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This is pretty shallow critique. "With UBI, ever citizen will rely, at least in part, on his or her income being handed out by the state. Rather than there existing pockets of state dependency, all of us will become (albeit to differing degrees) dependent." Who is enforcing intellectual property law? Who builds roads and subsidizes factories and offices? You get paid by a corporation, and that corporation is profoundly dependent on the exercise of state power. It spends a lot of money to lobby and influence that power. This author supposes that, right now, most of us are independent actors vis-a-vis the state. That's silly. The UBI question isn't, "should the state be expanded," because the state is already expansive. The question is what nature of relationship is the least worst. As the author acknowledges, right now we intrusively monitor and examine the poor, ask them to fill out a ton of paperwork, and punish them with arbitrary cutoffs. The nature of that relationship is horrible. UBI could improve it. But hey, if you're well-off and/or feel that the corporate-state fusion is furthering your interests already, then yeah you might feel "free" at present and fear any changes. |