Universal Basic Asset
The future will be automated and humans will need to adapt our economy and politics to promote human flourishing. The current ideas on the table will not achieve this goal.
UBI / UBE are a bad idea
They're just Communism with extra steps.
Universal Basic Income (monthly check from the government) and Universal Basic Employment (guaranteed job from the government) essentially mean that the corporations do all the actual work for creating goods and services and then the government.
In this world, over time, the elites will consolidate power into fewer and fewer hands because humans cannot compete with the robots. They will own all the means of production and have no incentive to improve the lives of the rest of us, because they don't need us.
This will lead to
- Prices never going down, even as productivity increases, because there won't be competition.
- UBI/UBE checks getting cut. Why would elites let the 99% take so much of their money when they don't even need them.
How to harness the state
As per The Dictator's Handbook whoever controls the tax revenue controls the country, that's where a state derives its power. The more taxes they can raise the more power they have to do things.
Dictatorships confiscate the wealth of its citizen as a much higher rate than democratic countries because democratic countries often have citizens voting to lower taxes or at least increase spending on the citizens.
There's a reason why resource rich countries abuse their citizens while, high income countries are generally more responsive to the citizenry. High income countries are incentivized to keep as many people high income as possible so they can get more taxes. Resource rich countries get their tax revenue without the help of many people.
To create/preserve a system where people share in the bounty of automation, we must make sure the state gets more taxes from the mass of citizens than it could from a handful of monopolistic corporations.
An economy where humans are still valuable
For humans to be valuable, they must be able to A) cultivate skills and sell the products of those skills (B) have an ownership stake in the economy (owning productive assets)
In practice that means
- The Craft Economy: where humans cultivate a craft and sell it's products to each other.
- Universal Basic Asset: more below.
How UBA would work
At adulthood, every citizen gets a lump sum of cash from the government to kickstart their life.
This can be invested to increase in value and/or provide income in perpetuity. This can be used to start a business. This can be used to buy an immigration visa and ticket to the Mars or Venus colonies. No strings attached.
If invested this would pay out far more than people dependent on welfare would ever get from the government. So it should replace welfare for people who are young enough that they receive UBA.
For rough math if you replaced all welfare spending and entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, etc) each 18 year old would get ~$1 million today. That's without touching defense spending or anything else.
As prices decline due to automation this lump sum will give a bigger and bigger leg up to young people.
Why it works better
People would get the same monthly income as UBI/UBE (if they their UBA) but they’d have autonomy over their livelihood. It's not a check cut every month by the government.
Investing makes people an owner in the economy. They gain when the wealthy gain, they have a vested interest in the prosperity of the country.
UBA helps ambitious people who want to take risks and launch something to disrupt incumbents.
Automation will decrease prices for needed goods, so this program will benefit future generations more than current ones.
Government will be able to get more tax revenue from the income generated with the UBA, so there’s less incentive to go Elysium on us
Tremendous opportunity to capitalize on abundance
Human flourishing requires autonomy, opportunity, community, and many other things. A world where we can work a lot less to provide for ourselves is a good thing. A world where no one has the ability to improve their lot in life, no matter how hard they work, is a bad thing.
The age of automation that is unfolding before us is a tremendous opportunity to harness the rewards of what humanity has built since we crawled out of the mud. It is actually within our grasp to end hunger, to end homelessness, to end the futility of jobs that bring no meaning to life.
We must prepare for the radical change ahead of us, and capitalize on the immense opportunity that this change presents.