I don’t know how relevant this is now, but here’s a link to another post where I expressed my thoughts on what kind of pitfalls you might most likely face – https://lemmy.world/post/36867409

By the way, what is this phenomenon on Lemmy? Let’s say people are reluctant to read and comment on old posts published just a couple of days or a week ago, but with new ones, it’s a completely different story. What kind of psychology is this? Or it seemed to me?

  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    4 hours ago

    With UBI you get a labor shortage though as less people will work, and the people that do work will be demanding higher wages like you said, pushing up the price of the finished goods.

    People will work if they get a good enough offer. That a company’s competitors hope that slavery returns after UBI is implementented is an opportunity for those companies who understand that it will stay forever and hire the people they need to take consumers money. Where imports from slave labour nations is an option, as it mostly is today even with tariffs, then imports can displace higher housing spending. Immigration, AI, Robotics are all alternatives if no one wants to work, and if no one wants to work, everyone is happy to not have to work, and still get cheap enough products.

    The other benefit of it is that we as a society can decide on what work is useful and not the market.

    Market is absolutely better at deciding what is useful. There still can be functions that are best/only provided by government, and need staff, but those should be proposed government functions/programs because the programs are good. A job guarantee is first you must sacrifice 8 hours per day, then we decide what’s best for you to spend your 8 hours on.

    caring for your dependents at home

    UBI allows for caring for people/dependents. You don’t need unionized child/dependent care. If I am caring for someone full time already, by all means, bring your dependents to me for extra income for me. UBI can make me more friendly to community on setting a fair price compared to slavery, union supported slavery, economy that forces extortionist pricing for care.

    It’ll be hard to build actually affordable housing if all the government budget is going to UBI and construction workers now cost twice as much in wages.

    Social housing in much of the world is “income based rent” that rewards getting a 3 bedroom space even if you are single. Rules disallow sharing, and there may be other stupid/oppressive rules too. The best bargain is to only earn grey/black market income to make the housing free. UBI is a far better housing solution. I previously mentioned sharing, or if you are not interested in work, moving to a community where work availability is a non-concern. Expensive housing is exclusively because work opportunities are awesome, or it is a tourist paradise (often convenient for part time work). Welfare/unemployment insurance rules often stipulate that you are not allowed to move.

    UBI works on the assumption that there’s not enough work to be done and that a sizable chunk of the population can stop working and we’ll be fine.

    UBI only needs to work on principle that you deserve an equal share of tax revenue. Our slavery system works on principle that Oligarchists best rewards are only from slavery, and that paying higher wages to attract people with “fuck you” money cannot possibly be profitable. It’s an argument for even harsher slavery conditions. Oligarchs, and only oligarchs, must decide the only possible economic path.

    we need to do more to transition to net zero and figure out how to sequester millions of tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere, that’s not going to happen by itself.

    Concern for human sustainability only occurs when your next voting decisions is not based on inflation resulting from yet another failed war on Russia. Poverty and stress makes you full tropic thunder, and short sighted. War mongering Zionist supremacism pillaging of your country is too hard to see, if Biden caused egg prices is all the media tells you to base your vote on. Cooperation with Russia is needed to get global warming constrained. Threatening Russia just burns more diesel.

    • Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 hours ago

      Yes people will work, but less people will work then they do now, that will lower productivity and therefore supply and raise prices. If you’re relying on imports from low wage countries, while your own countries productivity and therefore exports go down, then that will just increase the trade deficit. So more money will be leaving the country, increasing the supply of that currency on the international market and thus decreasing its value. Another word for a decreasing value of currency is inflation.

      everyone is happy to not have to work, and still get cheap products

      Again where are these products coming from. Internally they will get more expensive as wages rise, externally they will get more expensive as the value of the currency falls.

      You picked the one job out of that list that people will voluntarily do. Very few people are signing up to do manual labor restoring ecosystems, building housing/infrastructure. You can say this is a mindset thing that will change once people have there basic needs covered but there are a ton of rich people who don’t work for a living right now and you don’t see them on the highway picking up trash. A change in scarcity mindset isn’t going to build a high speed rail network, labor and investment will, and UBI will make that labor and investment a lot more difficult to get.

      We don’t not live a slave system we live in a capitalist system, both use coercion to extract labor from the worker but they do so in very different ways. I’d recommend you read some Marx to better understand the labor relations under capitalism. Either way a UBI system doesn’t challenge the capitalists control of the means of production and thus doesn’t challenge there true power. If anything it reduces the workers power as they can no longer use there power to withhold there labor. What are the unemployed on UBI going to do if there conditions deteriorate? If worst comes to worst workers can always strike which is devastating to the capitalist class. That is one of the main differences between slavery and capitalism, a slave can’t strike and is thus completely powerless.