[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

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Using wooden chits *and* US dollars limits overly reductive conceptions of money. It's fine to play word games and point out ambiguity in the usage of the term "money". But it should be clear that, like with languages, having diverse types of money is less reductive than 1 type of money. I'd no more want to rid the world of Yen than I'd want to rid the world of, say, Farsi. Here lie many of our disagreements about hooking one nation's money to another nation's money.

Options are contracts. You can trade contracts without money. We do it all the time with, say, "quit claim" deeds. While the overwhelming majority of these trades use money, my claim is that money isn't *necessary*. Of course, it may be effective and efficient.

This conversation is about the accumulation of capital and UBI as a band-aid to help maintain a society under the tendency to accumulate capital. In that larger conversation, reduction to a singular, grand unified measure like a single money, like USD, washes away the variation in ways to store value. Storing value in Yuan, as opposed to Euros, actually means something (at least Putin thinks so). Similarly, storing value in a .25 acre plot of land with a fairly maintained building on it is different from storing value in gold. Although they can all be *thought of* as money, only a capitalist does so. The rest of us think, say, our espresso machine, is different fundamentally from our pickup truck.

On 5/10/21 8:22 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> As you say, your alternatives are "money writ large." So how does that eliminate money? It just changes its form. 
> 
> I don't understand how options further your position. How do you trade them without something like money?


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