This is why we need Land Value Tax, redistributed by UBI.
So disappointing that nobody in this thread has mentioned Georgism
Forgot I had this
OP just needs to find a place where there are remaining indigenous people to bully, or go live where there are still imperial ambitions and a Ukraine that needs to be de-nazified
(Is a slash ‘s’ or smiley still relevant for those who miss that dark humor is also humor?)
— Someone needs a reality check on how many generations it’s been since most developed countries had land left free for the taking. It’s not new that a scarce commodity is an expensive commodity
— Someone also needs a reality check on which land is in demand and which not. It’s still possible to find land cheap- in places people don’t want to live. Even back when we could bully indigenous people, settlers were still looking for land where no one wanted to farm
— Are you really saying UBI is not necessary, if a snowflake can claim land for next to nothing in a rundown town or desert/wilderness area?
This bit about free land is exactly why the term “snowflake” exists
We also need the minimum wage to be double what a living wage would be
Henry George had it right - Just Tax Land
A lot of people here are making comparisons to animals in nature, but there’s one big difference. Yes, animals have to work to survive, but they’re not born into debt. Humans effectively are because we need things like housing that are already owned by someone, and they’re free to change exorbitant prices for letting other people use what they own. At least in nature no animal can own more territory than it can personally control, and when it dies the territory is up for grabs by other animals that need it.
and when it dies the territory is up for grabs by other animals that need it.
BEFORE it dies. That’s what your stupid romanticizing doesn’t get. The animal kingdom didn’t get together and decode, “okay, leapord #378, you get these two acres here, and leapord #379, you get those two acres…”
Leapord has to fight and struggle every day to cling to his acres and eventually he’ll get to old or sick and someone will kill him and take it from him.
This is such a ridiculous conversation to be having with anyone over the age of 12. The world is not a Disney movie. Animals in the wild live short, brutal lives.
You obviously didn’t understand a goddamn word of what I wrote if you think I’m romanticizing anything. I’ll cop to not explaining well, but you’re still an asshole putting words in my mouth. Nowhere did I suggest an animal doesn’t have to defend its territory. Allow me to clarify.
First, there are no animal billionaires. An animal can’t force thousands of other animals into starvation because it controls a thousand times more territory than it needs.
Second, there is no inheritance. You don’t see situations like we have now where property stays in a single family for generation after generations. THAT is what I meant by “up for grabs”, not some Disney movie animals living in harmony shit. Animals compete for territory all the time, but they at least don’t have to worry about old, sick or dead animals controlling all the territory. Each new generation of animals starts from the same place as the ones before it rather than starting out way behind the offspring of a small minority of the previous generation.
Sure there is inheritance in the wild, it’s called eusociality. Any animal group that holds territory fights to hold it and passes on that territory to their offspring. “Each new generation of animals starts from the same place” is definitely a romanticization of how non-human animal society works. Lion prides fight for the best hunting territory, leaving the weaker group to starve in poorer territory. Same for wolves, same for most primates, and these are just the easy ones off the top of my head.
The original “old, dead animal” that took the prime territory in the first place continues to control all the territory because his offspring and family group get the most resources and have the advantage in fighting to defend it. The only reason there are no animal billionaires is because seasonal resource scarcity cannot be overcome without agriculture and ability to plan months or years in the future, which limits the size of a group and group interaction. Animals don’t stop expending territory because they hit an upper cap on their needs, they only stop at the limit of their ability to hold it.
I don’t know about you, but I think the modern human method is better than having to fight daily to hold onto my house and job, and that it is frowned upon to attack and drive off or kill the patriarch or matriarch of a family and take their place if you want to own instead of rent. The human method still needs lots of work because we still have those same animal desires to keep expanding territory.
Minimum wage worker has to fight and struggle every day to cling to his acres and eventually he’ll get to old or sick and someone will apply to his job for lower and take it from him
If you think that’s anywhere near as bad as animals living in the wild have it, you’re welcome to go try to fend for yourself in the wilds of Canada.
Humans often live short, brutal lives. Your point? Human suffering doesn’t count cause something isn’t trying to eat us? Are you 13?
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We are the only species with “money” too
While I generally agree with the overall sentiment and like the idea of UBI, saying we’re the only species that pays to exist doesn’t seem right. We’re the only one that uses money, so of course we’re the only species that has would pay money to exist. However, other species all over the world, many right outside our doorsteps, live much harder lives than we do and pay with their lives if they make a mistake. If I had to choose between working a job and being out in the great outdoors having to farm/hunt/craft and such to survive, I’d choose having a job, which is a choice we all pretty much make anyways. At any point I could quit my job, walk out the door, and live with just the clothes on my back… and I would probably not be able to hack it. It’s not much of a choice and it’s pretty much coercion, but the choice is there.
