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You guys seriously don't think they'd really use UBI, do you? Heck, they'd mandate sterilization of those too poor and also cut off benefits to people deemed too old to keep around by socialized medicine or not good enough for the society due to disability, poverty, etc. That's what would happen.
Please, don't trust the Zuckerberg billionaire types or the socialist (really Communist) politician types with your future and the fate of future generations. Tens of millions (possibly into the 100's of millions now) of people have made that tragic mistake throughout history and paid with their lives!
You guys seriously don't think they'd really use UBI, do you? Heck, they'd mandate sterilization of those too poor and also cut off benefits to people deemed too old to keep around by socialized medicine or not good enough for the society due to disability, poverty, etc. That's what would happen.
Please, don't trust the Zuckerberg billionaire types or the socialist (really Communist) politician types with your future and the fate of future generations. Tens of millions (possibly into the 100's of millions now) of people have made that tragic mistake throughout history and paid with their lives!
Also remember, it won't necessarily start off this way. The beta programs will be very successful, because they will be engineered to be. It is when masses of people start buying into this and those at the top start wondering why all this "extra labor" is around and what to do with it. Then the cull begins. Clandestinely at first of course, but picking up speed. Many will play right into it, giving up rights here and there for fear of losing the benefits they get "for free" or by feeling it is their duty to "humanity" or the world to become more and more controlled. The cage will come up, but it will be a golden cage at first with soft bedding. It isn't until those last bars latch that things will get nasty.
Also remember, it won't necessarily start off this way. The beta programs will be very successful, because they will be engineered to be. It is when masses of people start buying into this and those at the top start wondering why all this "extra labor" is around and what to do with it. Then the cull begins. Clandestinely at first of course, but picking up speed. Many will play right into it, giving up rights here and there for fear of losing the benefits they get "for free" or by feeling it is their duty to "humanity" or the world to become more and more controlled. The cage will come up, but it will be a golden cage at first with soft bedding. It isn't until those last bars latch that things will get nasty.
I would not be surprised if it is not already happening, I have talked to people that have know of transient people that just disappear, of course they are transient so no one thinks much of it. I know our city hates homeless people and they are always trying to craft laws to make life harder for them (police harrasment, if they are known transients they are not allowed into the city centers without risking police harrasment, police busting up their camps in the woods and taking their stuff, etc, etc). There are people that target them for murder, we had homeless people being killed at an alarming rate a few years ago and the media said oh it must have been a serial killer, yea uncle sam. What serial killer just decides one day that they are just going to start killing homless (at the same time that the city is creating all these laws against them). Serial killers usually have a reason (other than in very rare instances) to kill the people they kill.
I dont think thing will ever get "hunger games" nasty, our govt is smart, very smart, they will cull people out as soon as they fall to the edge of society. Cars parked in parking lots late at night that are fogged up, oh man a police shoot out sucks to be him he must have had drugs. He was living in his car and had a joint, cops totally had to put him down. Old veteran guy riding around on your electric wheel chair who refuses to go to a nursing home (so they can give you a leathal injection), ope car lost control put out some flares and clean it up (of course it just so happens that this car had a reinforced bumper so no damage was done).
The only time it will go to mraps and militarized police is if people start rioting, then they will go in hard and kill alot of people, of course it will be accidental deaths due to medical conditions and the tear gas (with just a tiny bit of syrin nerve gas blended in) and not so rubber bullets (but not metal either).
So dont fall to the edges and if you think you might get out of the USA. As long as people are working like good slaves and dont get sick then you can stay, but as soon as that changes you better be smarter than the govt because once you appear to be a transient and the police state identify you, your done, better off to go live in a cabin in the sticks or even move to siberia. Russia is slowly going to the way the USA used to be and the USA is slowly going towards facism. My understanding is the days of secret police killing people in Russia is over, now we are taking the baton.
In the end, I'm not trying to convince the die-hards. They will do their duty for humanity and gaia giving up their freedoms, marching into their new "sustainable" hovels in order to get hand outs, and as you put it being "population managed". That is not what "UBI" means to you. But that is really what it means to those who often push it from the top, if you take the time to really listen. Those who will will, those who buy the psyop, well good luck...
And you're a conspiracy theorist -- and the ironic thing about you lot is that you're actually correct that conspiracies do exist but totally incorrect which ones....
So you folks are worried about contrails, mind control, 9/11, the Illuminati, Bilderberg Group, etc., etc., etc., et al. but absolutely miss the very real conspiracies right in front of us: millionaire and billionaires buying national and state-level politicians, upper middle-class petite bourgeoisie and non-profit and organized labor leaders buying off local politicians, Russians doing to the U.S. what the U.S. through its C.I.A. did to Chileans, Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Greeks, Turks, Sicilians, Argentinians, Dominicans, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, etc., etc., etc. et al.
alot of people don't go to suburb or rural areas b/c there aren't enough jobs.
