HonoraryMancunianUBI works too
UBI without a minimum wage workplaces that don’t respect worker’s labour, and socializes while privatizing profits. It would be the issue Germany had with social support before minimum wage was introduced. We need both UBI and a minimum wage.
Why would people work for an abusive employer when they don’t particularly need to work at all?
Because most people want more than basic survival? Having food and a roof over your head come very low on the pyramid of needs.
Where does not being abused every day stack up? I’d rather just sit at home then that.
The whole premise of the argument is that the workers in question are getting paid shit wages, so they’re barely getting more than basic survival anyway. So I ask again, why would people put up with that when they could be using that time to look for a new job, learn new skills, become self-employed, etc.? How could giving workers the leverage to quit without the fear of becoming homeless possibly result in them having less leverage over employers than they do now?
Does higher minimum wage make workplaces respect worker’s labor more?
HubertMannewhat we need with ubi is a progressive tax structure that is across all forms of income equally. In the us the top rate is just above 6 figures and never goes higher and if its from investments it gets taxed in a different system designed for no taxes to be paid (same with corporate)
GCostanzaStepOnMeLeftist memes be like
Hell yeah brother raises fist
TowerofPimpsUBI is kind of cool but it has some massive flaws. What you want is Universal Basic Services. Anything you need to live is free.
Bappityinternet should be free for everyone imo
I wish all cable cartels a very Nationalize that shit
It’s super frustrating that my state banned the ability for cities to have municipal internet, it makes organizing to make gigabit Internet a municipal utility much harder
that is batshit insane what good reason would there be to ban it
Because telecom companies secured their monopoly after a whiff of community organizing
ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρєYeah, why TF is the internet so shitty in US? I get 500 Mbps down/10 Mbps up for $80/month. It’s disgusting. I’d rather have 100 Mbps symmetric. Or better yet, 500 Mbps symmetric. My parents pay around $20/month for that, and they live in rural India. Even they got fiber, but I have to deal with fucking coax cables. The only local provider with fiber and symmetric speeds doesn’t operate in my side of the town. Why does everything in US have to be designed to fuck the end consumer? It’s really frustrating.
the closest thing we have now in the us afaik is public libraries, but even those aren’t getting much support these days :(
must be even more annoying with that stuff about book banning in some states!
Bernie EcclestonedAnything you need to live is free. Literally impossible for anyone to game that system
Let me introduce you to government corruption
I’ve never heard of UBS before, I hope it takes off
(I mean it absolutely will take off… in a post capitalist society. Hopefully it takes off long before then though)
You can do your part by fighting for socialized housing and municipal cable. The rewards are well worth it.
HolzkohlenWe should get rid of landlords either way of course. Don’t even need UBI for that. Also get rid of billionaires.
HauiThe ideas of „you can only own a building you live in“ and „companies can’t own residential buildings“ keep popping up in my head. Any reason that can’t be the solution?
Any reason that can’t be the solution?
Capitalist brainwashing and status quo warriors?
Probably. Do you have any deprogramming resources handy? I‘d really like to have answers to people who think we need to have rich overlords to live appropriately.
“Anarchy Works” by Peter Gelderloos is one of the most compelling arguments I’ve ever seen for debunking the idea that capitalism and trade are normal behaviors for humans, and it’s honestly a smooth and pleasant read. Just the introduction alone is enough.
Text: theanarchistlibrary.org/…/peter-gelderloos-anarch…
Audiobook Introduction: piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=Ht-2t2K68ls
Audiobook Chapter 1: piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=gleMbLbbYv4
Audiobook Chapter 2: piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=PUK_PAYNtmE
Thanks for mentioning those. I‘ve checked out the book. It‘s not bad so far but I‘m not convinced just yet. :)
I don’t really read things to convince myself of anything, but there’s a lot of food for thought.
Definitely. I do though. Books have always helped me to make sense of the things I see. Life has been rough and an early dip into psychology helped to stay mostly sane.
Seeing that the world is still struggling although our efficiency is through the roof makes me think there must be a reason for it.
