This proposal for a guaranteed income is so stupid it gives me hives.
Not sure if it’s the neverending libertarian fantasy that a reputation economy is somehow workable when we know it isn’t, thanks to reams and reams of experience (the net result of a reputation economy is simply that it becomes dangerous to offer anything approaching the real value for any item or service outside of your trusted social networks so everybody loses out massively once they try any wider commerce) or if it’s the fact that this “workable solution” is, quite simply, a giant workfare scheme that actually has nothing to do with the idea of a proper guaranteed income program (hint: once the income isn’t guaranteed if you don’t work, it’s no longer guaranteed so maybe stop calling it that), or that it is painfully obvious that this system would be gamed to death by every corporation able to afford so much as one single lousy contract lawyer, or that it believes that the problem with joblessness is a lack of desire rather than a lack of jobs, or…
oh man, I can’t go on, there’s just so much that is wrong with this idea and I didn’t even get to its overall screw-the-lazy-poors tone yet.
Hey, let’s all play a game: come up with a strategy to abuse this system as much as humanly possible! Best one (as judged by me) will get a prize of some kind. And you know it will be a good prize because I’m willing to put my reputation on the line so clearly I am incentivised to make it, I dunno, Krugerrands or something.
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BAHAHAHAHAAA!!
Hey, guy, Australia called – they want their shitty government policy back.
Well, obviously you have two classes of employees – ones you pay okay (but run into the ground and generally treat like crap), and a larger pool that you pay $40 a week solely to generate positive feedback.
Also, I love the assumptions that: a) all the people hiring and all the people who can fill those jobs live within a 5 mile radius of each other, b) none of those people are going to ever be related to each other, and c) that the “creative class” is really clamoring for a way to make a subsistence-level income with all the worst aspects of freelancing and full-time employment lumped together.
Well, obviously, the key to this plan is that the
subhuman filthdisadvantaged folks need to be really hungry to go after the jobs we make available.So that’s why we’ll start slashing their SNAP benefits by ten percent for every month they’re unemployed. Gotta stay hungry so you can go get that money!
“The 74 yr old woman in a wheelchair who wants to work to keep busy?”
It’s funny because this is almost a direct quote from “Starship Troopers”.
If reputation = how much money a person or corporation (same thing, right?) made, Microsoft, Taco Bell, Exxon, every cable TV provider, every phone company, etc. would have been bankrupted years ago.
Personally, this was the laugh out load bit for me:
Right. So, if you can find some company willing to pay $40 a week to “do art” you can quit your job and live on that fat $280 a week check. That works out to $1100 a month, by the way, which is almost enough to afford rent and utilities in most American cities. It might cover some food too. It won’t cover some painter’s supplies or a piano (much less a piano tuner to keep it in tune), nor will it cover promotional costs or anything like that. But hey, it’s a dream job, right? And if there’s no company hiring “stay at home piano composer,” well, then you’re forced into some other drone job. But it’s still a dream job, right?
Now, if I want to game this system, here’s how I do it. I hire people at a high rate with the contractual requirement that they rate me on week 1 and at the end of their contract. That way, I get the “I’m thrilled to have a new job that’s paying” bounce to my rep. Then every week I cut their rate by $20 along with a “bad performance review,” citing their inability to meet some arbitrarily difficult performance/production requirements. If I know it takes 40 hours a week to make 100 gizmo’s, then I set my “high pay scale expectations” to about 120 gizmos. Each week I keep cutting their income, along with a dire threat (and another piece of a paper trail) that I’ll rate them as poor workers.
I’m no economist but these three ideas took me about 5 minutes to come up with. It seems obvious the biggest money is in finding a way to be a middle man. But even the currently employed can take advantage. Goods production is also a huge market.
