“Income is associated with working, right? And we have — most people — still have a very narrow definition of work.”

Duh. Why is income associated with working? Because working produces value. Value is where income comes from. Disconnect the income from the effort that produces the value and guess what happens? People stop putting in the effort to produce the value.

What does that look like in practical terms?

Venezuela

You profess faith in owing what we have to a god. Bregman believes such rights are bestowed upon the people as a group, by the government.

Very flawed and narrow views on both sides

This depends entirely on a number of things:
1) define “serviceable”. Is a functioning toaster that is “grody” and would cost me one labor-hour “better” than a nice brand-new toaster that costs me 1.5 labor-hours?
2) is a good which exactly suits my current needs/wants “better” than an existing one that offers 80% of them? At what price differential?
3) is a 1998 Toyota Corolla better than a 2015 Toyota Corolla?
https://youtu.be/xidhx_f-ouU
There’s no commentary (i was looking for a similar vid w/ commentary), but the engine in the 1998 gets rammed into the passenger compartment (notice the massive dashboard displacement in the 1998 interior shots)… The 2015’s does not. Newer cars have vastly better survivability.

The point, is, mere sunken value is not the only valid metric to be used. You are correct, it should be considered, but is not even the dominant decision factor.

https://www.nbc.com/the-good-place

Cargo cult. Build the fake plane (or name the fake “dividend”) and prosperity will result. As always, it just shows a profound lack of understanding of the system they want to replicate. But at least the islanders who tried it presumably figured out pretty quickly that the wooden plane did not, in fact, summon the gods; the people who insist on renaming handouts and safety nets as “fundamental human rights” and “dividends” and “social credit” (the old “social credit,” from Heinlein’s silly salad days back when he was campaigning for socialists, not the Chinese version) still believe that the prosperity is coming if they just pray hard enough, it seems.

This is what ancient idolatry and polytheism must have been like. Money comes from the gods, who must be appeased by appropriate levels of slavishness to wokedom.

That is a little harsh…

Just because I think something might be an idea worth pursuing doesn’t mean I believe that it will happen.

I do think that taxing income is bad policy and I think that funding government with a VAT tax is a better policy. Unfortunately, I don’t see any possibility of that happening. Stating my opinion in the matter doesn’t make me naive.

Roy’s partial support of Universal Basic Income, to replace all other gov’t programs, is so stupidly naïve as qualify to be a Lenin labeled “useful idiot”. Most need-based gov’t programs are NOT going away, even with UBI, even if politicians promise they will go away. Just like VAT would NOT end the income tax or any other tax.

But the real key is the difference between a “right” and a “civilization benefit”. Lots of tax-funded benefits are civilization based, and should be called that. Venezuela’s “democratic socialism” is destroying its benefits system — and disproving the Hugo Chavez supported idea that free money is a “right”.

The policy we need is a gov’t supported Job Guarantee — so everybody willing to work is told what to do for 8 hrs a day. Thereby EARNING an income. The Big Lie of the socialists, so attractive to useful idiot professors, is that money income can and should be separated from work and earning.

No society can give a person self-respect. Each of us has to earn it themselves. Most of us need a good amount in order to get and keep a job — but doing the jobs allow us to keep earning that self respect, as well as producing the goods and services. Bregman fails to see the connection, fails to see reality.

No argument at all on your last comments. In my medium sized town, federal and state governments are preventing us from expanding our city limits even though we have a housing shortage. The result is an artificial increase in both housing costs and rents.

Political power and decision making needs to be decentralized.

How about houses? One of the few areas of inflation in this country is in housing prices. We aren’t producing enough new houses to satisfy the demand. A big reason for this is that governments at all levels have made it more difficult and expensive to build new houses. In Washington state we have a “Growth Management Act,” the purpose of which is to slow down home building and other development. As a result, housing is in short supply and prices are through the roof. The government will not allow builders to build manufactured homes set on foundations (About 50% cheaper than site built homes. and now better built than most stick built homes.) because it would result in faster growth of housing stocks, which they are dead set against.

The two other major areas of inflation in our economy are higher education (Too much money (student loans) chasing enrollments that are rationed out through byzantine admissions policies.) and healthcare. ( Government meddling at all levels of the process, which drives supply down and demand up.)

We have little inflation in manufactured goods, services, and commodities because the supply of most everything meets or exceeds demand. And that’s a good thing.