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Martin Luther King was talking about a universal basic income before it was cool

businessinsider.com

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Re: Martin Luther King was talking about a universal basic income before it was cool

#11

Post by thatguy0900 »

abeppu wrote: post #5

> "Is money a birthright now? Do we just get born and get money from the government?" Republican Rep. John Gillette told Business Insider. "Because I think the Founding Fathers would say that is very contrary to our capitalist system and encouraging people to work." I think the other perspective is that the US _has_ historically been comfortable with giving away property in the Homestead Act, land rushes, the Oregon…

Everyone gets their own Ai chat bot at birth (maybe with a physical robot for it to pilot) and it's up to them to direct it in ways that produce value?

Re: Martin Luther King was talking about a universal basic income before it was cool

#12

Post by gcheong »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #11
abeppu wrote: post #5

> "Is money a birthright now? Do we just get born and get money from the government?" Republican Rep. John Gillette told Business Insider. "Because I think the Founding Fathers would say that is very contrary to our capitalist system and encouraging people to work." I think the other perspective is that the US _has_ historically been comfortable with giving away property in the Homestead Act, land rushes, the Oregon…

Everyone gets their own Ai chat bot at birth (maybe with a physical robot for it to pilot) and it's up to them to direct it in ways that produce value?

Maybe something more akin to the Alaska Permanent Fund - just replace oil revenue with AI?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

Re: Martin Luther King was talking about a universal basic income before it was cool

#13

Post by guywithahat »

JohnFen wrote: post #2

A common hypothesis for why he was assassinated is that it wasn't his fight against racism that "crossed the line", it was when he started fighting for the economically downtrodden across the board.

James Earl Ray shot him from his apartment across the street, presumably as an act of racial hatred. Maybe he had economic views but I don't think they're relevant, he was a convict and a bad person who acted alone.

Re: Martin Luther King was talking about a universal basic income before it was cool

#14

Post by bitwize »

King was a socialist. That's not a conservative insult, it's just what he was. I think the only thing stopping him from calling himself a communist and siding with the Soviets was, communists in the Marx tradition did not believe in God.

Re: Martin Luther King was talking about a universal basic income before it was cool

#16

Post by CharlesW »

guywithahat wrote: post #13
JohnFen wrote: post #2

A common hypothesis for why he was assassinated is that it wasn't his fight against racism that "crossed the line", it was when he started fighting for the economically downtrodden across the board.

James Earl Ray shot him from his apartment across the street, presumably as an act of racial hatred. Maybe he had economic views but I don't think they're relevant, he was a convict and a bad person who acted alone.

Maybe, it's not quite that simple. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-repor...

Re: Martin Luther King was talking about a universal basic income before it was cool

#17

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò had the most beautiful thread on MLK last night, on how he viewed capitalism. America as a building already on fire, deep into crisis. And needing to be the firemen, needing to directly work to make the state actually help the poor, becoming a force for good rather than promoting the tensions of capital that are set up to only ever hurt the non capital rich (the poor) more and more. Amazing thread.

> we live in a failed system. Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level.

https://bsky.app/profile/olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social/post/3mct...

Strong recommend!! So many great things from following Olúfẹ́mi but I found this to be such an incredible view, such an amazing story, from shortly before King's murder. (Linking to the end so you don't have to expand the thread)

Re: Martin Luther King was talking about a universal basic income before it was cool

#19

Post by wahern »

guywithahat wrote: post #13
JohnFen wrote: post #2

A common hypothesis for why he was assassinated is that it wasn't his fight against racism that "crossed the line", it was when he started fighting for the economically downtrodden across the board.

James Earl Ray shot him from his apartment across the street, presumably as an act of racial hatred. Maybe he had economic views but I don't think they're relevant, he was a convict and a bad person who acted alone.

There's some pretty compelling evidence that Ray's inception of the idea may have come from hearing about a bounty on MLK's head. See https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/martin-luther-ki...

If true I wouldn't consider Ray to have been acting on behalf of a conspiracy (even if the bounty itself was a conspiracy), but it's not quite acting alone, either. It's sort of like if someone got the idea for doing something from gossip on 4Chan. They may have already been primed to do something horrendous, but there's an element of but-for causation regarding the particulars and follow-through.

Re: Martin Luther King was talking about a universal basic income before it was cool

#20

Post by jauntywundrkind »

abeppu wrote: post #5

> "Is money a birthright now? Do we just get born and get money from the government?" Republican Rep. John Gillette told Business Insider. "Because I think the Founding Fathers would say that is very contrary to our capitalist system and encouraging people to work." I think the other perspective is that the US _has_ historically been comfortable with giving away property in the Homestead Act, land rushes, the Oregon…

RAM. The pro-human state of the future has fabs & distributes ram to it's citizen.

I actually do think it would be incredibly interesting to have state sponsored data centers. Give folks a VPS. Give folks some incredibly affordable services.

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