Bloggertarians and the CBI
In the little spat that has blown up in the blogosphere over the last few weeks over so called Bloggertarians one of the better arguments relates to the Citizens Basic Income (CBI) and ID Cards with their National Identity Register (NIR).
While his comments about being negativist or ahistorical (by which I think he means placing everything within the context of the Marxist materialistic dialetic of power relationships) can be safely ignored other comments by Paulie that a CBI would require an ID card and National Identity Register deserve more time. This is because otherwise people would end up finding ways of claiming it several times. He does not think that National Insurance numbers would cut it as they are given out like confetti (and they are). He is correct that anybody that wants to is able to collect as many as they want. This is used as an example of how the people he labels as bloggertarians are logically inconsistent because us Bloggertarians are against ID Cards and the NIR, but often in favour of the CBI.
As an argument this falls down because there is no need for the NIR for a CBI.
Exactly the same problem of people using multiple identities to claim the same handout multiple times happens now with the dozens of different handouts that the states gives away. Many people have many National Insurance numbers, but is there any reason to think that this will not happen with the NIR as well? Personally I doubt it. Give people the incentive of free money and they will find ways to game the system, any system, that is just human nature and no overpriced, insecure, unavailable, database of Stazi like proportions would make any difference to this at all. If anything the NIR would become the one stop shop for identity thieves to harvest information to be used in their scams.
As with the current benefits system, which also needs to know the identity of claimants so they don't claim twice but runs without the need for a NIR, the answer is not to try and use technology to try and solve an insolvable problem. You have to just accept that some fraud will happen, but make reasonable checks on claimants, investigate suspected fraud and prosecute those fraudsters found. The simplicity of the CBI gives it a huge advantage here over the current mess.
With the current mass of different hand outs first you have to find people that might be acting fraudulently out of a great mass of transactions with dozens of different frauds possible, and then pick your way through dozens of different means tested benefits all with different requirements to find out if they are trying to scam the system (either deliberately, or by accident on their part because they didn't understand the systems complexities, or by bureaucratic error because the people in charge of the system did not understand the systems complexities). With a CBI all you have to do is show one person is getting the cash from two cheques. Simple.
Simplicity is the attraction to the CBI:
- It is simple, and therefore fraud is much easier to discover and prosecute than the current system.
- It is simple, and therefore does not require a vast army of bureaucrats to administer.
- It is simple, so it will produce fewer strange distortions and unforeseen side effects.
- It is simple, it does not need the state to know anything else about you other than you exist (unlike the current array of means tested benefits where the state needs intimate details of your bank accounts, location, health, history, family situation etc.).
- It is simple, it does not care how you live your life: be single, be married, be in a complicated melange of wifelets and hublets, it makes no difference and so it cannot be used to try and force people to live in certain state approved ways.
The CBI is less intrusive on your life, because it requires the minimum disclosure of the details of your life if you claim, and it is less intrusive in your wallet, because it is simpler and cheaper to administer. So if you want a state that is as small and unobtrusive as possible then, because having some form handouts being an unfortunate political necessity, the CBI is your least worst option.
posted by chris at 12/04/2007 05:58:00 pm
11 Comments:
"As an argument this falls down because there is no need for the NIR for a CBI."
Surely a CBI would be by default a NIR. The only difference is that you would be getting paid to be on it.
hmmm, A CBI could potentially include every adult citizen, therefore in some ways the state could use it like the NIR (containing far fewer details than the proposed NIR). However it would not require an NIR and there are some differences between it and the NIR:
1. It is opt in, you can choose not to take it. Everybody admits that NIR and ID Cards will be compulsory eventually.
2. You actually get something for joining. ID Cards give you nothing as they rely on clinging onto some other scheme like a parasite for their utility.
3. It won't track you. All it needs is a back account to put the money and some kind of record that you exist, e.g. naturalisation papers or a birth certificate. The NIR and ID Cards keep all sorts of details about you on file, plus you have to keep them informed if you move on pain of a fine or prison.
4. It won't give them anywhere near as much data, most of which the state would have on most people anyway at the moment through all the current benefits. The NIR and ID Cards mean handing over lots of data and being forced to keep it up to date for them. In the long run it would lead to the state holding less data on the citizens than at present.
