On unconditional basic income

[matrixmann]

"Your unconditional basic income is a nice idea, but here's the flaw in your system: It reestablishes how the old social benefits worked, but it doesn't change anything on the factor "prices". As well as that it doesn't change those facts that still each year it's the goal of all national economies to impress each other by proving how much percentage they can compile in attaching zeroes to the sums of the last year ( = GDP) and that the economy it ought to function in only can keep itself up by generating lots of fictional money that doesn't exist out of credits it didn't hand out to one customer, so it's whole self-asserted "growth" is nothing more than multiplying the sums that have originally been there before a few hundred, a few thousand years ago. In other terms: Not only you keep adjusting the sum each year, you also don't change anything that makes it so nessecary that this basic income needs to exist at all. You only make the circumstances takeable again. But that because you don't really know what you're trying to fight when you talk about "overcoming capitalism".
You're still one of those dreamy starry-eyed idealists that don't know how the world they live in really works."

Comments

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

Here I agree with you. It seems like an attractive idea for some but it is a definition of utopia. It is like giving everyone a million bucks and voila everyone is rich... Yeah, right.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

If everyone had a million dollars, then the price of bread would be like $100,000.

[matrixmann]

This would definitely happen. As the income doesn't abandon the regular book money the world currently functions with.
Capitalists just say then "okay, if people got more money in their pockets, let's gather that money up in our pockets again!".

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

Sure enough and still someone needs to make bread. It won't just appear if people wave million dollars like a magic wand.

[matrixmann]

Nails down something I also often have in mind.

Not even to say: It might be a good utopian imagination, but if the unconditional income is higher than if someone goes to a job daily - even if you let people keep both, their income despite having a job to earn some extra (opposite to most practices of receiving money from the state), it might have that effect that people rather stay at home because work gets them a lot of obstacles and things to do per day, but the reward from that effort just isn't worth starting to work anyway.
But despite the income, you'll still be in need for someone who bakes break or treats other peoples' diseases.

It absolutely changes nothing in the way the current system is run.

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

Exactly, sometimes just expenses and time associated with going to work and being there make it attractive to stay home and save on gas and food and clothes etc. It is like an invitation to a crisis.

[matrixmann]

I often ask - the unconditional income wouldn't be a low sum people received, so how would they finance that sum statewise?
An argument against asking for this is often "they also got money for saving banks doing shit, so they got that money too!", which is correct on that hand, but on the other even that bank-saving and saving-enterprises isn't just for free. They need to raise credits, borrowed from the IMF and what-not, so what have you actually won then? One knows what the policies of institutions like these are, the unconditional income won't survive for long if you've got to beg those for money. So - how you wanna make that?
I never found or received an answer to this. And such circumstances always let me guess "hit it right in the bull's eye", found the hidden error in the picture.

[matrixmann]

I know why I have doubts about this unconditional basic income idea nearly since it started to appear.
It only took my a few years further and a leisure hour to get an idea why and it nails it down very specifically.