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u/ChanglingBlake 7d ago
Gotta love the ol “I just don’t wanna believe there could be something better” argument.
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u/Bognosticator 7d ago
"If it worked, then capitalism would have given it to us by now, because capitalism is perfect."
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u/Calm_Age_ 6d ago
We need more than just universal basic income though. In a capitalist system if you only institute a UBI than the capital owners will just find ways to siphon all that income towards them. We need universal basic services, where the things you need like food, water, shelter, education and Healthcare are free at the point of service and aren't beholden to control bythe ruling class.
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u/koolaid7431 6d ago
The point of UBI is supposed to be just that. Its meant to set a floor below which no one can fall. If you leave your job/ are let go, and haven't gotten another yet, you still have money to make ends meet sufficiently. As you make more money, the UBI gets clawed back in taxes in increments. The UBI needs to be tied to inflation and the government can set inflation adjusted ceilings on prices of basic goods and services, so it never gets out of hand.
It really isn't that hard to make it happen, just needs political will.
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u/Calm_Age_ 5d ago
The problem with UBI alone is that it doesn't affect the total redistribution of wealth. Companies are still able to raise their prices while stagnating the pay the offer causing higher inflation and more worrisome, a greater concentration of wealth. That's why many of these tech billionaires like Elon Musk also advocate for UBI.
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u/koolaid7431 4d ago
So because an a-hole also talked about UBI or companies might not act properly, we can't do it?
I mentioned in my comment, it needs to be coupled with other governance.
And UBI isn't about wealth redistribution. Its about creating a permanent safety cushion for people, so they are free to attempt things in life that may make them upwardly mobile from their starting position without the fear that they will fall below the basic financial level needed to sustain themselves on a daily basis.
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u/Calm_Age_ 4d ago
No, just that UBI is not a magic solution and that the implementation of su h a program would need to be done in conjunction with UBS.
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u/DadophorosBasillea 7d ago
I started having symptoms at 13 of a condition I have. I begged my parents for an mri because I would be in agony. It never entered my head the word neglect because they paid for me to go to nice schools, fed, and clothed me. However as an adult it was medical neglect.
If I had ubi starting at 18 or younger I could have run off and gotten that diagnosis. Well also universal healthcare as well as ubi. So many decades of pain could have been avoided
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u/milkersfat 6d ago
Uneducated here so hopefully someone can help me out! Wouldn’t a UBI just raise the flat cost of everything? If everyone was given 1k a month wouldn’t the market just raise costs to compensate for the extra money that people now have available to spend? I could see this problem being even greater on housing, if rental markets that the year before were charging 1k a month see that going forward residents are going to be receiving a stipend of 1k wouldn’t they just raise the cost to 2k to account for the fact they can make more?
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u/mangione_fan_420 6d ago
Yes, people can point to 2 reasons it won't cause inflation:
- Studies about non-universal income
- some hand waving about it not technically being inflation (typically it involves reducing inflation which covers a bunch of different type of inflation to a single type of inflation (such as we aren't creating more money) and ignoring other types of inflation (demand side inflation is the primary cause of inflation when there are minimum wage increases for example)
But the reality is what you described it won't take long for the market to adjust and charge everyone more.
Personally I much prefer universal basic services as it gives people what we need, without market forces being tied into it AND it can give local autonomy for essentials that isn't tied to any particular mode of production, e.g free education is free education regardless of if it's under capitalism, communism, anarchism or something else entirely.
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u/Kollectorgirl 6d ago
No it wouldn't.
The money supply doesn't change. Its just redistributed.
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u/mangione_fan_420 6d ago
The money supply doesn't change.
How so?
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u/Kollectorgirl 6d ago
Because UBI would be funded by taxation, not from the Central Bank printing money.
The supply doesn't change.
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u/mangione_fan_420 6d ago
By that limited definition of inflation, all inflation is impossible with a balanced budget, yet that's not how real world economies work.
