Wage Slavery vs. UBI

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You need money to pay for food, housing and other neccessities in life.

To get those money, you either have to have some already, either through inheritance or as a gift.
Alternatively you need to rely on other people's good-will - which can be obtained by working for them one way or the other.

In other words, in order to live you are completely dependent on other people, at least if you don't already have a saving or large inheritance or win in the lottery.

But when discussing welfare benefits, like UBI (Unconditional Basic Income) people always criticize it for making people too dependent on the state/government. But working for your money makes you equally dependent on other people - including the state as well, because you need the state to gurantee safety measures, like police etc. but also working conditions.

Welfare benefits like state pensions, unemployment benefits etc. all have some requirements. With unemployment benefits, you are often obliged to work for your unemployment benefits, but with fewer rights compared to ordinary employees.

With UBI you are completely independent from anyone else's "good-will". You don't have to ask for other people's money or give anything in return.

The money is given to you - unconditionally* - from the state.

This makes you completely independent to start your own business (if you want to), educate yourself, or do just about anything you want.

How can UBI be a bad thing?


* - By "Unconditional" I refer to the right that any permanently residing citizen has, to receive money from the state to pay for life's neccessities, without giving anything in return. It does NOT mean there can't be a limit ie. if you already earn money from something else (which may reduce the UBI) or if you're a foreigner not eligible to UBI.

It's a religious argument coming from people indoctrinated with the idea that no one would do any work, if not for existential fears.
And there are certainly jobs so horrible and poorly paid you have to find desperate people to do them - because if they weren't desperate, you'd have to pay them a lot more.
So the belief that no one would do ANY work creates the widespread existential fears necessary to have a pool of desperate people who can be exploited.

UBI might be very bad for the belief systems of capitalists.

Not exactly the same but I saw it earlier and it plays in to the same issues:



So yes, entrain the populace and entrain their internalized priorities and values. The trouble here too - if we're headed for unprecedented change and constant career field upheaval, we're going to stagnate terribly if so many people have so little flexibility.

If it's not UBI, we at least need very smart ways to pivot people out of collapsing industries and workplaces as the inevitable ends up being something that might be happening several times per decade.

I generally believe people should be doing some kind of labor on most days. At least so that they don't get totally stir-crazy. But the way work works right now is really flawed. And because you need a job to not be destitute, people will work in unsafe or toxic work environments because they don't have a choice. I have issues with UBI, but I hope that if it passes people will be able to strike and fight for better workplaces without risking homelessness.

I think I just saw the first Youtube advertisement in a while that's really made me sick.

The advertisement started with a wind-up that could have just as easily been Chris Hedges, talking about the domestic economic situation where we're having not just pandemics and other crisis but K-shaped recoveries and it started going into the content of K-shaped recoveries, only in turn to pitch a sale for economic advice - stating that people on one side of this would make all kinds of money, people on the other side of it would lose out, that the media has been 'hiding it', what the actual f..., your solution to the problem is to inform people how to better rob each other?

Lets ask what I think is an incredibly elucidating question. Think of the best gradeschool teachers, the best nurses, the best doctors, the best civil engineers, the best plumbers, all of the people who keep our world up and running as well as dealing with infrastructure, health, and cultivation of future minds - should they be f'd with their pants on because they aren't also top-flight day traders or because they aren't willing to throw their fellow citizens under the bus for a dollar for themselves? This is like someone who spends all day at the gun range saying 'Now that I've done that - I should be able to rob you at gun point, because you didn't put the work in to get good with guns, and you deserve it for being a sucker with other interests'.


This also really makes me think that the stuff that k-shaped recoveries are made of really belongs in a sovereign wealth fund. For the reasons above, if you're going to rob grade school teachers for being grade school teachers, or nurses for being nurses, or plumbers for being plumbers, or whatever else - it's a sign that you're baldly throwing the rest of the populace - in your economy - in your fuel tank and treating them like fuel rods. It's the closest thing I can think of to legalizing cannibalism and by extension murder in the service of cannibalism. Heck, the big problem as far as I can tell with pedophilia is that it's treating innocent people as fuel rods, by someone who can't manage their internal states and - in their narcissism - they decide that someone else is of such lesser importance than themselves that they're worth throwing on the grill and eating. It's the same damn pattern and when we actually understand that pattern for what it is we should have just as dim a view (baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire memes or whatever else) for that sort of cannibalistic template rather than just going after the viscera of one specific manifestation of it.