Capitalism is a system where you die if nobody needs you to do anything. Nobody needing your help is supposed to be a good thing.
Why is being useless a good thing, pls elaborate
Cause it means all the work is already being done and there’s enough to go around and meet everyone’s needs.
That’s a terrible behavior to enable, that’s like exactly the opposite of what we want
No, we want everyone to have enough, and to be able to take it easy when the work is done. We don’t want people forced to work when it isn’t helpful.
Work is always helpful, that’s why it exists
Work isn’t always helpful. If my partner got out of bed to clean the dishes or vacuum the floor at 3AM I’d be very cranky. Sometimes work is bad.
…bro it’s cause you said 3am in this example, think this through.
I can’t work due to a disability, am I useless?
yes
If you are part of a tribe and contribute nothing anyone else needs, you’ll soon be left to fend for yourself alone, which is a quick death sentence in nature.
Tribal societies valued different things. If they were measuring just based on economical value and “productivity” then tribal societies would have a reputation of having no elders, because they would have all been forced out.
I wasn’t talking about economical value or productivity, but contribution.
Elders contribute a link to the tribe’s past, knowledge that lies beyond the young members’ lifespans, an endless supply of stories, and so on…
Thank God we are evolved, huh?
Apparently it’s a bad thing, according to OP
That’s incorrect, it’s a system where you die if nobody wants you to do anything, which is a much lower threshold to clear given how many things can be delegated.
Like, you can make a living making art, which is not necessary but definitely something people want, if you’re good at it.
We need art. Art is what gives life meaning.
Lol no it’s not, and I say it as an avid consumer of several different artforms.
Also, even then, you don’t need a specific artist to make it for you, you can make art too.
The fact that art thrives in mercantilist and capitalist societies is a testament to the fact that want, and not need, drives the market.
heh, for me that would be bitches 😎
*proceeds to get none*
No it isn’t.
But it gives those who float through life without any practical purpose, purpose. You don’t understand, man! It’s just so deep.
Only a life lived in the pursuit of productivity, efficiency and economical value is truly meaningful!
Probably why the Taliban banned music.
May I remind you people spend thousands on furry art lol
That’s my point. You don’t need furry art to survive, nobody needs furry artists to make furry art, but people with surplus want them to, and that makes them thrive in a capitalist society.
Capitalism is a system where you die if nobody wealthy needs you to do anything.
Unpaid labour is still labour, and there are unfortunately billions of people living, and dying, in poverty who do an endless stream of labour for other people and their community, from caring for children, elderly, and disabled people, to cooking and cleaning, and providing a whole range of other physical, mental, and emotional support.
Them not being compensated for it is the feature of capitalism, not the need for labour itself, which leads nicely to
Nobody needing your help is supposed to be a good thing.
Actually, no, it isn’t. Humans are interdependent and need each other to function as a society (even on the most a-social level - you’re unlikely to be producing your own food, power, water supply, buildings, building materials, and so on, you need others to live, and at different points in life others will almost certainly need you in different ways). That’s exactly why a hyper individualistic society like capitalism encourages leads to the kind of dystopia we have now.
I think you’re defining “compensation” a bit too narrowly. Just because people are doing work of some kind in their community and not getting monetary wages for it doesn’t mean they aren’t being compensated. All human interaction is in some sense a transaction, it might just be more amorphous and unquantifiable than x many dollars. Friendships are trades. If a friendship isn’t worthwhile for people, they generally end the friendship, even though most people wouldn’t dream of assigning a dollar amount of value to a friendship.
And I think you’re missing the fact that we’re talking about surviving under capitalism, and that you can’t buy food and shelter with friendship 🙄
Of course you can. Lol. Stay-at-home moms and dads are doing this exact thing. Older parents who live with their kids are, too. They’re probably doing something like labor in addition to just being in some kind of human relationship, but they are effectively getting paid for friendship. It would be hard to put an exact dollar amount to this, and most people including myself wouldn’t really want to write an invoice for every hug they give or minute of conversation they’re partner to, but since all human interaction is effectively a transaction that is informally what’s happening.
Those handclap emojis trigger the fuck out of me.
