“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
Modern rent seeking is rooted in a feudal concept. The lord maintained an army that protected the land, and the workers paid the lord for the upkeep of the army that protected them.
Modern landlords provide absolutely nothing but exploitation of their tenants. They take rent and provide nothing anywhere near equal in value.
They are parasites on the working class. Our labor gives them profit, and they offer only what should be ours by right.
We pay to live here. It’s our home. You only rent seek, you fucking parasite.
Not sure why you’re being so heavily downvoted, it’s true. Landlords, due to their position in society benifit from high poverty, less rent control, etc. Working class people want the exact opposite. It’s a clear and obvious dielectic contradiction
Not sure why you’re being so heavily downvoted
Currently his post has one downvote
Now it’s up to two.
THE HORRORDude, you really posted this 5 hours after my comment. Fuck off.
No u
Maybe there are defederated downvotes?
Where are you going to live if you can’t buy a house?
The apartment people should be able to own.
Ok I hear you. Like you would buy the bottom or top floor.
Same question though, what happens if you don’t have enough money up front to buy a unit?
Seems like a simple solution here: tax and redistribute money to pay for social housing to be built by the government, subsidizing people’s housing.
That’s the issue - do we want people to be homeless? No. So we should proactively fix the situation and build social housing, implement rent control and limits on non occupied structures.
Even setting aside love and empathy, it’s to the benefit of society for people to be productive, which is hard when you’re scrambling just to meet basic needs. And the cost of homelessness on society (shelters, emergency medical care, crime) outweighs the cost of providing permanent shelter. There have been studies.
Yes, but land free for the taking is not part of that argument, and is naive at best
It’s not about “give me free land” it’s “resources were distributed before I existed.”
Funny you say that, since the reason why houses are so expensive is because landlords are buying all of them to rent, and creating artificial scarcity which drives up the price. They create a problem where the only solution is to pay them.
Without landlords, worst case, housing would be far more inexpensive. Best case we could even make them free, and start treating housing like a human right and fundamental need.
One separate reason housing is expensive in the US, at least, is that most jurisdictions make it very hard to build new housing. Law of supply, if supply goes down, price goes up, if supply goes up, price goes down. Supply hasn’t been allowed to increase much for the last few decades, therefore price goes up. If we could double the amount of housing over night, it wouldn’t matter how much landlords wanted to buy everything up, they wouldn’t be able to keep up.
We already have more than enough housing to give everyone a home, and have some left over. Landlords are causing an artificial scarcity.
It’s also not enough to just have enough units in total (which we don’t have), you also have to have them in places people are actually willing to live. People are on average wanting more and more to live in cities each year. Cities are exactly where it’s hardest to build and where we’re most short on housing relative to demand.
Upvoting out of pure hope
Why are we all just accepting of getting absolutely gutted by rent?
Because we’re not ready for guillotines yet.
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👏 Don’t 👏 let 👏 that 👏 detract 👏 from 👏 the 👏 message.
Off topic but I read it as handicap emoji . I’m a boomer and use emoji and acronyms infrequently.
I read it that way too. Our brains tend to guess the word and fill in the blanks based off of the first and last character of a word. I’m sure the length helped in this case too lol
Same. Handicap is a far more common word than handclap, so it was a good guess!
The word boomer should be cancelled
OK, boomer
Don’t think I am one. Born very early 80s.
OK, millennial
Think I’m GenX
It’s been around since 1963, good luck with that. It will fade into obscurity once the last of the boomers are gone.
They make me think of that Stefon character from SNL.
That’s kind of the point. It’s supposed to be attention grabbing, drawing attention to a point that is supposed to be implicitly agreed upon by everyone, except people don’t agree with it because too many people are chasing clout or wealth.
I hate when people clap alongside every word they say. It’s so damn obnoxious and annoying, it makes me disregard whatever input they want to give.
Leftists try not to be insufferable whilst doing/saying leftist things challenge [impossible]
– sincerily, a leftist
I agree. It’s trashy as fuck.
Me 👏 too 👏
100% with you. It’s like writing “Period” at the end of what you said, as if that makes it more true. And, ironically, it’s almost always some take that requires ignoring all nuance.
It isn’t ironic at all. Ignoring nuance is the whole point. Saying “Period.” at the end of a statement emphasizes that the statement is complete, and that you will not entertain any qualifying subclauses being appended to it. It’s explicitly rejecting nuance.
Still annoying, though.
Eh, it’s for emphasis, it’s just a style that gives a visual along with the words that indicate a specific physical movement that some people interpret in a specific way and changes how they are communicating, thus changing the message in a minute way. It’s not hurting you, if it’s enough to make you want to disregard what they are saying that seems pretty petty of you. Just because people communicate differently from you isn’t enough of a reason to disrespect them or what they have up say. Now, if they’re saying something abhorrent, that’s a different story, but you’re not an idiot, just judgemental
It’s not hurting you
No, but it’s highly irritating and jarring. Almost even threatening, as if they want to smack you because you disagree with them. If they can’t have a calm, reasonable discussion then I don’t think it’s petty of me to not want to listen to them.
That’s the point. It’s supposed to hammer home what should be an implicit idea that everyone should agree with, except people don’t agree with it.
No, it’s meant to hammer home what that person thinks everyone should agree with. More often than not they’re wrong, but because they’re so stubborn and clap happy there’s no reasoning with them.
It is intended ironically. Whether or not this is a good thing, I think the lemmy audience tends to struggle with anything that is not strictly literal.
No, it’s not being ironic. They’re using the clapping emoji the regular way.
Yes, the “regular way” implies a sense of irony i.e. we recognize this is stupid, but it’s ok because none of us are being serious here.
