Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees.

He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stress (which is known to make people work less, not more). And replace it by just giving all citizens the same amount.

Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.

On top of that comes the other realization: If the current trend of automating everything continues,we'll ultimately end up with (hyperbole) 1 person owning all the machines doing all the work. That 1 person earning all the money, and (in an ideal case) paying his taxes to give everybody else welfare. Which just is the same as UBI.

In a certain way this already happens now. Most not-too-smart people that used to be gainfully employed as laborer somewhere are now on welfare, and the threshold for not-too-smart could go up rather steeply with the current AI trends.

>UBI is meant to provide some _basic_ income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy

That's only one definition of "basic". Based on a hundred+ "UBI" threads on HN expressing different opinions, there's a wide range of what "UBI" means.

The spectrum looks something like this:

from ... <UBI just means re-allocating existing payments of welfare+foodstamps+age65socialsecurity minus wasteful costs government bureaucracies> (no new tax increases necessary)

to ... <UBI is the ideal of "nobody has to work at bullshit jobs anymore and can just pursue artistic pursuits like poetry"> (requires massive tax increases for trillions that's politically unrealistic)

For some, that means that a UBI that only provides enough money for 3 meals a day but one still has to live with 10 other roommates in a tiny communal apartment like Foxconn sweatshops in Asia is not really "basic enough". The so-called "UBI" that's still not enough to buy your own house and car and maybe a new smartphone upgrade every few years isn't the standard that some proponents are wishing for.

The "nobody has to work if they don't want to" would include some highly paid paid coders on HN who are sick and tired of working on JIRA tickets to fix bugs in boring enterprise software. This level of UBI so coders can can quit their soul-crushing white-collar job but still not reduce their standard-of-living too much ... can't be funded by removing all inefficiencies from existing welfare and food stamps payments and redistributing those "government savings" to the white-collar workers.

George Hotz is arguing that the quantity of real products like "eggs" (and by extension, cars, houses, etc) will dynamically respond to the existence UBI. These products will go down in quantity and/or become more expensive which then negates the "basic" in "basic income". The carpenters and factory line workers who previously built houses and cars don't need to work anymore because of UBI which means the supply-and-or-cost of houses and cars changes.

The owners of production paying taxes?! Seems unlikely.

>Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.

I'm not sure this is stupid. I think the people against the negative income tax system are kind of stupid. Like, the best place to apply the welfare rules is where all other complicated rules about income are made: the tax office (IRS). If you decide that for whatever reason you really really want people receiving welfare to be second class citizens, you'd go out of your way and build a separate welfare office, where all the work the tax office is doing gets to be duplicated for no reason other than so you as a working class citizen can pay even more money to be angry at the second class citizens.

Overall, it sounds kind of stupid. You build a bureaucracy that designates people as a special class, so that this special class is difficult to escape from, since if everyone was a continuous recipient of welfare, there would be no second class and "escape" would merely be progression through the simple passage of time.

The dumbest arguments I've seen are extremely cranky and boil down to rich people becoming net beneficiaries of CO2 dividends, because they spent tens of thousands of dollars on EVs, heat pumps, cycling, insulation, solar panels, etc so they can get 100% of an annual 100€ CO2 dividend. Like, giving 100€ to even a single rich person is such a horrific crime, that it's better if everyone else, who actually needs it, should get less than the 100€ even if that reduction will result in hundreds of millions of € being diverted away from people who actually need the money to compensate their CO2 taxes.

Someone needs to make a website explaining why UBI doesn't work conceptually because this comes up over and over again on HN.

You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't:

• Dead

• Non-citizen

• Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc

• In prison

• Moved abroad

and so on. All that is expensive, and yet the overheads of even existing welfare systems just aren't high compared to the amounts they pay out. Getting rid of means testing doesn't magically make the numbers balance.

Geohot is correct. UBI seems to only appeal to people who don't understand how the economy works. You can't have an economy in which one person earns all the money by definition.