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  • mhoyemhoye@cosocial.ca
    Oct 6, 2026, 4:08 PM

    RE: furry.engineer/@ntoskrnl/11738

    Universal Basic Income is scarcity-mindset, capital-captured thinking. We implement Universal Basic Needs Met - shelter, food, education, medicine, connectivity - and the productivity boom that society would see from every idiosyncratic, hypercommitted weirdo out there being freed up to do the hell out of whatever their idiosyncratic hypercommitted weirdo brains are hotwired to get up to and get done would be an economic miracle humanity has never seen before.

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Replies

  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Oct 6, 2026, 5:26 PM

    @mhoye the worry i always have is that if the government implements $500/mo UBI my rent goes up by $500/mo and the amount of money i have to scrounge from somewhere per month to continue living remains unchanged.

    capitalism is a machine that serves certain functions. you can look in the textbooks and see what those functions are. "everyone is happy and has equitable access to the basic amenities of life" is not in there

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  • Daniel Lakelanddlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
    Oct 6, 2026, 5:37 PM

    @mcc
    UBI is a good idea in an anarchistic world. If we didnt have a state or private property titles that it enforces with violence, then we might still want to use markets to allocate certain goods and services. In that world a monthly amount added to everyone's bank account, and a monthly amount removed proportional to bank balance would be effective. In a world of withholding shelter and food by violence, probably not so much.
    @mhoye

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  • John Mieraujohn@vyrse.social
    Oct 6, 2026, 5:41 PM

    @dlakelan @mcc @mhoye one benefit to UBI even in this world:

    Give the masses UBI and it triggers the discussion of wealth accumulation and laws as cudgels against the masses in a very palpable way.

    And it works where it isn't offset by even more cruelty.

    So support UBI and the doors of questioning it opens

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  • Daniel Lakelanddlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
    Oct 6, 2026, 5:43 PM

    @john
    I support UBI even in this world. Specifically UBI plus a flat tax on income. But I dont think it will work well until we end the world where a small group of people can own tens of thousands or millions of housing units (and factory machines and copyrights and etc) and withhold them from use by force until a rent is paid.
    @mcc @mhoye

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Oct 6, 2026, 9:05 PM

    @john @dlakelan @violetmadder @mhoye "percentage of households that are owner-occupied" is slightly different from how many people own their home. What if the owner lives in one room in a house and there are one to four other people in the house the owner is collecting rent from 🤔

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  • John Mieraujohn@vyrse.social
    Oct 6, 2026, 9:39 PM

    @mcc @dlakelan @violetmadder @mhoye far cop: from same article:

    "According to ATTOM Data Research, only "34 percent of all American homeowners have 100 percent equity in their properties – they’ve either paid off their entire mortgage debt or they never had a mortgage"

    The other 66% would likely be trapped by the rentier class

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  • Daniel Lakelanddlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
    Oct 6, 2026, 9:40 PM

    @ozzelot @mcc @mhoye

    They are, and a lot has been said about this at c4ss.org and in market anarchist circles, such as by @KevinCarson1 The key is that this type of money is very different from state issued money. It is, in essence a pure unit of accounting.

    Graeber's "Debt" points out that there were many "informal" debt based systems of this type in history. Essentially people "keeping track" of pseudo-balances in their head. Credit flowed from community not state sanctioned gatekeepers.

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  • Linalina@neuromatch.social
    Oct 7, 2026, 4:36 PM

    @dlakelan
    @ozzelot @mcc @mhoye @KevinCarson1

    yeah, the history of money and monetary policy shows that what we call "money" is always a historically contingent and unstable assemblage of policies and social practices, rather than being simply about coinage or some stable theoretical conception of value and exchange. along with Debt, Christine Desan's Making Money is a good reference for that analysis.

    this is also one area that I think some MMT folks provide some decent insight (despite my qualms with other parts of the MMT world). Scott Ferguson's Declarations of Dependence is a good example of that.

    on the front of imaginaries of alternative monetary systems/practices, I've got Aaron Benanav's Beyond Capitalism on my reading list... don't think it's explicitly anarchist in orientation, but, from what I've gleaned, it seems to provide a plausible alternative monetary policy framework (while eschewing blueprinting).

    and, of course, there's plenty of anarchist research into how policy frameworks can be (and have been, and still are) designed and implemented in ways that embody anarchist practices and organizing without a state apparatus of enforcement.

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Oct 7, 2026, 4:42 PM

    @lina @dlakelan @ozzelot What you and Daniel are saying makes sense but my naive question is, what makes your "historically contingent and unstable assemblage of policies and social practices" from evolving into something that looks like a government?

    This the the thing that I never see answered in anarchist literature— "okay, I see how the system you're describing could work— what would keep it *stable*?"

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  • Daniel Lakelanddlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
    Oct 7, 2026, 5:01 PM

    @mcc @lina @ozzelot

    I think the answer to this is the society needs to value anarchy, that is, not having people whose opinions matter more than others. The population then puts pressure on anyone who appears to be trying to set themselves up in a special role, up to an including active defense.

    This is how immediate return hunter gatherers act. There's some ancient Indus river valley civilizations that seemed to have this kind of thing going on if I'm not mistaken.

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  • Mx. Chara Aznable of Pnictogenmxchara@cyberpunk.lol
    Oct 6, 2026, 8:11 PM

    @mcc @mhoye I honestly don't think that any U.S. politician of significance would offer UBI except as part of a scheme to extort more rent with the excuse that people could now be expected to be squeezed for more. Corporate techlords and Andrew Yang are talking UBI, that's such an evil sign.

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  • michielmichiel@social.tchncs.de
    Oct 8, 2026, 7:06 PM

    @mcc @mhoye That's why most original proponents of UBI - from Thomas Spence to Henry George - linked it to a Land Value Tax that captures that value from landlords again. That system wasn't entirely braindead.

    I agree that a UBI by itself would just go towards rent seekers.

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Oct 8, 2026, 7:09 PM

    @michiel @mhoye georgism is definitely interesting to me, but this possibly just moves the "person who realizes they can charge $500/mo" from being the landlord to the cartel that provides food, gas, or medical care. now maybe you can break food and gas cartels and introduce single-payer medical care. But at some point you've built so much of socialism UBI starts to seem like not just the easy part but a trivial part, compared to building socialism…

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  • michielmichiel@social.tchncs.de
    Oct 8, 2026, 7:12 PM

    @mcc @mhoye I respect any kind of socialism that at least engages with economic theory. Some socialism does, but I have to admit that many varieties look like cybernetic fantasies to me. To each their own.

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  • fluffy 💜fluffy@plush.city
    Oct 6, 2026, 7:15 PM

    @mhoye @jack Also all of the “basic needs met” things are something that there’s an extreme surplus of in many parts of the world but they’re being hoarded by people who have no interest in letting it be used even though it’s costing them money to hold onto it while it rots and decays.

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