/liberty/ - Liberty

>>17472

I think a UBI will be needed for the transition period to when people can start owning personal robots en masse. However, you can still have a lassez faire market with a UBI attached. The taxes needed to run it would also get lower as industry becomes more productive from automation.

I'm pretty sure that Case 1 would cause mass unemployment, and we need to transition to Case 2, so we need a UBI. Even if labor is still needed in small companies, an absolute fuckton of people would be dumped from big companies who can afford the automation.

Once you reach Case 3, you wouldn't need a UBI anymore. To be honest, at that point it would be hard to tell the difference between a non-violent government program and a private one, since the taxation needed for programs would drop to zero if you have robots gathering resources to make more robots to hand out to people to own. There would be no public employees that need paying at any step in the process. You've essentially made the automatic capitalist programmed with noblesse oblige built in.

My favourite thing about Universal Basic Income is how you need to leave it as acronym to ease the visceral disgust that most working people will feel at the suggestion.

OP, the answer is the same as it has always been: inequality. Automation hysteria paints an image of this scary future where automation has priced the vast majority of workers out of their employment, without ever explaining how that future is arrived at. The fact that a competitive company will only ever implement automation if automation is cheaper than the going cost of labour is forgotten. So too is how cheaper methods of production result in globally cheaper prices, or how unemployed people have consumer needs too. The reality is that automation is no different than every single technological innovation yet, in that those who cannot afford the transition remain at the prior level of technology. They will not need socialised allowance because their needs as consumers generate the demand for the jobs of their fellows.

What I fear more is middle-class socialists agonising over the fact that some people will still have to MAKE things with THEIR HANDS and with TOOLS, while they won't. Collectivist instincts are inwrought in our species and they evolve just as past ones become obviously discredited.

In short, I think it will feel like an economic bubble that never goes bust, because this time the underlying market forces are real.

Almost everyone in Western societies has some assets, for instance, savings in the bank. Let's say these savings are invested in a portfolio including several companies. As companies increase their profits thanks to automation, prices go down and thus, savings increase their real value. Everyone becomes richer. There's no need for a statist UBI, or for massive charity. As automation advances, your labor abilities become less of a factor in your wealth, and your assets (physical, finalcial, etc) become more of a factor. You should only be worried if your assets are exactly zero at the time of full automation, because then, indeed, you would need charity. But not a constant stream of charity. A one-time payment of financial stock would be enough to cover your basic needs indefinitely.

For some time there will still be labor and people will have to adapt to consumer needs, but increasingly more people will become quasi-NEETs because they can afford it.

>>17488

>>17494

>implying libertarianism is against gibs and not against high taxes and regulation

>implying we couldn't privatize almost everything, deregulate, and then have a UBI AND lower taxes

We're going to flat out need one. There will be mass technological unemployment. Eventually next to no one employed.

Now, maybe by that point everyone can own a load of robots and use their labor to gather resources and so on, but inbetween now and that far far off point, there is going to be increasing levels of automation in big business, and without any advanced humanoid robots running around, mass unemployment will result.

You need a UBI just to stop communist revolution at that point.

>>17588

So you can have libertarianism, but you need a UBI and tight border control in order to enable it (at least for now).

>>17501

>Automation hysteria paints an image of this scary future where automation has priced the vast majority of workers out of their employment, without ever explaining how that future is arrived at.

It's very simple. At first automation would mean lower costs and therefore lower prices. It's good for the individual firm at first.

However, eventually, when more people are rendered unemployed by automation than employed, then you'd have a downwards spiral to the economy.

Why? Because no employment equals no wages equals no disposable income equals no consumption equals no revenue for business.

You can say, yeah, but companies wouldn't go that far, but you are ignoring that cutting costs is good for the individual company, but if all companies in the economy got rid of their workers then there would be nobody to buy the products they are producing because nobody would have any money.

That's why you need the government to smooth over the gap between technological unemployment and libertarian utopia in which everyone personally owns waifubots that travel into space to mine asteroids for us.

>The fact that a competitive company will only ever implement automation if automation is cheaper than the going cost of labour is forgotten.

It's not forgotten; it's accounted for. Even in this model T era of highly automated robotic production things like Baxter are almost at the price level of a worker over a year.

>>17588

>We're going to flat out need one. There will be mass technological unemployment. Eventually next to no one employed.

By definition, with full automation no-one would have a job, but no-one would need a job either. It will be all about owning assets (either land or financial stock), not about having a job. The UBI will be a simple fact of the economy, not a statist project.

>>17596

>this is what closet socialists actually believe

>>17600

Hmm might have interpreted things wrong

U can ignore if I'm dumb

>>17601

Not dumb, just a hasty reader ;)

>>17597

The gradual transition is the problem, since we aren't going to wake up and all have automatic capitalistbots we can go down to the shops to buy.

The problem is that companies will automate before individuals can benefit from that automation and risk causing mass unemployment. You'd need a UBI to cover for that.

I literally don't see how it's a problem unless you are an Ancap. You could privatize pretty much everything else and deregulate business, but we need that basic income, otherwise low skilled workers will die on the street instigate communist revolution.

>>17606

I literally don't see how you don't see a problem with a statist UBI unless you are a socialist. Automation is a fancy name for an increase in the productivity of labor. If automation justifies socialist welfare programs, any improvement in technology does. Also, trade barriers and tariffs would also be justified, because a more efficient foreign country could leave everyone unemployed. Since Ricardo, we know this is not the case. Start by applying Ricardo's law of comparative advantage to the internal market. Let's say a few people own multi-purpose robots. Even if these robots provide an absolute advantage in all types of labor, there may still be comparative advantages for human workers. And if there are no comparative advantages for human workers, then robot owners will live in autarchy and have no effect on the economy. There's the possibility that robot owners decide to buy gold for the sake of safety (assuming that gold remains scarce and robots don't provide enough defense against robbery and commie revolutions). In order to stay competitive, workers need to charge less (in gold) for their labor, but they also pay less (in gold) for the labor of others. If labor costs fall at different rates for different kinds of labor, workers will simply switch to the most profitable kind of labor, as usual. It could happen that the value of YOUR labor falls faster than that of your neighbour's labor, or viceversa, but not both at the same time (looks like Say's law applies here).