Comment on Great plan
Jax@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoI mean, yes — but the reality is that universal basic income dictates that everyone gets the money.
For instance, let’s say Congress allows the perfect UBI bill to be put forth. For whatever Bizarro World reason you can conjure, because we both agree that they would never agree.
What happens next? We’ve already seen what regulatory capture has done to sectors like real estate. Corpos buy up shitloads of land, whether it’s individuals looking to be land barons or alongside corporate interests.
How would true UBI result in anything other than higher prices? Seriously, in the current markets that exist within the United States — how, without some kind of serious societal and economic shift prior to it’s introduction, would this actually play out?
Maybe it’s better in other democracies, I actually can’t really argue for any other nation — I can only apply this concept to what I already know.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
So you’re saying that UBI would lead to higher costs of living, because companies can charge more because people can spend more.
Then, explain to me, how did it come that in the 1960s, Americans were wealthy? How could they afford so much stuff back then? Corporate greed already existed back then; why didn’t it just eat up the wealth of the citizens?
Amir@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Lack of safety regulations that allowed people to be slowly poisoned by cheap materials or die in freak accidents, siphoning resources from the rest of the world through soft and hard political power, and not being destroyed from WW2 while Europe was recovering
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 day ago
i would argue that it was largely this, plus the states added a ridiculous amount of industrial capacity in WW2. i like to use california as my example. it was a small western state before the war. then they needed 3-5 million more people on the west coast to build warships (and support the people building warships) so california’s population nearly doubled in 20 years (per the US Census 1930: 5,677,251 people; 1940: 6,907,387 people; 1950: 10,586,223 people). I recognize my view is a touch biased because i knew a lot of people at the old submarine shipyard.
a huge victory for keynesian economics. it’s my go to example whenever monetarists start talking like they’re the only school that matters (don’t get me started they both work and have their benefits and drawbacks i was in micro and just like winding up the macro dudes).
Jax@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Oh, don’t get me wrong — my position has never been that UBI can’t work.
My position is that UBI cannot work without very major changes first. I don’t doubt that UBI can inject a lot of good into an individual’s standard of living — without some kind of regulation associated with it, which requires those regulatory agencies to not be inherently corrupt, UBI seems impossible.