Source: Universal Basic Income / Andrew Yang for president

Date

2018-12-15T00:00:00.000Z

Author

SolSeed archive migration

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Create maintainable Markdown archive revision

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4057 bytes

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*This was a session at the August 2018 [Resilient Communities Mini-Unconference](/Resilient_Communities_Mini-Unconference).*

### Participants
- [Brandon](/Brandon) (convener)
- [Ben](/Ben) (note-taker)
- [Shawn](/Shawn)
- [Eric](/Eric)
- Judy
- Steve
- [Shelley](/Shelley) (briefly)

### Discussion
- Judy: Should UBI be provided only to people who really need it?
  - Perhaps on an honor system? I want to have faith in people
  - Shawn: The idea is similar to the negative income tax for the poor
- Brandon: I've listened to one podcast on UBI, with Sam Harris interviewing presidential candidate [Andrew Yang](https://www.yang2020.com/)
  - Side note: Harris is a New Atheist, but more spiritual than most
  - Yang has run companies and been a professor at Harvard Business School (where the students are motivated by just wanting to make lots of money)
  - Yang also supports social currency that aligns purchasing power with work that isn't currently paid, e.g. caring for the elderly
    - Everyone starts with an equal amount of "esteem" points and hands them out to each other as reward for work they appreciate
    - Related to [time banking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency)
  - The context of Yang's UBI proposal is that automation is rapidly replacing jobs, and there may be no replacement jobs coming
    - Yang proposes a UBI of $1000 per month, which is below the poverty line, and would be mutually exclusive with other assistance programs for the poor
    - At one point he and Harris express the motivation of "not wanting to have to buy bulletproof cars for their children" due to crime arising from immense income inequality
    - Steve (much later): I don't see a problem with a world where robots do all the hard labor
      - Shawn: Tell that to people whose family identities are wrapped up in that labor, and who want to feel valued for their contributions
      - Judy: But if you had UBI, it would give you time and resources to figure out another way to contribute to society
- Issues with UBI
  - Shawn: "Rentier states" are using something like UBI to buy off their own citizens, e.g. with oil money, making the government unaccountable to those citizens
  - Judy: I thought I saw an article in [Yes Magazine](https://www.yesmagazine.org/) saying UBI would be somehow destructive to the Black community
  - Shawn: How do we pay for it?
    - Judy: Get the wealthy and corporations to pay
    - Brandon: Yang wants to use a European Union-style value-added tax
      - Steve and Shawn: That would be paid by consumers, which seems to defeat the purpose
      - Brandon: Trades in the economy add value; this tax and UBI distribution means more money moving around and therefore adds the value needed to make it worthwhile
- Argument about perpetual growth and whether or not it's motivated by compound-interest loans
  - Brandon: The three origins of value are:
    - Using up stored value (e.g. oil)
    - Accelerating the movement of money (not counting banks' financial tricks and automated trading algorithms)
    - New ideas and inventions
      - Steve: e.g. if we find a more valuable use for rhodium, the world supply of rhodium suddenly has more value without having to mine any more
      - Shawn: But you pay a resource cost for every invention, generally underpinned by cheap fossil energy
      - Argument about replacing fossil fuels with renewables
- Brandon: I support UBI because it makes me feel like things would be possible that weren't before, e.g. for new college graduates who don't currently see a positive future for themselves
- Shawn: I see UBI as life support for the current system, when what we need is system change
  - More argument about compound interest and "unpayable" debt
    - Eric and Judy: In Canada, they have rules so that banks can't lend more money than the borrower can pay back
  - Steve: Lenin viciously attacked reformers as enemies of revolution
- Ben: What can the SolSeed Movement do about any of this huge national economic stuff?
  - Brandon: Support UBI