5. There is a potential for the CBI to give good social effects, such as encouraging people to work by reducing the massive marginal tax rates that the low or unpaid face at the moment because of benefit withdrawal. No such good effects come from the NIR and ID Cards, however the NIR and ID Cards have the potential very bad social effects e.g. people being stopped on the street and having their papers demanded by some officious sod for such crimes as "walking while black".
Oops, that "hmmm" might have come across as sarcastic. It was meant so as to indicate giving thought. Oh well, live and learn.
chris, with reference to your points:
1. Agreed. (Shame you cannot opt-out of paying for it.)
2. Agreed. You get a larger tax bill.
3. Disagree. Nice bloggers would implement this without compulsion or recording your details - governments don't work that way.
4. Again this boils down to do you trust politicians' motives? The temptation to use a CBI database as a basis for a ID system would be too great. And because of the financial penalties of opting out only the rich could.
5.I don't see the positive social effects. We currently have 5+ million people able but not willing to work due to the current benefit system. Giving universal benefits this figure would sky-rocket - I would give up working. CBI is basically a progressive/redistributive tax system to tax the rich and middle classes. (Polly supports it - need I say more)
Points 3 and 4, OK I shouldn't underestimate the maliciousness of politicians to twist a system for evil purposes.
Point 5.
Having a system of handouts is a bad thing, but now that everybody is so addicted to them they have become a political necessity. Unfortunately handout cold turkey isn't going to happen, no matter how good the end result might be, people would be too worried about the withdrawl symptoms. A CBI is a way of reducing the damage because, unlike the current system, it does not actively discourage work. It merely reduces the pain for the lazy and so reduces their discouragement for not working.
Lets say if you do no work you get £10 to make the numbers easier.
Currently if you do £10 of work due to benefit withdrawl you end up with £11.
Under a CBI if you do £10 of work you get £20.
Some people might still just take the £10 and not do any work. This will happen under any system, but some would want the extra £10 from doing £10 of work as would happen under a CBI. Very few would be so desparate for an extra £1 that they would do £10 of work to get it, especially when they can see their contempories lazing around doing nothing and getting almost exactly the same amount, as under the current system.
Remember the CBI replaces all current hand outs, it is not in addition to the current hand outs. There are already hand outs available for everybody who decides not to work. Anybody that wants to can already claim they've got 'stress' or a 'bad back' then kick back and play on their X-Box and watch Sky for the rest of their lives. By being universal a CBI has to be low as no other level is affordable. This makes it less attractive for scroungers than the current benefit scams. Also the current schemes are easier to rachet up by playing various special cases against each other. By being universal there are no special cases so this rachet mechanism is harder to use.
I love this combination of airy superiority and a cherry picking of arguments as a prelude to the 'safely ignored' dismissal.
I have made arguments that what the (you?) ahistorical bloggertarians call 'statism' is largely the product of liberal democracy and how it has emerged. These arguments have a good deal less to do with 'the Marxist materialistic dialectic of power relationships' than they have to do Weber's explanation of public administration and bureaucracy along with a reading of Public Choice Theory (the preferred tool of many libertarians, I might add).
Congratulations on sneaking in another way of implying that non-bloggertarians are all totalitarian freaks though.
I have little more enthusiasm for cumbersome bureaucracy or the assumption that states should take over roles that would be better performed by mutual arrangements than almost anyone I know. But I accept that there isn't a better counter-proposal on the table at the moment and I don't think that the absence of one is the product of a willful totalitarian conspiracy either.
You've also invested a good deal more than I did in the arguments about CBI and ID Cards. However, let's play along. Here's something that would be worth considering. A CBI could only be introduced in the teeth of significant political opposition. In case you haven't noticed, it isn't a shoo-in into all of the three main UK party manifestos because it exposes it's proponents to a variety of political attacks that would be hard to rebut.
It isn't like the introduction of smallish benefits. None of the smaller ‘frauds’ serve – in the bureaucratic mind - to justify expensive identity tracking. But if you could stop hundreds of thousands of instances of £10k-a-year frauds, I suspect that the arguments for ID cards would be very hard to oppose.
CBI is a permanent covenant by the state to pay everybody a fairly large sum of money in perpetuity on production of proof of citizenship. If the British welfare model is portrayed as being a 'magnet for migrants' a state offering a CBI would be doubly so.
