Memes

I’m not saying everyone should stop working! I’ve said that a dozen times now.

It's not a matter of what you say, it's a matter of the inevitable consequences of the arrangement you propose.

People should not need to find employment to be deemed deserving of basic necessities.

In most western countries, the ones wealthy and well run enough to have such a system, that's already the case. You need to look for employment, strive to be useful to society, not actually succeed.

They should not be allowed to starve simply because they can’t stack shelves or flip burgers.

can't

Yeah, that's not what you've been arguing for, and you know it. Nowhere in your prior post does it mention being unable to work.

You've done nothing but arguing that people should not need to work to live regardless of ability.

They should be offered basic necessities regardless of their employment.

But not regardless of their willingness to be employed.

You can't find a job? Cool. If the state comes around and tells you there's roads to tar, you'll tar roads. That would be a fair arrangement.

If there's literally no work left to do for you there shouldn't be a gun to your head, I agree.

However that isn't, wasn't, and likely will never be the case.

But I’m not entertaining your delusions that I’m saying everuone should stop working.

No, what you're saying is everyone should have the option not to work (which they already do, if they can afford it) with no drawbacks whatsoever, making work completely optional for the individual, which it de facto isn't for the collective as a whole.

Since, as you already conceded, food does not manifest out of thin air decoupling individual survival from labour, when collective survival is very much not decoupled from labour, creates a tragedy of the commons of catastrophic proporions.

Which means that unless some people decide to work for no reason other than funzies, or worse an understanding that they must take responsibility for no reason other than altruism, a lot of essential work just won't get done.

I know for a fact i'm not getting up at 4-5 AM to tend to a farm and, for that matter, neither will you, mr "think about whatever it was", but if society is not to collapse after this systemic change, someone will, and you are not entitled to their labour any more than your boss in real life is entitled to yours.

Salaries and tying able-bodied people's quality of life to labour are ways to ensure not only that the work that needs doing gets done, they're there to ensure it gets done consistently and to the required scale.

What the baseline quality of life should be is a matter of debate but if live in the west with the possible exceptions of US and maybe the UK, you're absolutely fucking fine at the baseline. I should fucking know, I was there for years.

Work must happen so someone must do the work. Saying no individual person must, doesn't mean someone won't have to at some point, and the reality is that this work needs to be consistent and reliable enough to be essentially taken for granted for society to function (something we've clearly achieved given your worldview), which means it fundamentally can't be done on a volunteer basis.

It's a responsibility that must be dealt with at all times.

So if some people must work, who gets not to, in your world? Who gets to opt out of the must clause?

How do you divide those who must work and those who can just exist?

We used to have that distinction once upon a time, it was called slavery, or indenture, or serfdom.

If you are to be delivered your beets and vodka ration every month, someone has to make them.

If someone makes them they are expending their labour, paying for at least part of your existence.

And you know what?

Not only would it not work.

Not only is that fundamentally parasitic (which makes me realise you're probably not a communist, as those guys are very not in favour of leeches usually).

But, frankly? You don't deserve that.

I'd rather the person making your food get to take an extra day off than you living for free for no reason other than leaving your mother's cunt because, ultimately, it doesn't take all that much not to be a useless sack of shit, and you're not even doing that, in this scenario.

Studied have already been done in this area proving it is entirely feasible.

UBI pilot studies are fundamentally flawed because they inject wealth into a specific subset of the population (the people in the test group) instead of absolutely everyone up to and including the primary and secondary sector.

If a handful of farmers happens to slow production down because they are in that one pilot progam, that won't impact worldwide or even nation-wide production, if every farmer, trucker, etc. in the world were to do that at the same time without improving per-hour productivity, there's absolutely no guarantee you wouldn't see food scarcity rise.

As it is now, testing UBI is the same as a few people winning the lottery. Not a valuable test of a systemic change.

Meanwhile every country that has tried giving universal basic necessities without means testing or other counterbalances has failed horrendously unless they were autocracies with command economies, in which cases they were just dystopic hellholes, instead of starving dystopic hellholes.

Stop fighting your own liberation.

It's my turn to post a quote this time:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

~C. S. Lewis.