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I like Zuckerberg because he understands technology, but I'm worried about UBI. UBI is based on the assumption that everyone will take basic income money and u

I like Zuckerberg because he understands technology, but I'm worried about UBI. UBI is based on the assumption that everyone will take basic income money and use it responsibly. But we know that's not true for a large part of the population. Gambling and drugs exist, for example. That's not to mention other short term rewards that hurt people in the long term. UBI in its most corrupt form turns into communism. And we know from the 20th century that communism is corruptible almost by default. We've paid for this knowledge with 100s of millions of humans dieing in multiple countries. I think of capitalism as a type of learning system that depends on a individual reward signal. Government can also be thought of as a learning system. In a corrupt system capitalism stops learning and even regresses. People stop participating. In a corrupt government, the government mandates based on really bad abstractions. So the question becomes "how do we prevent, measure, and fix corruption" than which system we should live by. Having said that, I'll end up voting for anyone who understands technology. I think it will disrupt employment for essentially everyone, given enough time.

Turing_Machine 9y ago
"UBI is based on the assumption that everyone will take basic income money and use it responsibly." I don't think UBI advocates are assuming anything of the sort. Of course some people are going to spend it on booze and drugs. How is that different from the system we have now, where some people spend their welfare money on...booze and drugs?
dragonwriter 9y ago
> UBI is based on the assumption that everyone will take basic income money and use it responsibly. No, it's not; neither the libertarian nor the progressive arguments for UBI assume that. > UBI in its most corrupt form turns into communism Wait, what? Perhaps some form of communism, by the broadest definition, could be linked to UBI, but even then you'd be equivocating at best when you say: > And we know from the 20th century that communism is corruptible almost by default. We've paid for this knowledge with 100s of millions of humans dieing in multiple countries. Since in that bit you are clearly narrowly referring to what has been learned specifically about Leninist vanguardism in the 20th Century (which, actually, plenty of people—including many other communists—observed about its structure and departures from Marxism even before practical experience underlined the problems.) > I think of capitalism as a type of learning system that depends on a individual reward signal. Capitalism is an politico-economic system in which, by way of a particular model of property rights, society is ordered to favor the interests of a particular class, the owners of capital ("capitalists"). Hence the name given to that system by its critics when it was the dominant world system. Now, arguably, the politico-economic systems of modern representative democracies with mixed economies combine a base drawn from 19th Century capitalism and its basic model of property rights with various redistributive and power-limiting mechanisms to implement a "learning system" of the type you describe, but UBI is essentially a retuning and streamlining of some of the redistributive mechanisms in modern mixed economies, not a fundamental change.
zzalpha 9y ago
UBI in its most corrupt form turns into communism. A I know it's fashionable to label any level of government involvement in the economy as "communism", but unless the means of production are collectively owned, it's not communism. Public financing with private delivery is just a form of hybrid capitalism (and is the model used for socialized healthcare delivery in a number of nations).

Turing_Machine 9y ago

"UBI is based on the assumption that everyone will take basic income money and use it responsibly." I don't think UBI advocates are assuming anything of the sort. Of course some people are going to spend it on booze and drugs. How is that different from the system we have now, where some people spend their welfare money on...booze and drugs?

dragonwriter 9y ago

> UBI is based on the assumption that everyone will take basic income money and use it responsibly. No, it's not; neither the libertarian nor the progressive arguments for UBI assume that. > UBI in its most corrupt form turns into communism Wait, what? Perhaps some form of communism, by the broadest definition, could be linked to UBI, but even then you'd be equivocating at best when you say: > And we know from the 20th century that communism is corruptible almost by default. We've paid for this knowledge with 100s of millions of humans dieing in multiple countries. Since in that bit you are clearly narrowly referring to what has been learned specifically about Leninist vanguardism in the 20th Century (which, actually, plenty of people—including many other communists—observed about its structure and departures from Marxism even before practical experience underlined the problems.) > I think of capitalism as a type of learning system that depends on a individual reward signal. Capitalism is an politico-economic system in which, by way of a particular model of property rights, society is ordered to favor the interests of a particular class, the owners of capital ("capitalists"). Hence the name given to that system by its critics when it was the dominant world system. Now, arguably, the politico-economic systems of modern representative democracies with mixed economies combine a base drawn from 19th Century capitalism and its basic model of property rights with various redistributive and power-limiting mechanisms to implement a "learning system" of the type you describe, but UBI is essentially a retuning and streamlining of some of the redistributive mechanisms in modern mixed economies, not a fundamental change.

zzalpha 9y ago

UBI in its most corrupt form turns into communism. A I know it's fashionable to label any level of government involvement in the economy as "communism", but unless the means of production are collectively owned, it's not communism. Public financing with private delivery is just a form of hybrid capitalism (and is the model used for socialized healthcare delivery in a number of nations).