As an individual:
Hey Boss, I will take a pay cut from my current pay rate down to $1/hour in exchange for you giving me 80% of the difference in the form of other incentives such as stock, store discounts, etc. Now I make nearly the same amount because of the Gov’t program plus the extra incentives so I’ve given myself a large raise by taking a pay cut. You as my employer have saved significant money by not paying me as much and giving me goods or whatever worth less than the money you save in pay. If those incentives are tracked and not allowed, there are other things you can give me without breaking the letter of the law. A company night at a professional sports game (where if you can’t attend you still get tickets you could sell), a boss taking employees out to lunch every day. Etc.
As an employer:
Hey Walmart, fire all your workers and hire my small company to staff your store. You just pay your managers. That saves you millions in taxes and benefits. You pay my company $5/man-hour of labor you need. You don’t pay the people, you pay on a contract to me. You don’t even have to pay minumum wage for your labor, let alone paying benefits. I hire these people at $1/hour. They make more than they would working a non-full-time position at the store anyway, I make more money the more people I hire, the company is not participating in the system they are just hiring a staffing company, and everyone gets a government check.
Hey kids, why go to college when you graduate high-school? Why not just come make shoes for me that I can sell to Nike for pennies. You get a stable job, if you find something better, good for you. But if you want to do the minimum needed to pay for your teenage priorities like booze and x-box games, come here. Your parents will be so proud you have a job, and who cares what we pay because you are getting a bunch of money from the government anyway. Why study and work hard to advance when you could do the bare minumum and get paid pretty well.
Oh, come on. Your are making this too hard.
Open up a hundred bank accounts. Get a hundred social security numbers. Lie. $110,000/mo.
Man, I don’t have any ideas for gaming the system but I just love the complete obliviousness necessary to have a system where workers are obligated to take jobs if offered (albeit choosing freely amongst all available jobs), and then say that employers won’t be able to exploit workers because workers can choose not to work with exploitative employers.
I mean that is just amazing. How dumb do you actually have to be. In addition to all the other obvious and glaring and deep problems with the setup, obviously, and the many ways it’s fundamentally unrealistic and naive, but there’s something astounding about being able to say that.
And this is what you get for following Morgan Warstler’s link spam, Chris. Someone needs to get him a job in retail middle management so he can learn what supervising new hires is really like.
He lost me at “Using Paypal and an OPEN SOURCE MASHUP of Monster.com and eBay”.
Why is the Right so obsessed with turning our workforce into China? I’ve literally had someone tell me we’re bad off because “we’ve outsourced our poor to China” and we need cheaper labor to compete.
If everyone is broke, who is going to buy all the expensive shoes and TVs? The wealthy elite doesn’t buy THAT many TVs.
“Now unnecessary illegal immigrants are being priced out or the market. It is only truly the jobs that NO ONE will take, that illegal immigrants can afford to stay and do. We’d ALL want them to stay.”
Is he implying they are taking all the good jobs now?.
Man I’d love to pick apples for 15 hours a day, but the damn illegal immigrants have a lock on that market.
I tried to read the linked proposal, but it made me feel like either I’d suffered head trauma or the writer had. And I don’t have any bumps or bruises.
I don’t know how other people would abuse the system, but I’m pretty sure I’d gladly pay $40 a week just to have a personal lackey do whatever I want. Heck, I could splurge once a month and have a full squad of minions for a week. Think of the possibilities!
This is so stupid and disgusting that I am not even going to soil my brain by finishing reading it.
Wow, that is a special mix of privileged ***hole, sheer stupidity and naivete.
And I barely made it past the first couple of paragraphs.
Found it. Direct quote from the dumb paper, emphasis mine:
“Hire more than one person, receive kick-backs, and be found not requiring them to work in the eyes of society, you go to prison.”
The paper makes exactly zero mentions anywhere of owners paying themselves a salary — proof positive of the writer’s “benevolent job creators will fix all problems, have infinite money” mindset — so let’s assume that it’s allowed, and the government will give them their debit card too, but the same rules apply. You’re forced to pay yourself a salary. Yes, this is very stupid and many owners forgo a salary, especially when their business is new/doing poorly, but the whole thing’s very stupid, so it fits in.
