It may or may not. You look at all the costs and all the benefits to the people directly and indirectly affected and make a judgement based on your values.

I think the fire department is a small cost, a big good, and should, by right, be available equally to all who can and cannot afford to pay.

I think there's potential for UBI to, in some cases, not actually create jobs or benefit workers and any programs tried should be monitored closely to see if the results are in line with what the purpose is.

Three points.

1) My guess is that a UBI would actually increase wages for low-skill labor by decreasing some of the labor supply because economic coercion would be less effective for companies when bargaining with workers.

2) Wages are generally sticky - the chances that even a 1/2 living wage UBI would significantly lower wages is unlikely imo.

3) I don't think even a partial living wage UBI would just be a transfer to owner's profit margins. Imagine Walmart lowers wages by a 1-1 of the UBI. Some of the increased profit would go into investment - including expansion. This would mean higher demand for labor. However, unemployment is already below 5%, so the labor market doesn't have much slackness. Thus, in order to attract more workers Walmart would have to increase wages. Since the UBI would be universal, so would everyone else, meaning that wages at the bottom of the income-scale would have upward pressure - meaning that the 1-1 decrease in wages is unsustainable.

A UBI is predicated on society having sufficiently automated the production of certain renewable resources to such a point that the labor cost required to provide everyone with certain basic necessities like housing, food, water, and the like is minimal. Real wages in the general economy would assuredly rise given the advent of a UBI due to a massive increase in labor's bargaining power.

LOL no.

Right now, without all this sci-fi improvements or whatever, enough stuff is produced to provide for everyone's housing, food, water, and the like. That isn't the problem at all. The problem is that even though enough housing, food, water is in fact being produced... it's not being distributed as needed.

It's not a production problem, it's a distribution problem.

If 5x shiz was produced, but the problems with distribution aren't addressed, we're in the exact same boat. Which, BTW, is exactly what has been happening to working folk around here since WW2. Production keeps going up & up & up, wages have been stagnate for decades.

Seems like we have adequate distribution systems for, e.g., food such that every adult getting a monthly cash allotment for food would work out just fine, but maybe I'm mistaken?

I mean, isn't the fundamental insight of a UBI that the distribution problems (and the moralism of means testing) in which conventional welfare systems tend to get mired can be replaced by just giving people cash?

As UBI/automation develops then companies will have to offer job satisfaction. That will be partly about wages but also such things as job enjoyment, profit shares, belief that some public good is being done etc.

What will become increasingly impossible is exploitation - it's hard to treat employees very badly if they aren't sacred of being unable to pay the bills.

Wait, what? UBI isn't intended to create jobs. What do you think the purpose is, exactly?

Sure. My point was that this has absolutely nothing to do with "sufficiently automated the production" or "the labor cost required". At the current existing levels of man/hours needed to provide, we already have well more than enough food/etc.

We're agreeing, I think, but opponents of UBI will tend to argue that people having their basic needs guaranteed creates an incentive to just stop working, and this could include those engaged in agricultural production, leading to some nightmare scenario where society literally slacks itself into starvation.

I don't know, you either believe our economy is largely a result of things like incentives and demand, or you don't.

Of course.

Without the Jerb Craters, we all wouldn't work. Without the landlords, we'd all live outdoors. And without the finance companies, we wouldn't have any gear.

The pace of automating agriculture is going to be much faster than that of implementing UBIs.

Plenty to worry about but I wouldn't sweat that one.

Uh, guyz... remember a few posts where I pointed out that around here, and since WW2, production has gone up & up & up while wages have stagnated. That rate of profit extracted per man/hour is the new normal. If you imagine that any scheme, be it a UBI, or any other scheme imaginable, is going to significantly turn that clock back to the rates of profit extraction per man/hour back before WW2... well you're all just plain crazy. To turn back that clock, you're going to have to lose your shoes...



I've already pointed out that automation/etc isn't the issue at all. In fact, automation, that automation which is alienated from those do the actual work, is the enabling cause of this upward spiral in the level of profit extraction per man/hour.

Nothing is turning the clock back. Automation is increasingly going to be for everything including the new jobs created by automation.

We will find a new way to distribute wealth or we will have a catastrophe. I expect we will have the later before the former but we should at least try. The options are more socialism and/or UBI as far as I can see.

Holy ****! This is a rally at the end of a 450km walk in Turkey. They say there were more than a million people there. It was last Sunday.

https://news.sol.org.tr/huge-crowd-r...e-march-172576

qft. It's the suburbs people, they are in the suburbs resenting the lazy moochers.

I misspoke or really just didn't type some things I was thinking, but you're extremely tiresome to engage with, so forget it.

I want one of these anthopological Hillbilly Elegy takes to infiltrate mid-level country clubs in various places throughout the country. That is where the rot is. Think "financial services professional", accountant, sales rep, insurance/real estate sales, pharmacist. These are the collaborators, especially the retired ones with actual pensions.

The other demographic that doesn't get beat up enough around here is men. Men are pretty ****ty voters on average. And pretty ****ty leaders. The Rojavan system with shared man+woman in every leadership position, at least 40% women in every legislative body/committee, and separate women's only political and military organizations seems pretty solid.

Men are awful, obv. I knew something was afoot like 20 years ago when I saw that the majority of those going to law and med school were women. Marshmallow experiment.

what if a tree falls and theres only one person around to hear it? and everyone else just pretends your death is ok?

i agree but enough eople dont like me already.

also hi allcoweatgrass, yeah i agree.

Been enjoying The Young Turks lately. They've done a few of these interviews with big name politcians. Mostly the politicians appear blindsided by TYT, because they walk in expecting Pod Save America or some other kind of friendly outlet with mainly inside baseball questions. Manchin is certainly caught unawares by some of Cenk's questions on progressive politics, but I still found it a worthwhile watch.

Maybe you're fishing for affirmation, but what heck, everyone worth spit around here likes you spaceman.