I agree that certain jobs require a certain level of education & it’d be dangerous to allow under-qualified individuals to do those jobs. But at the same time, everyone has basic needs like food, water, and shelter. And no one, regardless of their financial standing or education level, deserves to be starving, homeless, unable to afford healthcare, or unable to afford a college education (which is necessary to get a decent job). I believe that there should be jobs available to all skill levels and a universal basic income of, at least, $1,000 a month because everyone deserves to live a decent life & survive.
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Social theorists have dreamed for a long time of things like “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” but actual implementations simply don’t exist. Education ought to be readily and cheaply available – and it used to be. But, if you “give” people money without requiring them in some way to earn it, what actually happens very quickly is that your money becomes worthless. (It’s called, “hyper-inflation.”) Money is a necessary instrument of trade, but it has no intrinsic “value” of its own. The moment you start handing out $1,000 bills which are not tied to actual human productivity, your prices will explode by a commensurate amount to absorb it. Just as you can’t have “money for nothing,” you can’t have “money that means nothing.”
When Germany started “printing money” in the between-the-war years, housewives quickly figured out that it was cheaper to use bank notes to fuel their stoves than to try to buy wood. At one point, a loaf of bread cost $1 billion Marks – if you could find one.
Education is actually an inexpensive thing to provide. Classrooms don’t cost much. Society benefits very greatly from being able to assume the existence of an educated workforce, and it is capable of achieving this goal without hardship. As it used to do routinely. (Does anyone here remember, or even know about, “the GI Bill?”)
Marxism ‘fixes’ economic inequality and poverty by pillaging the wealth of the population and making everyone poor. You end up spending the rest of your days in a drab concrete oblong built by the state, and getting your food and your goods at the local distribution center (also built by the state). As mentioned, everyone else is in the same boat as well so at least you can feel good with your situation.
We don’t want to go down that route, but UBI takes us a step in that direction because someone has to pay for it (and it will likely be paid by the people who actually worked hard to move beyond cashier in their career life). It won’t force you out of your single family home right away, that will eventually come as the state raises your property tax while progressively taking more of your income.
Some quotes:
“Inflation was observed as reduced after Kuwait gave almost $4,000 to every citizen in 2011. It was called the “Amiri grant””
“Contrary to the skeptics, the grants led to more labor and work (figure 2).” “The positive effect on production and growth means that the elasticity of supply would offset inflationary pressure”
Alaskans get around $1K per year from the government and:
“Ever since the dividend was introduced, Alaska has had a lower rate of inflation than the rest of the United States.”
A key difference between Germany and what Andrew Yang was proposing is he didn’t want to print money. He said that there’s no inflation if you don’t print money, but simply redistribute the money by taxing ultra-rich corporations like Amazon. UBI is just capitalism that doesn’t start at zero.
According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, people can only satisfy a need once all lower needs are met. So in order for a person to have financially security or achieve their full potential, first they need food, water, & warmth. By giving people money, you enable them to be more productive by giving them the ability to satisfy their basic needs. Just like with Blender being a free application. Many great artists on this forum would never have been able to have made great 3D art & had successful careers if Blender didn’t exist & they couldn’t afford spending $15,000 on AutoDesk packages. Free stuff makes people more productive & the world a better place.
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In the case of Alaska’s UBI, the government could do that because of a a combination of massive oil reserves and a fairly low population. It is quite different than say, giving a UBI to 330 million people, more than 200 times the number that live in Alaska.
But even in that case, Alaska had to face reducing the UBI or even getting rid of it when oil prices plunged in 2008, and now we have an administration that is steadfast about ending the age of oil altogether (so how can the state replace the funds when the pumping ceases)?
In addition, last I checked Kuwait also has massive oil reserves, and your post suggests it was a one time thing too.
Blender is only where it is today because thousands of users and many companies pay into the development fund on a monthly basis (so you can choose to make Blender ‘paid’ software with a price you set yourself). So you are enjoying ‘freedom’ in 3D because of people paying big money for the cause.
In the USA, only 2 out of 25 (or 7.78%) workers are working in essential jobs and a 2017 McKinsey Global Institute study suggests that roughly 50% of work activities are automatable using current technologies. If all cashiers were replaced with self-checkout stations & they went home to play Minecraft all day, then there would be no labor deficit at the checkout lanes. Tesla already has self-driving cars, so we’re very close to not needing taxi drivers, truck drivers, etc. We live in an age where society has the choice to let the machines do most of the work. And it’s not like people are going to starve & die if Reckless Ben doesn’t do backflips on a tightrope over mousetraps. Nothing says, “you earned that meal” like getting your testicle stuck in a mousetrap, so an audience can get a good laugh.
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New opportunities will come up though. For instance, devices like 3D printers and 3D pens bringing manufacturing to the home (and as such lowering the bar for starting a business venture).
I would also note the current and coming ability to have your current living standard on an ever lower budget, 3D Printing items will be cheaper than buying goods at a store, kitchen gadgets already help you make food that was once only found at restaurants, AirB&B gets you a better place for a lower price than the hotels, and if some companies get their way you can ditch business with the airlines and use your car that flies. If the world of work becomes so roboticized that UBI is needed, then by that time it shouldn’t be near as pricey as it would’ve decades ago.
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A fundamental precept of Marxism, which is what all of this actually is, is that you should “take from the rich and give to the poor.” Except that it never actually turns out that way. Those who have access to the power-levers of government simply do what such people always do: they take the wealth from someone else and then keep it for themselves. Marxism is a political philosophy that sounds great “on paper,” but it has never worked in practice and it won’t start working now. The most blood-soaked pages of human history teach us how these books end.
A wise man once observed that what these philosophers were actually doing was telling people who wanted to be in power whatever they wanted to hear. Those power-struck people then used those writings as “justification” for what they subsequently did – and had always planned to do. “Just give me a reason.”
Face it: When your objective is “to gain power,” you are always really only trying to gain power for yourself. Talk all you want to about looking out for the plebeians, but what you’re actually going to try to do is to claw your way to the top and, once you get there, piss on everybody below you and step on their fingers, while stuffing every gold coin that you can reach into your own pockets. Because, whenever given the chance, that’s what ambitious people do. They play “King of the Hill.”
Karl Marx & Company were smart enough to know how to use the written word to advance themselves on the coat-tails of others. They put other people’s thoughts in writing, labeled them as their own, then went along for the ride. Even though their ideas don’t work, they stil have strong appeal to ambitious, power-hungry people who want to believe them. Human nature really doesn’t change.
What do y’all Americans know about Marxism?? I live here in a country that has Died because of it, a country that’s never stood, a country that doesn’t breathe…
I live in it every day. Every DAY!
What’s all this about “printing” money? I’d be obliged if someone could xplain it to me…aren’t we moving to a cashLESS society? 
Last I checked you said you were from India, not Venezuela or Cuba. The Indian economy has a lot of capitalism involved in its economic growth, Marxism meanwhile demands a top-down command and control economy (where the government has a controlling stake in everything from the largest manufacturer to the smallest coffee shop).
Seeing how this discussion veered way off the original question, I’m locking this pending further review by our moderation team.
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