So: I’m going to start a business and hire my friend Joe. My business is watching TV on Saturday and forming an opinion on what I watched. (Hey, the author wanted to subsidize the arts!) If he pedantically insists on some proof of “work”, we will create a website where Joe will make a weekly update telling everyone if he enjoyed the shows he watched or not. Just a sentence or two, don’t wanna bore the readers.
Joe will now start a business of his own, hiring me as sole employee. This business will be watching TV on Sundays.
Joe and I will each pay each other a $40 weekly salary. I’m giving this system the absolute minimum benefit of the doubt and assuming that something as simple as a “you only get one account per SSN and the government won’t put more than $240 into it per week no matter what” rule will be in effect. (If it’s not, obviously you just create a couple hundred businesses and hire yourself for reach one. That’s easy. My solution is better because it is not so self-evident.)
Joe and I each make $240 a week, tax-free, for watching TV on the weekends. Not bad at all, especially since our Monday to Fridays are still free. If Joe and I already had full-time jobs, we can continue to work them and draw that salary, as before. We pocket the extra grand a month that we didn’t actually need and laugh at the plebs trying to get by on what is literally our pocket money.
I already get enough of this Ayn Rand insanity from the Fox News playing on the break room tv at the terrible retail job I took because I can’t get a real job even with a degree.
Sidenote: If this reputation nonsense actually worked then these companies would be out of business …
http://consumerist.com/2014/03/18/have-fun-breaking-down-this-years-worst-company-in-america-bracket/
Kinda hard for Palpal/eBay to be part of the solution when they’re already part of the problem.
This article has the same earnest, faux-factual, pie-in-the-sky tone of a sports writer trying to sell the notion of, say, the Detroit Lions winning the Super Bowl for the next 30 years. Why, if the players would all just play like they’re supposed, and if no other team would try to win, I’m sure you’ll see how we are guaranteed sport supremacy, world without end!
so you can’t hire someone who hires someone who hires you. but can you hire someone who hires someone who hires someone who hires you? can you hire someone who hires someone who hires… n+1?
If you can – find the number of people that’s allowed in a loop and form a coop. I actually approve of this because the 5mile radius thing means people will get to know their neighbours.
If you can’t – divide society into employers and employees. you can’t do both, because you’ll end up in a loop EVENTUALLY. okay, no, if every person you employ is employee-only and every person who employs you is employer-only, that’s stable. otherwise…
He does state that cycles like that are not allowed. It’s less clear about how that works with relatedness/cohabitation constraints. (It’s also unclear what those relatedness constraints are. Cousin? Second cousins? How many degrees of removal? Are their significant others excluded? Roommates?)
If you don’t have any constraints, Joe hires a relative or roommate of yours, and they hire one of Joe’s and so on until you run out of people not in the chain who would be willing to share resources.
Since that’s obvious abuse, we’ll assume that if you’re related or cohabiting, you’re considered the same person when searching for cycles. Which means some perfectly safe circumstances are now forbidden: Alice works for Bob’s company. Bob’s daughter Carol works for Eve. But Eve is Alice’s sister, which would form a cycle.
On top of this, it’s unclear who large corporations count as for cycle-finding purposes. Stockholders? Boards of Directors? Executives? Managers? You might end up in situations where employees must avoid owning stock in the company at all costs, lest they find themselves unemployable. How much stock can one company own of another before they get included into the employment graph?
It’s incredibly obvious this idea is halfbaked. For $1/hour, people will submit a lot of really stupid, trivial jobs. E.g., I want you to come over to my place each morning to iron my newspaper, so it’s nice and warm and my fingers don’t get stained by the ink. $5/week. The mechanisms to prevent abuse are either trivially circumventable, or cause all sorts of unintended consequences, and right now it would make it a solid business strategy to hire an army of workers to do Mechanical Turk work all day. So long as they earn more than $1/hour, everyone gets ahead.
