chris8535

I have to say while I applaud your goals, I think you have a conceptually flawed view of the forces that make society work.

Labor has never been free, and overly free labor becomes wildly expensive (as seen already with the inflation of labor due to covid money). I’m not going to place a judgement on that merely point out that power is what uses capital. And power wants cheap labor and I think you’ll have a hard time arguing otherwise.

The “liberal” powers you speak of in Silicon Valley I think you severely misunderstand how sociopathic they are. They imagine a Ayn Rand like world where UBI is more like rations for a large poor demographic in society while they remain in charge via control of those rations distribution. To believe they are allies in your notion of freedom is to misunderstand how they manipulate ideologies like yours for other end goals. Just look at Facebook, it’s about trading in the idea of your relationships — but we all know it’s about manipulating you for advertising revenue.

Second if you are honest with yourself you’re going to have to come up with a societally easy to understand argument as to why this isn’t just covid stimulus 2, which broadly resulted in the rich getting richer as most of the money went to poor and working class people who spent it on goods and services that recuperated and aggregated back into the hands of wealth. And that’s not even mentioning those who just yolod it on bitcoin and scams.

Ultimately covid as pretty strong proof that UBI can make inequality worse as those using it will not build engines of creation but rather consumption — which is fine — if you are ownership class.

I’d suggest if you really are serious about UBI you form a coherent argument on why communist Russia failed to work, specifically what it did to the population, and why the sort of communist style rationing is really different than UBI.

Just my two cents.

We could debate this forever of course but corporations can only continue raising prices/margins to customers when there is free money available for them to vacuum up with pricing.

If it’s not there then this goes away.

It’s already resetting with higher interest rates. And companies are desperately trying to find ways to keep their margin.

Sorry I'll take the downvotes but I'm starting to really doubt you since your window of analysis here is way off. Real wages through covid in america were UP significantly and consumer spend was UP significantly, most due to much greater savings and spending power. This is going away, but resulted in... inflation -- corporations of course vacuumed it up and got increased margins and profit, but it was fade now. Thats literally why the fed set interest rates high and is trying to spur layoffs. They want the people to suffer enough to stop driving inflation.

To be fair in that equation OdderGiant is entitled to some fraction as the tree itself is rented in part from him. So if you think through the story yes, some tiny bit of rentier value is owed him.

This quaint little story always inadvertently points out what Companies do. They steal a shared resource then claim they are owed all the value due to their labor extraction. I’d argue they are owed some or maybe most, but certainly not all.

Also that John guy later would turn around and buy more trees and of course flip his story and claim someone else should do the work and he is owed rent.

This story is a great illustration of the talking out of both sides of their mouths corporate leaders are.

Whats the difference, who cares of its wasteful if its still net cheaper than the alternative?