Yeah it’s not really the paying part that is bad, in and of itself.
It’s that there are people who defy the socially accepted rules, are greedy, are corrupt, or otherwise go against the herd for their own selfish gain. They warp and twist the rules when they have the power to do so to turn things intended to create equality into machines of oppression. And then they turn around and tell people it’s not them, but the group they are oppressing who is to blame… And for some reason, people believe it.
EDIT: I’m actually a believer in Basic Income, but this is a silly argument. Bad arguments do a disservice to the idea of Basic Income and make the battle uphill that much harder.
I read this two days ago when it was posted, and it didn’t sit well with me because it didn’t make sense. I hand to think about it for while about why it didn’t make sense, but I have it now.
Lets break this down:
We’re the only species who must pay to exist
We’re really the only species that uses money regularly. So at first glance the literal statement is true but irrelevant: We’re the only species that must pay, because we’re the only species that uses money. So the literal definition is that other species don’t have to pay. True, but they don’t get to use money to store work. Our society has determined that “money” is a method to store “work”.
What the author is saying in spirit is: We’re the only species who has to work to exist.
If indeed I have the author’s meaning right, then this is clearly false. Every other species has to do some level of work to exist. Even parasites will not have a second generation without working to procreate. This brings us to the author’s next statement:
In a private property system where all the land was claimed by others before we were born, and everything we need to stay alive costs money…
If you’re willing to lower yourself to an animal that doesn’t use money with all of the freedom and consequences that comes with that, you don’t need to spend a time on land, food, shelter or ANYTHING. There are huge swaths of land all over the world where you could live in the wilderness likely your entire life and never see another human being who will bother you. Most of northern Canada and northern Russia and completely unpopulated for hundreds of hectares. Same with lots of the middle part of Australia. If you’re willing to live off the land without modern medicine, communication, entertainment, or societal infrastructure then there’s no one out there to force you to pay for anything.
The author goes off the rails in suggesting an non-human species, which has no benefits of humanity, has to pay for nothing but lives and dies off the land and at the will of other predators and nature, is equal to the life of a human in modern society with modern medicine, agriculture, law, defense, technology and entertainment.
To the author: If you want to live like a non-human species (an animal) there are plenty of places you can do that. No one will stop you. No one will make you pay anything. Have at it! If you want the benefits of other people’s work in a society, then you have to contribute something back to that society that society values. EDIT: I’m removing the last sentence because it needs more context for a much larger argument. The rest of my post stands.*
If you want the benefits of other people’s work in a society, then you have to contribute something back to that society that society values.
Although you have to contribute something that someone else will pay for such as not parenting. Our society disregards parenting even though it gains greatly from its benefit (or in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, suffers greatly when parenting is neglected) While we don’t literally toss our children out to the elements, the degree to which children are disregarded is conspicuous.
And for most of us, we are expected to contribute more than we receive, as demonstrated by the plutocrats who gain from and hoard those profits. For the rest of us, we get meager benefits from living as bonded servants in society, but we don’t get full benefits of mutuality. And for most of us, our benefits exclude healthcare, nutrition, etc. which should be communal. When we have the capacity to automate a particular duty, it is not the rest of us who gain from that benefit, but the elite who cease paying workers to do it.
We’ve yet to see a mutualistic community that assures its wealth and privileges are evenly distributed but we certainly see ones more mutualistic than the ones that have to rely on thought-terminating clichés like Living here is better than living in the wild (and yes, I suspect even all of Canada and Siberia is alloted and owned.) Living here might be better than in the wild, but it is still miserable for the most of us. It’s still feudalism and slavery only with extra obfuscating steps.
And now our civilization careens towards high existential risk, and we’re going to see if it really is easier to imagine the end of humanity or the end of capitalism.
Although you have to contribute something that someone else will pay for such as not parenting.
I’m sorry, that’s not allowed by the premise of the OP’s post. The OP’s post is making an attempt to say that only human’s have to pay to exist.
