so does nobody stop and think “hmm maybe the reason obama and zuckerberg and friedman love UBI is because it’s designed to relocate working class discontent to the 3rd world and keep capitalism on life support long enough to belch out the last ton of co2 that destroys the earth”
turns out i was just pretending to think that all value is derived from labor, actually if the bourgeoisie will give me a cut of what they looted from the third world that’s fine
this and my proposed anime ban are my most controversial left twitter opinions
okay i've had this thread muted all day but now that i have time i'll answer some of the questions
most common one is "so do you oppose all reforms"? no, but it's important to distinguish between reforms that just improve quality of life and those designed to preserve capitalism
most common one is "so do you oppose all reforms"? no, but it's important to distinguish between reforms that just improve quality of life and those designed to preserve capitalism
the reason friedman and the rest are alright with UBI is because it's different from most other types of reform. the purpose of UBI, in the minds of most economists who support it, is to act as a single subsidy for basic needs.
it's not completely fair to criticize it for directing money to rentiers and producers, since you can in theory spin basically any subsidy this way. still, it's very deliberately designed to protect their interests.
look at housing, as an example. the most common solutions to a lack of affordable housing in the US right now are direct rent control or indirect schemes requiring developers to make an investment in affordable housing proportional to their investment in luxury housing.
i've already given my thoughts on rent control, and i see government housing as the preferable solution. however, UBI addresses this problem by having the government indirectly paying rentiers the difference between exorbitant existing rents and what people can actually pay.
this means that rather than addressing the issues that enable rentiers to charge those enormous rents, the government effectively pays them out of pocket in the hopes that these private parties will build more housing because they've enabled the further circulation of capital.
another example that people will probably be more familiar with is healthcare. as has been discussed many times, american healthcare is the most expensive in the world. the most cost-effective solution would be a single-payer system, because it would allow the government to
combat monopoly pricing on medical care and equipment, since they're the only purchaser, rather than what healthcare providers currently do which is pass on the cost of those $10 cough drops to the consumer.
however, once again under UBI the government would essentially just be indirectly covering the difference between the exorbitant fees and the price people can actually pay. like with the rent this does nothing to actually address the enormous markups collected by pharmeceutical
and healthcare providers. it simply masks the most visible symptom of this arrangement, which is the huge number of people who go without healthcare. this is exactly what UBI is meant to enable: rather than addressing these systems specifically designed to redistribute
wealth upward, it just artificially pumps wealth in the front end to maintain the continued consumption of commodities in a system where all wealth is so rapidly funneled upwards that commodity consumption could no longer continue without intervention.
i've seen some people suggest that UBI could exist alongside other welfare programs, but that would defeat the purpose of UBI. UBI is meant to enable a minimum standard of living; if the state already provided that basic standard it would be redundant.
the purpose is just to ensure that private enterprises can continue to extract as much wealth as possible from the provision of those basic necessities.
people have also brought up alaska as a positive example of UBI, but the payout from the oil wealth trust fund isn't the same as UBI. alaska was smarter than most other states in that it mostly didn't privatize its oil fields, meaning that instead the state collects
the profits from resource extraction. as i mentioned before, under the labor theory of value wealth can only be derived from labor or from the extraction of resources. alaska has the good sense to keep the latter in public hands to some extent and distributes that wealth evenly.
alaska's citizens have a fundamentally different relationship with production than what you'd have under a UBI system. it's the difference between receiving a share of publicly owned resource wealth and receiving a share of the wealth the bourgeoisie extract from labor.
if you own a factory and live off the profits from that, you're bourgeois. if you're a sustenance farmer and you discover an enormous gold nugget under your field, you aren't bourgeois since your wealth isn't derived from someone else's labor.
you could still argue that UBI simply gives some of this surplus labor value back to the people it was stolen from. however, the express purpose of UBI is to address the fact that most americans are increasingly uncompetitive in the labor market.
that isn't to say that their labor isn't exploited. you could make $7.25 an hour for labor that creates $25 in value for your employer. however, if someone else is willing to perform that same labor for $1 an hour, your labor is no longer competitive.
i've already talked about the declining workforce participation rate in america and all the effort and incentives and subsidies the government puts into private industry to keep american labor somewhat competitive. once the government no longer has to worry that they'll be voted
out of office if people don't have jobs, they'll roll all of that back. private industry will then be able to do the economically efficient thing, which is to replace as much of that labor as possible with overseas production and automation.
this will only be accelerated by an increase in the cost of american labor, since everyone who only remains in the workforce out of necessity (i.e. a lot of us) will drop out and sharply decrease supply. i got into more of this already so i won't repeat everything
if you believe in the labor theory of value you believe that automation can't replace labor, only greatly increase its productivity. all wealth will continue to be derived from labor and resource extraction no matter how much technology advances.
this means that the wealth collected from the bourgeoisie is still only the wealth they've derived from one of those two sources. and as labor costs rise, the share of that wealth derived from foreign labor and resources will only grow.
which means that, to reuse an analogy, under UBI you'll have the same relationship to production as a kid living off of his dad's trust fund. your income and your economic interests are inextricably linked to the economic interests of the american bourgeoisie.
alright that's it for now. i still have this thread muted so if you have any questions you can dm me
you may ask, "don't you have it set so that only mutuals can message you?"
yes. yes i do
you may ask, "don't you have it set so that only mutuals can message you?"
yes. yes i do
also if you post a screenshot of my tweets after blocking me you're a coward and a class enemy and you're mom gay
i realize that it's a lot easier to latch onto the first cogent-sounding rebuttal than to decide that something that would benefit you personally would be a bad idea, even if that rebuttal is a personal attack. i understand. that being said, if you did so you're mom still gay
fugg anime :DDDDDDDDDD