Ironic or not, it’s poor taste IMO. I would be fine with seeing less of it. There are better ways to emphasize phrases. It always comes across as obnoxious and immature in any context.
I often feel similarly, but I could say the same about “IMO” - they’re just conventions, and as such, are entirely subjective and without intrinsic value.
If I were forced to choose between people obnoxiously enjoying a sense of community through styles of communication I don’t personally identify with, or people behaving “properly” by communicating in a conventionally acceptable way that is more familiar to me, I’m pretty sure I’d go with the former every time.
In a lot of cases, I’d actually argue that recent generations’ use of irony is part of a more sophisticated or complex form of humour (and even communication) that has been spurred by some of the less wonderful aspects of growing up today. I have no doubt that a lot of it is superficial, and anti-intellectualism is definitely a credible threat, but there is often more going on than what one might assume: consider, the people using the emojis will be the first to tell you they don’t really like emojis.
There’s something aggressive about this one, similar to writing in all caps. It evokes imagery of someone getting in my face to say something they don’t think I want to hear.
Meh. Not everyone is good at writing. Personally, I prefer the clap emoji to people using quotation marks for emphasis.
And then there are the people who double-space after a full stop like it’s 1914 — give 'em the chair, I say.
Really? That was your shut-it-down moment?
Not the : let’s compare ourselves to other species which have no doctors, science, hygiene, toilets, devices or ready made food as to why were such a cushy society that hoarding money really shouldn’t be a thing we do and kinda missed the point of why a society is usually formed?
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Annoying and irritating, proving my point.
That’s low-key racist innit?
what race claps the most hands?and 👏 IS 👏 IT 👏 SIMPSONS 👏
I can say for sure that they have a scene about clapping. When Lisa asked Bart “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” during a discussion of philosophy, and Bart replied, “Yo Lisa, listen up” and went psht-psht-psht with one hand by clapping the fingers against the palm.
Okay, but other species aren’t even able to pay to exist. If a human wants them dead, they dead —unless they the property of another human being of course.
They’re also at the mercy of nature and all it entails. And nature is fucking brutal.
And they do pay to exist, just not money. They spend their time seeking food, expend their calories seeking more, risk their well-being to defend what they have from competitors, etc.
And that’s how we would live too without exchanging money for good and services. It’s just a resource, and no species is free from having to gather and manage resources.
No free lunch
You’re right, we all need to acquire resources. The thing is that by law, we don’t have the ability to use property without the owners’ permission. So unlike a butterfly or something, we can’t just do our thing, we have to give over some portion of our energy and acquired resources to other people.
Many people worked hard to start a business or buy land. But not all of them, many people’s wealth has some proportion derived from other people’s labor. It would be impossible to sort out individually whether an individual “ought” to have what they have. But to avoid reverting to the “natural” state (I’m stronger / there are more of us so I / we are going to take this) we should guarantee that all people have some minimum standard of living.
Even in nature there is property. A lion will defend its territory from other motherfuckers. They will even kill. There is “property” in nature and it’s fucking brutal. The butterfly example is ridiculous. You can’t compare 1 butterfly with 1 human. A butterfly does not need a lot of resource but human does.
Property is what you’re able to keep without having to defend it constantly. There is no property in nature.
You’re right nature is brutal. Do we want our lives to be like that? If a homeless person sees a billionaire should they kill them and take over their mansion?
No. The point of society is that we can all have better lives working together than by living as animals.
What I’m saying is that we are not the only species that “pay” to exist. Money is the abstraction of work. That first sentence is a joke, it’s ridiculous, it’s infuriating. It’s not an argument to anything.
I’m with you on this. I get where they’re coming from and we are being taken advantage of but the argument being used is lacking in cognative thoroughness, it’s like a surface or second layer thought being mistaken as deep thinking. I think there’s enough automation in the world that we all could be living much freer lives with more time for building connections, learning and creating rather than having to spend all available waking hours repeating soul crushing tasks to simply pay for food, shelter and some basic future security. Trying to push this idea with flawed arguments is dumb because there are so many flawless ones available.
If a homeless person sees a billionaire should they kill them and take over their mansion?
Honestly, there is probably a good justification to be made that they should. Billionaires hoarding money are a big part of why the homeless exist.
You can compare a “butterfly just doing its thing” to a human though you are right in that don’t need anywhere near as much resource even when factoring in size and lifespan. Even still it follows the same idea, take the plants around it for example. You could argue for many insects and animals this is a limited renewable resource (property albeit unclaimed). The butterfly must work to acquire the nectar. If another animal comes and eats those plants the butterfly must now work harder to acquire the same amount of resources.
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You act as if paying to exist is a privilege. It is a requirement of being a human in our society. A requirement that functionally requires you to be exploited by those who won the birth lottery.
It is a privilege in contrast to other species, the exact juxtaposition done by the OP. It’s like complaining that the free man has to pay for room and board while the slave doesn’t. I’ve heard exact arguments like this from slavery apologists, that slaves had it really good actually.
How exactly are other species relevant to how we structure our society? It is true that humans are the top dog in the circle of life, but how is that relevant?
I said nothing about slavery, why are you changing the subject?
EDIT: I guess I missed the first sentence in the OP about species. I think caring about how other species do things is just a red herring to draw attention.
I think they’re trying to say if you were to take you and your family and delete all of society and drop you in alongside all the other natural species, you would find your life is probably going to be way more work than it is now even under the shit heads exploiting us. I’m not saying it’s ok at all, it’s fucked and I’m all for fixing that but the idea that nature is somehow easier or better has many flaws. It has some benifits but if it was so much better I don’t think we would have bothered to build societies and security like we have
Also, you could easily not have to pay to exist. You’d just be living a hard hard life out in the sticks or be taken care of in jail with the tradeoff of a lack of freedom.