Easiest answer is capitalism and we know that our gains accumulate at the top, not spread through the population. Still, I‘d like a more science based explanation and solutions.
That way I can stand behind it without needing to follow blindly. Tried that. Doesn’t work for me. I hope it makes sense for you. :)
The biggest trick is to break people out of their capitalist programming. Instead of rebuttals, just ask questions.
“We need landlords”
Why?
“Because they provide housing, duh”
Ok, but what about housing do they provide? They don’t build the buildings, they just own it.
“Sure, but they do the repairs”
They do, but why do tenants have to pay someone else to live there in case a repair is needed? What if the tenants owned the building together instead?
Asking questions is a good idea. But I‘m convinced there is a lot more needed than this.
I don’t think people think that we „need“ landlords, just that this is the system we have and they are not used to thinking for themselves.
If you remember the kids in school that were popular: they mostly had cool sneakers or were sweet talkers of some kind. None of them actually were smart or did anything particularly interesting. Same goes for CEOs today.
The reason we have capitalism (in my opinion) is because we are braindead as a group. The overwhelming majority lacks the skills to judge character, skill or even experience. We elect people without social accomplishments to public offices.
That is also why hiring in companies is such a mess. Companies looking for specific keywords in a cv or letter will never get the best specialists because the people they hire are specialists and gaming the system, not at their job.
We‘re naturally drawn to narcissists because they are good at selling themselves. We should be looking at the quiet person. They are normally 8 times better than the loudmouth.
Have a good one. Sorry for the rant.
AtaraxiaIf you think this is a simulation you can hack then I have news for you…
The fact that if you need to rent you can’t because who do you rent from and where do they move to?
If you want to rent, who owns those buildings? One person who lives there?
I don’t have a definitive answer for that. Right now I‘d go with that, yes. The goal would be to move away from renting as you age. Everyone should own their living space sooner or later. There are options for this. Where I live you can rent-buy something. It’s renting but you also reduce the price you‘d pay for buying it. It’s very rare though afaik.
Landlords and groceries can just raise prices to bring the cost of living up
Sigh. People make this braindead argument every single time this subject comes up. No they can’t. Markets do not work that way. It’s literally just a repackaged argument against minimum wage and it has been thoroughly debunked in that context.
Unless you live in a city with rent stabilization, yes landlords will do that. Groceries will likely not have that problem, because of other market conditions. The first to increase their rents will be luxury apartments. Once the Internet is done laughing their asses off about $5000 rent, other landlords will use realpage to guage the market and increase in tandem. Landlords literally do not care if their property is occupied, because the money is in the land and we’ve commoditized housing.
Don’t try to mischaracterize me. For UBI to work, we need national rent stabilization. I’m not against UBI, but it can’t just be added without other changes.
Then… it sounds like you are against UBI.
Saying we should do X and Y before we do Z, is functionally the same as opposing Z itself. Shit, that is how most polices are rejected.
“We can’t send money overseas, we need to take care of our own first, or things will never get better” “We can’t increase funding for our own services, we need to find out how to optimize their spending first, or things will never get better” “We can’t impose extra regulations on services, we need to do that on the vendor/supplier level, or things will never get better” “We can’t impose extra regulations on vendors/suppliers, because most of them are overseas, we need to spend resources overseas to stop it at the source, or things will never get better”
On, and on, and on we go. Meanwhile, people starve. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
I never specified in either direction which should be done first. Ideally it would be an omnibus bill, but both should happen. The order doesn’t matter to me. But don’t pretend that ubi is a solution in and of itself.
DreamButtIt becomes more and more meaningless when you start to talk about any form of regulation or extension of basic rights. Plenty of countries are coming around to the idea that housing is a basic right. It’s hard to raise prices when your competition is literally free. UBI + market regulations + basic human rights are all required. No solution exists in a vacuum and anyone who considers it as such is missing the point
Have you seen how housing prices rose when interest rates were low? Markets work that way because consumers outcompete each other, at least in the housing market. You need a surplus of supply, like the corn market, to keep costs low.
