Welcome to the being a fiscal conservative... probably the only thing more frustrating than being a social conservative, in that socons at least have a few areas they've made progress and have support on. Fiscons never get listened to...
United States California approves 1st state-funded guaranteed income plan
fiscal conservatives get listened to after the government has collapsed, people are eating garbage, their children are dying in the streets and hyper inflation has destroyed the value of the currency. Then and only then when you say.
"You know we could have avoided all of this....."
Only then people listen. for 20 years until some one else offers free shit....
You do know they're going to get increased Federal funding to pay for all this, right? Which means people like us, who are tax payers, are funding this. This is lunacy.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
Don't get me wrong; I am not against having a welfare system. I just think what we have now is wasteful, and incentives dependency and stagnation. Wiping the slate clean and replacing everything with a Universal Basic Income seems like it would be a massive improvement.
I am against the welfare state, its done a lot of harm to our inner cities.
I'm not against it, but I think its current form is flawed and needs an overhaul. And I think the inner cities' sorry state is a result of quite a few things. Single mothers using Daddy Government as a paypig, shitty schools and probably a thing or two more.
Last edited:
Terthna
Professional Lurker
Most of those flaws has to do with how complex and restrictive the welfare system is, in an attempt to ensure that the money only goes to certain people, and can only be spent on certain things. If we just gave everyone a flat sum of money, no strings attached, people wouldn't be encouraged to become single mothers, or stay in areas with shitty schools; they'd actually be able to save their money over time, and use it to better their lives, instead of merely subsisting.
Huh. But what about the other economic side effects that get brought up? Such as the rise in taxes and so on to compensate?
Terthna
Professional Lurker
That's why you have to shut down every other welfare program before you institute a Universal Basic Income; so long as you do that, the costs should equal out. All a UBI is, ideally, is a streamlining of our current expansive welfare system into a single lump sum that everyone receives, regardless of their circumstances.
boomghost
I trust you know where the launch button is?
yeah, but theres no way existing welfare systems would be cut down to make it UBI, they'd demand UBI on top of existing welfare or riot in response.
Make it a condition of having UBI from the start and damn make it clear what trying to have both would cost them money wise.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Most UBI plans include removing the minimum wage and an assumption of increasing automation. We no longer have professional elevator operators, f'rex, that job was automated away a long time ago. Self-driving cars are just appearing but as that technology matures, expect to see taxi drivers and truck drivers go the way of the elevator operator. Thus remove minimum wage so that people whose skills aren't worth it anymore can still earn a few bucks, but survive on their UBI and work for play money.
UBI programs assume that at a certain point, Average Joe simply won't be able to earn a living anymore because robots will be doing all the work, and we will need to gradually adjust society to account for the fact that only the most gifted and creative people can do anything useful that a robot can't do for free.
Arlos
Sad Monarchist
That sound dreadful tbh.
The robots doing everything or the UBI stuff?
Arlos
Sad Monarchist
The « Majority of humanity will de-facto become superfluous kept pets» part, which would be both of those I guess?
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
This assumption has been wrong, and will continue to be wrong for the rest of human history.
First off, because there will always be more things that people want.
Second, because robots, in economic terminology, are tools, not consumers. They produce goods at the behest of who owns them, but they do not create economic demand, so effectively they add value to the economy, but do not absorb any of the value created.
As with literally every other part of human history where automation and tools have made production more efficient, new jobs will come into existence, because people who have more effective purchasing power because the goods they buy have become cheaper due to automation making costs lower, will spend that money on other things instead. Those other things will need to be made, and thus more jobs will come into existence, etc, etc.
What we see again and again in the post-industrialization world, is that the surefire way to create high unemployment rates, is for the government to mess with markets, especially labor markets, to try to 'fix' things. Then after high unemployment comes high crime, which then drives up costs, which spirals into destroyed cities and ghettos.
The world is rife with examples of what I've described above, and has exactly zero examples of what the 'automation will result in permanent unemployment' people claim will force us to use UBI/BLS to keep society going.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
That's why I said trying to implement a UBI right now is pointless; we have purge the government of corruption first before we try to fix anything else.
That's one way to look at it I suppose; though I'd argue that being forced into wage slavery isn't any better.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
You're not wrong. It's not exactly a happy future but currently nobody can see a clear path around it. Robots are getting smarter and more capable. They're already stronger, the only reason to employ a human is their ability to think more creatively than robots, and, sometimes, that it's still cheaper to hire a human than to build a robot. Keeping humans from being too expensive is a major component of UBI. It's pretty much a bandaid though, some are looking to genetic engineering or augmentation to keep humans competitive but that has issues of it's own.
You're setting up a complete strawman here. Nobody ever said robots are going to be buying stuff, just making stuff. The rest of your argument kind of falls apart once you remove that leg. The claim is that once robots can think effectively enough to displace a human, that human will have extreme difficulty finding work anymore because thinking is the only viable niche for humans left. Jobs won't come into existence to make things, robots will make things. People won't have more effective purchasing power because they won't have jobs in the first place, because robots will be doing all the work.
God-damn it all, the future is supposed to be better then what’s come before, not worse!
I swear, between the political stuff and this sort of thing, I’m really starting to believe we live in the ‘bad’ alt-history timeline. Which is an incredibly depressing thought. Because even if we do take back control from the neo-marxists and globalists, we’ve got the robots issue to deal with in the next decade or two!
Edit:
I swear, between the political stuff and this sort of thing, I’m really starting to believe we live in the ‘bad’ alt-history timeline. Which is an incredibly depressing thought. Because even if we do take back control from the neo-marxists and globalists, we’ve got the robots issue to deal with in the next decade or two!
Edit:
Last edited:
Doomsought
Well-known member
Automation technology is like a car, just because you own a car does not mean you know how to drive it. Unlike a car, automation technology is very difficult to implement: it's more like being able to pilot a jet fighter off an aircraft carrier than driving a car. There are very are not an unlimited supply of people who can do it, and it also needs most of your management staff involved in the project to also be competent enough to tell the implementer what you actually need.