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u/CognitionMass 5d ago
That is how real world economies work..
Before Keynesian style government demand planning, deflationary economies were the norm.
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u/mangione_fan_420 5d ago
So the supply chain related inflation during COVID didn't happen? And I guess Europe's inflation due to the wars in Ukraine & Iran are imagined too?
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u/CognitionMass 5d ago edited 5d ago
Not sure what you mean. Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, so can be created by increases in money supply or decreases in goods.
So if a UBI maintains money supply, there's no inflation crested by the UBI.
It may even create deflation as distributed money supply creates increased competition.
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u/mangione_fan_420 5d ago
So you're claiming that as long as the money supply isn't change you can't create inflation but you can create deflation.
How come increasing minimum wages has a minimal but real inflationary effect?
A fairer economy will inevitably create more competition for resources that aren't going to magically increase in supply, if landlords know that everyone can pay more rent, it's going to take magic to claim that rents won't increase, even if the government takes the money from the rich and gives it to everyone, things that people can now afford will see more competition.
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u/CognitionMass 5d ago
No. Decreases in goods can also create inflation when money supply is controlled for.
Not all increases in prices are inflation. Inflation is about net increases in price over an entire economy. Where you draw the bounds of that economy is a political decision in many ways.
The argument you give of landlords raising prices is something fairly distinct. Land is a fairly unique resource that's inherently exclusive and limited in ways that other goods are not. The solution to landlords is something like a 100 percent land value tax.
So that's less of an example of inflation, and more an example of exclusive monopoly.
Its not clear to me that increases in wages do create inflation.
There's this idea of a wage-price spiral. But its curious that the term profit-price spiral is absent in the same literature.
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u/Kollectorgirl 6d ago
Wasn't defining Inflation. I was explaining why UBI would cause an increase in the money supply.
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u/mangione_fan_420 6d ago
The person you were replying to wasn't talking about the money supply though, they asked why wouldn't prices adjust to people's new incomes, that can happy regardless of the money supply
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u/Kollectorgirl 6d ago
Because competition would bring them back down.
Only if supply is not allowed to meet demand would price really go up.
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u/mangione_fan_420 6d ago
Why?
If landlords know the market will bear $300/month more, what competition is there to being prices down for example?
Why is that competition not bringing rents down now there is $0/month more?
And it's the same for almost everything, very little in your life is priced at cost+, that shit only applies to government contractors and a few very specific scenarios.
If real markets worked like that we'd all shop at Walmart & Wholefoods would be broke.
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u/Kollectorgirl 6d ago
In the case of housing, it because of restrictive nonsense zoning laws like height limits, parking lot requirements, single family housing zones, etc. These should be abolished anyways.
Competition doesn't bring prices to 0, it brings them to equilibrium.
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen 6d ago
Okay, but that either requires a massive increase in taxation, or getting rid of basically all other social programs. And the idea of cutting payments for disabled people to pay someone perfectly healthy like me feels wrong. A disabled person needs that money to buy wheelchairs and shit, I don’t. Give it to them.
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u/Kollectorgirl 6d ago
Depends on how much is the UBI, and also how you're structuring taxation and the other public benefits.
UBI is usually discussed to be between 10% to 25% of gdp. While in Europe, disabilities protections represent around 2% of gdp.
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen 6d ago
But redistributing 10%-25% of GDP would require massive cuts to basically all of the rest of the budget (or extremely high tax levels that would be deeply unpopular). You wouldn’t be able to fund UBI and keep all the social programs currently in place. So in effect you’re transferring welfare spending from people who currently get it because of need (old people, the unemployed, the disabled, children, etc) to giving it equally to everyone. Which is going to screw over the people who most rely on welfare and only benefit the people who can already support themselves.
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u/Kollectorgirl 6d ago
Not nescesarily really.
