Bitcoin Forum

120,000 Swiss signed a petition to hold a referendum on implementing a living wage in Switzerland.

http://rt.com/news/swiss-adult-minimum-wage-794/

What I'm extremely interested in, is where does Bitcoin help with living wage and other progressive schemes in a society moving towards a post-scarcity economy?

I'm also interested in how Bitcoins could be used to help build local co-operatives of people: imagine a neighbourhood with people of various skillsets and resources. How can Bitcoin, 3D printing and other breakthrough technologies improve the social economy?

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

http://timharford.com/2013/11/a-universal-income-is-not-such-a-silly-idea/

Regardless of whether Bitcoin is used, the universal income is a great concept.  We have endless subsidies, tax credits, welfare programs and the like.  Abolish them all - have one universal payment that covers basic food and shelter and close the bureacracy.

Of course, that is also the main problem with the idea.  There are a lot of state employees who would be immediately redundant.

True, but they aren't doing any productive work anyway. Move the same amount of workers to health care etc. sectors. Where there migth be problems in the future...

I agree.  I should have said "main political problem" - they are a big voting block.  They are wrong but then we don't expect turkeys to vote for Christmas  ;)

I agree it's a great concept. I do think it needs fine tuning before it's viable though - for example, people with disabilities should still be taken care of, so a certain amount of bureacracy will always be necessary.

Of course, being in IT, I do tend to think that eventually software will eat most of bureacracy *eventually*... it will take time though.

I'm curious, WHY is the basic universal income a good idea?  The rationale presented in the several posts has to do with eliminating waste in government.  But these arguments should be valid only if the cost of the waste in government is roughly comparable with the total program outlay.

In other words, if a extremely wasteful, arrogant bureacracy dishes out $90 in benefits for every $10 it keeps itself, then we might grumble and call it a 'necessary evil' - but we would not grumble and argue to do away with it in favor of something 10x more expensive.

So are there facts and figures to support the argument?

As much as I'd like every human have enough, the issue is if you give everyone say 20k as a basic wage then all you do is inflate rents, food prices etc until that's all eaten up.

that's not the problem but the solution....they can find their own way, just like those of us in the private sector have had to when some harsh uncaring government mandate caused a loss of jobs....for example right now in the coal industries...

But come to think of it, maybe all those bitter desk clinging government workers should go to work in the coal mines.

I corrected myself in a later post.  It should have been "the main political problem"

http://timharford.com/2013/11/a-universal-income-is-not-such-a-silly-idea/ - there has been some research he says.  It shows a small percentage of people do lose motivation but that its not more than would be unemployed anyway.  Since every society is different, I'm not sure whether we would be better off trying it in a town in the country that wants to try it, then a county, and so on.  

It would not bring together humanity like anarchy would.  People would still be trying to earn their cut, people would still think with greed.

how do you stop a landlord increasing rents by 200%? You legislate that as well?

Where does it stop?

Same way we do now.  If the rent is more than people can afford, he will have to drop to market rate or keep the building empty. 

Maybe in utopia but not in the real world. If it's a free market then the free market will eat that minimum wage. People need shelter. The seller is going to try charge as much as possible and like it or not giving everyone 20k means that landlord will charge more. As will all shops etc.

I'm not against the idea though. I just feel it's asset stripping rather than helping people.

Again, so what?  A universal income won't build houses and if there is a shortage of houses, rents will indeed eat up the universal income.  The answer surely is to build houses.

What a universal income aims to do is remove the massive tax and welfare bureaucracy.  For example, McDonalds gets a huge subsidy in the form of food stamps for its US workers which costs a fortune to adminster.  It might be cheaper to just give them the income and let McDonald's pay a market wage.

In Milton Friedman's formulation of the concept, he calls it a "negative income tax."  Just apply the same principles as the progressive income tax and take it to its logical conclusion.  There are a number of reasons that can be argued for it being a good idea.

1)  Increased efficiency.  People are best suited to make their own decisions and given the resources to do so, will tend to do a better job than the government.  Further, you have one person making these decisions rather than literally dozens of bureaucrats per person, each of whom is (badly) making decisions for hundreds or thousands of benefit recipients.

2)  The removal of perverse incentives.  The current web of ad hoc benefits programs each designed to address some real or perceived social ill has often led to systems that reward bad behavior while punishing good behavior.  I.e. people trapped into receiving benefits because if they did get an entry-level job at a low wage, they'd immediately lose more in benefits than they make in wages.

3)  Decreasing expenses relating to fraud detection.  Currently, the system of dozens of different benefits programs means each one has to spend a great deal of administrative costs related to detecting fraud unique to its own regime.  There would still need to be fraud detection for a negative income tax system, but it would be much more limited, since the only kind of fraud would be income-related.

4)  Increased freedom.  While a frequent criticism of the welfare state is that it requires coercion against those taxpayers whose money is taken for it, less often is it heard that it actually inflicts coercion on the recipients of the programs, into whose lives the government intrudes in numerous forms.  If there is anyone who ends up most humiliated by the nanny state, it is the ones it treats as infants.