Under that narrative, you’re welcome to embrace the parenting style of non-human species. I believe that mostly means scattering your reproductive DNA in various ways in a numbers game hoping a small number of your offspring actually make it to adulthood to reproduce on their own while the rest of your offspring die of exposure the elements, predation by other species higher on the food chain, or easily preventable diseases.
OP’s post encourages you to embrace the superior lifestyle of non-human species!
Hachyderm post by user Scott Santens @scottsantens reading
"We’re the only species who must pay to exist.
“In a private property system where all the land was claimed by others before we were born, and everything we need to stay alive costs money, unconditional #basicincome is a basic 👏 human 👏 right 👏 to the resources we all need to exist.”
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While I generally agree with the overall sentiment and like the idea of UBI, saying we’re the only species that pays to exist doesn’t seem right. We’re the only one that uses money, so of course we’re the only species that has would pay money to exist. However, other species all over the world, many right outside our doorsteps, live much harder lives than we do and pay with their lives if they make a mistake. If I had to choose between working a job and being out in the great outdoors having to farm/hunt/craft and such to survive, I’d choose having a job, which is a choice we all pretty much make anyways. At any point I could quit my job, walk out the door, and live with just the clothes on my back… and I would probably not be able to hack it. It’s not much of a choice and it’s pretty much coercion, but the choice is there.
I didn’t write the original post, but did post it and it’s informative how much people get caught on that phrase. My take is that people are paying a gatekeeper. It’s not about “does it take effort to live” or an appeal to return to nature. It’s, “you have to work to live, plus you have to work extra so someone else doesn’t have to work.”
Not sure I’d lead with that specific phrase in the future, but it does seem to have generated a lot of interest and discussion.
Yeah, I get the overall idea, I’m just being pedantic. You can’t just live your life without paying somebody for the privilege of existence, we’re basically still medieval peasants paying a Lord for the right to live in his fiefdom. If you look over a map of the US/Western world, probably very square foot of land is owned by somebody somewhere. We’re trading the value of our labor, which has been artificially suppressed for the value of a piece of property, which have been artificially inflated. It’s all very one-sided and benefits people who provide seemingly no real value to society.
I don’t think it really is pedantic. The premise of the post was that humanity is somehow unnatural and that leads to our suffering. That universal basic income is somehow more natural. Everything in this world needs to work to survive. Life is not a given. Nature is savage. Brutal and oft uncaring. Often in nature children are eaten for breakfast, the sick are left behind to die alone, and the old starve to death. The few exceptions are created by the creatures who strive towards a social community – like Humans. Something like universal basic income could only be possible because of our efforts thus far. It’s an opportunity that’s never existed before. We just have to seize it.
I don’t think this is true when you can get arrested for trying to sleep outside or even just being I’m one place for too long. Vagrancy laws have been around for a very long time and have always been predatory. They used to be able to make someone a slave for not having a home. In the US our 13th amendment says you can legally be made a (prison) slave for committing “a crime”.
Working for oneself (the way wild critters do it) is fundamentally different from paying to exist. Capitalism creates a minority of people for whom all the necessary work of staying alive is simply done by other people, and a majority of people who must do more work than would be strictly necessary to sustain themselves because they have to sustain themselves and the people whose only contribution is that they’ve been arbitrarily designated the “owners” of the things we need to live. That’s what we mean by “humans are the only species that has to pay to exist”. In order for me to live, I have to create more real, material wealth than is actually necessary for my survival because someone else is entitled to use the threat of violence in order to keep me from the wealth I create (the only real definition of ownership is the right to use violence to enforce exclusivity).
UBI is just another populist handout, what We need is affordable housing and food not more money for it, making it partially state-run and/or controlled would make people look more optimistic about the future.
Let’s plot it out: Who would be eligible for the affordable housing and food? What will we do to make sure it’s affordable? How will people get it?
Do you think that all people ought to have a place to live and enough to eat? If so, one appeal of UBI is it’s simple (compared to alternatives) to implement. Everyone gets it, and each individual can sort out the details.
