I am all for basic income, I think it’s a great thing, the “non-reformist reform” that leftists ought to embrace. But.
I’ve been hanging out mostly with techno-libertarian types for a good while now - all wonderful folks, yes, I mean you, y’all just great -
- and I increasingly cannot shake the impression that propping up empty talk of ~basic income~ to every instance of economic oppression and misery is a lot like the internet bolshevik staple of ~we won’t have this problem after the Revolution~. And meanwhile, in the here and now, it is very easy to use it to brush aside lesser, economically Bad suggestions, dismiss ongoing workers’ struggles as misguided, etc, etc.
Like, tell me I’m just being uncharitable and gloomy and ideologically obsessed here. But seeing one post after another ending with “maybe, some indeterminate time in the blissful future, We shall be able to dole out enough for everyone to survive on - after scrapping every current social program everywhere and attaining efficiency and getting rid of Crony Capitalism” - well, it’s enough to see a pattern. I don’t know what it means, but it’s vaguely alarming.
And also… there is never a roadmap or even the most vague sense of how to get from here to there. How to deal with elite resistance to redistribution and capital flight, how to square it with another professed (and likewise worthy) techno-libertarian goal of open borders, etc, etc. There’s rarely anything at all written on this. Again, this is why ~basic income~ alarmingly resembles a hand-wave more than a goal.
I just remembered this post out of the blue and spent a while looking for it on your blog just so I could reblog it, it is a really good insight IMO
There really does seems to be some symmetry between communists who are like “don’t vote, don’t work to oppose short-term political changes that may directly screw over poor people, because only a revolution can really change everything” and libertarians who are like “don’t worry about what effect these policies would have without a basic income, because they’ll work great once we have a basic income”
It’s just really strange to me when people act like “caring about what happens in the short term” directly trades off against “wanting an ambitious, sweeping change in the long term.” This at least makes sense when it’s actual accelerationism (”make the short term worse, to encourage ambitious sweeping change”), although I disagree with that, but if it’s not accelerationism I don’t know what the logic is supposed to be.
I think the issue, similar to the internet bolsheviks multi mentioned, is that the current choices involve unpleasant tradeoffs. It’s not like there aren’t better or worse options in these cases, but it’s a bit grim to only consider “should we go for the poverty trap, the other poverty trap, the answer that fucks over a different subset of people, the bureaucracy that seems like it was designed to foster corruption, or ignore the problem entirely.”
Like, the vast majority of answers here aren’t good. Someone or another is getting fucked over with means-tested welfare, with minimum wages, with various health and safety regulations, with politically tenable but regressive taxes, etc. That doesn’t mean they’re not better than nothing at all, for now, but they’re crude and do fuck people over and often the benefit is ambiguous.
The thing is, basic income isn’t as politically untenable as it looked even just a few years ago. The major centre-left party in my country is discussing it, I would be surprised if in another couple of election cycles it wasn’t official policy for at least the Greens (and possibly the Worst Libertarian Party) here. It’s because everyone’s harping on about it every time it becomes even the slightest bit relevant, and because it’s something you can talk about in front of people across the political spectrum without setting off outgroup alarms, that we’re getting closer. Like, I’m usually not one for “awareness” being a huge thing, but basic income is a much clearer and simpler policy than many other welfare systems that have been enacted in the past, and it’s becoming a big part of the global conversation on welfare now.
My issue is that more people aren’t pushing a land value tax to fund it. That solves the capital flight issue wealth taxes have. And open borders for residency, with throttled naturalization processes for citizenship (which I think is what everyone expects) could help avoid sudden unaffordability of the basic income due to the incentives it produces.
This. A lot of the proposed ways to alleviate the problems only bite someone else (or even the intended beneficiaries) in the ass seriously, and with proper epistemic humility I wouldn’t call it unvirtuous to be like “I am not a turd-polishing master, if you give me only crappy options I can’t build a shiny utopia out of them, but this one less crappy option should really be paid a lot more attention to”.
The fuck do I know whether supporting the side of crony capitalists or the side of redwashed rentiers is the better option. When traditional left-right politics is a horrible destructive tug-of-war, pointing at the huge pile of utility on the ground that is not picked up because an icky chicago school economist also pointed at it decades ago, is not such a terrible idea.
Also, UBI is far less difficult to make happen than a revolution, because the money is already there, it’s just spent at shittier things. It doesn’t need massive new taxes when it’s allowed to replace existing benefits, with a side order of cutting corporate welfare because everything needs to come with a side order of cutting corporate welfare. In fact, for any rich western country I could institute a proper UBI *and* still downsize the state enough to make even conservatives uncomfortable.
And seconding on the land value tax too. And the rest.
2 months ago · 103 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink
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andrewhickeywriter reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:Yep. I’m a strong advocate of basic income, but it’s not a panacea, it needs to be introduced with other reforms, and...
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This. A lot of the proposed ways to alleviate the problems only bite someone else (or even the intended beneficiaries)...
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I think the issue, similar to the internet bolsheviks multi mentioned, is that the current choices involve unpleasant...
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