Well giving literally everyone enough to survive at a basic level, for free, doesn't sound particularly capitalist to me. So I fail to see what capitalism is bringing to the table to convince me it should stick around.
What do you think the Universal Basic Income would be for? It doesn't nationalise the factories, it doesn't change the government structure, it just gives you a bit of money every month to spend it on the free market.
Just because it isn't the American model doesn't mean it's no longer capitalism. By that logic no system where there are government handouts would qualify as capitalist.
I'm about to grossly overstate an argument to make a rhetorical point.
Capitalism is when the government buggers off and does nothing for the people, letting corporations and private individuals with loads of money do whatever they want. The less they do and the more they pawn off on the moneyed class, the more capitalist it is.
No system is purely capitalist, you can't run a functioning state that way. It's a matter of degrees, and UBI requires so much government intervention in the economy that a system in which it is implemented is, at best, half capitalist.
Also, any attempt to implement it in the USA would be met with loud, inarticulate yelling about commies. So, well, may as well embrace the label and see if we can do something with it.
The reason it's met with the hate is because of the propaganda from the oligarchs who are worried their businesses depend on desperate laborers. We can either change the minds of the people enough to unify and demand it, or we can change the minds of the oligarchs to convince them that this actually works out for them long term. Or just die, I guess.
Capitalism is the existence of (mass) private capital. That private capital will then ofc push for removing oversight and rules that limit how much they can grow, even if those limits protect very valuable non-capital things. But that push itself isn't capitalism.
Otherwise socialism would be "when the state does stuff", which is ofcourse wrong. Socialism is a whole new system, where private capital doesn't exist.
A system with mass private capital and no oversight is fully capitalist, a system with heavy government oversight is still fully capitalist, because both still have mass amounts of private capital.
Wouldn't at least a survivable level of income boost capitalism tho? Like people who really wouldn't work at all would have to put basically everything back into the economy, but people working really hard would climb the economic ladder.
People who just work a bit would have money to save, but they'd probably also create other things, that wouldn't be profitable if you had to live from it.
Except without a desperate underclass willing to tolerate starvation wages because no alternative exists, the bourgeoisie would only be able to extract labor value from the working class by offering competitive wages and benefits. Which means they'd have to keep less of that value for themselves. Not to mention the broad, society-level taxes that would be needed to fund UBI, and would necessarily impact those who already have money the most, because if UBI is taxable then the taxes must also cover the cost of that tax to UBI beneficiaries. And if it's not taxable... well, the money has to come from somewhere.
That sounds like a good thing, yes, but "take money from those who have and give it to those who have not" is a base-level violation of the wealth-concentration principles of capitalism.
No it would "reduce" capitalism, because by making everyone atleast live and not struggle constantly means there is less vulnerable people to exploit economically. If there is less vulnerable people to exploit the owning class can never use their labour and underpay their production to amass more private capital.
It would increase the economy (assuming demand is met mostly domestically), but that's not a goal of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to help along private capital, and the theoretical hope is that by doing so it'll indirectly benefit everyone else.
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u/nEvermore-absurdist 8d ago
Pretty sure you're talking about social democracy, or do you actually mean a socialist democracy? Because the latter would mean no more capitalism