An Argument for a Basic Income

 Economies, all of which are flawed, can be oriented in one direction only. They are attempting to be humane, as Aristotle put it, enabling human flourishing, or they are broken. They may be broken by necessity but they are broken.

Material existence, the physics of being here and now, is the stuff of economics, of supply and demand. Once the problem of filling an empty stomach is solved, very naturally, given free time and wonder, humans move on other puzzles, intellectual existence.

Intellectual existence is structured by libraries, the repositories of our common culture, cognitive and otherwise. We cannot communicate ideas without common reference and those references are in libraries.

In an interesting loop, intellectual existence feeds material existence by creating technological solutions to material problems, generating more free time for creating advanced analytical tools.

We are now approaching a technological watershed, what I call the Economic Singularity of capable robots making and maintaining capable robots driving larger and larger productivity increases. In terms of production, the sky's the limit. Resource scarcity and demand shortfalls are the only limiting factors.

Resource scarcity can be addressed by asteroid mining and other offworld exploitation already underway. Demand shortfalls are not being systematically addressed at this time and we need to be thinking about them.

Here is a basic income scheme, market oriented, necessity driven;

I propose a GSE corporation assessing registration fees upon capable autonomous robots as a privilege of doing business in the polity and tariffs upon the products of unregistered robots as protection and collecting those fees and tariffs to be distributed as dividends on non-transferable voting shares in that corporation, one to each citizen and others to the Treasury Department and the Fed.

This will constitute a closed loop of some merit in supporting aggregate demand, inhibiting a too rapid adoption of robots, and ensuring an economic democracy.

Do Well and Be Well