Comment by slg
1 day ago
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
1 day ago
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.
I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.
I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?
The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.
I’m not sure what the solution is.
who will redistribute stuff?
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.
All that wealth people are bitchin about is ephemeral, its mostly unrealized gains on stocks that balloned.
People want to overtax Elon, but he doesn't sell his stocks. Its all imaginary numbers propped up by the federal reserve.
It is still extremely common today, if you look at the demographics along the Atlantic Coast of the US. The richest zip codes always have poor ones nearby.
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Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.
ask yourself why did US not become like Norway, despite having new deal until 1970s?
is there something structural that prevents it from becoming Norway ??
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It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.
This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
we had this UBI experiment during COVID lockdown and PPP loans, and what happened??
People splurged all government given money on luxury items and unnecessary stuff, or just gambled it way on stock market or betting.
UBI does NOT work in the US and will never work. More sensible approach is what China does: low prices.
Just massively lower prices for basic cost of living items, so that even Uber driver could live normal life
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The fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation.
So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
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Funnily enough, Asimov tackles this in his short stories. The power goes to...the robots ( AI basically )
> it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power
> taking power away from the capitalist class
An obvious and apparently irresolvable contradiction.
Capitalist power is inherently anarchic and isn't power at all. It's simply order emerging from the anarchy of the market. But the ability to take that power away from them, no matter how you measure it, itself falls into the category of "too much power" with wide margin. And with this amount of power there will be no change of hands that hold it.
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If you follow UBI out a few generations, there will be nobody left to tax, which funds it.
The end result is total system collapse or forcing people to work through total government control, which is where all communist systems end up.
UBI creates a slave class. It's just a dressed up and renamed system that's been tried many times before, and failed.
I'm not sure why every new generation thinks they discovered something new.
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No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.