Gettting rid of serfdom, debt prisons and endentured servitude all reduced work and caused products of labour to be redistributed. Who said that current distribution of products of labour between Amazok and their workers is optimal?
We all fantasize Bezos and Musk should pay for it, but in reality it will be yet another tax on middle class (e.g. run-of-the-mill senior developer from high CoL area, so from Amazon engineer to (would be ex) Amazon warehouse worker).
If those people aren't getting paid a very high wage, they can reduce their working hours too.
If they are getting paid a very high wage, then they already had the leverage needed to reduce their working hours, and they were choosing not to. They'll still make plenty of money.
That’s the interesting thing. Some people want to be lifetime wage slaves: they will work till they die at a low earnings level. Others would like to make five times as much with five times as much work. Proportionality is what they value.
The problem, apparently, is that you want to force the latter into the former lifestyle. To that, I say no. In fact, you’re not going to get that world.
> The problem, apparently, is that you want to force the latter into the former lifestyle.
No I don't. If I was in charge then for step one I wouldn't change the amount of money those people make at all, I'd try to claw back any productivity gains from the last few decades that aren't going to workers and see how much UBI that can turn into. If I did want to tax someone with 5x income more, it wouldn't be that much more.
>I'd try to claw back any productivity gains from the last few decades
If productivity gains come from capital, not from labor, then trying to take that from rewarding capital will also hurt labor. Over the past few decades a significant amount of productivity gains are from capital investment. Your average worker isn't simply turning out 2x or 3x the goods with the same effort. They have been given a productivity multiplier tool paid for by investment before they set foot on the job.
When it often takes significant tooling and tech investment from an employer to increase productivity, if that stops, we're back to much earlier productivity and level of goods.
Next, over the past few decades, there has been (in the US, likely others) legislation benefiting workers that has a cost to employers, which has also taken up some wage growth, by giving workers other benefits. BLS tracks such things under terms like total cost of employment and total remuneration. If you look at these over historical periods, you can see more places that workers are better off today than in decades past, without it showing up in wages.
There are reasonable causes not all productivity gains are immediately given as wages - not all gains come from workers.
I don't think all that much capital is going to stop investing in companies even if taxes increase, especially if increases are over many areas.
Also, any business that already exists under this setup has the necessary equipment, and any new business should be budgeting for the necessary equipment. Not much should be stuck in a place where they have lots of inefficient employees and can't afford to upgrade and can't secure a loan.
And I'm not totally sure my visualization in my head is correct, but if everyone is getting $1,000 per month with a high quality of life provided with that, an additional $1,000 per month is weighted much more purchase power wise than in today's model.
How much is "plenty" and who gets to decide? What if they live in high CoL area? You propose they should sponsor someone else's leisure time instead of buying a house for their family, for example?
So go use those arguments you already mentioned, about redistribution and buying houses, against current taxes. You can even use the same complaints about freeloaders.
You made it sound like this caused new objections, rather than being one more bout of business as usual tax griping.
You seem to be upset with my arguments for some reason. However, if you read some other comments here and multitude of previous UBI-related discussions, you will see that there are a lot of people who (naively) assume that UBI will be somehow financed by taxes on corporations (from one of the comments: "Really, you'd just want to tax corporations over a certain size that are both highly automated (i.e. high revenue per employee), and have lopsided compensation structures (which could be measured by CEO to median worker pay)."). However, if you want to get a good approximation how modern politicians structure similar programs, then just look at California health care tax proposal (aka "Let's make healthcare free for ourselves and get tech-bros pay for it!").
I'm not upset, I just think that particular argument doesn't support keeping the status quo. And because of that, I don't find it very convincing as an argument against making a change.
And I would prefer not to get into the details of who gets taxed or how to optimally structure a tax today.
You mean for the machine's labour - progressively more and more as more and more is automated, and where people with their UBI are paying into the system (consumers aren't a fuel leak, they're the largest cog in the wheel) and workers will be getting paid adequately on top of the UBI they'll be getting too?
A concept missed by most is that the buying power of "$1,000"/month grows exponentially as more and more gets automated.
> You mean for the machine's labour - progressively more and more as more and more is automated
How do you propose to finance UBI? All proposals that I've seen assume middle class to pay (for example, "everyone pays percentage of their income and then everyone gets fixed amount of money at the end of the period"), not nebulous machine-automation overlords.
> A concept missed by most is that the buying power of "$1,000"/month grows exponentially as more and more gets automated.
I don't observe housing getting exponentially cheaper "as more and more gets automated". In fact, I believe landlords would capture non-trivial amount of any potential UBI program.
Does your thinking here work if including automation into the equation?
Why didn't society then collapse when automation began - like textile/garment/fabric manufacturing, etc?
You also seem to be ignoring the other side of productivity - if it drops it's arguably, in part at least, that less people are buying - so there's no funds/fuel for the local system. If UBI had to be spent locally and only on "local" goods - within the ststem - then there's no leak, and instead of fueling China and letting the tank run dry locally - you force fuel to be spent locally. This is why major, credible think tanks estimate an immediate 13%+ increase in GDP with implementing a $1,000/month UBI.
>Does your thinking here work if including automation into the equation?
Yes, I am more of a technologist than anything. Automation is not free, and if a thing can be efficiently automated it is already or will be as soon as it's efficient.
Automation gains in the past have not freed large swaths of workers, simply because as more goods are available people want higher quality of life, absorbing any gains. If you want to live like someone in 1950 you could on a much lower salary than people get now, but people now want bigger houses, more cars, more goods, more entertainment, more of everything.
If you think automation will free us all, work on figuring out why all the massive automation gains did not already free large amounts of people from work.
>If UBI had to be spent locally and only on "local" goods - within the ststem - then there's no leak
This completely fails. Consider how good your life would be if you could only have goods you made. Not nice. Then make it people within a mile of you. Better, but still crap. Make it a US state. Better again, but not really anywhere near first world standards.
If you want a first world standard of living, you need goods from around the planet and skilled people from around the planet trading and making and innovating. Buy local simply lowers your quality of life (and everyone, since you'll soon lower the # of specialists that can exist by serving large populations).
>This is why major, credible think tanks estimate an immediate 13%+ increase in GDP with implementing a $1,000/month UBI.
And others have reached the opposite conclusion. Most importantly, the evidence from real world trials is consistent with a smaller, not larger, economy.
Isn't that a good outcome? Humans get more leisure time.