I wasn’t asking those questions as a gotcha, when we talk about this stuff I like to think through how the implementation would look.
For UBI the federal government would pay it. It would be perpetual. If someone wasn’t receiving the payment presumably they could file a suit, although it would seem unlikely to be an issue since it’s pretty straightforward. Unlike means tested benefits, it’s not complicated to determine who would be a recipient.
While you’re not wrong, prices need to come down, a UBI is probably the easiest thing we could implement literally overnight, cut back on some of the more aggressive welfare we currently have, save money overall and improve outcomes for a very large number of people. It’s not a fix-all, never was, but it’s a huge first step.
Yeah, I’ve been pointing this out since it kinda clicked in my mind and I realized this (which, to my shame, took quite a while).
Most of us are not born free because to have a roof over our heads and food in our table we have to work within the system and get paid what the system allows us to get, since we can’t just occupy a piece of land, build a house and farm it.
We have at best “limited” freedom, depending on nationality (for example, an EU passport lets you easilly try to live in in quite a list of countries), opportunities (i.e. is Education free and good quality were you grew up) and the biggest one, how much money and connections do mommy and daddy have - all of which dictate the options available to us, but only a tiny number (the sons and daughters of the rich) have full freedom.
That is one ‘Wtf first sentence’ if I ever saw it… All other species shit literally anywhere and do not have ready made food. And parents eat children or fling them out of the nest if they can’t feed them all. There are no doctor rats. Watch a documentary or two.
Communists are the only people who believe that we are the only animals that can completely upend and violate the rules of nature that all other animals have to live by.
Senility while sad, isn’t an excuse to go be an open bigot online and abuse others. It’s a state sure, but people are allowed their feelings about you being inappropriate to them.
Maybe you should sit down when it comes to conversations about who’s smart.
And this is coming from a self professed older person btw. So that should mean something. You should know better if I can catch out even your hypocritical moment there.
Universal basic income does not fix inequality, it doesn’t take existing accumulated wealth into account. You get X amount per month, yay, food. Jeff Bezos gets the same and throws it on the money pile without blinking an eye. It will lead to more inflation and you’ll still be poor compared to who’s wealthy. Socially corrected incomes are a way better tool for battling inequality, and in today’s world’s, it shouldn’t anymore cost a million-person bureaucracy to run a wealth-distributing system either.
If anything they’ll pay loads to smart people who can help them calculate the absolute minimum, taking away your freedom to choose what to eat, when to eat, where to live, how to live etc.
I get the sentiment, but they will create the absolute worst possible outcome as it benefits them the most.
That’s quite a shallow take on the whole thing. Universal Income’s main impacts are indirect and affect the whole of society, for example:
It allows people to give it a go as inventors or artists at any point of their lifes, rather than the traditional 2 points of “young adult still getting money from your parents” and “having retired (for a few by having made so much money that can retire early) and do what he or she always wanted to do”.
It places a floor on all incomes. Specifically if Universal Income is high enough so that people can afford housing and food from it alone, nobody will ever accept any jobs paying the same or less - all jobs will have to offer something beyond it to attract any workers.
Less crime because the sorts of crimes that desperate people commit and other “low yield” petty crimes will pretty much dissapear because they’re not worth the risk and people don’t need to do it.
As for means testing it or not, it really boils down to the complexity and cost associated with means testing: if it’s cheaper if not means tested, why do it? It suspect Jeff Bezos’ “pleasure” in getting Universal Income will be nothing next to what the losses from not to being able to pay shit salaries and treat his workers like shit anymore will make him feel.
Then they’ll tie eligibility for UBI to being employed or seeking if able or having some sort of medical excuse for not being able and we’re back here.
Whilst I wouldn’t say that would be the case for certain, it does sound like a genuine possibility for a trully Universal (rather than in name only) UBI.
