SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 16 2018, @04:29AM (4 children)
Socrates was a stonemason, soldier, and politician in addition to his philosophy career. A career as teacher or academic was common for thinkers of the time.
A key reason why working to "survive" is a good thing is because you become versed in actual applications of your ideas and with the problems that result. A key problem with the intellectual-side Greeks is that for the most part they had little idea of how their ideas could be applied nor interest in doing so. So there were plenty of ideas spit out, but little work done to validate any of them.
I think that was an important reason why so much of this was lost after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Like with the engineering technologies of the day, the knowledge of the ancient philosophers died out. There was little context or value to them in the hard new world that followed the Roman Empire.
Just look at how it works in the world today. Financial reforms frequently can't happen because someone shrewdly created an entitlement that would need to be massively cut back in order for the reform to have any chance of success. Examples include Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare in the US and the Japanese Postal Savings System. These become bribes to the electorate to go with the status quo even though that's destroying the future of their country.
Just make the UBI big enough that most voters will protect the politicians who are divvying up the resources of the country.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday October 17 2018, @06:19PM (3 children)
Tell me more about the Japanese Postal Savings System and how it keeps people down.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 18 2018, @03:30AM (2 children)
The key to understanding the problem is to know the dynamic by which it operates. The Japan Post Bank has almost 200 trillion Yen in savings - the only loans [wikipedia.org] it does are short term credit lines and Japanese government bonds (meaning it holds somewhere around a fifth of Japan's massive government debt). So right there, there's an ugly issue. In order for the bank to pay interest on the savings that have been accumulated by Japanese citizens, the Japanese government has to borrow from the bank.
So what does the Japanese government do with the money it borrows? It turns it into concrete [nytimes.com] - lots and lots of low value construction and infrastructure improvement. So a fraction of the country which happens to use this system encourages the country to borrow excessively and then turn that spending into crap.
Supposedly in recent years, they've implemented reforms to fix this mess. We'll see if that's true or not. But having reached debt levels twice over their GDP indicates they have some very serious problems to overcome.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday October 19 2018, @01:30AM (1 child)
Reading that article, it looks as if the problem is viewing infrastructure development as a direct means of providing jobs, rathern then in doing things that will provide returns later, such as education. Still, having a captive bank to borrow from is seductive, and may rob the government of imagination and innovation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 19 2018, @06:04PM
To go back to my earlier remark, we have here a situation where people are encouraged, by higher than market rates, to put their money into a system of government abuse and corruption. It's a great example of how the electorate can be bribed to go along with these things.