What would you do if you were given a monthly UBI to cover your basic living needs? ( Archived) (44)

They said "No" to it in Switzerland after a referendum...as far as I remember...

Early days, it's in the future when technology largely eliminates the workforce and the biggest employer is TaskRabbit. Silicon Valley are big fans of UBI I believe.

It will be a strange future. We still need aspiration and that 1-5% of the population to keep things moving forward and we'll be telling our kids not to bother with a career unless they're naturally talented which clashes with today's mentality where we insist that those without a brain receive an education and hold high expectations in life.

It's safe to say that any human involvement in the economy will fall into an elite of IQ and this elite must always remain competitive. UBI would allow this.

However, there isn't going to be much left for anyone else to do and the hope is that a world redundant of work and purpose doesn't tear itself because no crime could be as stimulating as a PS9.

They do it, damn it, don't they...

That fear speaks most to those in an insecure position as it is. The elite of IQ is going to have an incredible amount of wealth and surplus production and to them UBI makes sense from the point of view of self-preservation.

UBI is not for the old economy where hard work and living sensibly near guaranteed you at least a reasonable standard of living. It's for the new highly-evolved economy where only the genetic elite can possibly compete and the rest find piecemeal work on apps.

I do believe UBI will be a case of when and not if and the argument will be whether or not UBI totally replaces the welfare state as we know it.

And UBI is something people on the Left(and not only the Left)find appealing yet Marx would spin in his grave. For the majority UBI is the entrenchment of the class system and it will create a lumpenproletariat incapable of social revolution. Anarchy and crime might tears a UBI society down, but there would be no cohesive movement to achieve class consciousness and capture the means of production.

In Marxism the people who worked were the working class and the people who didn't work were scum obstacles to a proletarian revolution.

Yet it's the only social policy which could allow a better life for our kids. We're looking at creating the kind of improvement to the quality of life seen between the years of 1906 and 1966. It's truly creating a better life for our kids and it will probably take until 2066 to achieve this.

As part & parcel of UBI I'd say we need to have a very generous child benefit for the more well off. The longterm aim being to breed up the race. You can't have 90% of the population genetically incapable of contributing and the idea is that the talented slowly but surely outbreed the not-so talented.

To this we must remove the lements of the working class enthralled to fast-breeding. Namely the Muslims but not only. Yes, we'll pay for IQ 90 to have 2 children but we won't pay for him to have 9 and action must be taken against communities where it is normal to have 9 kids. The survival of advanced civilisation depends on not breeding like our medieval ancestors.

Really UBI should only come in if many social conservative trappings come along with it. Like marriage, staying married will raise your UBI. Or the grammar schools we hear so much about in England at the moment. Grammar schools could be used as an early guide to separate the people who you want to go forth and multiply from the people we pay UBI to to stop them harming themselves or anyone else.

I'm not saying we have need-blind welfare state, UBI covers the vulnerable and those not able to adapt to technology, but why not also use the welfare state to increase the numbers of the best amongst us?

UBI is essentially the noblesse oblige(privilege entails responsibility)of a genetic elite. For noblesse oblige(or even welfare states)to survive for any great period of time the ethics of society must return to the old ways of know your station, humility and gratitude: Entitlement in the receiver leads to the death of compassion in the giver.

Anyway the difference between the movers and shakers seeing us as needy or viewing us as useless eaters is our gratitude. The gratitude deficit could be a real problem and the 2% may decide we're not worth it and up comes the private security and elite cities raised on hydraulic legs.

I know many who voted Brexit feel like this was a victory for the peasants and the luddites will have their way, the truth is nothing of the kind, we've simply shifted elites from a detached one to one more close to home. And I trust the noblesse oblige coming out of London towards the culturally similar British far more than that coming out of Brussels towards an entire continent.

And is it happens post-Brexit the labour party starts talking about UBI. The most radical thinking in labour for decades. The referendum was a victory for British independence and not a victory for left or right. Shame on the public sector middle class left for believing that social justice is finished outside of the EU, quite the contrary, leaving the EU is the only way a British Left could make any difference to Britain. They're just scared of the work and don't have the balls to fight for anything.

Basically there are three future scenarios.

There's the UBI future where we advance in a moral blankess where many are paid to exist.

There's a kill the useless eaters future where also we advance(perhaps more so)supported mostly by a minority of the Brexit/Trump vote. The globe reduces to a population of about 500 million in the future.
.
And then there's majority of the brexit/luddite/peasant/Trumpster vote of frame-breakers who want to revert back to primitive ways of doing things to avoid the peasants ever becoming redundant.(weirdly the other strain of ludditism is in the middle class left who know that UBI would sack half the public sector).

These are the 21st century left and right whether they realise this yet or not. Ideally there needs to some kind of compromise where we adopt UBI with a longterm goal of getting the population down to maybe 2 or 3 billion or, alternatively, the UBI is used to increase the average IQ by 10 points within a few generations.

We could even go hell for leather on the blacks. Take the talented tenth of the black community, concentrate their breeding, and achieve racial equality in its offspring. Blacks could become equal to whites if we heavily encourage the breeding of their talented tenth.

Fascinating subject anyway. UBI is effectively a discussion on the next industrial revolution which is in our lifetimes(even for many of you reactionary oldendaysers).

No one else finding it fascinating reinforces my point about only the genetic elite being able to function in the 21st century. We are on the cusp of the technological transformation of the developed world and yet people have nothing to say. It's clear to see that most people have no vsion and won't be able to do anything in this clever clever future of technology. The silence on the subject speaks volumes.