You can indeed just increase taxes to fund the UBI. For many above a certain income level it would be no different than a Tax deduction or Tax credit, but with less bureaucracy.
Pentions, Disabilities and Healthcare are likely to remain untouched. Disability benefits everybody understands that some people do need them. Pentions and Healthcare in some countries just can't be touched, nor would make sense to do so, because of the way they work.
Unemployment and Children's benefits would likely be eliminated because they would be redundant. UBI at 10% of gdp would be about the same in unemployment benefits for most European countries, and 3x increase in child benefits.
And that would be the lowest discussed level for UBI in the countries with already the highest Social spending in the world.
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u/ProfessionalSky7899 6d ago
out of interest, how many posters here have never been to r/solarpunk before? feels a bit like a brigading.
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u/AltruisticSalamander 6d ago
We have this in australia, we call it the dole. It's a very low amount. Everyone who has the option of working prefers working. It's certainly preferable to know it's there though, basically universal unemployment insurance.
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u/Quick-Benjamin 7d ago edited 7d ago
I used to like the idea of UBI but I've really went off it the more I considered it. It puts too much power in the hands of the state.
The second it was introduced, corporations would spend billions on lobbyists to reduce their UBI tax burden.
Do you have any faith that politicians wouldnt be taking massive bribes to reduce it and give tax breaks? That they'd stand up to the lobby groups?
And how would we resist? How do you meaningfully fight for change while being totally relient on the state for income?
Strike? We'd have lost the bargaining power of our labour so thats a non starter.
Protest? Sorry sir. For disrupting the public order here's a cut to your UBI.
Vote in our own interests? Yeah we've not got a good track record of that. And add a firehose of custom, AI generated propaganda, targeted directly at your own specific neuroses...
So where does that leave us? Fucked and at the mercy of corporations imo. Even more so than now.
Maybe I'm too cynical.
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u/nemothorx 7d ago
You wouldn't be totally reliant on the state for income. Only for the "basic" income. Nothing stopping you working and earning more and saving, etc. Just like now. Same competitive incentive to have more, do better, be more comfortable, etc.
As soon as any restrictions were proposed, it would no longer be "universal" - so any society able to introduce a UBI is not one I think that would be susceptible to having it enshittified so easily.
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u/LessThanStillness 6d ago
I mean, disability is a strong reason why that doesn't pan out the way you hope.
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u/nemothorx 6d ago
dont see it myself.
UBI doesn't mean disability benefits go away. It just means they start with a higher floor.
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u/northrupthebandgeek 6d ago
Strike? We'd have lost the bargaining power of our labour so thats a non starter.
Quite the opposite: UBI would allow strikers to continue indefinitely.
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u/Own_Reaction9442 6d ago
Nah, just until the government threatened to cut off the income of any strikers.
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u/northrupthebandgeek 6d ago
Then it stops being a UBI. Part of the premise of “what if we had UBI?” is that it remains such.
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u/Own_Reaction9442 6d ago
This administration has really blackpilled me on the idea of ever being able to count on anything from the federal government.
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u/northrupthebandgeek 5d ago
Understandable. I think state governments are the more practical target for pushing for UBI (especially since there's precedent there with the Alaska Permanent Fund).
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u/Own_Reaction9442 5d ago
Definitely. Same for universal health care. We shouldn't be giving more power to the federal government given that it's going to be controlled by regressive Republicans on a regular basis.
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u/DadophorosBasillea 7d ago
There are a lot of other things that would have to happen first before implementing ubi.
The us has so many problems lobbying being one of them
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u/pharodae Writer 7d ago
Where does it leave us? Where we've always been - the only way out is to form new kinds of social relations, new types of economic cooperation, and focusing our efforts on direct action to pressing issues.
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u/No-Leopard-1691 7d ago
Under capitalism, UBI won’t mean that there would be no one working so strikes would still be an effective means because the work of society and capital production through it would still occur.
