Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

I’ve taken a year off of work to start a business that failed and spent the past few months hanging out with my kids. At first, my stress levels were high because daycares were shut down and I was panicking about my business. When I accepted the fate of my business, I chilled out and just hung out with my kids. These past few months were amazing. I loathe finding a new job now. Instead, I’ve built a mechanical keyboard, explored streaming, learned how to cook, read useless books, and learned how to be present.

I see the choice of UBI as: “do I toil away for the wealthy class? Or do I took away for myself?” No way will I toil for someone else if I had a choice.

Assertion: capitalism 1.0 as implemented in the US today, rewards sociopathy more than intelligence or work ethic ( or any other sort of ethic for that matter).

Sociopathy I use loosely in both its narrow technical, and lay, uses.

Lemma: many of the current "unicorns" lionize sociopathy under the pithy cover of "breaking things," such as laws, not least through exploitation of societal and legal zero-days. Their fully disclosed business model has been to exploit the slow response time of legal and societal remedies long enough to burn VC buying customers and building a defensible monopoly.

The point of the UBI is to provide a defense of last resort for citizens of one of the wealthiest, and rapidly stratifying and polarizing, cultures on the planet.

We are likely agreed that it shouldn't be the only and first source of income,

but it should absolutely be the last.

That it would also help prevent the absolute devastation looming from this pandemic, not least by allowing businesses to remain solvent during black swan events,

makes it more pressing, and obviously beneficial, than ever before.

For my next rant, I'll address why single-payer healthcare is in the same situation.

If you give everyone UBI, dramatically boosting incomes, in order to achieve the desired net gains in quality of life for the lower classes you will have to drastically increase the regulation of all prices, all assets, all economy, all consumer activity, all production in order to attempt to control the negative consequences of UBI. This attempt will fail horrifically, resulting in catastrophic destruction to the economy.

We've already solved the quality of life problems that UBI claims to solve: countries like Finland, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Japan, Australia, Sweden, Canada solved it to a large degree long ago, entirely without UBI. They have relatively extraordinary standards of living, and have made extraordinary progress over the last half century. We already know how to do it, we already have something that works, and we should be focused on improving that further. At its best UBI is entirely unnecessary.