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pegothejerk t1_j64l59s wrote

Which wouldn't be such a bad thing if we had wealthy people in favor of guaranteed basic income as a way to transition society from one reliant on coerced labor to function to one that encourages more choice and opportunity for varied work, study, and enrichment. Instead we still have them pushing the idea that being poor is a character flaw, and also preventing changes from a system that will create more impoverished.

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chaogomu t1_j64px38 wrote

An idea I had once would be to transition from glorifying the hoarding of wealth to a sort of leaderboard of who gained the most this year, with very high taxes to keep people from hoarding.

But the dragons don't want their hoards to diminish, and see anything that prevents the rapid growth of the hoard as diminishing it. We need a modern St. George. Likely in the form of an empowered and fully staffed IRS.

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thatnameagain t1_j65gk6b wrote

I agree with the spirit of your comment but I think the details here are really important.

Firstly, it's not rich people who need to be in favor of it (they never will) it's regular people. In the U.S. 80-90% of votes in primary elections go to Republicans or centrist democrats, and until that changes we won't see policies that don't reflect the far right or the center. If we want UBI, we need to vote for it and that means in primary elections since thats where you'll find the candidates who support it.

Secondly, UBI is actually not a good solution in itself to automation because it will create a wealth gap in society that makes the growing one we have today seem tiny in comparison. Why? Because corporations / the 001% will own all the robots and make ALL the money, and then UBI is what filters out to regular people in an economy with minimal upward mobility. So we either need a solution that is based around increasing career upward mobility for most people, or we need to go full socialist and make all corporations publicly owned and all the income publicly distributed.

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PPQue6 t1_j64sh4h wrote

Absolutely agree. The time is coming sooner rather than later, where the need for labor will be a relic of the past.

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