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IGetNakedAtParties t1_j6gwb9f wrote

You're painting with a broad brush, which got sone others' backs up, but anyway it's an interesting conversation starter.

There are two things to bear in mind which will help form an opinion. First, it is in the interests of industry to have customers, from Henry Ford paying a minimum salary (thus diving up salaries to a level where he had more customers) to the modern versions Bezos and Musk who do the same source despite their rivalry. This seems at first like it should be a shared goal between unions fighting for higher salaries, and minimum wage proponents, but here is where we get into politics.

Since the turn of the century there have emerged two parties in most Western countries, one representing industry, and the other the labour unions (side note, this is in contrast to the preceding political landscape which was drawn more along the lines of city vs country, the British Tories and both US parties seemingly "inverted" at this time as the world changed around them). It is worth noting that these political parties are usually completely funded by their respective bases.

The industrialists support a minimum wage commensurate with their target customers, but want it to be enforced on their competitors even to the detriment of their competition. Imagine Ford trying to sell more Model Ts, your town of 1000 workers, which has nobody earning his $5 minimum to afford it (only the bosses) if he pushes for a minimum wage some businesses will fail under this burden, others will thrive, so he sells 500 cars to wealthy workers and creates 500 unemployed workers, great success, until they vote for unions.

The unions push for higher salaries also, but their goal is also maximum employment, they calculate the maximum each business can sustain and negotiate for this, maybe, in the example above, only 100 cars are sold, but employment is maintained.

In this 1912 example a UBI results in something in-between, taxing companies, however not pushing them out of business, and leaving wages low but supplemented, ideally results in the maximum number of cars sold, by limiting both wealth (with low wages) and poverty (with UBI).

If you add a load of technology redundancy to this situation the maths becomes even more extreme, requiring a UBI for the major companies (the ones with the technology) to survive.

How strange that modern industrialists would want something so socialist, but it must be Universal to work, they can only go so far on their own, for this they need a political party to do their work. For the industrialists this is most likely the GOP, so socialist! It's almost as if political parties have never "inverted" based on disruptive technology... Oh wait!

This is my hypothesis: Amazon, Tesla, Apple maybe even Ford (the company) need a UBI to survive the technological revolution we're in, the unions must resists this technology, and therefore resist the UBI. Ironic that the "socialist" parties of the left must resist literal socialism. The GOP will rebrand itself as a champion of the free market's success story, an "innovation dividend" or whatever they call it, paid for by those that pioneer technology, and punish those that don't (especially unionised businesses). Sold to the traditional voters as a way to have smaller government and empowering individuals to choose how they spend their own taxes. Looking at demographics and reading Strauss - Howe's Generational Model, the boomers and gen X are already mostly republican, so the battleground must be fought over the millennials, so I think they need a charismatic "leader" - a front-person to bring in the millennial vote by targeting them directly. To do this they will also need the press (Twitter, Washington post). The wheels are already in motion, maybe not this election cycle, but not much longer after that.

In answer to your question, from my perspective it is a private enterprise, they just need to go through some minor inconveniences like elections to make it happen.

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SantoshiEspada OP t1_j6kiskx wrote

Thank you for sharing your opinions. For one, we're in reddit, and within, in the futurology sub. It's basically us making sht up since no one can predict the future. So I applaud comments as yours. Cheers

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