I was once talking with one of my classmates and he said that in the future, there will be universal basic income implemented by entire world. I was not convinced at that time and thought he is just being stupid but given the layoffs happening and massive amount of unemployment, I am thinking about this possibility. What do you say?
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Zionazi, Corporate, Oligarch fascim will put up a good fight. UBI is more power redistribution than any wealth redistribution. It becomes easier for everyone to make a lot of money and get richer. The objection is about reducing fascist totalitarian establishment power.
what do you wanna say?
Establishment does not want power redistribution. Most people look to government as having a role of providing shared prosperity, instead of just forcing you into war and to go die for your King’s amibitions. A conditional welfare system is rationed by political preference, and expensive to police and administer. UBI provides the shared prosperity at a 0 effective tax rate. You’re simply transfering very high income’s taxes to lower income people in a net 0 transaction for the state. With UBI, every corrupt empire spending plan must justify taking away equal cash alternative to every citizen/resident, and so the political power of establishment/rulership representatives is redistributed to the citizenry far better than election promises meant to champion a specific constituency (necessarily at expense of all others) without the obligation to follow through and deliver. More bureaucratic allies of the empire is also a corruption, if their function is fundamentally useless and can be replaced by UBI.
UBI leads to massive economic growth because wealth always trickles up, and redistribution is just step 1 in trickling up to all workers and owners who make more to sell more to broader population that can buy more.
A better closing sentence would have been. The objection to UBI is that the establishment loves more fascist totalitarian power instead of losing that power.
No because corps and oligarchs will campaign against it, inexplicably win, and destroy one of the country’s greatest achievements with cheers and applause
Its cynical, but its happened to many social programs thay way.
UBI will only come as a response to a new economic depression. The idea that our society will proactively fix itself has been proven wrong time after time.
Humans only learn the hard way.
I in my heart of hearts see UBI as unworkable and inflationary, as universal basic income doesn’t set universal basic buying power which is very hard to do without a socialist system guaranteeing housing, food, etc. I also don’t believe people are ok with a disconnection between work and financial value. Money is one of the few ways to quantify the value of work and humans in general have a need to feel what they do is valued, particularly if it takes up so much of human identity and what they do on a day to day.
as universal basic income doesn’t set universal basic buying power
i disagree. food prices would not go up. prices are set by supply and demand. demand would not change. imagine a society with 1 million people. all of them need to eat, whether they earn their money through wages or get it through UBI. the demand for food does not change. i don’t see a reason why supply would change either. so prices stay the same.
do you have any rational argument against this?
Sure - I have 10 customers, their income is fixed. They all need food, and at current prices, all of them can afford rice and beans, but 5 of them can afford rice and beans and meat. UBI increases everyone’s income by $100/mo. They still all need food, but now all of them can afford meat, but the quantity of meat hasn’t changed and they can’t all get meat. Therefore, I as a producer, may increase the price of meat as demand has increased - there’s more money available to buy my goods, therefore there’s more profit extraction available to me. Now, it gets more complicated and with a free market, you’d expect more players to enter the market, but we don’t have a free market, we have limited suppliers. Take housing as an example. There is a shortage of housing causing prices to way outpace inflation. What happens when you give more money to everyone? They now add more players into an already supply constrained market, causing prices to go up even higher. You’d assume with the massive demand there’d be incentives to build, but in practice, we don’t see this. That’s my issue with things like UBI - it tackles a symptom of wealth inequality and while it works somewhat, its still inflationary. you’d have a better shot at taxation for the very wealthy to redistribute wealth in public goods and focusing spending on the poorest of society(i.e. welfare), not an equal distribution across the entirety of the population.
It’s common for retirees or others who are able to cover living costs without paid work to do unpaid work with their religious congregation or for local charities. Being a valued coworker doing work recognized as making the community better doesn’t require being paid.
Alaska has had their Permanent Fund for decades, and it’s not been shown to be inflationary. At some (I believe much) higher amount of money distribution, UBI would be inflationary, sure, but there’s a lot of benefits to be had at lower support levels.
UBI has to have a lot of folks wanting it and theres contingents that would rather starve then see those people get a thin dime, with “those people” having various meanings. Then there’s the temporarily embarassed millionaires, and of course the Fox news crew who think socio-commu-trans folk are going to dye their kids hair blue and make them worship Satan.
It depends on society not turning itself inside out.
If we could just pluck along where we were in the early 10’s, everywhere that has socialized healthcare will eventally slowly install UBI and all the like things that come with it.
