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“The distinction between worker and pauper vanished.” To understand the catastrophic effects of UBI, it’s worth considering the Speenhamland system, a prototypical form of UBI enforced in rural Britain in the early 1800s. Memorably analyzed in Hobsbawm’s classic _Captain Swing._
The Speenhamland system, like the UBI so deeply desired by the contemporary ruling class, allowed employers to lower wages below starvation levels because public finances would automatically take up the slack.
"The traditional social order degenerated into a universal pauperism of demoralized men who could not fall below the relief scale whatever they did, who could not rise above it ..."
The wealthy gave the workers "their charity in return for their servility, and on whose whim depended their livelihood."
Key sentence from the above: "They lacked even the only real resource of the British laboring poor, the capacity to constitute themselves a classed to fight collectively as such." This is the future promised us by UBI.
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