Because the first $6/hour of wages are free, this will encourage employers to keep wages as low as possible – if the median employee’s weekly income is $400 (i.e. $10/hour, or maximum wage allowed by the system), it costs the employer $280/week. Dropping the weekly income to $280 ($7/hour), it only costs the employer $40/week. Paying employees $7/hour instead of $10/hour saves the company money by a factor of 7, rather than 1.4 as expected. The quality of employee you could get for $10 would have to be worth seven $7/hour employees.
Would have taken MGK’s prize offer seriously if he offered bitcoins. 😐 0/10 Your reputation is ruined, sirrah! I say to you good day! I said good day! I will not tip my fedora to you!
@Andrew: hey, don’t knock the noble Krugerrand. It provided valuable foreign exchange to South Africa for many years! How many crumbling, corrupt, monstrous police states has Bitcoin supported, eh? 😛
Wait a second… how does this work with professionals such as doctors who incorporate and then pay themselves a salary? Could a money-hungry doctor pay themselves 40$ a week for that extra couple of hundred dollars?
More realistically, could *I* incorporate and pay myself 40$ a week? If I pay each week’s salary out of the previous week’s takings, that’s a steady trickle of free money!
“Every American middle class family who wants to hire cheap gig labor loves it”
TRANSLATION: “I want slaves”
The “no loops” rule shows a profound lack of knowledge about how economies work, but luckily this isn’t ever going to be a working economy anyway.
Even without loops, you can have arbitrarily long make-work job chains where one guy can spend $40 to force the government to pay thousands of people $240 (net) each. Or probably set things up where everyone in the chain is, I don’t know, mining bitcoin for the person at the front of it.
Or just do an old-fashioned chain letter.
“Well hell, this company’s NOT earning more than $3M a year! See, the electronics department is technically a separate company, separately incorporated, just operating out of the same space. Small businesses often do that for convenience, you know. We’re leasing the space from a separate company that earns about $2.9 million a year leasing this and two other properties. Like a lot of small businesses, we’ve chosen to outsource certain management tasks to a series of other companies, all quite legally separately incorporated. Sure, it looks like a huge chain store, it functions like a huge chain store, and it generates profit like a huge chain store, but in reality it’s a whole bunch of plucky small businesses, each of which is separately entitled to subsidized near-slave labor. Nobody in the company makes more than a buck an hour except five guys at the top. I mean companies! Plural!”
Christ, this game’s already going on. It’s been going on so long that when Sam Seaborn outlined it on The West Wing fifteen years ago, it was in a flashback to before then.
Clearly he meant to say “Dunning-Krugerrands.”
Game the system? Sure.
Get some kid who’s fast on the keyboard to sign up for every good job offered, then scalp these jobs to people desperate for work in return for twenty percent of the take. Split this with the kid, as both of you are necessary but replaceable.
And if I win you post a permanent link to my book at:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JBMDKCI
because while I genuinely cannot work a regular job for health reasons, I’m still not a mooch.
The easiest workround of all is “I’ll ‘hire’ your partner to do nothing if you’ll ‘hire’ my partner to do the same. Then your partner can ‘hire’ me and I’ll ‘hire’ your partner, and all four of us get the income for doing nothing.”
@Terminus
I don’t think they call them “slaves” anymore. I’m pretty sure its “interns” now.
Your peeps have easily done the best of everyone I’ve asked to try and game the system.
If you are confident, or even adventurous, or even bored, let’s do an hour long podcast, you hit me with every hack they have, and you can think of, and I’ll defend it. Trial by fire.
I’ll give you $50, and you can give it to whichever reader whose argument you think best whipped me.
In return I get a copy of the podcast to publish, and the practice smashing skulls.
Tell me when, and I’ll make it happen.
I’m one of those BIG idealists, and I thought you were insulting Basic Income Guarantee at first.
Then I looked at the link. Wow, way to miss the point of BIG. Seriously, this is almost the opposite of my take on the workability and desirability of refundable tax credits. I’m not sure I care enough to go back and read the whole thing.