People in prison are hardly taken care of. Read up on healthcare in prisons, for example.
Taken care of was not the right phrase, only in the sense that you’ll keep existing for no money. Quality of life for a free existence is not going to be pretty any way you slice it.
Yeah. This is a terrible argument. Sounds great to ubi supporters.
All I’m reading from the OP is “gimme gimme gimme”
There are good arguments in favor of UBI but this is just whiny.
The argument is that a person can be willing and able to work, but because resources were distributed unevenly before we were all born, it’s possible to be homeless and hungry. Or more likely, scraping by with a job while a small percentage of wealthy people take a cut of everything you do and you have to be careful not to displease them.
See, that’s a good argument.
“All the land was claimed before we were born” is silly.
Well it certainly drove some discussion.
I think talking about land, some people think it’s about buying a nice house or something, but really it’s about being able to exist in any physical space. You’re born and now you’ve got to be somewhere, you’ve got to sleep somewhere and work somewhere. If you’re lucky your parents own something. If you’re not you’ve got to pay. (Of course even owning you’ve got to pay tax but that’s another conversation)
Everyone needs an income source and needs to pay for necessities.
Some people have income purely through inheritance and that is not fair. It’s not just to do with land. “Trust fund babies” have been a thing since forever.
You’re right, everyone needs to pay for necessities. Some people don’t need an income source, because of inheritance.
Your original post is really shit and no one will take you seriously. Everyone has to contribute for society to exist. Even if land was free, we would love in a society. There is no living “alone”. Everyone lives together and everyone contributes. Now, is it the reality currently? Maybe not, but your post does not even address that and it makes just some wild statement about we “have to pay to live and that’s atrocious” while in reality, even in the goddamn wild you have to pay. Not with money but with labour which is what money is about.
Forgot I had this
I think the alternative is finding and defending your own space and possessions from others who have weapons and would take it from you, growing or hunting everything you require for survival, relying on whatever gifts other may give you or on trading whatever excesses you have accumulated for other needs.
Money has made this difficult job much much more efficient, leading to a vast excess of wealth accumulation*. Everybody can focus on what they can offer, in exchange for tokens of value. Those tokens of value are then exchanged for the goods and services that they didn’t otherwise need to create on their own.
*The problem is that the accumulation is focused on the people and their heirs, mostly, who’ve acquired tangible assets. Although a lot of the wealth has been reinvested in improvements. We have GPS guided robotic harvesters now, for example and not as many people need to toil just to live.
There is no system through which to redistribute this wealth once it’s locked into some dynastic family’s coffers. There are many governments that could and should be tasked with improving the place constantly, however they typically suck at the job.
I think the solution now is the same as it has always been. When the masses are too pissed off they’ll either stop reproducing, decline in population, leaving the production capabilities of the wealthy in decline, or they’ll fight back in a revolt.
think the alternative is finding and defending your own space and possessions from others
Surely there must be a middle way.
I don’t mind renting land from the state. I pay my property tax and income tax and in return get protection from the police and military and health care and more, basically a whole society to live in.
The problem is that the landlords set themselves as the middleman who rent the land from the state and sublet it to the people. I don’t remember any of my landlords defending me or my belongings from wilderbeasts or other people. They’re just middlemen who have increased the potential pricing of all the land so that it is no longer affordable for everyone to rent directly from the state. They can only do this because they have enough capital to get their hands on the land in the first place, or by inheritance. The price of the land is artificial. It’s not about how much it’s worth for anyone living there. No, the price is only about how much can theoretically be leeched off the people needing to live on that land
Landlords aren’t renting land from the state, they own the land, the state is just collecting a protection fee from them since landlords generally don’t have an army to defend them and their property from attackers.
What’s the difference?
Saying landlords are renting and then subletting makes it sound like they’re double dipping, just a passive middle man contributing nothing. They’re not renting from the state, they’re the owners who take on all the risk and other costs associating with full ownership. They pay for maintenance, they’re subject to value changes in real estate markets. They bear the cost if someone builds a dump next door and tanks their value. Their asset is very un-liquid. The tenant can walk away from the property somewhat easily, but the landlord has to find a buyer.
Of course, some landlords actually do nothing. As long as we have a healthy competitive market where people can relatively easily build new housing, this competition would punish landlords who don’t provide a good product. Unfortunately in a lot of the US building new housing is very difficult due to NIMBYism, zoning restrictions, and sometimes too harsh environmental or historical review.
I’d argue one impressive thing about our current global system is it’s possible to make some improvements without total revolution. Will it be enough to, say, avoid climate catastrophe or nuclear disaster? I don’t know. But democracy is a pretty good invention when the alternative is either no change or armed conflict.
!remindme 10 years
something something the industrial revolution
Give me the alternative. At least that way I have a chance and my opponents aren’t an army of police who just wanna make me a wage slave in their system. Give me the alternative every single time. I’ll take protecting myself 10 times out of ten over being exploited by people who are pretending to protect everyone.
You’d already be dead. That’s a bad bet.
Or I would be fine. Give me ‘fine or dead’ every time over ‘suffocated and alive’.
Shit take, the average person only used to have to do 20 hours a week of labour to feed their family
Money didn’t make labour “more efficient”
This only works when you divide the time spent working over the year. As a medival peasant you worked your ass off in spring or whenever you sow your fields, kept it up while it grew, which was somewhat normal working times by todays standard, and toiled for double digit hours in harvesting season again. After that was time to do literally nothing. When you look at seasonal holidays in many european countries, they are mostly at the end of harvesting seasons, when you could easily be blackout drunk for a week because there was nothing else to be done. I personally don’t mind regular working hours when the alternative is half a year of 15 hour shifts and half a year of more or less no work.
