Universal Basic Income and Immigration

That's not an observation that I've made. In my experience, Republican voters are well aware of the gap between what the voters want as policy and what the Party wants. As they say, Republicans are afraid of their voters, Democrats are afraid of their staffs.

The gap is based on the fact that policies that Republican voters want do nothing to enrich Republican office holders. There is no money in restricting trade and immigration to raise wages and have more domestic good jobs, which is why the only major players on the right who support it are eccentrics who don't need the money (Perot and Trump).

For the Democrats, they have a different problem; they have staff and lobbying groups that want things that are electoral nightmares, like supporting Hamas terrorism, and have to walk a fine line with that. But when it comes to policy issues, they are more or less in lockstep and want the same thing, but at differing speeds.

 

A pity that Trump is, well...Trump.

 

I realised this is wandering a little off topic for the thread but to add a neat conclusion to our conversation the only way to reduce the illegal immigration to a manageable amount, not excluding any other approaches (for example strengthening the border) is to have the processing of potential refugee immigrants undertaken well south of the US border. This of course would require significant cooperation with Mexico and probably some level of cooperation with other central American countries as well. I cannot think of a potential President of any party that has the political nouse and diplomacy to pull this off.

However it is certainly possible. If you can build automobiles in Mexico you can certainly process immigrants. Which is more complicated??

 

Well we don't get much in the way of options of candidates who support the populist Republican issues. Perot was nuts too. Maybe you have to be to go against the interests of your own class.

 

Politically the "remain in Mexico" policy, that Trump initiated and Biden repealed, isn't going to happen again. I don't think the Mexicans are going to go for that a second time, and Biden doesn't want that anyway. He didn't want them to remain in Mexico, he wanted them in the US. So that policy is dead.

 

UBI steals from me to give to others. Its theft. I will fight that... figuratively and literally.

 

What if you are one of those people for whom a robot does a better job?

 

Who knows what Biden personally wants. Having said that, you're probably right...

 

Well when I say Biden, I mean the Biden Administration, not him personally. I don't think his opinion, if there is one, counts at all.

 

Apples and space shuttles. Automation put a lot of people out of work... but it didn't reach into their bank accounts and seize their money.

 

Unfortunately young people don't have any money in their bank accounts yet.

It's usually the younger generation that will end up paying for the negative effects of current policies.

 

Whereas you prefer it vice versa.

The Henry George Theorem shows that all government spending on desirable services and infrastructure that is funded by anything other than taxes that bear on the unimproved rental value of land steal from taxpayers to give the money to landowners. You are in favor of that stealing and giving because you own land. You like taxes and spending programs that steal from others to give the loot to you.

But relax: I can assure you that UBI, like every other social program, is really just a subsidy for landowners. All money distributed through UBI will simply be taken by landowners, like welfare, SS, etc. Can it somehow have escaped your notice that after the trillions given to the poor in income support payments, they are no better off, while landowners have been astronomically enriched with no effort or productive contribution on their part?

You will fight it not because it is theft, but because you think -- erroneously -- that someone else will get the loot rather than you.

Greed (unfortunately mistranslated as "love of money") is the root of all manner of evil.

 

Of course rapidly increasing population and overcrowding in the economic centers only exacerbates that problem, doesn't it?

(A separate discussion, but one worth pointing out here)

 

Yes; the Law of Rent states that cet. par., any increase in the workforce -- whether through immigration, births exceeding deaths, increased participation by women, or whatever -- will reduce wages and increase land rents. A similar effect occurs with increased investment in producer goods. As a result, nations with democratically accountable governments have had to intervene massively in the economy through income support programs, minimum wages, publicly funded health care, education and pensions, labor standards laws, union monopoly laws, etc., etc. to rescue the landless from enslavement by landowners.

 

But there was always lots of other work for them to do. AI is different: over the next few decades, it is going to put effectively everyone out of work because there will no longer be anything people can do that AI can't do better.

All labor, from flipping burgers to running a multinational corporation, consists of three steps: obtaining information, making a decision, and implementing the decision. From the first pointed stick and sharp stone, our tools have helped us to implement our decisions. Later, tools like writing, mathematics, and electronic data processing equipment helped us to obtain information. But people always had to make the decisions. AI is increasingly able to make decisions on its own, often better than a human being, and that will ultimately leave no part of the labor process for us to perform.

I suspect you would not want us to look too closely into just exactly how the money in your bank account got to be "yours." As a general rule, the larger the accumulation of private wealth, the lower the probability that any significant part of it was earned by commensurate contributions to production.

 

Not sure how its designed to work, but I'm pretty sure you'd have to be a citizen to qualify for such thing.

As of now, there isn't a single country that has a universal basic income (UBI) in place, and nor is there any serious push for it in US either.

 

How long is "long"? Think about what the work world was like 100 years ago: did anyone foresee what technology would become in just 100 years? Now think about 200 years ago, or 500, or 1000. I very much doubt that anyone can predict with any accuracy what the work world will be like in just 50 years. I know I have no idea what to tell young people today about how to prepare for a career -- other than to get a good, unionized government job.

Yes, one of the ironies of AI is that it is really good at absorbing and using a large amount of arcane information that we have to pay smart people a lot of money to learn and use. As a result, some of the really good, high-paying jobs -- doctor, lawyer, accountant -- will likely be among the first to fall to AI. It takes decades and lots of money to train someone to be a competent doctor, lawyer, or accountant. But once that expertise can be implemented in AI, we will be able to reproduce it in arbitrarily large quantities in seconds.

That will be a temporary condition until superhuman artificial intelligence (SAI) emerges. Then all bets are off.

That is less and less true. The difference between late-20th-century AI and current AI is instructive. In 1997, Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion. To do this, it was programmed with an immense amount of human chess knowledge -- it was an "expert system". But that approach was completely ineffective for go, and go programs remained very -- almost laughably -- weak compared to even ordinary human go players. Until AlphaGo. AlphaGo did not rely on prepared human go knowledge. Instead, it played millions of games against itself, learning which moves worked and which didn't. It then, in 2016-17, destroyed all the top human players, and has revolutionized go opening theory in a way that chess AIs have not managed to do. There are other examples of modern AI that do not rely on carefully pre-organized inputs: the 2005 DARPA Challenge winners that autonomously and successfully navigated a real-world off-road course for hundreds of miles; Watson, the IBM system that searched the Internet to defeat the top human Jeopardy players in 2011; ChatGPT convincingly passing the Turing Test in 2023; etc.

Have you spent much time on the road with human drivers recently? AI drivers are getting a lot better very quickly. In principle, they can access enormously greater information about the road, traffic, etc. than a human driver. I suspect it will not be long -- 10 years? 20? -- before human drivers are banned from public roads as too unsafe.