I'm not for Universal Basic Income (UBI). There are two primary reasons I'm against it.
The first is that it actively turns ordinary citizens into parasites. This not only doesn't solve their problems, it deepens them.
The second is that it actively undermines the health of the overall system in a way that is pretty much guaranteed to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Wealth is not a pile of money in the bank. This is what people used to think wealth was: Gold bars and the like that some king owned.
And then Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in which he posited, for the first time, that the wealth of nations is what we could call GDP today. But somehow we seem to have forgotten this lesson -- that wealth is about all the homes, businesses and general production out there and money in the bank is just the end result -- and we have entered an era where we have this deluded idea that "The world is so rich, we can just give money away to the lower classes."
There are a number of problems with that idea, but the crux of the matter is that it turns people into parasites who only know how to consume and don't have any idea how to add value back into the system, much less get value back out of it in a legitimate manner generally known as "doing business."
We currently have this fantasy that there is so much wealth, we can just give it away for free and we simultaneously have this idea that Open Source is a means to make the world a better place. And we do a poor job of rewarding people who write Open Source for free.
So our goals for our "Utopian" Future are damnably dystopian. We want to create a world in which most people don't have a job and can't get a job. We want to actively and intentionally design a system with like 80 percent unemployment.
And then we want this system held together with slave labor. Not only do we want people to work for free, we want them to do very skilled labor without paying them.
This is just a particular brand of crazy that I absolutely cannot get behind. Instead of promoting the idea of UBI, we need to be promoting ways to pay people for adding value to the system even if traditional business models don't work.
Fortunately, I'm beginning to see some good ideas sprout, such as this piece:
Sponsoring Open Source Developers
So maybe we aren't doomed. Maybe we will get our act together, resolve some of our housing policy issues, resolve the awful healthcare system issues in the US and figure out innovative ways to reward people for adding value to the system so the system isn't simply broken from both ends of insisting we should both give money away for free and also insisting on slave labor to keep critical systems working at all.
The first is that it actively turns ordinary citizens into parasites. This not only doesn't solve their problems, it deepens them.
The second is that it actively undermines the health of the overall system in a way that is pretty much guaranteed to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Wealth is not a pile of money in the bank. This is what people used to think wealth was: Gold bars and the like that some king owned.
And then Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in which he posited, for the first time, that the wealth of nations is what we could call GDP today. But somehow we seem to have forgotten this lesson -- that wealth is about all the homes, businesses and general production out there and money in the bank is just the end result -- and we have entered an era where we have this deluded idea that "The world is so rich, we can just give money away to the lower classes."
There are a number of problems with that idea, but the crux of the matter is that it turns people into parasites who only know how to consume and don't have any idea how to add value back into the system, much less get value back out of it in a legitimate manner generally known as "doing business."
We currently have this fantasy that there is so much wealth, we can just give it away for free and we simultaneously have this idea that Open Source is a means to make the world a better place. And we do a poor job of rewarding people who write Open Source for free.
So our goals for our "Utopian" Future are damnably dystopian. We want to create a world in which most people don't have a job and can't get a job. We want to actively and intentionally design a system with like 80 percent unemployment.
And then we want this system held together with slave labor. Not only do we want people to work for free, we want them to do very skilled labor without paying them.
This is just a particular brand of crazy that I absolutely cannot get behind. Instead of promoting the idea of UBI, we need to be promoting ways to pay people for adding value to the system even if traditional business models don't work.
Fortunately, I'm beginning to see some good ideas sprout, such as this piece:
Sponsoring Open Source Developers
So maybe we aren't doomed. Maybe we will get our act together, resolve some of our housing policy issues, resolve the awful healthcare system issues in the US and figure out innovative ways to reward people for adding value to the system so the system isn't simply broken from both ends of insisting we should both give money away for free and also insisting on slave labor to keep critical systems working at all.