UBI is kind of cool but it has some massive flaws. For example: Landlords and groceries can just raise prices to bring the cost of living up and since there are no rent/price controls (because “that would be communism”) we’ll be right back to where we started. What you want is Universal Basic Services. Anything you need to live is free. Literally impossible for anyone to game that system and equally impossible for people to slip through the gaps, but it’s also never going to happen because “that would be communism”
So yeah this is why capitalism has go to, because any attempt at actually making a just and fair society will be dismissed as “being communism”
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
Yeah, 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.
You can do your part by fighting for socialized housing (tenants collectively own the property and rent goes to upgrades) and municipal cable. The rewards are well worth it. You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) wait around for a bloody revolution to fight back against capitalism. Every little thing you can do to wrench power from the capitalist class even something small like joining a union helps a lot if we all do it.
The 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?
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.
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.
“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.
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. :)
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.
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.
This doesn’t stop anything though again. Unless you tax them out of business, they will still be a monopoly and will fix prices for their profit. Less profit is still profit.
If you tax them too high they will either seek recourse via illegally bribing politicians (or “lobbying”) to have those taxes removed, or monopolise with legally distinct businesses where wealth is concentrated in the few regardless.
Right, they are a monopoly until there is competition. That’s OK. You tax them higher until it becomes profitable for a competitor. That’s not ‘out of business’, just high enough.
But you can also accept the monopoly if the offer is transparent and good enough.
The colluding is a problem. It is the problem. It’s unavoidable. In every system there is corruption. This cannot be solved but has to be dealt with case by case.
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. That being said it’s important to front that with me not being in support of the neofeudal UBI that silicon valley techbros push for. That would be a disaster.
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 jump
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.
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.
It 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
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 gauge 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 and significant efforts to build non-market housing across the nation. I’m not against UBI, but it can’t just be added without other changes.
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. Don’t pretend that ubi is a solution in and of itself.
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.
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?
Landlords and groceries can just raise prices to bring the cost of living up
They already can, and do. If they do it too much, people leave that area. With a UBI, there’s nothing that says you have to live in a big city, it would be easier to move to bfe, where it’s always going to be cheaper. It’s not ideal of course to uproot and leave, but it’s possible, and it’s that possibility that keeps prices somewhat under control.
unless you have conditions that require you to have quick access to hospital, or doesn’t allow you to work in physically intensive labor like farms, or require certain infrastructure like elevators and access to wheelchairs, etc. i can see that working for some people, but not for everyone. and the people that would be left behind could be dramatically affected by this situation
Moving to more rural areas is what causes rural areas to build hospitals, and doctors to open clinics and offices. There are plenty of jobs everywhere that just involve sitting on your ass in front of a screen, or standing behind a counter. Even in rural areas.
Growth doesn’t just happen. People have to go places and build. UBI would make that process a shit ton easier.
I mean, sure… but it’s hard to build specialized medical facilities for people who need them in every rural area they decide to live, right? and it’s basically impossible to keep them running when there’s only a few people that will need them in that area, no? at some point, the places they can choose to live will be heavily informed by the disabilities they may or may not have.
eventually, you will probably end up with highly concentrated areas of people who have similar disabilities that can be treated in that area (as well as their loved ones, medics/physicians, people who provide food, transportation, etc…).
I don’t want to come across as against UBI, I think it’s a very interesting first approach. but I also definitely don’t believe it’s a solution by any , you see…
It turns out the specialized medical needs are kind of special, and they fly people to where there are facilities when they’re needed. And only affects a special portion of the population. For everyone else it doesn’t matter.
For fuck sake people crossed the entire US in a god damn wagon while risking being shot at by random tribes and eaten by bears. What’s stopping people now is that they can’t afford food or a place to park the damn wagon without getting harassed by the cops.
To be fair, it’s pretty communist. The problem with anything like that in America, is that anything remotely “communist” is regarded as bad because of the cold war (and other various conflicts with Nazi/communist countries) where anything communist became associated with being a traitor. So supporting communist anything, even if it’s genuinely a universal good, makes you a target for people who think you’re supporting stuff like what China/Russia/former communist countries did (when they were communist)… most of the problems in those countries aren’t related to communism, but rather authoritarianism that serves to underpin most communist regimes; which, bluntly put, is how most capitalism operates. Without something like unions, or organized labor, or collective agreements (usually a result of a union), the boss has 100% of the power over what you do, when you do it, how you do it, and what you’ll be paid for the task. Literally a small group (aka, the board of directors and c-suite) have total authoritarian control over what happens and you have zero say in it. Either you agree to their terms, or gtfo, and find another authoritarian business to work for on their terms.
But nobody talks about the authoritarianism in modern society, people are either on the “eat the rich” or “communism is bad” bandwagon with both extremes having their own problems and misunderstandings about what they’re actually fighting for and against.
I’m against authoritarianism, and in favor of Communist control (aka, for the people, by the people), and while that’s a nice sentiment in the American Constitution, it’s the authoritarian business owners that either make up, or otherwise bribe or own the entirety of the government. Good game everyone.
UBI without a minimum wage promote workplaces that don’t respect worker’s labour, and socializes while privatizing profits. It would basically be the issue Germany had with social support before minimum wage was introduced. We need both UBI and a minimum wage.
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?
what 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)
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