When talking to people who dislike UBI about UBI, they'll often say both that 'people need a purpose in life' and that 'nobody will work if they get free money'.

JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 316 points –

Those seem incompatible to me.

(UBI means Universal Basic Income, giving everyone a basic income, for free)

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Ignoring their ideas entirely, it's incredibly simple. There are two options.

  1. No ubi. Eventually AI automates all jobs, the 1% becomes virtually omnipotent, and everyone else dies.

  2. Ubi. Some of the profits earned by companies are funneled into the ubi system. As such, everyone has income. The economy booms, everyone thrives, and we reach post scarcity.

We've already reached post scarcity. Any current scarcity is manufactured.

If you don't have funds to buy resources then that seems to be accurate scarcity no?

The point is that there is no actual scarcity as in "we don't have the resources". We do have the resources, they're just distributed in a way that is profoundly unfair.

Sorta like nature. There’s calories aplenty to be had. They’re just protected by other organisms that don’t want to give them up.

So even in nature, the scarcity is artificial.

That's a matter of access, not whether a sufficient amount of resources exist.

It’s been demonstrated repeatedly that markets distribute goods better than centralized control systems, every time.

When centralized control is seized, people start lacking. When the control of food is seized centrally, people starve.

How about option 3: we stay the same and the world doesn't end in fire and death.