My entire industry is going nuts over NFTs right now. My students are telling me they are well aware of the environmental impact of blockchain trading, but they expect everything to go to hell anyway, so they'd rather make a few hundred or a few thousand dollars if they're lucky than trying to keep their environmental footprint small. I think UBI might be necessary to save what's left of the environment, because now my relatively wealthy first world design students are arguing like coal miners: we don't care about the environment, we need to pay the rent.
And just like with coal miners, it is hard to point to an alternative to making money at ALL costs.

Because many people are classist is why. They will not admit they just hate poor people and those who are less fortunate. It's easier to blame them than do something about it.

I also think the poor work harder than the rich. Most of the low pay jobs are labor jobs. Plus they gotta work more hours than the rich to make ends meet and work several jobs. This is far from lazy and this would burn many people out so what do the poor do, they turn to drugs to self medicate to stay sane or to deal with pain from the labor. They don't get a break.

That's evil. People who have this kind of thinking (hate poor people) are evil, and society should get rid of them.
People who hate the poor or sick/disabled, should be sent to labor camps doing forced labor for the rest of their life.

We have a really ugly game theory problem with narcissism and psychopathy. They're the most downgraded views of what being 'human' could be, and yet because of their proclivity to violence and sadism they end up defining the culture because they win the competitions with anyone else who showed up with a laptop, or a book, or a easel and paint, or a compass, to a gun fight. In their heads life is a battle between their genes (the best of the best of the best ever) vs. everyone else's - and that's it. We seem to have a world where we end up with people like this in the driver's seat and we do so because any system that selects power by win-lose games selects for these people because winning win-lose games and gaining prestige is all they're interested in. It's a case where evolutionary processes can't and won't map on to what we'd think of as human morality.

I get a laugh out of this Guardian article, in a good way though:
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable ... BUT_K53ST4

Obviously a bunch of pedestrians will read it thinking 'Ah... he must be sharing his Hinduism!', well... you'd probably learn the same exact things in Freemasonry, AMORC, or anything even glancingly Hermetic. A lot of the complex systems eggheads would say similar things as well. This is where I do think there's some possibility that consensus could occur that the reign of narcissism, psychopathy, 'greed is good', might have to take a back seat to 'we live in a complex system, there's nothing out there that's not in us and vice a verse, we can't strip the gears off of the ecosystem and hope to live, quality of a person's character means at least as much as whether they can kill it on a trading floor', etc. etc.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 18 Mar 2021, 8:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

Broken record.

You wouldn't feel like you earned your money.

You might feel shame/loss of pride.

Eventually, you would take it for granted and become complacent.

You may even get fat.

*Wage slavery* gets you out of bed in the morning, keeps you busy, no time for nonsense when your life is all about work.

Nobody should decide the way of my life, but me.

My mentality thinks that UBI definitely is a good idea. Even someone who has the least money or other goods should have enough for comfortable life. People should not have to work hard or in dangerous conditions for small wages, small rearnings like (not so much money for) just something to eat, drink, clothe etc.

For my "mind" comfort and happiness are not rewards which have to be earned, meritted, deserved, but they are basic right of sentient beings like humans... My mentality hates suffering, difficult and ugliness.

Much more people in the world have too small income than too high

I feel no need of having millions of dollars for luxury, pomp, panoply like lots of jewelry or expensive cars as status symbols. Stable comfort and general happiness are more important for me than being richer or even better than someone else.

And I am definitely not an atheist Monotheism looks logical for me. "But I can't understand why books considered holy by believers of Abrahamic religions tells that God can punish His creatures by very painful, harsh, severe, everlasting punishments". I do not want to deprave anyone or cause harmful doubts! I am a Catholic but I have thoughts about converting to a Quran-based religion because really large number of striking and impressive mathematical an linguistic dependencies associated with the original text of Quran were found.

My apologies, but is this sarcasm?

Do you have evidence that people won't do labor without some kind of coercion? I do favors for people because I like to be helpful. I work on my artistic hobbies because I feel like the work is meaningful. I think most people have a desire to feel useful, productive, needed, etc. I came out of a period of laying around all day playing video games, but I was like that because I was mentally unwell. I actually felt a lot of guilt about how useless I was. Hell, even when I'm working I often feel useless because I can't control anything in my workplace and because I am alienated from the product of my labor. Ultimately I'm a cog in a massive corporate machine. Maybe capitalism doesn't actually offer good incentives to work?