I don’t know how relevant this is now, but here’s a link to another post where I expressed my thoughts on what kind of pitfalls you might most likely face – https://lemmy.world/post/36867409
By the way, what is this phenomenon on Lemmy? Let’s say people are reluctant to read and comment on old posts published just a couple of days or a week ago, but with new ones, it’s a completely different story. What kind of psychology is this? Or it seemed to me?
UBI is a bad idea because it reinforces and relies on the capitalist idea of money. We should make basic resources themselves free, like a supermarket you can walk into and take stuff without paying, rather than giving people points to buy stuff that costs points.
Fundamentally money is a way of allocating limited resources. As long as there remains greed and limited resources, there need to be such limits. All anti-capitalist campaigners seem to rightly agree that human greed is a constant factor, so it would be crazy to forget it here.
If you give out money the people who own stuff (rich people) will just increase prices and take all that money.
Increasing the money supply does lead to inflation, but it’s not as simple as you make it seem. It’s worth pointing out that generally people intend UBI to redistribute money rather than add to the current supply. If necessary, there’s no reason that you can’t have stronger price regulation for any destabilized industry.
Because even if there is inflation, that doesn’t mean prices go up evenly. For example, staple foods are fairly insulated from inflation because of steady demand and low barriers to entry. If it seems noticeably profitable, a lot of people can start producing it and undercutting each other. Industry collusion is very hard to achieve the more players there are that can sabotage the group.
If UBI covers only basic needs (implied by the B) that are purchased at steady amounts regardless, that opens up the lower classes to a lot more optional spending. So you would probably see the most price increases on things that are currently bought by the upper middle class. Expensive hobbies, premium brands of things with cheaper alternatives, and services in general would probably become more expensive from induced demand.
Those people should be taxed more really. Personally, I believe every dollar over $1 billion should be taxed at 90+%. I would set the threshold for scaling those tax brackets much lower than that though.
Billionaires should be banned from using their stocks as collateral for loans as well.
So, why don’t they do just increase all the prices now?
Because people can’t afford it?
Yes, but the free money that is given out is typically obtained by taking it from the people who own stuff.
That would be great but it’s usually not the case (look at COVID, the banking crisis in 2008 etc). The money is not coming from the rich.
If you print £100 and give it to every person, then yes. But if you tax every person with progressive taxation so that the poor pay little or no tax, and then give everyone £100 using the proceeds, no, because you are changing the distribution of resource-allocation-units between the people who had the most and the least of them previously.
Even in the former example the inflation hits the billionaire harder than the worker. For example if we all got a trillion dollars it wouldn’t really matter that Elon has a trillion and a half. Scale that same principle down and UBI is good for the workers.
I disagree that inflation hits billionaires harder, they invest their money in the stock market which outpaces the rate of inflation Year over Year. Meanwhile, your total buying power drops tremendously because of inflation’s increase each year. If most of your money isn’t in the stock market then the worth of your money continues to be less. If you don’t get a wage increase at your job, then you’re making less money each year rather than the same amount as well.
I do agree that UBI is good for workers though, mainly because it also puts power back in the hands of workers since they become not dependent on their employers to survive. Workers instead would be coming into work because they want to thrive.
The “price increases” side of inflation harms the people that hold money.
Billionaires do hold more than poor people, but they still mostly don’t hold any. It’s normally the high-middle class and the poorest fraction of the rich that are hit the most here. You need proper taxation to reach the billionaires.
I agree with you, but also I’m not gonna say no if they did implement UBI. Anarchist mutual aid is better than money, but UBI is better than nothing
UBI empowers mutual aid. There’s no basic needs mutual aid required. The most important mutual aid is the ability to contribute work/time and money in exchange for share of future profits. UBI empowers you to contribute your time to something you believe will make you prosperous/happy, without the concern for eating in the next weeks.
anarchism only works with the right kind of people, i’d say. which not everyone is.
Everything only works with the right kind of people. No system is perfect and will always have people who disagree and work to destabilize it and change it. Like America isnt falling to fascism for no reason. So we should at least work towards as free and kind of a world that we can
If we accept that the act of living is inherently a destructive action by our consumption of natural resources.
Then design production chains that try to meet local demand while transparently measuring and minimising actual loss.
We can open stores like this who in an early stage are for select groups like elderly and disabled. The total loss is just a reference number similar to national debt.
Using digital communications polling to measure actual demand to project production needs becomes simplified because potential clients don’t have to choose how to spend a limited currency.
As those production chains and new standards for how to measure loss expand so can we expand clients to include the people who work in such industries and eventually everyone.
Crucial is we don’t need an overnight revolution. This system can get its roots By co existing within current capitalism with the calculated loss simply measured as a financial debt.
The biggest hurdle is legalizing an industry that basically gets a blank free debt card that can be spend on input resources, while making sure they maintain transparent calculations and dedication to minimize planetary loss.
This cannot work in the real world unfortunately. there will always exist greedy self-centered people (coincidentally also the type striving most successfully towards position of power), they will not abide by rules of courtesy that this requires.
We shame them. Greedy people should feel panic at the thought of someone noticing their greediness
Granted that would take a couple generations to instill, but it would help if we started with food
Free food, take as much as you want, but it’s all unprocessed. Lots of stuff would last a while, but greedy people would just make a ton of work for themselves
We produce so much this is an actual option
It’s not like a situation where one greedy person is dropped in the middle of a society of altruists, and the whole thing goes belly up. It is possible to educate a society on what greed looks like, what its effects are, and how to deal with people who try to become utility monsters.
Well, I’m wondering what kind of chaos will start, because these fascists don’t plan on stopping. They want to create cyberpunk and dystopia at any cost, even by stealing taxpayers’ money and more.