Comment by dinfinity
2 days ago
Another angle: We tell people to "vote with their wallet" to let the better producers rise to the top. That works a lot better if more people actually have something in their wallet to vote with.
2 days ago
Another angle: We tell people to "vote with their wallet" to let the better producers rise to the top. That works a lot better if more people actually have something in their wallet to vote with.
This doesn't really work because the big firms that consumers boycott have political leverage and magically become too big to fail.
It also presupposes that unregulated capitalism is the best kind of market. But "unregulated market" only means unregulated in ways that benefit people.
BI and UBI are better ways to ensure that the people that governments actually represent are supported when they need it. They are more direct and have quicker market benefits.
What really gets me is that UBI would be great for everyone, even the rich and the big business. It allows more consumers to buy more, ensures only productive, motivated and properly rewarded workers are in the workforce, lets artists create fine art rather than doing meaningless busy work so that they can eat, and even lowers the cost and inefficiencies of social safety nets.
Conservatives can't see how anything can be anything other than a zero sum game. They are always trying to maximise their wealth, they assume that everyone else is too, but really, most of us are just trying to find enough to eat, have a home and stay alive.
They are scared of losing what they have because they want to take what anyone else has. They hide that by saying it's unearned or whatever, but they mostly haven't earned what they have. They have at best grown what they were given. They don't know what it's actually like to have nothing.