Lori Summers (aka MadLori) posted this insightful thread about discussing Universal Basic Income. Many people have spent their whole lives so deeply steeped in unfettered capitalism that they can’t even imagine anything beyond our system that exploits workers and enriches the exploiters. Hopefully reading this will make people think something fundamentally different and better might just be possible one day:
Source: Lori Summers
(via: Amy Edwards McFadden)
Obviously we have a long way to go toward a universal basic income and change is hard. Of course this is being idealist, but it brings to mind the iconic Captain Jean-Luc Picard quote from Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
This is possibly the single best argument for Universal Basic Income I’ve ever seen!!
This is one of the great dichotomy is between liberal and conservative thinking. Liberals say, this would help many people legitimately, so it is worth allowing for the few miscreants who will abuse it. Conservative say, this might include some of the wrong people, so to prevent that we will not do it even though it might help the large number of legitimate people. Witness the conservative attitude toward funding any sort of public activity like recreation and swimming pools – since the “wrong crowd” might come in, there’s nothing available for the “right” crowd to use.
I’d go as far and say, conservatives are projecting and secretly thinking “I would abuse that, so everybody else would, too”. They also often can’t imagine people wanting change just because it’s better for society but doesn’t even benefit themselves, and assume greed when you are fine yourself but want everyone else to have it better.
and it’s still bloody effing valid today in ’24
My questions are: Who would we trust to hold and distribute the funds for said UBI? The government? Because THEY are trustworthy somehow? Let’s give them full power over even MORE money? Plus, where is this money coming from? Who is funding this? Take from the rich to feed the poor kind of thing? Because, you try to implement THAT, and they’ll all just move to some country that ISN’T doing that, and then what? Leaves a whole country destitute trying to supply some kind of basic UBI but the only way it can be funded is through taxation, and now we’re in a downward spiral leading to a dictatorship of some type (but if the government was the one distributing the UBI in the first place, then we’d already be in one, I guess).
So in theory, it’s nice, but in practice? Yikes. She is right about the fact that there will ALWYS be people who will take advantage no matter what, so imagine a government that has enough power to seize and distribute funds to that level, and you think that there won’t be massive grift and fraud on that level, like there is today, but worse?
I’m not sure where this has been implemented successfully already – all my google searches tell me that this has NOT been successfully implemented yet, but perhaps my google-fu is falling short and I’m missing something. But as far as I can see, the only way to implement this on a massive scale (across the world or even just the USA) is to have only moral people in charge of the entire program, people who would never lie or steal and are happy to simply be public servants with no extra benefits aside from what they would fairly earn through their labors. Plus, it would need to have equally moral people in the local areas everywhere because no national public servant can correctly assess the needs of individual families on the state level, let alone on a community level. This doesn’t even address what happens in the next generation when THOSE people die or retire. Where are you going to get that number of consistently moral people to disburse these kinds of funds across a long period of time?
The odds of this happening, are, frankly, zilch. Corruption thrives the most where the money flows from. So, like I said, nice in theory, but in practice, impossible.