👏 Don’t 👏 let 👏 that 👏 detract 👏 from 👏 the 👏 message.
That’s kind of the point. It’s supposed to be attention grabbing, drawing attention to a point that is supposed to be implicitly agreed upon by everyone, except people don’t agree with it because too many people are chasing clout or wealth.
They make me think of that Stefon character from SNL.
Off topic but I read it as handicap emoji . I’m a boomer and use emoji and acronyms infrequently.
I read it that way too. Our brains tend to guess the word and fill in the blanks based off of the first and last character of a word. I’m sure the length helped in this case too lol
Same. Handicap is a far more common word than handclap, so it was a good guess!
The word boomer should be cancelled
It’s been around since 1963, good luck with that. It will fade into obscurity once the last of the boomers are gone.
OK, boomer
Don’t think I am one. Born very early 80s.
OK, millennial
Think I’m GenX
In the US, I don’t think that UBI could work. Why? Because then businesses and companies will raise the price of everything. Real estate, food, etc. And then prices will stay high, no longer to be afforded with the given UBI. That’s what will happen.
EDIT: I’m not saying that I’m against UBI or that it doesn’t work– I’m saying that capitalist system of the US will find some way to fuck its implementation.
Does that mean you think it would work in other countries?
I don’t know. I’m just some guy on the internet.
I’d certainly support it if it works to significantly reduce poverty and homelessness. And there are plenty of studies that say it does.
My pessimism & skepticism lies in the US capitalist system, not UBI.
Sounds like we need to change that system then.
They’re already doing that, so we may as well try something different.
Hold up, is that guy suggestion we just fight or kill to take what we want like an animal would?
We’re born slaves to society. We are not free. Everything in the end has the threat of violence if you don’t do what society wants you to do.
Best case you can go forage in the “wild”, but its claimed wild. There is no free land. The freest people are perhaps homeless people, because there is almost nothing you can threaten them with, they have nothing to lose, in a way, its the only freedom that exists.
If you stop paying rent or your mortgage, you will be forcibly removed by a trainer killer. If you resist, you may be killed in an altercation and become a statistic. If you don’t pay taxes, you may end up in a cage, or perhaps killed by another trainer killer in a mishap.
When you “buy” a house, you are renting the land, sure it temporarily has your name on the deed, and you own the house itself, until you stop paying property taxes, then another trainer killed will come take it from you, perhaps put you in a cage. Don’t even get me started on HOAs, the wrong color paint could cause you to lose your life’s savings because a Karen thinks it might lower her property value.
If you don’t raise your kids perfectly, a trainer killer can come take them away from you. Even someone falsely reporting you for improperly raising your kids can cause you to end up losing them. Your kids don’t belong to you, they’re your cute little liabilities, one misstep and the most important thing in your life is taken away from you.
What if I just want to do nothing? Where can I go and just chill, and eat berries, and like the occasional squirrel or whatever? Society won’t permit it, you might end up in a cage, or again killed by a trained killer. Those are someone’s berries, those squirrels are probably a protected species.
Freedom is an illusion.
UBI is just another populist handout, what We need is affordable housing and food not more money for it, making it partially state-run and/or controlled would make people look more optimistic about the future.
I think the alternative is finding and defending your own space and possessions from others who have weapons and would take it from you, growing or hunting everything you require for survival, relying on whatever gifts other may give you or on trading whatever excesses you have accumulated for other needs.
Money has made this difficult job much much more efficient, leading to a vast excess of wealth accumulation*. Everybody can focus on what they can offer, in exchange for tokens of value. Those tokens of value are then exchanged for the goods and services that they didn’t otherwise need to create on their own.
*The problem is that the accumulation is focused on the people and their heirs, mostly, who’ve acquired tangible assets. Although a lot of the wealth has been reinvested in improvements. We have GPS guided robotic harvesters now, for example and not as many people need to toil just to live.
There is no system through which to redistribute this wealth once it’s locked into some dynastic family’s coffers. There are many governments that could and should be tasked with improving the place constantly, however they typically suck at the job.
I think the solution now is the same as it has always been. When the masses are too pissed off they’ll either stop reproducing, decline in population, leaving the production capabilities of the wealthy in decline, or they’ll fight back in a revolt.
Give me the alternative. At least that way I have a chance and my opponents aren’t an army of police who just wanna make me a wage slave in their system. Give me the alternative every single time. I’ll take protecting myself 10 times out of ten over being exploited by people who are pretending to protect everyone.
