EDIT: To put it another way: if I'm a productive worker and have a job, I am "rewarded" by working for a boss (taking orders from him/her), and having to turn over 35-50% of my income to government, to give it to others. If I were unemployed, I'd be "punished" by receiving welfare, food stamps and a bunch of other stuff, without having to contribute in any way to society.

This argument doesn't hold water for me. Society makes it possible for everyone to earn a living, so people who aren't doing it should start.

But they won't. It's safe to say that lazy people are good at being lazy and will find a way to be lazy no matter what system they're in.

Pretending we can build a system that eradicates laziness in an exercise in futility. It's better to accept the fact that a fixed percentage of people are only going to take while most others give (and take), and stop wasting the enormous overhead trying to figure out which is which.

Not at all. You know what eradicates laziness? Hunger.

Do you have evidence of the size and nature of job vacancies compared to the skills and number of the unemployed?

While I can't speak for OP:

Without a society there'd be no education system, no legal tender, no laws protecting employees, no laws protecting companies, no infrastructure supporting it - and so on. So society makes it possible for people to have jobs. There's an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child, which tends to indicate that the group has had a lot of input to the success of the individual for a long time.

I can't even imagine how something as complex as the prerequisites for programming would work without a society. State of nature economies. I suppose you could have small family groups at some point on the hunter-gatherer to farming spectrum, but the minute those families come together into groups and start to develop more complex interactions... that looks mightily like a society to me.

But it doesn't follow from that that society makes it possible for everyone to have a job. Just that those who do could not without one.

It's very close to being the same underlying logical form that goes:

'All cats are four-legged mammals. Buts not all four-legged animals are cats.'

All employees are enabled by a society. But not all people in a society are so enabled.

Paradoxically, you would gain much more from a BI than someone who is currently living in poverty, because you would be free to extract the maximum potential from your hard work and talent.

Personally, I'd love to get BI. That would free me to work only on what I like, or not work at all when I don't want to.

Naturally it would be much better for businesses to do this than the government. Businesses have much higher motivations to use their money wisely (i.e. give the right amount to the right people and create the right incentives to ensure people are motivated to use the funds wisely, go bankrupt or get sued by investors if they spend poorly) than a government (which just gets to shrug or inflate the currency or embark on a fresh round of vilifying productive citizens).

Oh wait, don't we already have that? Bank loans or something, I don't know, lol.

in the same vein, your job only exist because there's people with enough buying power to keep the business you're at existing, so again you depend on people, and you could be punished or rewarded depending on how society as a entire organism does...

I already had a similar discussion on Slashdot recently. Taking other people's money by force is, IMHO, theft. My question then isn't why it would be OK for the guy, but why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that stealing is acceptable if you're desperate enough? I say it's never acceptable.

EDIT: Paying people so they don't steal from me is called a protection racket. If that's what you're arguing for, let's call it what it is.

I'm not arguing that "taxes are theft". I'm arguing that giving money to poor people so they don't attack me is theft. buzaga was saying that if I/we don't "take care of the unfortunate", they'll decide to take our money/stuff by force. Sounds like a veiled threat to "give them money, or else..." That is theft, in my opinion.

I'm perfectly fine with taxes as long as they go to things that benefit everyone equally, including me (like roads, schools, police and courthouses).

EDIT: Also, please point out where I said (or implied) that "taxes are theft". You completely misread what I wrote, therefore I have to agree that we can't have a productive argument.

> why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that stealing is acceptable if you're desperate enough? I say it's never acceptable.

The implications are obvious. Taxes don't have different natures depending on the use we as society give to the money we collect. In fact, the very economic definition of taxes is that you aren't promised anything specific in return[1].

Regarding the tyranny of the majority argument, that would only apply if we were proposing a ridulous amount of taxation. We are not. It's been pointed out that this program could be funded by replacing it with current expenses, and by a minimal raise in taxes. That's not oppression, that'a a choice that we as society are well within our rights to make.

In short: spending taxpayers money can't be theft, and taxes aren't a service you pay if you like how the money is spent.

[1] > From the view of economists, a tax is a non-penal, yet compulsory transfer of resources from the private to the public sector levied on a basis of predetermined criteria and without reference to specific benefit received (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax)

You still can't seem to think outside your box it seems.

Misery breeds violence, there's no "or else", there's no "they", it's reality, I could resort to violence to survive and so could you.

This is not a conversation for the 'what about me?' mindset. The whole of this discussion(also to the other replies) you're only talking about yourself, I don't want to talk baseless opinions, the stuff I'm talking about is conceptual so you need to understand the concepts that precede the topic and don't seem to be there yet. I've made my argument at the first reply then tried expanding on it but you missed it

On the other hand, I believe society is just a big group of individuals, so "what about me?" does matter (in fact, it's maybe the most important question in all of society).

That's an unreasonable assumption. There are differences in productivity even among farmers. Some people are much better at farming than others.

> If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to society.

So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%, nothing more? Also, you're arguing that I owe part of my success to the drug addict who gets high all the time, and to the drunk who starts drinking early in the morning, and to the mugger who robs people at gunpoint? Even to people who play World of Warcraft all day?

Society is a mix of people that make wildly different contributions, and in some cases hugely negative impacts. I am immensely grateful to people like Leibniz, Newton, Shakespeare and others, but not so much to people who just coast through life. I also wish Stalin, Hitler and many others would have never existed.

Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera.

"So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%"

Pretty much useless to the subsistence farmer. Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work. Not to mention that society provides the source of your inspiration, provided your education, an outlet for your talents, et cetera.

Obviously my argument is a little bit of reductio ad absurdum. But much less so than "taxation is theft".

I disagree with that. Half my native country is rural, with a really long history of agriculture, and it's far from homogenous. Work ethic and intelligence really matter, even for farmers (especially work ethic; some people just work harder than others). There's always that one farmer who has more cattle or pigs than the others (or takes better care of their crops), and a few who can barely feed themselves. This was true even centuries before modern equipment, like tractors and chemicals.

> Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work.

Not everyone is equally hard working; in fact, I'd say the differences among individuals are quite significant. Also, you're ignoring intelligence/creativity.

> But much less so than "taxation is theft".

Also, as I already said in another comment, I'm not arguing that "taxation is theft" (as I already asked another commenter, please point out where I explicitly claimed that). I'm only arguing that paying people so they don't hurt me is theft (or extortion or a protection racket).

Two ideas seem insane to me in this whole thread: 1) that "we should pay poor people to stop them from killing us" and 2) that "we as a society are punishing people who can't find a job", with the corollary of "we're rewarding people who do have jobs". So far, I've only been arguing against these.

It's not taken from you, if everybody receives basic income, how can it be taking from you? You're missing the point.

Maybe you find those acceptable, but I find all of them horrible. Killing someone is only acceptable in self defense (in which case someone else is trying to kill you first), while cannibalism is just sick.

How is that not "depending on the circumstances"? Is not "killing is needed to defend myself" a circumstance?

"while cannibalism is just sick."

So, if someone is genuinely in a situation where their options are 1) starve to death, or 2) eat the other guy who just starved to death, you think it's clear that they should choose 1?

The question itself is incorrect. Low-paid workers or the unemployed are not parasites on highly-paid workers; the capitalist class is a parasite on all workers, no matter the salary, and through their control over government they continually engineer a level of unemployment that can suppress wages.

(If you don't believe me about the government, look up how inflation targeting works. Central banks are supposed to target both low unemployment and low inflation, but for the past several decades, the deliberate policy choice has been to consistently sacrifice wage growth (ie: exploit workers harder) in order to maintain both low inflation and economic growth at the same time.)