A CBI may be a perfectly good idea for all of the reasons that you outline. I find it an attractive one myself, but I've never had a political roadmap that would lead to its introduction shown to me. But if there were a roadmap, it would be a tortuous one. Can you imagine its opponents being prepared to play down the risks of fraud? Can you imagine that they would accept your 'what-will-be-will-be' approach to duplication of identity or proof of citizenship?
At the bottom of it all, I’d ask the same question to you as I’d ask generic bloggertarians: Do you think that the demands for ID cards in particular, and ‘statism’ in general are the product of the totalitarian instincts of ‘socialist’ politicians, or the dynamic between representative democracy (regardless of the political colouring at any given moment) and budget-maximising bureaucrats?
And if you think the latter answer is better, where’s your alternative?
Frankly, I regard CBI an irrelevance to this discussion, which is why I did not enter into that discussion, although it does make an interesting discussion in its own right.
What those of us criticising the government are doing does not require us to provide "solutions" or alternatives. Our parliamentary democracy is deeply flawed, but is the least worst option currently available. I am not proposing to change it. What I am objecting to is the behaviour of those individuals we have elected to serve us.
If, as I suspect, this is as much about the desire of the bureaucrats in government departments as it is about autocratic politicians, then it is up to politicians to use the "N" word; No. That thy haven't says much about them. And, if necessary, we, the electorate may have to force their hand, much as happened over the poll tax. Much as happened in France recently.
John Major's cabinet decided that ID cards were not necessary so, too, could the current cabinet. We do not need to offer an alternative political system to achieve that. Nor, for that matter do we need to proffer an alternative policy. The policy itself is a solution for nothing, so no alternative is necessary.
We could do with an electoral system that does not disenfranchise everyone who does not live in a key marginal; but that's another discussion.
“What those of us criticising the government are doing does not require us to provide "solutions" or alternatives.”
Yes – this is what I mean when I use words like ‘negativist’ and ‘ahistorical’. You can decide that it’s a respectable argument to keep saying ‘don’t do that’ whenever a suggestion is made, but you will find it very hard to sustain once a second subject is introduced into an argument – and it tends to ignore the reasons why your interlocutor is tempted to do the something that you are objecting to in the first place.
Sooner or later, someone will ask you ‘what would YOU do then?’ – and when you finally give them an answer, they’ll probably be able to piss all over it unless it’s based upon a defensible understanding of how things really work.
This is one aspect of bloggertarian argument that I don’t really get. Most ‘libertarians’ tend to be very keen on the way that markets work – particularly the way that markets incentivise people. Yet when you ask them to assess why politicians are incentivised to behave the way they currently do (and that to change things, you need to change the incentives) then the response is to tell them bluntly to ‘just say no’ whenever someone wants them to do something.
Most politicians’ actions tend to be based partly upon the calculation of ‘what will get me re-elected?’ The reason that ‘don’t do that’ won’t work as an argument is because they have already calculated that inactivity will present them with a greater price. The institutional scepticism that characterised the latter years of John Major’s government compounded the public perception of sclerosis there – you picked possibly the worst illustration possible for that argument.
The Poll Tax is a bad example as well. OK – an unpopular and regressive tax was scrapped. But the resulting compromise has left local government finances in an indefensible mess - almost impossible to reform without massively disadvantaging a key political constituency. Absolutely no-one thinks that local taxation is fair, and a failure to find a sensible way of linking local government performance to taxation is – in itself - significant factor in the increase in political centralisation that we’ve seen ever since.
I agree with you about electoral reform though.
Rather than take over Chris' comments, I've discussed it on my blog
Chris, I note your subsequent post on this. Interesting...
Excellent post!
BTW, if you had a CBI (say £60 per week) and a flat tax system (say 30% on all income), then you could offer people a choice between a) claiming CBI and paying tax on all income or b) waiving the CBI and claiming a £10,000 personal allowance instead. Comes to the same thing, mathematically.
Well Paulie, this what the government should do. Decide what an ID Card is meant to do: is it about security, is it about entitlement, is it about proving identity. The technical architectures required to support those requirements will be different so the choice does need to be made. Then when you have decided what it is for, propose a solution that meets those objectives, is technically robust, is proportionate in the amount of provate data it stores and is value for money. That's not so f***ing difficult to understand, is it. So perhaps you can tell me why defenders of ID Cards just can't get this elementary point?
Post a Comment
<< Home