I, too, have spent a lot of time on these issues. I’ve been researching UBI full-time for over two years now.
I respectfully disagree with several of your comments. I have dedicated much of my life to the pursuit of knowledge specifically in this area so I hope you will carefully read what I have written and wait and read everything before challenging it.
Strange article to pick. I’m not sure what kind of case you’re trying to make with it. The author seems to understand that the Finnish experiment was never a very good representation of UBI, and seems to be in favor of UBI in principle. I’ve always been puzzled at why Finland became the de facto face of UBI for so many. I blame the mainstream media and their sometimes lazy, sometimes biased, reporting. The trials in Canada, Kenya, and Oakland were far better conceived and executed, although each with their own flaws. Hell, the smaller trial I’m managing as part of a documentary project will show more about the real nature of UBI, I think, than the Finnish one. That said, the Finnish trial is ongoing and will probably come up with some fairly positive, if no-brainer, results when they release them, namely that benefits that remain after taking new employment will encourage more of the unemployed to take new employment. The news reports and general impression that Finland’s trial failed is all nonsense and sensationalism. the conservative government that never wanted to do it in the first place simply chose not to extend it. They’re finishing out the trial, though, and I am interested to see the results when they are released.
Socialism takes from those, money and property that earned it and thus it rightfully belongs and gives it to those it doesn’t rightfully belong to. You are going to get those that produce and want less redistribution of wealth voting against those that produce less and want more redistribution of wealth. That is just one reason why all the democracies and democratic republics have failed in history.
Capitalism is Jeff Bezos imagining he produced as much as all of his thousands of employees combined, and that he has actually earned $150 Billion. Capitalism is someone who inherited millions and could live out their days lavishly without ever contributing anything imagining that they have earned it. Capitalism poorly-regulated looks like a higher tax rate on earned income (labor) than on unearned income (interest and capital gains). Capitalism regulated poorly looks like a lower class so desperate for income that they are at the mercy of employers, who will pay them not what they have merited with their productivity, but rather as little as they can get away with, skimming the rest off the top for themselves and their shareholders and pretending they earned it. Wages used to grow in lockstep with productivity. Google “the great decoupling” and witness how wages have stagnated since the 70s as productivity and GDP continued to grow. This is how inequality grows. Workers need enough security to be able to hold out for what truly is a fair market rate for their labor, or else those who control capital are afforded far too much power over them. If your kids are hungry and your rent is due, you have to take whatever abuse (from mistreatment to underpayment) your employer decides to put on you. Capitalism with UBI is a form of capitalism that lets everyone participate. You say taking from those who’ve earned it? I say much of it has been gifted to them off the backs of the working class. Perhaps these titans of industry have earned more than the average person — perhaps even a lot more — but where do we draw the line? 1,000 times? 100,000 times? How valuable can a single person actually be, and at what point are they benefiting from unfair imbalances in today’s system?
FYI: All communist societies are oligarchies. They may have one very strong figurehead at the top of the ruling group, but no single man or woman can lead an entire nation without many people watching their back and implementing the plans of the ruling oligarchy. All the famous leaders had their core group. There is really no such thing IMHO as a dictatorship.
We are also an oligarchy. In fact, pretty much every society since the invention of money has been, to one extent or another. Money is power, plain and simple. Those with more money have more power. UBI is a way to make sure every free, breathing human being has SOME power over their own direction in life. It’s a way to make this world a bit less of an oligarchy. It’s freeing the wage slaves.
UBI is just one social policy so you are partially correct. It doesn’t have to be set in a communist economic system but it could surely cause your society to become more communistic. As an example, FNMA and Freddie Mac where both private companies insured by the Federal government. As you know, they are now, since early 2009, both owned by the Federal Government, thus when you have ownership in the hands of the state you have communism. We generally do not talk in terms of a single social policy being communistic, but it should be and is. When Venezuela nationalized the oil industry that was communistic. All those working in that industry were now government employees.
As another example the Veterans Administration with its hospitals. Even the Doctors work for the government and that my friend is communism. The land and buildings are owned by the government and everyone working there also work for the government. The best way to look at communism is that everyone works for the government and all business and land is owned by the government. Of course, you are going to have black markets so you never really have 100% communism but we have several historical examples to examine.
UBI is not a bureaucratic program. It is a simple financial passthrough. It’s essentially a tithe that gets redistributed to all. It’s not government controlling anything or anyone. That’s why so many libertarians love it. It’s a share of national prosperity for all, and then each is free to do what they will with it, and held accountable for their own decisions. Your comparisons with other programs are not relevant.
Think of socialism as a sliding scale. The more social policies you have the closer you are to communism. The less social policies you have the more libertarian. https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/harrietrobbins/I_QZj6Aj8kg
I agree. It’s a sliding scale. If you allow for more dimensions than just two (in your case libertarian and communism), it gets more complicated. The point I was making was that in order to function well, a society must exist somewhere on that sliding scale, not at either fundamentalist extreme.
Communism, as I understand it, is basically socialism brought about through class war. I think that socialistic policies could also theoretically be brought about peaceful and cooperatively, through evolution not revolution. We have examples in human history of both pathways. And again, we must find our spot on the spectrum or field of possibilities that is most appropriate to society’s current technological and logistical needs. If we succumb to the urge to oversimplify into big ideological categories, we’re in trouble.
I post some of my articles on Google Groups: I have some pretty good stuff on trying to understand all the terms used in socio-economics from both what academia says but also the general public and media. It took me a while to come up with the method of analysis in the essay. https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/harrietrobbins/anuASCIPc6E
What evidence do you have that capitalism cannibalizes itself? The Irish Celts are the only ones that I’m aware of that had real capitalism and it lasted close to 1,000 years between 65 AD and 1650 AD and it was overthrown. It did not cannibalize itself. Far from it, it was the most successful and prosperous society in all of Europe at the time.
Nobody has ever been fully capitalist, and simplistic examples from hundreds or thousands of years ago are not useful. We’ve had an industrial revolution and the beginnings of a digital revolution between now and then. Global population has skyrocketed. Times have changed. If you’re a classroom teacher, you don’t handle 50 students the way you would handle 5. You need to be ready to adapt. You need to get a little more socialistic in you strategies or a lot of kids are going to get left behind through no fault of their own.
As evidence of my claims for cannibalization of capitalism as we now know it: poverty rates, employment rates (very different than “unemployment rates,” because those are lies and always have been), polarization, the rise of populism, suicide rates, health outcomes, inequality, incarceration rates, insecurity rates, infrastructural degradation, etc…. especially when held in contrast with our ever-increasing national wealth and per-capita GDP and assets.