If the Gov. placed a million $ in everyone's hands tomorrow, who would get up the next morning and make your doughnuts, open the grocery store and the gas station?

NEED and WANT are great motivators.

I NEED to eat every day AND I WANT to eat every day. Each motivates me to do what I must in order to eat every day.
What I might do in order to accomplish that can be pretty radical.

Read about the Donner party.
Read about the

After the Plane Crash—and the Cannibalism—a Life of …
news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/...plane-crash-canessa-ngbooktalk
Remember the TV series Lost? About the plane that crashes on a desert island? Well, this is the real thing. Except the island was the Andes mountains, and

Reality changes those high minded ideas.
When people are hungry, they are dangerous.

MShipley wrote on 08/11/17 at 10:39:42:


Meh, robots make everything anyway, and I'd rather use self-checkout...

In the more reasonable scenario of the government putting about $1000 in everyone's accounts every month regardless of income or need, you'd still have to go to work for a decent living, but you could sit in a job search for a while, pay for ramen as a student so you have less debt at graduation, have an income when you start a business, weather a medical emergency, and buy a decent set of clothes/and RV if you're homeless.

We're still going to be here and need income when we're mostly automated out of the workforce in the next 50ish years, so something like this will probably happen in most of our lifetimes.

Am I a good provider if I feed my family....
Regardless of how I came about it?

"everything" is a generality. Obviously we still need and will still need human labor for the foreseeable future. But what happens when every sector of the labor economy becomes like manufacturing, arcitecture or journalism? We're already deep in the process out automating humans largely out of the workforce.

$1k seems like a reasonable number to me based on very little. I'd be happy to discuss otherwise. It seems reasonable, as it's probably enough to barely survive on in most of the country, this keeping the incentive to get a job.

I dunno. If you have a better solution to distribute wealth in a post automation society, I'd love to hear it.

I can't follow your narrative about some group of "them" creating economic chaos by attempting to make things more fair. Union membership was over 70% of the workforce in the early 60's, when one could still expect to support a family on a single wage. Now it's less than 7%... Similarly, take a gander at the tax rates of the post-war era. Way more progressive.

I'm not saying that more regulation is necessarily good, but your narrative doesn't track because we, the labor pool, was doing a lot better when we were more unionized and capital ownership was more highly taxed.

I can see you're trying to frame this as a fairness argument. I am not. This is a supply and demand argument. When horses weren't in demand, we could simply breed less horses, but this doesn't really work because the entire point of human civilization is to increase general prosperity. Demand for the labor that humans are good at is and has been in decline which depresses what we make compared with cost of living.

This is offset by cheaper elastic goods, sure, but not inelastic goods like housing, healthcare and education.

Furthermore, a universal basic income is not a charity. Everybody gets it, regardless of income. If there is a shortage of jobs, which there already is, then we still have to distribute wealth or else our social and economic problems will only get worse. These jobs are not coming back. What we do reshore is only a shadow of the employment it once was because if automation.

Automation is fantastic. It's one less crappy thing a human has to do, but the market won't simply fix this on its own. This is happening very quickly. You can blame Democrats all you want, but this is a natural consequence of our technological evolution, and no political party could or should have such a profound effect.

So no comment on automation? You believe that there will be jobs aplenty for the foreseeable future?