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by asdff 95 days ago
I think you make perfect sense. And given that one has to take a cynical take to the writings on UBI knowing the voice of the elite establishment will overwhelm any grassroots thinking since it is actually supported by a financial sponsor to ensure the message is received the world over, unlike say you and I blogging to 7 people. So one can expect most points on it in the public discourse to be biased and in favor of elite-benefitting outcomes. Indeed, when you consider most topics in the media, no one has unique perspectives, they regurgitate the same couple perspectives everyone else does, which are probably crafted by PR firms.

The more I think about UBI though the more I come to the sad conclusion that you can't eliminate money. We can't just give everyone everything they could want for free; I don't think the planet can sustain everyone living like elon musk. So there has to be some forcing factor, some hand on top of the cookie jar that tells your monkey brain that just wants to be high, fat, and orgasming all day that it needs to endure a delayed reward or face some physical exertion to keep the party going. And for better or worse, that forcing factor is by making you have to do something to get credits, that you return for your portion of the produced abundance. This mechanism is able to tolerate the fact that someone might work on efforts not directly tied to any one thing and reap a generalized benefit from all the diversity of that which is produced. Whatever comes next, has to get through that hurdle and the more I think about money the more I find reasons why it is actually a great tool for this sort of distribution of resources and incentivizing labor.

I guess the challenge is that there is a lot of lopsided compensation, where people like say elon musk are paid handsomely even though there is realistically only so much a single human can do. When Elon musk does something that say moves billions in real world dollars on his decision, again this isn't because he is a unique superhuman, just that we have set up power on this planet such where one single person can make a decision to move billions in real world dollars, and if it wasn't musk it would have been someone else in that seat because the seat exists at all. So much power shouldn't be accumulated in one position, because again, we aren't superhumans.