UBI is foolishness! It all goes back to the extremely flawed idea of income equality, that is Marxism revisited. In short, income equality leads to a lack of challenge. Challenge is what creates human engenuity, and innovation. This is why every major communist country sunk into despotism, and poverty. People do not thrive with nothing that challenges them. They thrive with competition. They thrive when they have hope of bettering themselves! They die or kill each other when they have no hope! Socialism denies humanity hope of a better life! Socialism says here, take your UBI, and thereby makes it valueless!
Freedom, on the other hand creates value! It says find your passion, and create your future! It says that there is no glass ceiling. The sky is the limit, and you can reach the sky! Freedom holds no man down, and gives every man the chance at greatness! Freedom is what brought cars, telephones, computers, the cotton gin, electricity, washers & dryers & dishwashers into the home! I envy no man his wealth, because that wealth is a sign of just what I can achieve!
In theory, yes. Freedom says you can create your future, and the sky is the limit. But we live in a system that does not truly allow that to happen for most people. It is preached, but not followed.
UBI would not deny people hope. It would provide relief.
If it does not allow it to happen for most people, it is because the people have abandoned it's tenents. Rather they have become complicit in their own slavery, by submitting to their political masters.
The people have abandoned it's tenents, yes, but not by their own free will. Constant distractions in media, anxiety through fear and propaganda leave us tired and defeated daily. I would posit that the masses have awoken and are not going to remain complicit any longer.
Of course, they have abandoned it by their own free will! It was their choices that allowed it, and under their continued agreement, it advances!
Wrong. I did not choose to be born into this system, neither did you. And when people try to show support for real change (like taking a knee in protest of systemic oppression), they are scolded for not being patriotic or for disrespecting the flag.
UBI isn't really about income equality because wealth between individuals is not going to be equal. It's about having an economic system which allows all humans to survive in it. Some humans are always going to be more wealthy just due to luck but the humans less fortunate have to be able to survive as well. If you don't let the less fortunate survive then if you are a wealthy person you are only creating future problems for yourself when those who have less envy those who have more.
So let's look at the effect of a minimum wage. This was the last trend similar to UBI. Has it stopped poverty as was promised, where it is practiced? What about welfare? What about old age pension? In fact, the elderly are some of the poorest in our society. The housing projects that promised to provide shelter have become dens of systemic poverty, which are more like cages, leaving people who struggle uselessly to escape. Socialism is a lot of promises backed by few results. In fact, it holds people down rather than pulling them up, and more often than not, becomes control, rather than help! Absolutely the ONLY solution is liberty! This means getting rid things like anti-camping laws, zoning ordinances which do not protect health, licensing laws, and other laws which wealthy socialists use to keep the poor in a place which they view as protecting their property values, and keeping them from having to visually deal with them, as well as preventing the wealthy from having to personally associate with the poor charitably. It is the same heart as the rich man had toward Lazurus, though they feel better about it, as they gave government the responsibility, which reduces their perceived guilt.
While you may not be envious of another person's wealth, we don't live in a world where everyone is like you. So the safety of the wealthy which could include you is at greater risk as more people are jealous of whatever you were born with. If you're born pretty then others will be very jealous of your beauty and some will even want to ugly you up so as to balance the playing field in their own favor. If you're born rich then some people born poor will be jealous that you were born with a silver or gold spoon. If you were born with some rare talent or were a child prodigy then some other student in class is likely to want to bully you because of it.
How are the wealthy (who were born with rare capabilities) supposed to deal with the propaganda of the future when there is no basic income and propaganda riles up others to create jealous rage mobs intent on taking from people who have too much or who have been too lucky? UBI is as much about security as it is about anything else.
Lack of UBI ultimately leads to social conflict, social disunity, and one way or another people get made to pay for their crime of being too lucky. The unlucky could simply feel that the lucky owe them something.
I agree 100%
UBI isn't Socialism. it is just a baseline "living cost" allowance to let people actually have a chance at developing themselves in a future especially where automation takes over the world.
What would you suppose otherwise for a world where everything from manufacturing (factory robots), transportation (self-driving trucks and ships), construction (automated cranes and builders), office jobs (Big Data), Professionals (Task specific AIs like IBM Watson .etc), IT (self replicating AI), Finanace (Again, bots and AI) and virtually every other things is done my automated softwares and hardware?
Take it to a more personal level, what are you doing to sustain your life now? A robot will take that over in our lifetime, very sure of it. I am professional drone pilot and even i don't kid myself and know one day these drones fly themselves. what do you suppose i do then?
Having UBI is not welfare check "for the lazy". All of us are lazy retarded unproductive idiots compared to the 24/7 efficiency of robots. Is that our fault?
UBI as least gives a person a means of sustaining themselves in order to find a way to be productive. Lets say there is no UBI and the only jobs left are drug pushing and prostitution to the people who are rich-by-default, since everything else is taken over by bots that are owned by the few who are born into the family that owns them. Is a woman now "lazy" because she would rather not sell herself for a meal?
Of course, if and when that future becomes a reality, i can easily go back into the woods and homestead on a piece of illegally owned land. If that's what it takes to be productive i'd do it.
UBI is far form Socialism.
UBI is a fully capitalistic idea if you think about it. Only that the capitalism is done by the centralized authority that controls the population with the UBI and the big corps that has free reign on maximizing profits and power with their nigh-infinite production capability, no pesky worker unions or employee rights to worry about.
In the 1970's George Wald proclaimed that civilization would end within 30 years. Paul Erlich declared the 100 -200 million people per year would starve to death within 10 years. Al Gore, who "created the internet", swore Arctic ice would disappear by 2013. Yet there is still ice! How long will people be manipulated by their Chicken Little complexes?
Centralized capitalism is not capitalism at all. It is communism.
Did you just called the United States of America a communism?
USSR had a UBI. Communist China, UBI. All the people they killed, not impressed!
this is like saying "Guns are made of metal, swords are made of metal, therefore metal is for killing".
Do explain how UBI leads to killing?
because if i am correct in using that same logic, i can easily replace "UBI" with any other thing.
See how that doesnt make sense?
Every place that communist thought has been tried, which includes UBI, has become or is in the process of becoming, despotic. In fact, that has been the most deadly political system in history! A trend is a trend.
You are equating UBI and communism, which does not make sense. You do know that the idea communism is made up of many components right?
and why are we even talking about communism? the argument here is about the viability of UBI in future society.
For Context, i do agree with @dollarvigilante on his idea that government and finance should be segregated. The current fiat currency system represents the worst kind of enslavement a ruling class has imposed to it's people.
While people are not dying, can you confidently say they are living? Sure they are technically, as long as they are profit making statistics in a spreadsheet. Unless they get out of the system and be weirdo hippie anarchist like even @dollarvigilante himself, one of the weirdest dude a normal American will ever see. Guy who plants his own shit in the backyard.