Those are the advantages of a redistributional, social security safety net income and a minimum wage. UBI does not deliver, because EVERYONE gets it. It is impossible that for example housing prices would stay the same. They’d rise, because now the kid with the rich parent still outbids you: (UBI) vs (UBI + rich parents), the inequality in society stays the same, at best. It would only work if accumulated capital is redistributed equally over everyone as well. Which is communism.
Social corrections to existing system are superior. Not everyone should get the same. Some people need more, some need less.
Yes, everyone should have the right to good housing, food and to live stressfree (that is, with a bit of a financial buffer instead of pay cheque to pay cheque), but UBI will not accomplish that. Social-democratic systems such as Western and northern Europe already have, do, to reasonable extent.
A well implemented UBI would be funded by a progressive tax system that taxes rich people more heavily that anyone else. If that is the case a rich persons taxes would end up increasing more than the UBI amount. At the same time everyone else’s taxes may increase some but the UBI would more than cover the increase. That would lead to a net decrease in inequality.
Social corrections to existing system are superior. Not everyone should get the same. Some people need more, some need less.
A UBI as described above is a social correction. In essence it would redistribute money from those who have plenty of excess money to those who are struggling.
but UBI will not accomplish that.
This is just your opinion. How do you know it won’t accomplish that when it has never been implemented at scale?
Social-democratic systems such as Western and northern Europe already have, do, to reasonable extent.
Ultimately a UBI can achieve a similar end result as the social-democratic systems. The key is in making sure it is implemented well. UBI is just a way of achieving the same goal in a different way.
How would socially corrected incomes work? You tell the government you made $500k this year and they tell you that you can keep $400k?
You’re right that UBI does not create equality, it’s just a floor for basic needs being covered. It’s probably a little more palatable politically (ha) than socially corrected incomes.
I would argue we need other systemic changes like anti-monopoly enforcement, stronger unions and massive worker cooperatives to even start to address inequality, because of the disparity in power.
On top it’s also how the entire tax system works, and for good reason.
You earn 500k.
First 100k: 10% tax. second 100k: 20% tax. … Last 100k: 50% tax.
You make more, you contribute more. That’s how the dream worked very well for a long time. It’s just that the higher tax brackets went down and down and down… giving everyone random money for nothing every month fixes no social inequality issues at all. Potentially making it worse.
You’ve got the “from each according to their ability” part. The tax and welfare system we have now is missing the “to each according to their needs” part. A UBI is literally an overnight thing we can implement now, to vastly improve the lives of the most downtrodden, and it’ll save money in the long run for the government.
That’s sort of how it works yes. Most western countries already have similar things. If you, for example, make less than 1200 € per month, you get an extra 300 € to get to what is theoretically needed to survive. In Belgium it’s called “leefloon”. In Germany it’s “Burgergeld”. It is the very lowest anyone can “earn”. You only need to prove residence and a few other things (they want to shield the system from recent migrants), the bar for being eligible is very low, the main factor is your (lack of) income. The tier ‘higher’ is unemployment money. It’s a nicer cheque, but you have to “actively search for a job”. You need to have worked and contributed to this system for x years to be eligible. Both exclude people who clearly don’t need a UBI. Which is why it’s superior. There is 0 societal benefit from giving wealthy people more money for no reason whatsoever. The main issue with the existing systems is that taxes for the wealthy and corps got too damn low to support it, and that such systems require a big bureaucracy to verify who is eligible and who isn’t, and to guide them towards social housing, education, jobs etc. Tho the second argument becomes less and less valid in a digital age. 95 % of needed information I’d already in government databases.
In the states I believe the process you’re describing is called “means testing.” It’s how the government determines whether someone can receive food stamps or other government assistance: checking first if they really need it, do they have the means to buy food, etc.
The advantage of UBI is that the question of who has a right to claim the benefit is completely sidestepped, and so is the accompanying bureaucracy and barriers.
You’re right, rich people don’t need UBI. At the same time - much harder to complain about something everyone gets. Much harder to take back a right that all citizens have, than “charity” that only the powerless receive. Harder to call people “welfare queens”.
We’re born slaves to society. We are not free. Everything in the end has the threat of violence if you don’t do what society wants you to do.
