Jeebus said:
Moving over to this thread just in case.
Warbler said:
ChainsawAsh said:
Warbler said:
Seriously, I am growing very concerned about the improvements in computers and computer intelligence. It is not out of the realm of possibility that computers will able to replace every human at every job. Imagine what it will do to the economy if humans are no long employable? What if computers do take over. I’m serious.
Universal basic income. It’s going to happen. It should happen way sooner than it’s going to though, and it’s going to carry a sigma similar to welfare for far too long after it’s implemented, too.
communism?
No, not at all. And frankly, this kind of misunderstanding frustrates me because it happens too often. Not every social program is Communism—universal healthcare isn’t Communism, free college isn’t Communism, universal basic income isn’t Communism. They may or may not be good ideas, but I wish people would argue about that rather than throwing out “sounds like Communism to me!” However, I trust that you were genuinely asking, and not just throwing the word out as a “gotcha,” so I’m going to respond.
Universal basic income, if it were implemented, would serve only as a safety net. It would be a way for the Government to say “here is a bit of money so that you can meet the basic standards of living; you’ll have food and water, and you’ll have shelter, now go do with your life what you will.” This is in no way the complete abolition of private property that Communism is. Private property still exists, and capitalism is still very much in place.
Not only that, but universal basic income hails from a different era in political science. Nowadays, people create policies that sound good to them, they implement them, and then more likely than not they declare the program a success even though they haven’t defined any metrics for success. If pressed, they will create a metric that’s designed to make the program look like a success, or they will just make some numbers up and change the subject. That’s the method that gives us things like dynamic scoring.
Universal basic income was a social science research baby. Academics did experiments on control groups, observed the results, and found that it worked – often to the shock of the nonplussed researchers, I should add. These results were confirmed and filtered up through academic circles until it reached policymakers. The policymakers decided that since it’s a thing proven to work, they should implement it. And they tried. The Nixon administration, that is. Not UBI per se but negative tax rates, which are effectively the same thing but economists prefer them because they’re a little more efficient.
Either way, if you look at UBI and scratch your head wondering how can this possibly work (I’m pretty liberal but I’m pretty much in that position), you’re in the same position as the researchers decades ago who proved the policy works.
Sometimes, despite your best efforts to make sense of the world, you end up with quantum mechanics.
