This was a session at the August 2018 Resilient Communities Mini-Unconference.
Participants
Discussion
- Judy: Should UBI be provided only to people who really need it?
- Perhaps on an honor system? I want to have faith in people
- Shawn: The idea is similar to the negative income tax for the poor
- Brandon: I've listened to one podcast on UBI, with Sam Harris interviewing presidential candidate Andrew Yang
- Side note: Harris is a New Atheist, but more spiritual than most
- Yang has run companies and been a professor at Harvard Business School (where the students are motivated by just wanting to make lots of money)
- Yang also supports social currency that aligns purchasing power with work that isn't currently paid, e.g. caring for the elderly
- Everyone starts with an equal amount of "esteem" points and hands them out to each other as reward for work they appreciate
- Related to time banking
- The context of Yang's UBI proposal is that automation is rapidly replacing jobs, and there may be no replacement jobs coming
- Yang proposes a UBI of $1000 per month, which is below the poverty line, and would be mutually exclusive with other assistance programs for the poor
- At one point he and Harris express the motivation of "not wanting to have to buy bulletproof cars for their children" due to crime arising from immense income inequality
- Steve (much later): I don't see a problem with a world where robots do all the hard labor
- Shawn: Tell that to people whose family identities are wrapped up in that labor, and who want to feel valued for their contributions
- Judy: But if you had UBI, it would give you time and resources to figure out another way to contribute to society
- Issues with UBI
- Shawn: "Rentier states" are using something like UBI to buy off their own citizens, e.g. with oil money, making the government unaccountable to those citizens
- Judy: I thought I saw an article in Yes Magazine saying UBI would be somehow destructive to the Black community
- Shawn: How do we pay for it?
- Judy: Get the wealthy and corporations to pay
- Brandon: Yang wants to use a European Union-style value-added tax
- Steve and Shawn: That would be paid by consumers, which seems to defeat the purpose
- Brandon: Trades in the economy add value; this tax and UBI distribution means more money moving around and therefore adds the value needed to make it worthwhile
- Argument about perpetual growth and whether or not it's motivated by compound-interest loans
- Brandon: The three origins of value are:
- Using up stored value (e.g. oil)
- Accelerating the movement of money (not counting banks' financial tricks and automated trading algorithms)
- New ideas and inventions
- Steve: e.g. if we find a more valuable use for rhodium, the world supply of rhodium suddenly has more value without having to mine any more
- Shawn: But you pay a resource cost for every invention, generally underpinned by cheap fossil energy
- Argument about replacing fossil fuels with renewables
- Brandon: I support UBI because it makes me feel like things would be possible that weren't before, e.g. for new college graduates who don't currently see a positive future for themselves
- Shawn: I see UBI as life support for the current system, when what we need is system change
- More argument about compound interest and "unpayable" debt
- Eric and Judy: In Canada, they have rules so that banks can't lend more money than the borrower can pay back
- Steve: Lenin viciously attacked reformers as enemies of revolution
- Ben: What can the SolSeed Movement do about any of this huge national economic stuff?
- Brandon: Support UBI