There are also lots of criticisms of the idea from all areas of the political spectrum.  These are a few of the "pro" column arguments, though.

who pays for these houses you are building?

freethink - darkmule has made a better post than me.  Ignore me and deal with Milton Friedman logic :D

To be honest, I personally believe it's a good idea not because of economic arguments, but more because I think it's the right thing to do as we move to a post-scarcity economy. With 3D printing and software eating the world, millions of people will be unemployable. Does anyone dispute this? I've seen people (on other sites) claim that these people should just "retrain", or that more young people should go to University or learn to code. But does that solve this problem? What will happen when 90% of jobs taken by people are automated? What about when the best entrepreneurs are A.I's?

This future doesn't have to be dystopian, but we need to plan for it. A basic income is the first step.

I actually emotionally agree with the idea but intellectually I have lots of issues.

I've touched on inflation. It's fantastic idea if you can build unlimited houses but who's going to build these houses when there's no real profit? Are we banning the free market too? Wr're going to need to. What if one of these people decide to buy drugs rather than a home and food? What if lots do that? What if they don't want what you think they should want?

Friedman never seems to consider hyperinflation. If you give everyone 20k to me that's almost the same as giving no-one anything.

It works like this:

Without a vehicle to siphon wealth away from the individual and to the collective (i.e. hyperinflating fiat currencies), accomplished by using such monies like precious metals or bitcoin (not their redeemable paper counterparts but the actual items), and without a system that guarantees the top of the pyramid will always take more wealth from the working bottom, the individual retains the value of all his work done, and when coupled with machines that make the individual's job easier, he generates more energy than he expends, thus making his life more and more comfortable.

There is way too much intellectual power wasted trying to circumvent this core issue.  It's as simple as seeing it as it is: the working man can easily pay for himself and his family, as technology has improved so vastly that a minimal amount of effort can produce a lot of energy, but he cannot pay for everyone else and their families; eventually you run out of other people's money and everyone is poor again, wondering how we solve the problem of attaining a living wage.  Those who take from the working man are the reason why the working man either cannot pay his way or cannot find work at all, and thus becomes another parasite.

The solution to the living wage problem is simple, but difficult to accept: all we must do is refuse to participate in parasitical relationships, whether directly or abstractly, i.e. state welfare or business hierarchies.  Take ownership of your person and your time; let none profit from you, but instead opt to profit together.  Until we face the elephant in the room, all we'll do is skirt around the issue, forever stuck in an endless loop of sophistry, e.g. "This system has these advantages but also has these disadvantages"; the reason why no solution seems viable is because we've got the metaphorical planet Earth at the center of the solar system, so of course we have to go through extreme, complicated lengths to make it function, just to realize later that it inevitably doesn't.

The solution becomes evident once a deep understanding is made about why someone who works 8+ hours daily is having trouble with just his house payment, while someone who does not work at all can make anywhere from the same amount or more, or even far more than that, merely by claiming ownership over arbitrary lengths of land within arbitrary lengths of land and of all the profits made upon it.  The first step toward solving a problem is to see that there is a problem, and the problem of substandard living wages is but a subset of a much larger problem: sanctioned violence, enabling the theft of man's time and energy, which is itself a child of the parent problem; as Socrates put it:

You puzzle me.  The idea here is that we are already paying out this money through things like mortgage tax credit and social security.  But we have created an immense bureaucracy to "target" the payments. 

Take away that bureaucracy and pay everyone the exact same amount.  Forget targeting - its more cost that its worth. 

And stop worrying about who will build houses and cars - its not your problem.  Unless there is some regulation preventing houses and cars being built, they will be built. 

Anyway, in the US no-one will ever dare suggest changing mortgage tax credit or social security so its politically impossible.  Lets see how the idea does when put to vote in Switzerland.  It may be an ideal first country as its really a federation of tiny cantons and one of them could go first.

since I came in contact with bitcoin, i have developped a kind of lets system for my region. If you check it out let me know what you think, I like feedback!

www.tbrabantskwartiertje.info/indexenglish.html

Arguably (even for a fanatical Randian like myself) there exists an exception, which would be an extremely wealthy state that does not have to take from some and give to others...

Kuwait comes to mind.

Given sufficient technological advancement, this could eventually be the whole world.  In a world where machines take care of all the manual labor, there's going to have to be some adjustment.  Those fast food want fries with that kind of jobs will go away, and people will either have to step up their game to qualify for any kind of human employment, or they will have to be provided for.  Some people are almost by their nature inherently useless.  Some, though, given the freedom to do so, will do things that appear to be useless and may only be recognized as worth doing after they're dead.  Artists are often in this class.

That's really interesting, and I was playing with the idea of something similar in my own head! Very impressed that you have implemented it. I work in Helmond too, great to see an initiative like this so close by!