[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[uǝlƃ ↙↙↙]

Well, there are smarter people than me, who know more about Marxism than I do, on this list. But it seems there are ~5 principles to guide it:

• civilization is already a cooperative enterprise, it's just a matter of cooperation's extent/ubiquity
• there's nothing supernatural, so all solutions have to be built on science
• innovation, technology, culture, etc. are limited only by nature; so in principle the things we build (including governments) can be as big and complex as the natural world
• class is a cultural construct; we create it; hence we can eliminate it
• the spectral signature of organization sizes is present in nature and should be mirrored in society (e.g. power laws for org sizes, small world networks, etc)

None of this implies the elimination of money. Reduction to a single dimension is just fine *when* it works. But when it doesn't work, it has to be "fleshed out" with other structure. Contracts are such a structure. We use contracts all the time to flesh out our money-based transactions. And contracts need not be simply pairwise (as Pieter seemed to imply with his conception of a free market). Contracts can be between any number of groups or individuals ... they nest.

The trick is with the legal system and spatiotemporal extension. When the lawyers draw up a contract and the courts judge an alleged breach, there's spatial extent that we can't codify (unintended consequences, externalities). And do contracts have higher order effects (extend to descendants, siblings, business partners, etc.)? Designing a legal system to align with the 5 basic principles above would, I think, produce something very unlike capitalism ... but maybe not whatever it is the Marxists imagine would emerge.

I'm sure the above is too vague. But it's the best I can do. As I tried to make clear *I* have no idea what could replace capitalism. I don't even understand socialism. Smarter people than me would have to work it out.


On 5/5/21 4:15 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Earlier, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ said: If we're stuck with capitalism, then I'm for UBI. If we can get out from under capitalism, then I'm not.  Nick added: it is the "triumph" of capitalism to reduce all relationships to money. 
> 
> I wonder if this is not assuming that there is an alternative to what you are calling /capitalism/. As uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ points out, co-ops can work on relatively small scales, but if we are going to live in groups of larger than ~150 people, how are you imagining that we will arrange interactions without something like money? Even on small scales, how will a collective without money organize itself in anything other than a very static structure? And on larger scales, what is the organizing principle other than power? It's not clear to me how an alternative that uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ is supposing possible will actually work.  uǝlƃ ↙↙↙, would you mind elaborating what you have in mind?

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↙↙↙ uǝlƃ