61–70 of 155 posts
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If you don't like the inflation of the governments currency, just build your own. (Thats the libertarian argument when it comes to everything else privatized, e.g. roads, no?)
Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote. From this angle, the problem with UBI is it doesn't really represent a clear win…
I have no idea if you are right or not, but it is a pretty wild political science theory that a policy can benefit too large of a majority of the population and therefore would be unpopular.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The higher UBI areas would also be higher cost of living areas so in the right setup there would be little incentive to move just for UBI benefits.
But you would get to live in a higher cost area, at no cost to you.
Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote. From this angle, the problem with UBI is it doesn't really represent a clear win…
Many people have more than a billion, and I can't really think of any sort of luxury you get with 10 billion you can't easily have with 1B. Above the 1B mark you are solely holding wealth to further manipulation of macro-level power structures to your advantage. UBI is a means to forcibly redistribute anything above a certain "unlimited life of luxury" threshold to keep it below oligarchy. Also, I want fun, cool, tec…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people have more than a billion, and I can't really think of any sort of luxury you get with 10 billion you can't easily have with 1B. Above the 1B mark you are solely holding wealth to further manipulation of macro-level power structures to your advantage. UBI is a means to forcibly redistribute anything above a certain "unlimited life of luxury" threshold to keep it below oligarchy. Also, I want fun, cool, tec…
Wealth is not income; one is a stock, the other is a flow. This is not even Econ 101, it's grade-school level knowledge. You can't have a policy of draining "wealth" to fund an income subsidy without very severe side effects.
https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/
Can't find a decent, detailed description of the proposal. They have an intro video, a translation of the same one in the main page:
https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
which is mostly gross oversimplifications, I suspect, to trigger emotional responses. Around 2:00 they mention funding. Basically, more and higher taxes, and the critical point, IMHO: replacing current subsidies and other public services with UBI. The devil is in the details, though, and wording is critical: they seem to say, but don't clearly state, that they're getting rid of everything else, and thus saving all that money to spend on UBI.
E.g. for countries with a public healthcare system: does UBI mean all public healthcare becomes private, and you spend UBI on your provider of choice? Does this mean people/enterprises no longer need to pay healthcare taxes?
E.g. for countries with unemployment insurance: does this mean it fully goes away, so people/enterprises no longer need to pay the unemployment tax?
E.g. what about pensions? Does UBI become your pension, thus no more taxes paid for your retirement? We all know what you need to live when you're 20 is a fraction of what you need at 70.
I'm extremely skeptical of any of these initiatives because they tend to be scarce in basic details. Which is likely done on purpose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real idea behind the UBI is to "radically restructure" the economy in a freedom-promoting direction, closer to something like the US today than current policy in the EU.
How much economic and employment freedom does one have when health care is tied to the current employer?
This is just FIRE without the money. Did you read the actual proposal? They explicitly want to give a middle class life to everyone, with zero obligation from the individual.
This is complete insanity.
Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful. Kids are idiots (past me included), and if they knew they had the option to do nothing productive, then that's what a very significant proportion would do: nothing.
So you'll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free.
You know what, why NOT be a teenage parent and never do anything productive? There's no downside.
Or if you're one of the ones being productive, when you hit 30 and get a child, suddenly why bother going back to work ever?
Do you know how many people would be "artists" or "authors" if they could? They really believe in themselves, and write poems their whole life, publish books, paint stuff. But it's all shit. Literally nobody wanted what 99% of them did. But they had no obligation to produce anything anybody else wanted.
I'm for a strong social safety net and reducing inequality, but UBI is insanity until we actually have achieved Star Trek level of abundance.
UBI assumes that everything that people want that gives them fulfilment is actually useful to anybody else.
Neil Breen is funny because there's only one of him. Europe has what, 800M people? There would easily be 5M Neil Breens, but even missing the mark on unintentionally funny.
And NONE of them would be forced to "get their life together". Their life IS together, they're "film makers".
So we would have like 25% otherwise productive people dropping out completely, and another 50% switching to something that makes them fulfilled, but contributes nothing.
And we can't keep the world running on the backs of the 25%.
Another problem is that UBI becomes a level of power. People start planning their life after not needing it, and then politicians decide to not make it grow by inflation. Or they bump it up and make future generations pay for it. C.f. pension systems, medicare, and BBC funding for some unintended political side effects.
UBI is absolutely bananas.
I suspect there are all kinds of interesting pros and cons worth study, but without trials everything is just a wild guess.
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>UBI, just another socialist way to subjugate people. Seems preferable to endless wage slavery at the behest of unaccountable corporations run by billionaire oligarchs. If the choice is between driving a delivery truck and having to piss in a bottle versus a UBI and upsetting libertarians, I know which one I'd choose. >When a right requires an obligation to do something by a third party through the use of force by th…
The argument you should be making is why Europe's UBI proposal won't wind up at Venezuela. Calling capitalism "wage slavery" isn't how you do that.