3 ms·

And yet there seems to be a fair amount of support here for guaranteed basic income / guaranteed employment.

• icebraining 9y ago
  Basic income is a capitalist solution - a patch to keep the whole thing going. It has long been supported by people on the economic right (e.g. Milton Friedman's negative income tax).
• ixtli 9y ago
  As the other commenter said: it's a capitalist solution. But as well I find that the concerted effort to paint the word 'socialism' as a bad thing implicitly in america is exactly why the effect you observe happens. I think, from talking at length with lots of people from various places, background, and of various identities that americans are pretty amenable to socialist policy we just have some cultural peculiarities that make it hard to talk about. This is why bernie's platform vs trump's platform get more and more interesting to me as the majority continues to rebel against _how_ trump governs. It shows me that people really do want a progressive populist but there are a lot of bizarre little artifacts in our culture that keeps them from accepting certain concepts at face value. I guess what I'm saying is that socialism needs rebrand AND people need to be encouraged to discover the rich American history of socialism from the union workers in Appalachia that were attacked by our government for striking, to harriet tubman, mlk, and eugene debs.