this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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The context is that there is enough wealth in most western countries that not everyone must work to survive. Working should be for having access to more things that just surviving, and not everyone should be required to work all the time just to survive.
Basic needs are basic, like food, shelter, and healthcare. If everyone had access to those basic things they would be free even if they need to work to attain more.
Someone still has to work for those things to be produced.
True, but how many people actually work to make that happen?
Most people I know work for a company that works for a company to increase the profit of another company.
Also, at what point do you tip into you-dont-get-choose-your-job land? Is it still considered freedom if you are required to have a job to serve basic needs of the larger community? For example, we need more doctors even without universal healthcare in the US. If we covered the basic needs of everyone, wouldn't we have to require some people to become doctors, who are not on that trajectory today?
If doctors would be paid what managers are paid today, I'm sure there will be enough incentive. Essential jobs need to pay what they're worth, which is more than any other jobs
A lot of those businesses still need to exist for society to function. They could be restructured into non-profits, but they'll still exist.
There will always be a need for jobs that people aren't going to just do for the hell of it. No one enjoys breaking their back harvesting crops or digging ditches.
I'm not saying the current system is any good, but the idea of no one having to work if they don't want to is not obtainable without some serious advances in robotics.
If harvesting crops would pay six figures, I'm sure there'd be enough willing people
Where's that money going to come from?
The point of UBI isn't to allow anyone to not work if they don't want to. It's so that everyone can live securely while still contributing to keeping society running, and allow those who can't work to live without worry about survival.
You can't have UBI without workers. It's still working to survive, just with a massive safety net.
From net worth of all millionaires and billionaires, where it's not currently being used for anything worthwhile.
UBI is only the first step towards actual redistribution of wealth
Even if you could wave a magic wand and magically convert all that net worth straight across into that amount of cold hard cash, it wouldn't pay for a measly $10k UBI for all working-age Americans for more than two years.
Then what's the plan? That 10k costs over $2 trillion.
Get this, those billionaires control the production and distribution of these basic necessities, and attributing a monetary figure to it is the problem. It doesn't cost money, it costs labor. You get the labor in exchange for fun stuff. This is the crux of the issue. We need a system that can't be gamed to incentivize hoarding whatever it is we use to denote the worth of labor, as cash does today.
It has nothing to do with cost, it has to do with ridding the problem of the people hoarding the excess wealth for the benefit of an arbitrary group. Where the labor comes do the profits go. If a private individual puts in labor, and that generates a profit from itself, then yeah, they get that. They earned that. The nuance is that they have a community, infrastructure, all of the things supporting their ability to do anything, so any profit comes from the community in some fashion.
We need to get rid of systems of hoarding. 100% tax above whatever 100x the poverty line is, for everyone, that gets dumped into government coffers to subsidize all essential labor. This incentivizes the extra profits to go to the UBI coffers instead of individuals while still giving a huge ceiling to make extra money for labor that generates profit.
I'm just reiterating what Marx was saying. We need to stop focusing on the money aspect and focus on the labor.
Then, hopefully, during those 2 years of not having to be afraid for their lives if they lose a job, working-age Americans would get together and establish actual socialism
Things like this is why Dems lost the election
This kind of make believe talk makes you look as if you live in another reality apart from your voters
And then you guys ask yourselves why you lost The election?
You don't see it
Are these dems in the room with us right now?
$10k would definitely not make me stop caring about whether I lose my job, lol.
That networth isn't cash on hand. It's comprised of assets that can't be instantly converted into cash.
And like the other person said, it's not nearly enough for UBI.
I specifically mean those companies that do not directly add to the jobs that "need" to be done.
My feeling is that more people work bullshit jobs because they pay better than e.g. harvesting crops or driving a bus.
Those are low requirement jobs
Almost every body able citizen with a license can drive
Almost every body abled citizen can harvest a crop
Not EVERYONE wants to do it, so they invest time and money into themselves to get a skill level that will allow them to get a job in something else not related to the thing they don't like
But that was in the old days or with low ROI enterprises
Now most modern agriculture is done with automation, gps tracking and smart systems
Your average crop picker doesn't matter anymore
They'd need to be more knowledgeable to not only be in a new harvester cabin, but understand the training that comes with it
They work bullshit jobs because harvesting crops and driving a bus are shitty jobs that basically no one wants to do.
I used to work those shitty jobs, and pay wasn't the issue
If more people would work those jobs, each would have to do less of it
You make them then. Force them to do it.
There is a vast gap between "most people need to work for everyone in society to live comfortably" and "every individual needs their own personal income to survive".
The amount of brainwashing and propaganda is incredible. People actually just can't imagine a world where they're not toiling for their bosses.
It's insane. And any attempt to argue against it is shut down immediately. This post (https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?v=3) is one of the most digestible things I've seen for the scale at which those people hoard wealth. It's so easy to follow and understand how the world could be better if those people didn't exist. But anyone I try talking to says "oh I'm not going to read all that" or "scrolling through that will take too long" ...which is exactly the fucking point. And this is from 4 years ago! Their wealth has only increased while our buying power has gone down.
While I don’t disagree. there don’t have to be dragons hoarding all the wealth making us fight among ourselves to survive
An asset appreciating in value does not deprive anyone else of money in their wallet.
If you bought a rookie baseball card for $5, the player had a great year and now the card's worth $100, your net worth increased by $95. But who is down $95 as a result of your card becoming more valuable?
Nobody. Wealth is not zero sum. And the vast majority of increases in wealth among the wealthiest is newly-created wealth. You literally can't become a billionaire in a human lifetime simply by short-changing your workers. A linear increase like that just will not get you there.
Also, wealth in the form of purchased investments into businesses that run within the economy, is literally the opposite of hoarding. If you buy things with your money, you're not hoarding your money.
but an asset appreciating in value off the back of another persons labor deprives the laborer of their fair share
Were they not paid for their time in a consensual agreement?
That’s not the gotcha you think it is. They get the shit end of the stick and if they ask for more they get shown the door and if people gang up and try to form a union the capitalist police state send goons to break it up because how dare the proles ask for more money.
The point is that technology means a fraction of the population can feed and house the rest, and that fraction doesn't need to live like royalty, and the rest don't need to live in servitude for that exchange to happen.
Don't you want others to enjoy your success with you? Apply that principle to all of humanity the world over, and you have what could be, if we just stopped waring over hoards.
Nowhere in your comment did you refute the fact that it's currently not possible to have a society where no one has to work. There still has to be human labor.
I said nothing about the distribution of wealth or supporting our current system.
I don't think even OP or OC meant that nobody would work. But "work" as we imagine it now need not exist. Most specialist roles are fulfilling enough that people do them enthusiastically and with passion. It would be first and foremost a worker lead economy, rather than people being desperate for jobs. Companies need to buy talent in a more competitive market instead, in all industries not just the specialisations.
I imagine there's still a wealth hierarchy but it's a lot less dispirate and follows meritocratic lines, including the merit of being willing to get your hands dirty doing dirty or dangerous work not currently possible to automate. And obviously being very talented at sport, music, art, comedy, etc such that people want to spend any excess wealth they have on supporting them or buying access to their content (like now).
It's not so different from now, it's just the continued progressive advancement of what we see in many European nations already.