Was it 7 days on of 15 hours? Because if it was only 6 and I had that one day break once a week and eventually got 6 months off later I would definitely want to do that.
You can easily have medieval levels of quality of life working like 1 hour a week today. No one, not even kings a few hundred years ago had modern quality of life even with vast amounts of wealth extracted from whole continents of peasants. Modern money and economic systems allow for global trade and innovation that makes things Napolean couldn’t dream of into boring every day stuff for you and me.
Keep defending the need for multiple people to work multiple jobs to sustain a small family
And lived to the ripe old age of nineteen🤣
“People had it better before modern society” is one of the dumbest beliefs.
The reason average life expectancy used to be so low, is because infant mortality was ridiculously high.
You’re also missing the distribution of those life expectancies. While everyone is crapping on the wealthy, who do you think was able to live to a ripe old age? Who do you think was more likely to die at birth or as a kid, or young adult?
Yeah I know, but the overall point still stands. Life was not better back then. That’s not a gotcha, it’s a technicality.
Are we going to let this perverse society take every improvement we make and make us pay for it? We all work for the common good and we have the right to reap the benefits, not be forced to adapt to a system that exploits us just because someone sometime ago invented penicillin and so that good must be offset by an equal sacrifice?
That’s… How life works. In literally every society on the planet right now that’s how things work. If you want something someone else did you have to give in kind. Medicine, clothing, food. No matter what the system undo t get the fruits of others labor for nothing.
People with your take are always thinking they can exist in a society where everyone else provides and u get to do nothing and relax …cuz reasons apparently.
I didn’t get the same takeaway from their message. I don’t think it’s that we should do nothing and get everything, rather we should do things and get a reasonable return for having done them.
You don’t ever get guaranteed all the resources you need to exist. Saying otherwise is literally in the op post. Pretty clear to me.
We are also the only species not threatened to be hunted down and eaten at the whim of another species. Sometimes, you get what you pay for.
While I generally agree with the overall sentiment and like the idea of UBI, saying we’re the only species that pays to exist doesn’t seem right. We’re the only one that uses money, so of course we’re the only species that has would pay money to exist. However, other species all over the world, many right outside our doorsteps, live much harder lives than we do and pay with their lives if they make a mistake. If I had to choose between working a job and being out in the great outdoors having to farm/hunt/craft and such to survive, I’d choose having a job, which is a choice we all pretty much make anyways. At any point I could quit my job, walk out the door, and live with just the clothes on my back… and I would probably not be able to hack it. It’s not much of a choice and it’s pretty much coercion, but the choice is there.
Capitalism is a system where you die if nobody needs you to do anything. Nobody needing your help is supposed to be a good thing.
That’s incorrect, it’s a system where you die if nobody wants you to do anything, which is a much lower threshold to clear given how many things can be delegated.
Like, you can make a living making art, which is not necessary but definitely something people want, if you’re good at it.
We need art. Art is what gives life meaning.
No it isn’t.
But it gives those who float through life without any practical purpose, purpose. You don’t understand, man! It’s just so deep.
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Probably why the Taliban banned music.
heh, for me that would be bitches 😎
*proceeds to get none*
Lol no it’s not, and I say it as an avid consumer of several different artforms.
Also, even then, you don’t need a specific artist to make it for you, you can make art too.
The fact that art thrives in mercantilist and capitalist societies is a testament to the fact that want, and not need, drives the market.
May I remind you people spend thousands on furry art lol
That’s my point. You don’t need furry art to survive, nobody needs furry artists to make furry art, but people with surplus want them to, and that makes them thrive in a capitalist society.
Capitalism is a system where you die if nobody wealthy needs you to do anything.
Unpaid labour is still labour, and there are unfortunately billions of people living, and dying, in poverty who do an endless stream of labour for other people and their community, from caring for children, elderly, and disabled people, to cooking and cleaning, and providing a whole range of other physical, mental, and emotional support.
Them not being compensated for it is the feature of capitalism, not the need for labour itself, which leads nicely to
Nobody needing your help is supposed to be a good thing.
Actually, no, it isn’t. Humans are interdependent and need each other to function as a society (even on the most a-social level - you’re unlikely to be producing your own food, power, water supply, buildings, building materials, and so on, you need others to live, and at different points in life others will almost certainly need you in different ways). That’s exactly why a hyper individualistic society like capitalism encourages leads to the kind of dystopia we have now.
I think you’re defining “compensation” a bit too narrowly. Just because people are doing work of some kind in their community and not getting monetary wages for it doesn’t mean they aren’t being compensated. All human interaction is in some sense a transaction, it might just be more amorphous and unquantifiable than x many dollars. Friendships are trades. If a friendship isn’t worthwhile for people, they generally end the friendship, even though most people wouldn’t dream of assigning a dollar amount of value to a friendship.
And I think you’re missing the fact that we’re talking about surviving under capitalism, and that you can’t buy food and shelter with friendship 🙄
Of course you can. Lol. Stay-at-home moms and dads are doing this exact thing. Older parents who live with their kids are, too. They’re probably doing something like labor in addition to just being in some kind of human relationship, but they are effectively getting paid for friendship. It would be hard to put an exact dollar amount to this, and most people including myself wouldn’t really want to write an invoice for every hug they give or minute of conversation they’re partner to, but since all human interaction is effectively a transaction that is informally what’s happening.
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Tribal societies valued different things. If they were measuring just based on economical value and “productivity” then tribal societies would have a reputation of having no elders, because they would have all been forced out.
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Thank God we are evolved, huh?
Apparently it’s a bad thing, according to OP
Why is being useless a good thing, pls elaborate
Cause it means all the work is already being done and there’s enough to go around and meet everyone’s needs.
That’s a terrible behavior to enable, that’s like exactly the opposite of what we want
No, we want everyone to have enough, and to be able to take it easy when the work is done. We don’t want people forced to work when it isn’t helpful.
