I’m curious where people see Universal Basic Income on the political spectrum. Please mention what national/cultural/generational background is informing your answer. Thanks!

  • @trackcharlie
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    6 months ago

    UBI is neither left or right, it’s ridiculously logical. If people don’t have money, you don’t have an economy. No economy, no taxes, no taxes, no government, no government, no support for the people and no military, no military, no defense from aggressors, no defense from aggressors, welcome back to the age of Gengis Khan.

    You don’t need to assign a political leaning to something that’s fundamentally economic in nature.

    There are entire industries that are dying as we speak and they will NOT be returning and they will NOT have jobs to replace them like there has been throughout history of automation. (Manufacturers got automated bots, but those bots required people to set, align, and assist or repair. Now all of this will be able to be done by other bots with a single site overseer who, eventually, will also be a bot)

    This isn’t a printing press situation where the writers are replaced by a printing press so they can better focus on journalism instead of writing individual papers by hand, this is a situation where we will have entire industries die and entire sets of professionals age out and entire professions lost to the void.

    Another example of this would be bank tellers vs ATM’s back in the day, the tellers thought ATM’s would remove their jobs, it reduced their jobs at first, then changed their jobs outright to financial administration and management, rather than doling out cash to people, made their jobs more efficient and fundamentally different.

    This is not that situation. The tellers will lose their jobs as well this time, and so will the bank managers and investors.