But, looking at the trends in society, wars, weather, oligarchs, and population decline, we might only have a few generations left.
like welfare states in EU? I think EU will probably give UBI.
no lol.
have you ever met a rich person? like a real rich person? they’re arrogant and snobby and think the rest of us have no right to exist. there’s a reason there’s this massive push to implement AI. part of it is to save money but the other part of it is that they legit think that we’re all lesser and AI replacing call centers and fast food jobs will hasten our departure.
we’ll all end up being thrown in a volcano before they implement UBI.
i’d say asia has more of a chance in the long run just because social responsibility is part of culture and that can often act as an antidote to the worst parts of capitalism. south korea can be gross but at least they throw their corrupt leaders in jail…
no chance of this happening in the states.
have you met a rich person?
Yes. They are fucking insufferable assholes who think they are God’s gifts to the earth. I’ve meet oodles and I can count a handful that weren’t absolute shit or total idiots. Eat the rich.
Damn. Money really has something in it. More you have it, more you lose your humanity.
have you ever met a rich person? like a real rich person?
Yes. The one I got to know best is fine, you wouldn’t even know.
OP said rich, not the guy who’s only got like $2 million that you know
More like 30 million. Not sure about the other two I know less well, but one has private jets, and the other has a Grammy.
They tend to believe things that are convenient for rich people to believe, just like my own stratum does for our own sake, and stratums below that do as well. But, on a personality level, they’re the same damn humans as everyone else.
Sounds like a prick to me, and you’ve just got a high tolerance for bullshit
If you’re just basing that on the wealth figure I gave, that’s circular logic. They’re a dick because they’re wealthy, so the wealthy are dicks.
If it’s the second paragraph, the Lemmy “upper middle class” worldview grates way more, because it’s actively hypocritical. You said 2 million. People here are not poor or uneducated, and I’m guessing some have or have that coming to them. Most of the rest have more than 0, which is about the actual median.
Guess what! Kind-of-rich people collectively own most of the capital, and yet everyone thinks they’re the proletarian vanguard.
Sounds like you’re a bootlicker to me tbh
Yeah, I bet that would be convenient for you.
It will never happen.
Not because it is a bad idea; it is an AWESOME idea. Work used to be something you do for the collectivity; you do something for the group, in exchange of something from the group. Today, a work is a mean to earn money, regardless of the collectivity. We do meaningless jobs, which often gives nothing to the collectivity, just because we have a rent to pay, we want vacations and a new car. A universal basic income would completely break this; I would work to bring something to the group, not to reach a stupid objective for the company.
However, there is a fringe of people which will not gain anything from this, even lose leverage and power over the masses: the 1%, the millionaires and billionaires. They will do whatever they can to kill it, saying only freeloaders and foreigners will benefits from it. And the masses will vote against it, and it will be a big victory for capitalism. Until global warming accelerate, we will have nothing to eat anymore and earth will be inhospitable for humans. The end.
It’s that of we all die of heat death.
I feel really sad for what mother Earth is going through and we, her children, are not doing anything to save it.
In a few places, maybe, but there’s a lot of the world where governments barely function in the first place. Roads aren’t even a solved problem globally. UBI for even middle income countries wouldn’t happen before climate change caused such damage as to undo any progress that might maybe make UBI possible.
To be honest I’m not fan of UBI. I’m more fond of redistribution of work.
If there’s less things to do due to automatization let’s just all work less hours with full income.
I think ubi would do that
People have a baseline income and can work less or maybe even not at all if noy necessary. Those that really want more can work and earn more then
I think it will be very important for that to work that we first put wealth caps. Nobody should be able to have a net worth that is an X amount. Anything above that should be taxed 100%. Say, 10 million for example, nice upper limit.
If all the nasocs are covered, free healthcare, free education, UBI, wealth caps, I think we’d live in a near utopia
UBI is a concession to capitalists. It pacifies the working class while maintaining the system that oppresses us. At best, it’s a band aid. We need full blown socialism. Not “Democratic socialism”, real socialism, in which the workers own and control the means of production. That is the only path to working class liberation.
you mean communism?
No. Once the people have the time and leisure to think and mingle they might find out who the real source of the problem is. So it’s better to keep your slaves busy and struggling to keep the roof over their head and their belly not empty.
that’s not really how people are, though. if people are happy, they generally see little reason to change something about their situation. everything else is delusional
No, it’s the present (except some ultracapitalist places).
really? where?
Sorry, confused UBI with unions somehow.
It’s a nice idea, but given human nature we’re fucked. UBI might be implemented in a few places, but I’m willing to bet everything it will never actually be universal, and those who stand to benefit the most will be the least likely to implement it.