Work is always helpful, that’s why it exists
Work isn’t always helpful. If my partner got out of bed to clean the dishes or vacuum the floor at 3AM I’d be very cranky. Sometimes work is bad.
…bro it’s cause you said 3am in this example, think this through.
I can’t work due to a disability, am I useless?
yes
Or we could, you know, give free housing, healthcare and food to people who need them. UBI only works in a perfect society where the market doesn’t take advantage of it.
UBI only works in a perfect society where the market doesn’t take advantage of it.
Sorry, but that is simply not true. Alaska has had a form of UBI for decades funded by oil revenues. It decreased inflation. Canada also has a basic income for families that also hasn’t caused inflation.
With the introduction of this dividend in 1982, Alaska went from having the highest rate of inflation in the US to the lowest. Source
Not to dispute it, but the sources for the Alaska argument are a Twitter post made by the organization itself (which just says that businesses will have discounts when the check goes out) and a Medium post.
And the source used for the argument in the Medium post is a link to another post made by the same author. His proof that UBI reduced inflation is… A line graph of CPI comparing Alaska vs the US.
If the oil dividend caused the decrease in inflation, you would be able to find many scholarly articles on the subject, yet the entire proof is a single graph.
His proof that UBI reduced inflation is… A line graph of CPI comparing Alaska vs the US.
I did do some more digging and found that the graph from Scott Santens is supported by data from the stlouis Federal reserve. See stlouisfed graph
I think its largely common sense that businesses would have sales to when money goes out. The same thing happens when refund checks come out. The author is of course biased, but that it not a reason to discredit the data. Are you suggesting he fudged the numbers for the graph?
If the oil dividend caused the decrease in inflation, you would be able to find many scholarly articles on the subject, yet the entire proof is a single graph.
No one is claiming the dividend caused it because causation is notoriously hard to prove since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation. The author simply provides evidence in a graph that the after the dividend (Alaska’s UBI) Alaska had a noticeably lower inflation rate compared to the rest of the US. Graph in question Take a look and make your own conclusions.
I wouldn’t really count the Canada one since it’s not truly “Universal”, but the Alaska one is interesting.
It honestly seems like it’s talking of some utopic society (“Businesses would continue to compete for our money by offering high quality at reasonable prices” - when has that ever happened in the past 20 years?), but it does bring some sources to the table so probably has a point, even if I still see that as overly optimistic.
Anyway mine was just a digression, I’m not going to vote against UBI or anything similar if it ever comes up, I think there’s better solutions but I’m definitely not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
We’re talking about vastly different sums of money and access to infrastructure.
Alaska’s 1600 per year is more akin to a tax refund. It’s not dramatically changing anyone’s income and if it is, they’re barely scraping by regardless.
Alaska is also so remote that everything is more expensive.
If 300 million people suddenly had an extra 24,000 dollars to spend in a year, you don’t think every business in the country would be scrambling to get their cut? Most companies see you as an obstacle between them and their money that you happen to be holding.
Alaska’s 1600 per year is more akin to a tax refund.
It may be on a smaller scale than is traditionally advocated for with a UBI like program, but it is a UBI. According to Wikipedia, the PFD(Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend) is a Basic Income in the form of a resource dividend. Any adult Alaskan resident is eligible for it whether or not they pay taxes. It’s not a tax refund.
If 300 million people suddenly had an extra 24,000 dollars to spend in a year, you don’t think every business in the country would be scrambling to get their cut?
Of course they would be. That is why a lot of business offer sales, when the Alaska dividend check go out. They want to convince you to buy their crap. When businesses want money, they have to convince people to buy their stuff via sales and promotions. That usually means lower prices.
Ok and little league and MLB are technically the same sport but 8 year old Billie Jr isn’t going to be throwing a no hitter at Fenway any time soon.
Technically being the same thing does not mean it will function the same way.
Perfect is the enemy of good in this case. I would much rather have a $100 UBI just to test out the system than have no UBI ever happen because people argue it has to X amount. It is however very important to tie it to inflation so it doesn’t get effectively nickeled and dimed into continual cuts like the minimum wage largely has in many areas.
Yeah, it’s kinda funny. The research papers tend to cite things like “wealth flight” and “housing price plummet” as economic concerns about UBI, yet whenever folks talk about it, we’re all afraid of landlords just raising rent.
I’m not sure on either of them, but watching everyone argue both extreme opposite possible outcomes for it is funny.
Graph showing the last paragraph of my answer. I had to reply with another instance as lemm.ee has disabled images.
You can check the graph from the stlouis fed data and it lines up.
It is vastly simpler for the government to send everyone a check or deposit than to provide free housing, healthcare and food to people and decide who is ‘worthy’ of receiving them. And let’s be honest most social programs in America are the first thing on the chopping block. At least with a UBI, its very easy for the average person to tell when its been cut. If only a few ‘poor’ people participate in a program, it will be a lot easier for the government to cut it than if every legal adult in the country gets it.
Sadly, whipping on people who recieve benefits is a useful and convenient tool to have in reserve for politicians who are failing and need to deflect attention from that.
Yup. I recieve them because I am disabled with a progressive condotion and of course, poor. But I’m lumped in with those called “leeches”. I’m just trying to feed myself and my family. I will shamelessly swipe my EBT card as many times as I must.
I mean, free Healthcare is already being done in most of the first world and free housing is too, albeit in fewer places and with restrictions. Free food is trickier but I’m sure there’s a way to figure it out.
Imo the issue with UBI isn’t that it would get cut, it’s that it wouldn’t get raised according to inflation. It already happens with “conventional” income so I think just flat out giving the product with no adjustments needed is better, it’s not like as time goes on people are gonna need “more houses”.
