Killing the idea of basic income would be a good thing. It will never work and would leave a society in much the same situation as other past attempts at Marxism.
>Killing the idea of basic income would be a good thing.
Maybe we have a different look on basic income, for me it's like unemployment money with less steps and less overhead (less bureaucrats). I also dont know why you pull in marxism, but those systems normally starve because of bureaucrats (hello germany) where you have to fill out 10 papers to create one praline, and NO i dont say germany is "marxist", but they are really good at always taking the worst from both sides.
For giggles, lets say every work can be done by robots, every service by ai and energy is free (dyson sphere or whatever you want), who's left to spend money and for what? And tadaa StarTrek ;)
I raise Marx because going from people having what they earn to having what they need was pretty fundamental to the utopia he envisioned. A UBI is a huge step in that direction, complete with a state given the power to decide what we need and control distribution of resources. I'd expect the state would eventually need to take control of the means of production to stabilize the system, another big step towards Marxism.
If all work is done by robots we have much bigger challenges than who spends money. We need to consider how to counter dynamics and incentives that might favor having fewer humans dependent on the system, for example. We also need to consider how we avoid either humans losing control entirely or human control being massively centralized to a small group of people running everything.
Basic income is not Marxism. Marxism is against basic income. Getting a basic income is almost the opposite to getting the actual value of your labor. I write this as someone against Marxism. You should read up on things, and not just let your biases dictate how you understand things.
Basic income is very much a step towards Marxism. Its solidly in the vein of moving from what one earns to what one needs. It empowers the state to decide what we need and to allocate those resources. And personally I see no way the government could control such a program without eventually taking direct control over means of production.
I'm also not sure why you assume I haven't read up on this topic. We may disagree, but its extremely dismissive to assume your view is right and I must simply be uninformed.
I assume that you haven't read up because the modern concept of universal basic income was made by Friedman. You are so far off the mark laying it at the feet of marxism that I was actually holding back and treating you with more respect than you deserve when showing such an extreme lack of awareness of the concepts you are discussing.
I get you don't like marxism. But you come off like a parody when you have such shallow grasp on what it is. Most real life communist countries, it is a crime to be without work. As far as you can come from a basic income.
...and when your labour, and the labour of 90+% of all humans on the planet have no economic value, we'll do what?
Continue to avoid exploring obvious solutions because certain words have been made into epithets, or failed previously because they were solving future (now imminent) problems?
If we don't fundamentally change our economic system its simple, we're all screwed.
If we have a system depending on trading our labor for money to pay for stuff, and the value of our labor goes to zero, we need a different system.
We can't paper over that fundamental crack by giving governments even more power to decide what every person "needs" and send out resources accordingly.
There are so many problems in that system. How do we actually decide prices when every consumer has the same base level of money to spend? How does the government decide what we all need or deserve? How do we avoid the corruption taking over that massive power granted to dole out resources? Are we just living in a feudal state again? Does the government need to control the means of production to keep such a system stable?