And here's how UBI would absolutely help dramatically with that (and why it should be "universal" and not contingent on need or anything other factor, it seems to me):
1 -- Many people would go live in those economically dead communities due to the lower costs of living, thereby revitalizing all the local economies.
2 -- UBI needs to be just barely sufficient for big towns like NYC and LA but quiet good for those rural/semi-rural places in order to encourage such a migration and revitalization; big towns relieve price pressures as a result, too, for true win-win outcomes.
The "universal" part -- the whole point of UBI is that it's not contingent based...like a right, not a privilege; "universal" in its most complete sense.
You start attaching terms and conditions on it and it becomes a far cry from what it's supposed to be...a bit like what happened in Orwell's Animal Farm: all animals are equal -- but some are more equal than others (it winds up being eventually).
It'll be the end of UBI, guaranteeing its death by crippling it, ensuring we get right back to where we started with our present situation of a morass of ineffectual policies and the bloated administrations charged with implementing and overseeing them, all in the end simply giving further fodder to the "conservative canon" (pun intended) about how socialist ideas just don't work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by oceangaia
To guarantee a minimum level of income? A community service element doesn't change that. Check.
It absolutely does. You need another administrative layer to oversee and implement this community service element -- thereby adding to the costs of UBI, which will lose you your support from fiscal conservatives and libertarians alike.
And don't forget the disputes...what counts as community service? What if it's against someone's religion, interests, capabilities, whatever??
In Germany a few years ago, there was a case of a local employment office insisting that a woman work as a prostitute (prostitution is legal in Germany and many of the other more socially advanced societies) or lose her benefits. An extreme example, to be sure, but you'll need so many administrative layers just to properly implement your community service proposal that UBI will wind up looking like welfare as we know/knew it...going against the whole point of UBI.
Quote:
Originally Posted by oceangaia
To free people from "mind-numbing soul-crushing work"? A small community service requirement leaves them free 6-1/2 days of the week to be creative and philosophical. Check..
Again, it distorts the intention of UBI and, in the here and now, costs support.
Quote:
Originally Posted by oceangaia
There would obviously be exceptions for those medically unable to do anything. And the service might even include taking a college course. The point being that everyone has to contribute in some way to be a member of society in good standing.
Admin, admin, admin and thus costs, costs, costs (and we're not even talking about disputes)...do you actually have any experience running an organization??
I'm not being snarky or insulting -- I really mean it. I don't think you understand the practical implications of what you propose at all.
You also act like the people who would benefit from UBI are the only ones who are not moral.
And as I keep saying, our most fundamental disagreements come from not understanding what, exactly, is a human being.
Not to hijack the thread but really all our disagreements over UBI come about from not realizing the true nature of a human being.
It's a very complicated thing and perhaps we can go into in-depth it here, but suffice it to say for now that people are at their core "moral" and, as Karl Marx had pointed out, "productive" -- we were built for work, we were born for labor, we have evolved to innovate...and we are social creatures who inherently want one another's company.
All life has -- it's the very point of life, really -- but we as human beings are at the top of that spectrum (i.e., at the most aware [including self-aware] end)...so all this finger-wringing over whether folks will still work if given UBI, etc., really speaks to a very deep misunderstanding of what a human being is and how the social context of that human being -- the society and its economy -- further forms that human being.
People are moral -- it's a rotten society, born of the evolutionary pressures acting on our innate wills to pleasure, power, and meaning, that makes people immoral.
UBI would be the first step towards a just society where all can prosper and finally be the moral beings they are to begin with.
To paraphrase Warren Buffett the legendary multi-billionaire investor, for all his innate fascination and facility with numbers and making connections between disparate events, if he hadn't been born into just the right household in just the right country at just the right time in world history, his innately high numeracy and intelligence wouldn't have made him a multi-billionaire investor.
UBI would make for more Warren Buffetts -- not to mention Jonas Salks, Albert Einsteins, and Oscar Wildes.
The problem is that US common folk aren't going to be consulted or asked permission to do this. This is going to be mandated by the powers that be. Sure, there may be "voting" on this issue, but the outcome of the voting will of course be predetermined. Like Soviet Communist Joseph Stalin said "the ones that have the power are not the ones who cast the votes, but the ones that count the votes." This can happen under either a Capitalist or Communist regime. It is a cynical but realistic scenario.
Speaking of voting...in addition to all the other tremendous benefits induced, UBI would make for more informed voters, too.
People will actually have time to read and learn and think -- deeply think.
Eventually, anyway!
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