It is not like it has to be either or anyway. I would certainly support healthcare and other similar programs but would caution against making them overly restrictive. The restrictions of the programs are the problem as they are excessively restrictive to stop people from using the programs. Effectively these restrictions mean only ~1/4 people eligible for assistance actually get it.
See this paragraph from the post authors blog.
Before the pandemic even hit, 13 million Americans were living in poverty entirely disconnected from all federal assistance programs. The best functioning program is our food assistance program which reaches 2 out of 3 people in poverty, and lasts for 3 months every 3 years. Our worst is our temporary assistance for needy families program which varies by state, and in my home state of Louisiana reaches only 4 out of every 100 families living in poverty. Our disability assistance reaches 1 out of every 5 Americans with disabilities, and the average waiting time to qualify is two years. Our housing assistance reaches 1 out of every 4 Americans who qualify. Our unemployment insurance reached about 1 out of every 4 unemployed people in 2019. Over and over again, with targeted program after targeted program, our safety net tends to let three out of every four people fall right through it.
I would just prefer a UBI like program over other alternatives since its focus is on eliminating burdensome restrictions that serve to discourage people from using the existing programs.
I have a progressive illness, my brother in law moved in with myself and my husband. They are both disabled as well, but only one of us can work full time. We would be absolutely fucked without EBT. I am so thankful for it.
UBI only works in a perfect society where the market doesn’t take advantage of it
Says who?
Macroeconomics? If you increase the pool of money people compete to spend on a good or service we can expect the value to increase.
It depends how it’s funded. Strictly speaking that’s only the case if it’s funded monetarily by a central bank printing more money for a government to fund UBI. For example this is how most countries funded businesses and individuals during the pandemic and what has lead to the inflation you’re referring to. Otherwise there is the same amount of money in the economy, it’s just been fiscally re-distributed using a UBI policy. You might still see some inflation in some parts of the economy due to rising demand but if people can afford more, rather than less, this inflation no bearing whatsoever on people’s actual prosperity. If funded fiscally UBI would outstrip any inflation it might incur and therefore actually represent real-terms deflation for the vast majority of people. As a side note, what we are getting at the moment is the exact opposite: money was printed in huge amounts by central banks during the pandemic which largely ended up in the pockets of people who bought up assets like housing and are now out-competing everyone else in the market and extracting yet more profit. It might feel like inflation to us because food and bills have increased in value faster than our wages, but the wealthy have actually been experiencing real-terms deflation because their stash has been growing faster than their costs.
“If funded fiscally UBI would outstrip any inflation”.
Source for this claim please? Its been years but I seem to recall the Roosevelt Institute paper Yang relied on saying something different (worth noting Yang misrepresented this paper).
I think the best evidence for this claim is past experience with a UBI via the alaska ongoing UBI. Federal reserve graph showing that since alaska implemented its UBI (in 1982) it has had lower inflation than the US at large.
I don’t have an academic source; it’s my own prediction based on a) what I’ve seen/am seeing in the economy and b) my own personal finances.
I’ll dig it up later but I suspect you have that backwards. As I recall the tax funded UBI produces little to no growth so it shouldn’t cover inflation
This is actually the opposite of what studies seem to be suggestion.
The fear is, instead, that it will reduce values, especially housing, and that businesses and wealthier individuals would move away. Admittedly, if it’s truly universal, then there would be nowhere for them to move. But the real, often-forgotten underlying gain is that it would create some leverage for employees seeking jobs and raises.
Of course, an “unemployed-only” income would create more employee leverage, possibly matching or exceeding the leverage provided by unions because the employee could afford to strike indefinitely.
“Reduce values”
Which are a fictional thing we invented. How awful, a more equal society where people cannot as easily be superior! Do people really fear such a thing?
I’m really not sure what you think you’re getting out of this reply. Or hell, what you’re even trying to say. But here’s my college try at replying anyway.
Before I get to line-items, I’d like to reiterate that you’re arguing for “pay everyone money” in response to “pay people who aren’t working a living wage” and acting like giving money to the rich makes a more equal society than that. If I had $50k/yr guaranteed any day I wanted if I quit, I’d have a whole lot more leverage to get another $1000/mo from my employer AND be treated well.
How awful, a more equal society where people cannot as easily be superior!
That would be socialism, not a UBI. The economic concerns about UBI are that it will weaken the average quality of life and that every implementation ever pitched has a fatal flaw. Yang’s, for example, would hurt the poor and middle class while not actually redistributing any wealth from the rich. Models also suggest they will be job-killers, and not in the obvious way of giving people leverage.
Do people really fear such a thing?
Yeah, they’re so afraid of socialism they try to create capitalist equivalents like UBI
Yang’s issue is he flipped the tax funded UBI and deficit funded UBI’s growth numbers. There is almost no growth from UBI unless it is money falling from the sky.
Yang’s issue is that he wanted to fund UBI by using it to eradicate welfare. And there were a dozen very solid problems with that he was unwilling or unable to meaningfully address. Some of the families who would need his UBI the most are the same families who would have to opt out because their welfare is valued at more than it.
I used to be all-in for UBI in general, but over the years (thanks in part, but not entirely, to Yang) I walked off that ledge. The government should be guaranteeing housing/food/healthcare the same way they guarantee education. What they should not be doing is cutting a check and shoving fingers in their ears in the welfare equivalent of Privatized Social Security.
What people don’t want to accept is that under UBI, there will still be comparable homelessness to what we see now because a leading (perhaps the #1) cause of homelessness is addiction. The government subsidizing rental and home payments without means-testing would allow even addicts to have a place to sleep at night. Even they deserve that. And yes, there’s inflation “risks” with incentivizing housing or food, but it’s no more or less than with UBI or with just the FCC approving another big merger.
