Who in their right mind wants that? UBI just means signing your soul away to the state, who then can mandate your lifestyle completely including health procedures and even military conscription. No thanks.
During COVID, my friends and I were temporarily retired. Lamenting every moment since having to come out of retirement. We were all laid off and received about $2k/mo for awhile and what happened was we ended up hanging out every since day working on whatever we were working on, and feelings of inadequacy faded into the background. It was a micro golden age for us and that period of time has cemented UBI for us. It was a small amount of money and we lived with our parents but we were never more productive and happy.
Hopefully before I die I can witness a strong implementation of UBI. It would directly reflect in culture in terms of music and the arts. Little funding for the arts currently combined with massive rent nearly everywhere leaves little room for cultural phenomenon that was possible in places like the lower east side bowery for example. Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.
East side bowery was very cheap back then (it was also a pretty rough part of town, which is easy to forget). You just need to convince a hoard of like minded folks to congregate somewhere cheap and you can live like this. There's plenty of cheap places to live in the US. I kind of feel like we need to learn how to build new cities, we have the land, it's mostly cheap, we just continue to choose to reside in expensive places chasing jobs that help us cover the rent while working us to death.
Idk man, I wouldn't call bowery rough or cheap by any stretch - 20 years ago, during covid, or now. For rough during covid or now, head to east new york. For cheap, head deeper into the other boroughs.
Absolutely. More generally, as a taxpayer, I'm very unlikely to vote for anything that is justified in terms of how great the USSR was. One of several comments in this thread that give away the game: scratch a UBI bro, find a commie.
You were the beneficiary of a bullshit short term policy that has wrecked the global and national economies and think that means it was a good thing to replicate?
Your fun time was extremely damaging to people everywhere but of course, we can pretend "it was necessary because COVID" which we then knew and now it's undeniable, was an absolute farce of hygiene theater.
The people who worked paid for you to do nothing at your parents home. That's all there is. Meanwhile, there also were massive transfers of wealth with the same excuse, from tax payers to the wealthies company owners.
The only good Soviet art was the stuff that expressed the suffocating oppression of the communist regime and warned the world to never to do it again. Some of it was oblique, but all of it was human. If you and your friends lack the taste to understand that, then I am really glad that my tax dollars are no longer funding your arts and crafts projects.
> Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.
This is pretty good example why UBI is dangerous. Those funded artists were very happy to suck it up and go along with the regime. The censorship was in place, but self-censorship was even stronger.
Meanwhile a lot of art existed outside of the system with people working some shitty jobs and doing arts in free time.
Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was published.
The premise was that people were self censoring even outside of what was being officially approved, so not really.
That book was published during Kruschiov era. Which was definitely not representative of the rest of Soviet era. Let alone that the book was peanuts compared to Gulag archipelago.
Eventually Solzhenytsin was kicked out from USSR and had to take exile in west. Do you really want to use him as an example of Soviet artistic freedom?
Particularly if you live overseas on base. The military provides everything for you, albeit often through vendors such as AAFES. But yeah, free healthcare for sure.
Those living in poverty. Speaking from personal experience.
> UBI just means signing your soul away to the state, who then can mandate your lifestyle completely including health procedures and even military conscription.
I trust a functioning government over free market human participants. People always overweight their own ability to succeed, when the stats tell a different story.
How are the governments and economies in the happiest countries structured, for example.
(I think it was probably downvoted because it was too far over the line into ideological battle and other things that the site guidelines ask commenters to avoid here.)
lol the state(aka society's strong arm) will always have an immense say in your life even if you are so oblivious to it. Government exists to redistribute money, might as well distribute it to the poor and do it universally.
This study didn't say, we gave 1200 to people and then dictated their lives like a dictator.
Read a constitution and tell me where it states that the goal is to redisteibut wealth. I've read significant parts of the constitution of my country and it absolutely does not state that.
The goal of the government is not stated as such. It's not "the social contract".
But hey, your phrase sounded confident so you have that going for you.
> who then can mandate your lifestyle completely including health procedures and even military conscription. No thanks.
Entirely unlike modern America, where utility providers for food and water are regulated for what's healthy and representative legislature decides when to draft you for Vietnam 2.
The state gets more power over you without UBI (assuming a social safety net of any kind already exists) - without UBI it needs a larger apparatus to decide how to distribute funds, and it can pick arbitrary reasons to cut off your funds. Under UBI administration would be far simpler and cutting off your income for political reasons would be far more noticeable, since it's supposed to be universal.
I don't understand why you're downvoted. I grew up in a country that did exactly this, until collapsed. Strong social nets, free housing, free medicine for all, free education, no unemployment, sounds like heaven, right?
The only problem is that every person is a government-owned livestock unit. Their thoughts, knowledge, career paths, kids, even their private life, everything is controlled by government, that also obligates you to watch after your neighbours and co-workers. You can't even leave the country without government permission. You can expelled if you don't like the government though. You can't work where you want after getting your degree, government will send you where they think they need you to be. School is never ending propaganda. We literally had "political information" every Monday, since grade 1. Also, since grade 1 you're in one of the tiers of the only allowed political party of the country. There's tier for grade 1 to 3, then for 4 to 8, then from 8 to 10. Every 18yo is drafted for 2 years for armed forces (3 for navy). I can go on and on.
I remember it too well and would never trade messy and chaotic capitalist society to that labour camp with "free" rations.
It's frightening that so many people in 1st world want to live in a cage with 3-times-a-day meal.
that is a false dichotomy, just because a bad government that didn't give you any freedom implemented these benefits doesn't mean that any government implementing such benefits will automatically take everyone's freedom away. the freedom was taken away first. it did not understand that benefits are not enough and that freedom is also needed. we are discussing UBI as a means to give people more freedom, and not as a way to turn them into slaves.
Hopefully before I die I can witness a strong implementation of UBI. It would directly reflect in culture in terms of music and the arts. Little funding for the arts currently combined with massive rent nearly everywhere leaves little room for cultural phenomenon that was possible in places like the lower east side bowery for example. Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.
Time is more valuable than anything else.