Best case you can go forage in the “wild”, but its claimed wild. There is no free land. The freest people are perhaps homeless people, because there is almost nothing you can threaten them with, they have nothing to lose, in a way, its the only freedom that exists.
If you stop paying rent or your mortgage, you will be forcibly removed by a trainer killer. If you resist, you may be killed in an altercation and become a statistic. If you don’t pay taxes, you may end up in a cage, or perhaps killed by another trainer killer in a mishap.
When you “buy” a house, you are renting the land, sure it temporarily has your name on the deed, and you own the house itself, until you stop paying property taxes, then another trainer killed will come take it from you, perhaps put you in a cage. Don’t even get me started on HOAs, the wrong color paint could cause you to lose your life’s savings because a Karen thinks it might lower her property value.
If you don’t raise your kids perfectly, a trainer killer can come take them away from you. Even someone falsely reporting you for improperly raising your kids can cause you to end up losing them. Your kids don’t belong to you, they’re your cute little liabilities, one misstep and the most important thing in your life is taken away from you.
What if I just want to do nothing? Where can I go and just chill, and eat berries, and like the occasional squirrel or whatever? Society won’t permit it, you might end up in a cage, or again killed by a trained killer. Those are someone’s berries, those squirrels are probably a protected species.
You think freedom is not having anyone tell you what you can’t do.
You think homeless people don’t constantly get told what they can’t do
You don’t think freedom is being free to live the life you want.
In other words, someone dumped in the middle of the Sahara without food or water, and a pair of broken legs will just love being the freest person on earth until their death in a few hours.
I think homeless people feel free because they are unburdened by the pressures that society puts on all of us. You’re probably just so used to the burden, having never lived without it, it would be unfamiliar to not carry that weight.
I did not propose an alternative, just that, we are not free. Its a lie we tell ourselves.
Freedom to die, suffering while there’s (as far as you claim - I disagree) no-one to tell you what to do isn’t freedom. Freedom to live the way you want is freedom.
I’m well aware of the pressures that have been put upon me, but ignoring them and suffering the incredible, myriad of consequences for doing so simply isn’t freedom (not in any worthwhile sense) - if it were, why aren’t you homeless? I’m not suggesting for a moment that we’re all free.
It’s the difference between largely pointless negative freedoms, and meaningful positive freedoms.
Yea, I mean you’re not particularly free if you can’t sleep anywhere without either drunk people assaulting you or a land owner kicking you out, or if you need to constantly worry about finding electrical outlets just to keep your phone charged or worry about finding a tap or water fountain to get water. And you’re never able to eat actually pleasant food because you can’t even access a cooker or even a microwave/toaster and you almost certainly can’t afford food that is prepared for you.
I can only imagine their image of being homeless is having one of those vans that cost like $40k USD to kit out with pretty much everything you would have in a house… in which case yea I guess that would be pretty liberating but you should probably specify that if it’s what you mean.
Not all homeless people live on the sidewalk of SF, some live in the woods in a tent somewhat content just out of society’s way to try to deal with shit. Source: done that.
He contends that all the clay on Earth was claimed long ago. The competition for resources now unfolds according to rules set by individuals, groups or organizations. In some cases, this struggle is even more intense than animal behavior, particularly when it occurs at the organized state level.
Please go watch a documentary or two. If you’re looking at your device and just about to flush the toilet right now, you have very little to compare to as a species.
I assumed he meant we shit everywhere and do away with doctors while we let parasites eat our brain. No half assing this. Quick: let’s chuck all our devices immediately and eat nits.
The Billionaire has better odds, tbh. He has more guns, cars, fuel, connections, etc. You’ll have to fight off all his armed guards and family first. If the power structure of mankind stopped working, a whole new one would pop up overnight. One much more brutal where your value is not decided with your input taken into account.
Fight a gorrilla or a lion and see if all the others just stand back and watch you attack their boi. The rule of the jungle protects those who have immediate access to resources.
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