You can’t just cite an entire field and call it an answer. Especially when than field is basically a pseudoscience.
Lol ok buddy. Tell us more about your complete lack of understanding of what science is.
If you make the maths, the direct inflactionary effects of UBI are quite small unless people were getting tens of thousands of dollars per month, and there are indirect effects pushing in the opposite direction (for example, fewer loans hence less money getting created by banks).
You’re making claims that an entire domain supports your conclusion but haven’t even gone to the trouble of making the maths to confirm it - you just assumed.
For example the “average household wealth” in the US is $1,059,470 and the average household size is 2.5, so an UBI of $500 per month for every man, woman and child of the United States (rounded to 300 million because I couldn’t be arsed to find the exact number) would depreciate that wealth (i.e. inflate its nominal worth) by about 1% per year (assuming 12x UBI payments per year). This is are only the first order effect, as indirect effects push in both directions (for example, it will push salaries at the low end higher, which is inflationary but not by much because it’s only lower salaries being affected, and it will reduce number of loans issued which reduces money creation and is thus deflactionary but again the strength of that deflactionary effect depends on actual proportion of loans that are not issued due to UBI making the money available).
All together macroeconomics does not confirm the effect you claim it does (an in fact the Alaskan experiment shows the opposite) but even if you only consider first order effects, it shows an inflactionary effect which is around half of the FED’s anual inflation target, so a mild effect and certainly not justifying the statement that UBI “only works in a perfect society where the market doesn’t take advantage of it”.
Macro is the field that would support the idea that giving people more money would increase the sale price of things like housing.
I don’t need to math out the inflationary impacts of UBI to make the claim that Macro backs the idea that giving everyone more money will increase the costs of housing. That’s historically demonstrable.
The Alaskan income bonuses aren’t relevant to this because they aren’t large enough to have distortionary effects.
Inflation and generally every market trying to push the limits of how much they can exploit their customers in every possible occasion.
I mean, if I have to choose between the current situation and UBI I’ll obviously go for that one, I’m not 100% sure it’s not going to work. But if we have to try and radically change society with a very expensive procedure, I’d rather they do it in the most foolproof way possible.
Imagine the quality of life of the disabled population if they didn’t have to try so hard to get these things. It’s so fucking hard when you can’t work or can only work a little bit.
Put free education there and we are Gucci.
I am considering skipping trade school, which would be valuable, because I can’t even afford the $10k program.
UBI only works in a perfect society where the market doesn’t take advantage of it.
Please expand.
You and everyone you know has an extra $2k dollars per month from UBI. Your landlord raises rents because he knows everyone has 2k more.
In a perfect world your landlord would not be greedy and take that money. He would have actual competition from other landlords willing to rent. We don’t live in a perfect world.
Increasing the money supply causes inflation.
That’s just a repackaged argument against minimum wage. It’s wrong there, too. Market competition is a thing, even for shitty landlords.
In the present day, the vast majority of the money created (over 90%) is created by banks when they give loans (I kid you not: you can read all about it in the paper “Money Creation In The Modern Economy”, from the Bank Of England) so it actually makes sense what seems to have happenned in Alaska (as pointed out by others) that in overall UBI reduced inflation if UBI ended up reducing the number of loans people took.
This effect exceeding the inflation from UBI is probably only possible because it’s a fixed amount per-person rather than a percentage of all the money in circulation, so it’s a small percentage of all the money in circulation (a $660 UBI for every man woman and child in the US would be 1% of M3) and a tiny percentage of all the money in existence (i.e. including wealth held in various non-monetary forms).
So yeah, UBI would create some inflation, but not as much as you seem to think it would and it has side effects that work in the opposite direction which, judging by the experience in Alaska, are strong enough to offset the direct inflactionary effects of UBI.
Spoken like someone who has studied large-scale implementations of UBI. Oh, what’s that? There aren’t any? Hmm.
Sure, effectively all land is claimed by some entity, but not to deprive people from being able to make use of it. The US for example needs to claim ownership of its territory to have it recognized by other nations and enforce its own laws. Otherwise, someone could lure you into the wilderness and kill you without penalty like it’s Runescape. And even “owned” land will be subject to emminent domain when the needs of the many demand it.
But buying undeveloped land for homesteading is cheap; you only have to have a token price for depriving the public of its potential value by your reservation. Otherwise, nothing prevents someone from taking it all for themselves for free (which really would leave nothing for others) just to not use it. Even if you did it illegitimately and just started using fresh land without paperwork or anything, you would likely still have recognized rights of ownership through common law squatters rights just by using it effectively for some time. But if you wanted to say, vote, or get mail, or have utilities, or have road access, or otherwise engage with larger society, the government would likely at least want property taxes. After all, getting that to you would take from the pool of resources used for the common good, and you need to contribute a fair share.
If you really wanted to forgo the social contract entirely, nothing is really stopping you from going into deep wilderness 100 miles away from civilization and fending for yourself, but people recognize that the benefits of being a member of society greatly outweigh the costs. Other animals do have to work to live and reserve their own territory. They just don’t use anything as formal as currency for exchanging work for resources, and reap fewer rewards from less specialization.
I personally support UBI but trying to pretend nature is somehow more fair than modern human civilization is just arguing in bad faith. The systems we enjoy are certainly flawed but also undeniably an asset at recognizing the rights of others to live. Nature’s resource distribution system is literally a combination of luck and might makes right.
I personally support UBI but trying to pretend nature is somehow more fair than modern human civilization is just arguing in bad faith.
I don’t think this has anything to do with anything. Nobody’s saying “we should all live in the wilderness but money fucks that up.” We have more than enough to facilitate modern survival for everyone and then some, but we manufacture scarcity while people starve. Because greed.