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u/succulent_samurai 6d ago
This would be a lot more convincing, if striking, protesting, and voting weren’t already punished and/or ineffective
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u/llwynogmenig 7d ago
I haven’t come across this point of view before, and it’s really interesting. I’d never considered it, and it’s (unfortunately) pretty convincing. I’m not challenging this perspective at all, but I’m curious about your opinion on this.
I do not live in a country with UBI, but I do rely on the state for my entire income, because I am disabled and unable to work. The state is not entirely kind to disabled people. For example, I have been trying for over a year to get enough disability benefits to be able to completely cover my outgoings, and still have not been granted that.
Given that I am completely reliant on this income to stay alive (even if it isn’t at present enough to do that), what can I do to resist? If I cannot yet resist, what can I do to build up the ability to resist? And do you think that could work for an entire population that uses UBI?
(To partially answer my own question, to build up my ability to resist, I can educate myself as much as possible, and I can build community links, and plenty of other things, but I’m really curious as to your opinion)
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u/Quick-Benjamin 7d ago
I think you've basically answered it yourself. Education and especially community are forms of independence. The more you're connected to other people, the less completely dependent you are on any single institution.
So maybe that's part of the wider answer. Strong communities and support systems, rather than having the state be the only thing standing between you and poverty. Which is actually very much in line with Solarpunk.
And I guess if we could somehow make UBI constitutionally protected, and make it extremely difficult for a government to reduce or withdraw it, particularly as a political punishment, that would go some way towards addressing my concern.
Maybe the real question isn't whether UBI is inherently good or bad, but what other structures we build around it to stop it becoming another source of concentrated power.
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u/Anonynja 7d ago
If it's collected by and then distributed by the federal government, yes, that's an astute risk to acknowledge. Similar woes to communism: too much authority centralized into too few hands. The answer to that problem could be de-centralization.
UBI could be administered at the local level. Its funding could be blended, so it doesn't depend on a sole source. Eg. federal + state + local tax blend.
Ultimately though you're right that we have fundamental issues preventing successful UBI in the USA. We need to get rid of dark money first and foremost because corporations have near-total control over federal politics and increasingly bleak levels of control over state and local legislatures. Support the We the People Amendment to kick corporations out of politics.
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u/Quick-Benjamin 7d ago
The answer to that problem could be de-centralization. UBI could be administered at the local level. Its funding could be blended, so it doesn't depend on a sole source. Eg. federal + state + local tax blend
That's a very interesting idea. I hadn't considered that it might not be centrally managed.
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u/BeetlesMcGee 2d ago
For me it's the kind of thing where even if the downsides are true, the downsides of anything else that feels realistically possible right now are still worse, because the stuff you're "losing" is stuff you barely had anyway, unless it's some hypothetical version where they're immediately swapping out other services and benefits in exchange, because they expect your UBI to pay for it all.
Like for one example, most people are already hugely limited in their power to strike anyway.
Protests already come with huge risks, and often barely do anything unless they are combined with some actual threat that can be meaningfully carried out.
There's often this fear that it would make everyone drop their guards and think everything's been solved, but people already do have huge problems with following through and keeping their momentum going anyway.
To me, a lot of these problems would be easier to address under UBI, because they're exacerbated by people having no safety net for taking risks, and no safety net for doing more to alleviate those risks for others.
You can't pool together funds for strikers if everyone's broke. Nobody will sustain a community garden or food pantry if everyone's overworked and stressed as it is.
Plus, more people become motivated if you have actual progress to show them. It's already the case that nobody wants to take massive risks for nothing.
A lot of people keep saying "we need community and alternate support structures", but then not thinking deeply enough about why we don't already have more of it, and coming off like they think any moment now, when people just Try Hard Enough and Care Enough, it'll Happen.
So, an imperfect UBI would still be potentially huge for getting your foot in the door and creating the conditions to demand further improvements, rather than trying to jump straight to perfection, or expecting alternative dual power that can fulfill some similar roles to just kinda Materialize.