You’d already be dead. That’s a bad bet.
Or I would be fine. Give me ‘fine or dead’ every time over ‘suffocated and alive’.
I’d argue one impressive thing about our current global system is it’s possible to make some improvements without total revolution. Will it be enough to, say, avoid climate catastrophe or nuclear disaster? I don’t know. But democracy is a pretty good invention when the alternative is either no change or armed conflict.
!remindme 10 years
Shit take, the average person only used to have to do 20 hours a week of labour to feed their family
Money didn’t make labour “more efficient”
You can easily have medieval levels of quality of life working like 1 hour a week today. No one, not even kings a few hundred years ago had modern quality of life even with vast amounts of wealth extracted from whole continents of peasants. Modern money and economic systems allow for global trade and innovation that makes things Napolean couldn’t dream of into boring every day stuff for you and me.
Keep defending the need for multiple people to work multiple jobs to sustain a small family
This only works when you divide the time spent working over the year. As a medival peasant you worked your ass off in spring or whenever you sow your fields, kept it up while it grew, which was somewhat normal working times by todays standard, and toiled for double digit hours in harvesting season again. After that was time to do literally nothing. When you look at seasonal holidays in many european countries, they are mostly at the end of harvesting seasons, when you could easily be blackout drunk for a week because there was nothing else to be done. I personally don’t mind regular working hours when the alternative is half a year of 15 hour shifts and half a year of more or less no work.
Was it 7 days on of 15 hours? Because if it was only 6 and I had that one day break once a week and eventually got 6 months off later I would definitely want to do that.
And lived to the ripe old age of nineteen🤣
“People had it better before modern society” is one of the dumbest beliefs.
The reason average life expectancy used to be so low, is because infant mortality was ridiculously high.
You’re also missing the distribution of those life expectancies. While everyone is crapping on the wealthy, who do you think was able to live to a ripe old age? Who do you think was more likely to die at birth or as a kid, or young adult?
Yeah I know, but the overall point still stands. Life was not better back then. That’s not a gotcha, it’s a technicality.
Are we going to let this perverse society take every improvement we make and make us pay for it? We all work for the common good and we have the right to reap the benefits, not be forced to adapt to a system that exploits us just because someone sometime ago invented penicillin and so that good must be offset by an equal sacrifice?
That’s… How life works. In literally every society on the planet right now that’s how things work. If you want something someone else did you have to give in kind. Medicine, clothing, food. No matter what the system undo t get the fruits of others labor for nothing.
People with your take are always thinking they can exist in a society where everyone else provides and u get to do nothing and relax …cuz reasons apparently.
I didn’t get the same takeaway from their message. I don’t think it’s that we should do nothing and get everything, rather we should do things and get a reasonable return for having done them.
You don’t ever get guaranteed all the resources you need to exist. Saying otherwise is literally in the op post. Pretty clear to me.
think the alternative is finding and defending your own space and possessions from others
Surely there must be a middle way.
I don’t mind renting land from the state. I pay my property tax and income tax and in return get protection from the police and military and health care and more, basically a whole society to live in.
The problem is that the landlords set themselves as the middleman who rent the land from the state and sublet it to the people. I don’t remember any of my landlords defending me or my belongings from wilderbeasts or other people. They’re just middlemen who have increased the potential pricing of all the land so that it is no longer affordable for everyone to rent directly from the state. They can only do this because they have enough capital to get their hands on the land in the first place, or by inheritance. The price of the land is artificial. It’s not about how much it’s worth for anyone living there. No, the price is only about how much can theoretically be leeched off the people needing to live on that land
Landlords aren’t renting land from the state, they own the land, the state is just collecting a protection fee from them since landlords generally don’t have an army to defend them and their property from attackers.
What’s the difference?
Saying landlords are renting and then subletting makes it sound like they’re double dipping, just a passive middle man contributing nothing. They’re not renting from the state, they’re the owners who take on all the risk and other costs associating with full ownership. They pay for maintenance, they’re subject to value changes in real estate markets. They bear the cost if someone builds a dump next door and tanks their value. Their asset is very un-liquid. The tenant can walk away from the property somewhat easily, but the landlord has to find a buyer.
Of course, some landlords actually do nothing. As long as we have a healthy competitive market where people can relatively easily build new housing, this competition would punish landlords who don’t provide a good product. Unfortunately in a lot of the US building new housing is very difficult due to NIMBYism, zoning restrictions, and sometimes too harsh environmental or historical review.
something something the industrial revolution
