of my pocket and gave it to you, I can assure you that you would be exactly $50k wealthier.

And if we took the trillions from govt and gave it to individuals to spend instead, they would all be wealthier.

113

Oh, I know! The minimum wage must be $1,000 an hour! Everyone will be rich! Better yet, let’s just give everyone their own personal printing press! Not only will everyone be rich, but they’ll never have to work again! Scarcity has been abolished forever! Huzzah!

114

Bohemian said: “Oh, I know! The minimum wage must be $1,000 an hour! Everyone will be rich! Better yet, let’s just give everyone their own personal printing press! Not only will everyone be rich, but they’ll never have to work again! Scarcity has been abolished forever! Huzzah!”

And it is the stupidity of some people who can’t understand the difference between a minimum wage and a dividend, and the difference between work and a job, that will keep them broke with their $35k salary, beat up car and ghetto apartment for their entire life.

115

This is a joke right?

116

So the plan is to decrease the incentive to create wealth without actually decreasing aggregate wealth? And at the same time pay for mass automation? Smells like snake oil to me.

117

And you would be 50k poorer. Redistributing wealth not only doesn’t create new wealth, but ends up disrupting the incentives to create such wealth. The great thing about capitalism is to have access to wealth, you have to create some of your own, so it’s not a zero sum game. And you are still confusing money = wealth. Here in Brazil many humble people can afford cell phones, televisions and a lot of stuff that is wealth, even if their sum of money doesn’t see much. It’s not the amount of money, but what this amount can buy. So, the USA are a place with resources and tech where everybody can make a decent living, even with the state working hard to destroy that applying the “modern monetary theory” you praised a few posts ago. And by the way, it’s not all about spending, saving is extremely important.

118

@MeSeesBadIdeas

I have a question, and I just realized this:

Why are we taxing and giving money to each other, if in the manifesto says that everyone will have their own personal printing press, and all this does is manipulate 0s &1s?

If everyone has an unlimited supply of credit, why does the gov’t, or whomever, tax and dividend the proceeds?

119

vitor said: “And you would be 50k poorer. Redistributing wealth not only doesn’t create new wealth,”

You are right, I would be $50k poorer and it does NOT create new overall wealth. It REDISTRIBUTES EXISTING WEALTH.

YOU would be $50k wealthier. The point is to decrease income disparity which is exactly what it achieves.

"[redistribution] ends up disrupting the incentives to create such wealth."

If taxes disrupt the incentive to create wealth, where did all this wealth come from!?!??!

The idea that people don’t want to earn $10 million and will just sit around broke, doing nothing, because they dont want to pay $5 million in taxes is wrong on so many levels.

“And you are still confusing money = wealth.”

Money DOES IN FACT EQUAL wealth. When I give you $50k, even though I have not grown the overall wealth of the economy and even though I have decreased my own wealth, I HAVE GROWN YOUR WEALTH BY EXACTLY $50k!

Somehow when the govt spends tax money, the money works just fine. But if we have you spend that money instead, it no longer works. Your logic is a little twisted.

If you just let the market allocate all income, you will get greater disparity of income and larger pockets of poverty. The richest countries on the planet all deliberately intervene in the allocation of the market’s income.

The richest countries in the world, with the highest standard of living, have the highest tax rates and the most intervention in the allocation of income. The US is falling behind all of them. And I do not know how any decent human being can tolerate the ghettos of Brazil.

120

mwalsh said: “If everyone has an unlimited supply of credit, why does the gov’t, or whomever, tax and dividend the proceeds?”

A loan is not going to increase your income. It needs to be paid back. The dividend is income, it does not need to be paid back.

If you just print new money and say you don’t have to pay it back, that would grow the money supply and cause hyper inflation within 2 years. Taxes do not affect the money supply.