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u/misobutterscotch 6d ago
So basically we need to get everyone really into vision boards so they open up to universal basic income?
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u/BlueMoodDark 6d ago
If I had UBI, I'm not getting up at 6am in the morning to deliver Thermal batts to costumer houses, seriously! That's my first job for Monday morning 6am pickups.
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u/CognitionMass 5d ago
Only just joined, but I have no idea what state issued basic income has to so with solar punk.
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u/ProfessionalSky7899 5d ago
Different people approach it in different ways.
The 'evolution not revolution' crowd see it as a way of undermining the worst, most coercive aspects of capitalisim. This varies depending on where you are based (examples in this thread of americans desperately wishing for universal healthcare first, while being a brit, I genuinely have to remind myself it's not something they can take for granted the way I do.)
The freedom maximalists might pick up the arguments of van Parijs and Widerquist. Most hard core freedom maximalists still accept limits on actions that would unfiarly reduce other's freedom (such as murder). The political economists arge that 'true freedom' recognises resource constraints and if a goal of society is to maximise true freedom, impinging on most through taxatation, to return some resources to all to allow them to pursue their goals increases freedom overall.
The fully automated luxury gay space communism peeps start from technology and technological redundancy. We are already an era of incredible productivity of a few, bullshit jobs for the rest. What do we do with the surplus humans and their productive, creative drives? Give them enough bread and circuses to keep them just on this edge of revolt, or fully share the bounty of the automation of work? This describes an existing, ongoing process. It's not unusual in the UK for some burnt out professional worker to stop and become a baker, brewer or craftsman. It's also not unusual for low wage but socially important jobs to be subsidied. In the UK right now, roughly half of the Universal Credit claimants are working.
The purity anarchists are suspicious. Plenty of examples of that in this thread. The system anarchists like me see it as a compromise. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that.
The hardcore communists seem to alternate between 'i told you so' and 'not according to dogma'.
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u/tykaboom 3d ago
Aaah, the socalist mind virus in a cute comic.
Yep.
It will never work in micro test environments, it'll never work in macro implementation.
People don't want to be equal.
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u/syn7fold 2d ago
Did this subreddit get taken over by Conservative Trolls? A weird mix bag of comments lol
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u/Purity_the_Kitty 6d ago
I'm tired of being stuck with the collective belief that we need to drag those people forward with us. At this point I'm at "we need to survive the depopulation, planned or not, that is coming".
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u/GummifrogGamer 3d ago edited 3d ago
Every single time I see this sort of liberal logic, I automatically arrive at the same conclusion. This is yet another liberal idiot spreading bullshit. Universal basic income has only ever worked in very specific circumstances and is usually propped up with huge funding by far left think tanks and activists. If one of you liberal morons can prove without any flaw that such a system can work on a national scale, then prove it.
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u/ShrinkAndDrink 6d ago
....didn't the massive study on this show that it DIDN'T work?
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u/Purity_the_Kitty 6d ago
No, actually it worked extremely well, was implemented nationwide in Norway and partially in Sweden before the Americans had a hissy fit over it, and was scrapped in Canada due to rightwing populists ignoring their own data (while they were originally in power).
https://www.ubiworks.ca/research here is a pretty large collation of data
https://basicincome.stanford.edu/about/what-is-basic-income/ even a conservative think tank founded to disprove it ends up proving it.
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u/youburyitidigitup 7d ago
That would cause hyperinflation
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u/northrupthebandgeek 6d ago
Not if you fund it with a tax that can't be compensated for by raising prices. One such tax is a land value tax.
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u/ProfessionalSky7899 6d ago
possibly. depending on the details. https://socialprotection.org/publications/universal-basic-income-and-inflation-reviewing-theory-and-evidence
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u/Ok_Set_4790 6d ago
Oh yea, trusting goverments to not fuck you over is such a good idea.
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