Comments on: James Manzi on a Basic Income Guarantee

By: Rick Hull

Rick Hull — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 15:51:48 +0000

The money comes from tax revenues. That is the unspoken premise. This question concerns itself only with how to spend it. It is a political argument rather than moral.

By: andrew'

andrew' — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 09:53:50 +0000

From efficiencies of solutions to public goods coordination problems!

By: andrew'

andrew' — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 23:27:59 +0000

The problem is all in their minds.

The folks are happy with their stogies and beer.

I might even be too. I seem to give insurance companies a lot of money and they have never saved my life.

By: andrew'

andrew' — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 23:25:03 +0000

Everybody dies.

By: Bryan Willman

Bryan Willman — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 17:42:07 +0000

I have seen twice now (but cannot find, sadly) papers that claim that a very important determinant of attitudes toward work were what percentage of the people in the neighborhood/community worked. That is, growing up in a community where “nobody works” was the thing that strongly caused youth to grow up thinking that “working” wasn’t normal, or that “not working” was the norm.

So we might ask a different version of the question – given a neighborhood where 90% of the adult population are visibly observed to be engaged in work, business, authorship, or the like, and a second where 90% are visibly observed to live off some kind of assistance, what will the employment rates of the children in those communities be when they are adults.

Assuming that long idea is somehow correct, the thing to support healthy (and thus sustainable) patterns of work and trade would be to minimize the percentage of the population in any one neighborhood living assistance.

By: R Richard Schweitzer

R Richard Schweitzer — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 15:38:23 +0000

and where does the “money” come from to do all this?

since governments produce no “money” how, and in what ways is it to be extracted (or re-directed) from (or within) the economy?

is it to be borrowed, as funds in excess of revenues?

By: Arnold Kling

Arnold Kling — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 14:50:30 +0000

David,
The parental behavior will exert some influence on the child, but I think that peer behavior and rational calculation will kick in.

By: Arnold Kling

Arnold Kling — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 14:48:57 +0000

I think this argues for having two forms of assistance. One is a basic and crude cash or cash-like grant from the federal government. The other is targeted assistance provided by local government and/or charity.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 13:45:59 +0000

There seems to be something fundamentally unjust about giving a paraplegic and an able-bodied man the exact same basic income entitlement. Any equal entitlement would likely be too little for the former to live on, or too much for the latter to have any incentive to work.

There’s a reason the welfare state is complicated and messy. People’s needs are complicated and the trade-offs of the world are messy.

By: David R. Henderson

David R. Henderson — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 13:32:49 +0000

Arnold,
I think you think this is a rhetorical question:
Do we believe that the child of the parents who work will want to work when he or she grows up?
But my answer is “yes.”