Like @espi wrote, you need fierce competition in all markets.
We literally just witnessed this with COVID shutdown. Im not sure why you think people getting handed money will not increase pricing as that is usually how things work.
Not to poopoo your point too much but inflation only happened after covid because a recent war gave justification for greedflation. You can’t really argue money is losing value when CEOs are raking in record profits during an economic downturn.
It happened because a large number of people had a pool of unspent money, some/much of which was the stimulus packages, who were competing for similar goods such as housing.
We should do away with using money for necessities. You want a pool, pay for it. A safe and sanitary living space? Free. Stop making people rely on something with no inherent value.
How do you determine what is a necessity and how much of that necessity is free?
Is electricity a necessity? Should it be free for everyone? Should the person who owns the massive mansion get it all paid for? If we say its only for a certain amount of electricity, does the person who doesn’t use all of their allocated amount get compensation somehow?
What about food then? I don’t think anyone would think lobster and caviar should be free. So let’s just do food basics like cheese. Artisan cheese is expensive. So we need paid for artisan cheese and basic government funded cheese product. So now we have a two tier food system where poor people live off gruel and soylent green, while the rich can afford real food.
The only way to solve these issues is to find agreed method of representing value that people can use on what they want.
No one can complain that someone else is getting something for free, because they also get the exact same thing. No one can defraud the system because everyone gets the exact same cheque. Well, unless you bump off grandma and collect hers too.
reinarsafe and sanitary space in Manhattan can cost the same as mansion with a pool somewhere else.
With current global world simply existing in attractive locations could be luxury.
So you want to tell me that companies aren’t buying out competition and with a monopoly they then rise prises as they want?
Explain to me how markets work if the only company selling or renting houses is not lowering their price when demand lowers? Or when they intentionally are not renting flats in order to keep demand high?
For the very problems you stated, I’m in favor of UBI. Capital would take some time to adjust to the new system and for a moment, misery would be alleviated for a metric shitload of people. When it’s ripped from our hands by greedy capitalists, it could act as a unifying, radicalizing force and bring us closer to a revolution. There’s a loooot more to it than my few sentences. But a UBI given to everyone with no means testing would be an objectively good thing. And its a bit like Pandora’s box. Once it’s here, you can’t take it away without serious social ramifications. I’ll leave a couple of articles that touch on this because it’s something the left ought to be taking more seriously, however I haven’t had a chance to read the two of them all the way through yet. I’m at work and things just got busy but here ya go one, two
I like the idea of UBI too. I hope it happens and that we transition into a UBS model once its success is shown to the world.
Hard agree on all points. It’s a bit of a bummer that Andrew yang of all people was the one to start the national conversation about UBI because his whole deal just pollutes the discussion from the start
It did at least get a lot of people talking about the idea, especially to people who the idea never would have reached.
Also for a guy with a Math pin he ignored key parts of the UBI research he used for his position and repeatedly misrepresented the figures in it.
The projection that the economy would grow because of UBI was in the part of the Roosevelt Institute study that posited the money would just appear from the sky whereas the growth rates projected from tax financed UBI were almost zero as would be expected.
I felt like it should be paired with government contracts for something akin to a private dorm room (room, cafeteria with meal plan, laundry, computer lab, wifi, etc.) that negotiates a price that is then what the ubi is pegged at. Folks are guaranteed being able to have at least that option or can utilize it for something else.
UBI is a way to make capitalism more fair. One important fact about capitalism that seemingly everyone forgot is that competition is a requirement for it to work.
If there is fierce competition in all markets, even if everyone is getting UBI, price hikes are impossible.
It’s a fantasy though. An extremely competitive market would be nice, but in reality it would be a race to the bottom and those who started with more cash would win out, buy up or starve the competition and monopolise, giving them the extra space to be lazy and pass on profits to their shareholders, who dictate increased prices to increase their margins.
That’s where you have to tax monopolies.
Monopolies will resist but it takes only some expropriations to motivate shareholders that they push for law-abiding behavior.