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Comment by nopenopenopeno | Hacker News Reader

The effective purpose of a UBI (why the ruling class likes the idea) is to constrain risky tendencies of a highly financialized economy that depends on a large supply of dirt cheap labor without too much inflation.

With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth. Everyone else will be a reserve army of cheap labor that serves to bare the weight of the financial ebbs and flows of the mighty dollar in the global market, similar to the function of America’s current lower class, but intensified. Rent prices in rural, small city, and slum neighborhoods will be saran wrapped to the UBI amount, and escaping those areas will be practically impossible because rents in the cities will be affordable only to the elite.

In other words, sure, you’re probably right.

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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 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.

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.

This is terrifying, and has a ring of truth to it. I still think it's better than the alternative though.

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