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.
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.
So, why don’t they do just increase all the prices now?
Because people can’t afford it?
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.
I agree and my reply was a bit short and incomplete. I’m mostly worried about things like housing and infrastructure. Very expensive and mostly privatized. With that also access to the workers and companies that can actually build stuff.
Yeah, I’m not sure how those would be affected overall. Housing unfortunately has been going up in price quickly for a long time despite largely stagnant wages. But I expect having a reliable stream of income would be a significant benefit for low income people to be able to afford at least what they would have otherwise. It’s an area that really warrants more attention regardless of whether UBI is implemented.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.