I do not think this concept is necessarily socialist / communist. The proponent is arguing that technology will make work irrelevant. Is that true? Maybe.
Conservatives need to think long and hard about the role of intellectual property rights. Should we support open-sourcing everything? I think not. The founders put the very reason for ip law in the Constitution: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”.
This is not natural law. Natural law gives me the right to own things. Ip law is a social contract and as such relies on the consent of the governed. Are we being served? Big corporations buy, sell and create ip. Little people, not so much any more, even though the original intent was to benefit the actual inventors and other creative types such as authors.
We the people are giving up the right to make copies of movies, music, books. We are giving up the right to reverse engineer every product and make it cheaper. We give up the right to duplicate pharmaceuticals for a fraction of their cost. Why? Because it encourages innovation. What do we get in return? Access to these innovations, inventions, works of art.
Is this a fair deal? I think ip rights should be on the negotiating table.
Look at it this way - if the director of engineering at Google is correct, computer power will match the intelligence of human beings within the next 12 years or so. And computing power and robotics will get better and cheaper so that we could theoretically have machines that do all of the work we could do, only better.
Who should have the right to financially exploit this scientific progress? Only Google? Only Facebook? Only Amazon?
We need to look at how wealth is created. It is created by work, innovation, and exploitation of natural resources (i.e. putting them to use for work or innovation). I am not really aware of any other ways wealth is created. (I am open to suggestions.)
I do not think a living wage from the government is absolutely against conservative principles. I think that if it is based on the value that the government can create by protecting ip rights through laws and treaties, and based on tariffs applied to imports, then it could be one possible conservative approach to the changing face of technological progress.
I add the following caveats though. It should be given to every citizen regardless of how rich or poor or anything else they are. It should not come from borrowed revenue (printing money is a hidden tax), and it should not come from income tax (which should be abolished anyway). It could come from tariffs and taxes on goods that receive ip protection.
Then what will be the incentive to work and invent? To have more than a living wage. All of the things that are protected by ip laws cost money and may be out of reach to those who just have a living wage.
A living wage could replace all of the broken government programs and consolidate them into a simple system.
My two cents. Hopefully will not provoke knee-jerk reactions. Intended to provoke thought. I am open to have my opinions picked apart and proven faulty, but please put a little thought into it if that is the intention.
If everyone didn’t have to work to get paid there would be nothing to buy. There would be no products, no commerce, no asset to purchase. We might be grazers and eat grass or bark, but no good thing could come from such a condition.
I teach history and economics to young people. They have little to no experience in the job market, but every single one so far understands why welfare hurts people. They understand it because they are human, and every one of us has a lazy streak.
The problem with a guaranteed income is the ability of that income to utterly destroy the will to work any harder than minimally necessary.
The ideas that no one should starve or that everyone should have a nice home are worthy. The details - dealing with human frailties - are huge and cannot be discounted.
I don’t know the answers - only that giving away OPM (Other People’s Money) to those who did not earn it - probably is not going to work.
I have read elsewhere that as automation increases a tax should be imposed on the robots that are displacing human workers since the fewer humans who remain employed will bear an increasing tax burden for the rest of their fellows.
A Robot Tax is pretty freaky sounding but the direction we’re headed with more automation seems like an idea worth exploring.