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> With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth. Gainful employment is when the product of your labor is w

> With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth. Gainful employment is when the product of your labor is worth (much) more than you are willing to sell your labor for. If you’re not rich and you want to become rich working for Google at $200K a year is clearly superior to a UBI of $40K a year. Even with an arithmetically impossible UBI[1] like that there are still many people who would like to be rich, but just middle class. [1]US average household income per capita is under $60K.

nopenopenopeno 5y ago
Those people won’t have access to jobs at Google, partially because Google would be a much smaller company if we had UBI because the number of people with disposable income would be minuscule and the internet would be scummier than ever before it gets shut down, which would absolutely happen if we implemented UBI in the U.S. because you simply can’t have a 2-tier society with free discourse. Realize the economic problems that UBI would address are caused by transitioning our economy from creating value to collecting rents over the past 40 years. Tell yourself whatever you need to sleep at night, but the fact that advertising does not create value for our society (or any society) is not a moral claim. It’s one of the cold realities that put us into this situation. Financialization has allowed us to deny the facts for a few decades and UBI will be the neoliberal New Deal, but without any of the good parts of the New Deal. It will effectively serve as a method of control. The contradictions of capitalism laid bare.