Nobody’s saying “we should all live in the wilderness but money fucks that up.”
Literally many people here in this thread are saying that. Many very stupid people.
This is fucking dumb. Even in the very ancient of ancient of time, people were working to survive. They had to go out, and farm the fucking berries out of the bush and hunt deers and what not. If you couldn’t do that, I don’t think you could be a part of the society. And then, another fucking tribes comes in and try to fuck you up.
What a fucking stupid statement to say. Nothing is free. Even if you remove everyone and everything, you still have to work to survive. And what a good way to survive than to be in a society that separates this burden. Some people farm, some people defends, some people heals and some people educate. Woooow, such a free tribe, they have to work to survive.
You’re right that people need to work. I think you’re reading something that’s not there.
The point is that we need a physical place to exist, to sleep, to work. And since all physical places are already owned, in addition to the work we normally would have to do, we now have to pay a portion of our labor to people who own things. And sure, after we’ve been working a bit we start to own things too. But it’s an uneven playing field. If you didn’t come into the world owning, you can be denied work. You can be made homeless.
If we don’t want the world to devolve back to the scenario you described where another tribe comes and takes what you’ve worked for by force, we should guarantee a base level of human needs being met.
It’s not wrong that our basic needs are exploited by others, but it is wrong to say that we’re the only species who pays to exist. All life must “pay” by expending energy to find food and shelter. We’ve just developed a system where we earn imaginary currency to buy things instead of having to go out and do all the work necessary to stay alive ourselves.
The sentence “we are the only species that pay to survive” is the most stupid argument one can make for UBI. That’s what is upsetting. Maybe UBI is a good idea, maybe not. But this argument is just not convincing, at best, it feels like a joke. What I’m saying is, we will always have to work to survive, no matter what.
I agree that our society are way too individualistic. We don’t care about each other anymore. It’s as if we don’t need society anymore these days. We take a lot of thing that society give us for granted and we don’t even realize it.
If we don’t want the world to devolve back to the scenario you described where another tribe comes and takes what you’ve worked for by force, we should guarantee a base level of human needs being met.
The scenario they described demonstrably never existed in humanity until hoarding of money and power by individuals became a thing (so feudalism then capitalism).
That’s actually not true. Raiding parties for slave labor has existed since neolithic times.
No no no, that can’t be true, the root of all evil is capitalism!
What is this history revision bullshit lol ? Read a book sir.
Also, claiming land is what all territorial animals do. They maintain high resource areas with violence. We are not so different. Nature is scarry.
The first sentence really throws it off. UBI might be a good idea, but it’s not because we’re somehow unique in the animal kingdom.
That’s what I"me saying. The first senyetis ridiculous. It’s not serious.
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If society will entitle me to go out and take anything I need or kill any animal I see, you’d have a point. The social contract of “private property” is only equitable between the rich and poor if there is some counteracting element in society that prevents people from suffering from the things they would be able to take on their own in the lack.
Further, there’s a sort of problem when you compare present society with past society. We’ve been working for thousands of years to make each generation live better than the last. Hunger, especially childhood hunger, should hit zero by now.
And those of us who are disabled and can’t work to survive…?
Society will help you ? That’s what it is here for. Everyone has strength and weakness, even a disabled person.
A disabled person would surely die on his own or in the ancient tribes time.
Where is that society to help me? In the form of very small social security checks and lifelong poverty?
Are you starving and homeless despite not being able to provide for yourself? If no, society somehow helped.
If you couldn’t do that, I don’t think you could be a part of the society. And then, another fucking tribes comes in and try to fuck you up.
Literally bullshit you could easily look up and debunk for yourself in about 5 minutes (here, I’ll even save you making any effort and share this link again https://theconversation.com/humans-arent-inherently-selfish-were-actually-hardwired-to-work-together-144145).
The fact that you in your ableist ageist mind moulded by capitalism to only see humans for the value of what they can “produce” for you, doesn’t actually mean that any of the bullshit you’ve been led to believe (and are comfortable believing) is true, it just means you’re a bit of an ageist ableist boot licking wilfully ignorant asshole… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Not sure if you’re functionally illiterate or just retarded but even that speculative opinion piece concedes that warfare came hand in hand with agriculture.
You are the asshole for not understanding that saying that we are the only species that pay to survive is the most stupid and not serious take anyone could ever fucking say.
You don’t even know my stance on capitalism or what I believe. Stay on topic or get the fuck out.
Pretty sure there’s no basic income for Lions either
Lions eat for free.
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They dont need to purchase a hunting license or restrict themselves to specific areas and times of the year though
But they need to expend a considerable amount of time and effort to eat every single day. Time and effort is a form of payment, money is just a proxy.
Actually lions specifically (i.e. the males, rather than lionesses, the females), often get to eat with minimal effort.
Also they dont always eat everyday if food is scaece and often go 3 to 5 days without eating, sometimes if food is very scarce 8 days
Yet, if they over hunt their food, they could kill off their entire species, which has happened to many species many times throughout the Earth’s history. We impose hunting restrictions because we’re smart enough to realize we could cause environmental collapse and kill ourselves if we don’t. That’s not because of any capitalistic or governmental greed.
Huh. Good point.
The cost is that they hunt it.
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Better to pay than fight tooth and nail for survival. Everything pays in one way or another.
Yeah it’s not really the paying part that is bad, in and of itself.
It’s that there are people who defy the socially accepted rules, are greedy, are corrupt, or otherwise go against the herd for their own selfish gain. They warp and twist the rules when they have the power to do so to turn things intended to create equality into machines of oppression. And then they turn around and tell people it’s not them, but the group they are oppressing who is to blame… And for some reason, people believe it.
We should change UBI to “universal battle (interspecies)”
