[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

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Reduction. All things in moderation, including moderation. Reduction is a triumph, if it captures what you're looking for. And fiat currency has done great things for the world, a cultural technology that allows us to explore possibilities we wouldn't have otherwise explored. Financial instruments have allowed us to spread ownership across demographics that would never have been allowed based on real property.

But those instruments are a reconstruction of the space that currency reduced out. And I think we're seeing that the reconstruction is trending dysfunctional. So, it's time to reconsider the initial reduction and, importantly, why the reconstruction isn't a cover for the original (full) space.

We are doing that in both ad-hoc ways (e.g. the Psychology today article, finding other dimensions by which to bolster the reduction) and fundamental ways (e.g. transhumanist experimentation of "what are we"). UBI is a reasonable suggestion to reduce suffering. But, ultimately, it's a capitalist suggestion, proposed by *conservatives* who want to prolong the status quo, to milk the current system for as long as they can. That's OK, of course. We try to balance exploitation with exploration and nobody knows crisply when to emphasize which.


On 5/4/21 11:16 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> Ah, now THIS is the Glen I know and love. Your 10:00 post rekindled old rage concerning the incentive-value of money.  Here I go.  Up on my high horse.  Hi, Ho, Silver. Budda bump, budda bump, budda bump, bump, bump.
> 
> The very little Marxism I know tells me that it is the "triumph" of capitalism to reduce all relationships to money.  This seems right to rich people because the richer you get, the truer it becomes.  I can imagine Besos, Gates, and Musk falling asleep at night, musing about which of them will first reach a trillion.  If you've lost your soul and you've lost your wife, what else could they possibly want.  Such people even turn women into a kind of coinage.  (Cue Waspish Moral Outrage).   But isn't that the point of UBI; that it frees people to think about something else?  And yes, what IS this so-called "productivity"?  The "happy ditch digger" and the "carefree slave" are all part of the same self-serving capitalist iconography.  I am sure there are people who love to dig ditches, but if that's what they love to do, give them a thousand dollars a month for free and let them dig ditches for Habitat for Humanity in Peru, if that's what they feel like doing.  
> 
> Glen, keeping your ad hominem firmly in mind, I am again going to use your post as opportunity to flog my old work which argues that it is capitalism's reduction of all ambition to coinage that makes it so toxic.  

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