canpakes wrote: ↑Thu May 28, 2026 2:01 pm
Gadianton wrote: ↑Thu May 28, 2026 1:20 pm
Isn't Philo just saying, sure, it's ran by the government but the government is ran by billionaires?
That’s how I’m reading it.
And as government decision-making over
who receives what is now becoming subject to the whims of Trump sycophants and lackeys and based on the idea of inflicting pain or revenge on perceived political ’enemies’ - or richly rewarding loyalists - there’s no telling how any future system would end up operating.
I get that. But Social Security is also run by government, which is run by billionaires, and Philo isn’t worried about that. UBI would be a program, just like SS, that people would depend on for their income. My question for Philo is, why is UBI scary but SS is not?
AI is already putting tens of thousands of people out of work. We’re looking at the very real possibility that the private sector will be unable to generate enough jobs to support a big chunk of the country. The only other employer is the government, which half the country is trying to shrink into near invisibility.
So, we can let the economy create Marx’s reserve army of the unemployed, risking violent revolution or we can find a way to allow people to have a place to live, food to eat, and an ability to live fulfilled lives. UBI is one way to do the latter. Another is to have the government guarantee everyone a job that pays a living wage. Both of these involve government determining how much folks get paid.
The free market doesn’t care about how GDP gets divvied up. It doesn’t care about how many workers can doings work. If AI eliminates half of American jobs, the free market is more than happy to let half of American workers starve. And it’s billionaires that are pushing the economy in that direction. I can get being afraid of billionaires, but fear about their control of one of the ways we avoid mass poverty in contrast to their influence in creating the poverty strikes me as odd.
