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posted by martyb on Monday October 15 2018, @05:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the perpetual-motion dept.

Think of it: The government prints more money or perhaps — god forbid — it taxes some corporate profits, then it showers the cash down on the people so they can continue to spend. As a result, more and more capital accumulates at the top. And with that capital comes more power to dictate the terms governing human existence.

UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers.

Meanwhile, UBI also obviates the need for people to consider true alternatives to living lives as passive consumers. Solutions like platform cooperatives, alternative currencies, favor banks, or employee-owned businesses, which actually threaten the status quo under which extractive monopolies have thrived, will seem unnecessary. Why bother signing up for the revolution if our bellies are full? Or just full enough?

Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords.

No, income is nothing but a booby prize. If we're going to get a handout, we should demand not an allowance but assets. That's right: an ownership stake.

https://medium.com/s/powertrip/universal-basic-income-is-silicon-valleys-latest-scam-fd3e130b69a0


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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday October 15 2018, @06:32PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Monday October 15 2018, @06:32PM (#749170) Journal

    Which is why Indian reservations aren't dumps.

    The key cause of reservations (and city ghettos, and religious compounds) becoming, and remaining, dumps arises because:

    (a) It's easy to lever geographically isolated individuals into culturally isolated insular cliques using little more than nonsensical finger-pointing at a claimed "enemy", and...

    (b) Because almost every time such an insular clique forms, it generates its own patois and style which serve to form a very strong basis for everyone else isolating the group. Or IOW, the enemy now actually exists.

    Once the cultural isolation reaches a critical point, most people inside don't reach out, and most people outside don't reach in — the isolated group descends deeply into antisocial patterns and the end result is terrible to behold. Very few people, relatively speaking, manage to pull themselves out of that kind of muck.

    Once you've invested in your own special set of pseudo-identity-based isolationist rationales and complemented that with behaviors that "outsiders" will find repugnant or difficult to comprehend, you're done, and those "outsiders" will promptly stick a fork in you.

    FYI, I have lived, longish-term, in two different ghettos (10y, 4y) and presently live right next door to an indian reservation (30y.) All three were, and remain, outright hellholes.

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