[pp.int.general] Basic income - how does that fit into the pirate ideology?

[Daniel Riaño]

As a very partial answer to the original question ("how does Basic income
fit into the pirate ideology?") I'd suggest that some short of of Basic
income should be implemented as machines start making larger parts of human
workforce unnecessary (the alternative being reducing the amount of human
race as its workforce becomes less and less relevant). Since such
"machines" are mostly ones driven by some sort of software, and at some
point they will have some kind of intelligence (software intelligence, if
you wish), I think there is point of contact with the core of the Pirate
Party values.

This said, I don't want to suggest "lets jump to the Basic income boat now,
now". Almost everybody agrees that, if feasible at all, this is a very long
process. To start with, machines have not yet started to make human
workforce less important (probably the contrary is more true). They do have
displaced most or almost all the human workforce from some areas of labour,
but they have created new, huge areas of new human labor. However, at least
in some plausible scenarios, the times will come when not only drilling for
rare metals in Mars and robot manufacturing will be done by trully
intelligent machines, but also most software engineering (to mention just
one example) will be left to the (by then) soft hands of robots, and by
then we better have devised a new concept of value, work and capital or…

2013/7/17 Zbigniew Łukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com>

> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 12:46 PM, carlo von lynX
> <lynX at pirate.my.buttharp.org> wrote:
> ...
> > scenario and we need a way to get the money from them. The simple UBI
> > strategies put the cost back on labour in form of labour taxation, so
>
> I've read somewhere that there is a tendency in the tax revenue that
> the personal taxes make less and less percentage of the whole - and
> becoming less and less important.
>
> > the chance to improve competitivity is lost and an incentive to evade
> > taxation is created. Smarter UBI strategies try to get at it differently.
> > My favourite is the plan to introduce massive environmental taxation
> > such that UBI leads to a sustainable balanced economy. Companies do not
> > pay for the fact that they create jobs for people but for the fact that
> > they consume energy, possibly non-renewable. This implies a major shift
> > on the entire economy of what works and what doesn't - but it's a change
> > that is overdue anyway: We can't stick to our current non-sustainable
> economy.
>
> I like this idea very much.
>
> Also commenting on some stuff from your other email about UBI being a
> revolution requiring a recalculation of salaries etc - I think the way
> to go would be to introduce it gradually - so that the recalculations
> will not create complete chaos.
>
> Z.
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