Universal basic income is not a road to communism | Hacker News Reader

Universal basic income is not a road to communism

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26 pointsersinesen27 comments

The most obvious response to this is “why give out money?” Why not “universal basic services “?

Providing the basics of life via a modern welfare system (like most of the developed world), or provide regulations that reduce inequality and spread the wealth

Just giving out money does seem like it lacks imagination for people who think state services can only be provided by private sector (and co-incidentally the wealthy will own the private providers hence getting the money)

Who will define exactly what services are provided and how?

Right to Food, Right to Education, Right to Healthcare, Right to Housing should be the bare minimum.

Food is probably the one where free market will do better. Or what should universal basic food look like? And how would it operate?

With education and healthcare. Well good enough systems already exist as examples. So nothing really to do there with UBI receivers spending payments.

Housing is more balanced question, but maybe involving money with public housing could allow better allocation. More popular locations being more expensive and less popular cheaper. Thus moving demand around.

People need more than the services the state provides.

Under the current system huge amounts to of people don't have the money to participate in the economy.

Give them money and they will spend it, local businesses get to grow and the multiplier effect should mean it more than pays for itself.

They will spend it all on rent or mortgage because rent will increase by exactly the same amount that UBI will provide.

Universal Basic Trickle-Down Economics

The private sector does it more efficiently.

Would you have a state-run grocery store?

> Would you have a state-run grocery store?

Apparently, yes: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/30/business/zohran-mamdani-g...

> The private sector does it more efficiently.

I think this is a misconception.

In the absence of private actors, the tendency of the state-run actor is to be inefficient. However, efficiency is not the only goal, and it should not be the state's main goal. Otherwise, you won't e.g. have emergency services capacity in reserve for rare but severe events. They get cut for "efficiency ".

In the absence of state actors, the tendency of private actors is to maximise profits and extract rents. But this is not the best thing for the larger society.

Therefor, the presence of each keeps the other honest. Specifically, we must distinguish the presence of state-run grocery stores from the straw man that you construct where there are only state-run grocery stores.

> The private sector does it more efficiently.

This gets said a lot, but only rarely does it seem to be true. Depending on what you mean by "efficiently", I suppose.

>Just giving out money does seem like it lacks imagination for people who think state services can only be provided by private sector (and co-incidentally the wealthy will own the private providers hence getting the money)

I think UBI is a concession to this unfortunate political reality. In the US (and maybe the UK I don't know, they seem to love privatizing everything now) universal basic services are an absolute existential impossibility. Americans hear that and they imagine Stalinism and mass graves.

A better argument against UBI, to me, would be that it would only pass muster with voters under the Devil's deal of repealing all existing social services (and likely privatizing them) to cut government expenditures, and so it would never be enough to allow people to afford those services to begin with.

It would also cease to be universal. Voters would demand means testing and governments would attach strings and limitations in order to keep money out of the hands of immigrants and the indigent poor, as welfare policies often reflect systemically racist biases. And of course there would be corruption and grift at all levels.

And I'm saying this as someone who supports UBI as a concept. I think coupling people's access to the economy (and in the US, to healthcare and education) entirely to the value the market can extract from them is a moral evil. Food deserts are a moral evil. But I absolutely don't trust the US to implement UBI in any way that doesn't somehow benefit the rich and punish everyone else.

I agree with the article, we are going to automate away everything what people can do except few jobs which only 130+ IQ individuals are able to do. What do you want to do with the 98% of population which will be effectively useless? I hope that staunch proponents of capitalism won't come up with a variation of "sucks to be them" because that's a recipe for redo of French Revolution on global scale.

Interesting article.

Personally, I can't begin to theorise what the best way forward is. A Universal Basic Income system always sounds great, but where the funding comes from and what effect it's implementation would have, what effect it would have on peoples aspirations, I can't begin to piece it all together.

You always hear people in work say that if they didn't have to work so much, they would do x, be y, practice more z. However various events (notably for me, Coronavirus furlough beyond the initial lockdowns in the UK) show that this rarely materialises. There is simply too many distractions in most peoples lives (many being products of capitalism, like our beloved tech industry which is 90% distraction economy).

On the other hand, our current system is one in which many people who don't really want to work are made to work, or people have to work in jobs they don't like and they do the least required. I've worked alongside terrible colleagues. Something like UBI would at least get people like this to piss off out of the workforce and make space for somebody who actually somewhat cared about the job. I get the "minimum wage, minimum effort" phrase, but these people aren't holding minimum wage jobs. The national productivity (notoriously bad in the UK) would be much better if those who wanted to work did so, and those who didn't want to could just live off of a UBI.

On the other hand, maybe I'm becoming more pessimistic, but I think we just have tons of companies offering redundant products and services, whose existence only really serves to worsen the environment, individual health and the health of society. I understand that under full capitalism all of these things are viable product and they serve to offer choice and competition, but a supermarket is now roughly 50-50 real food and junk (plus variations of junk). We're dealing with high levels of food and substance abuse, high levels of media and technology overuse. As a programmer, whenever I see a new app or website become popular, a lot of the time the first thing I think is "why".

I feel personally, and I may be wrong, the only way to fix any of this is to dial it back (degrowth), implement a UBI and to change a huge amount of people's standards and expectations, which I know probably sounds radical.

The way we live right now, largely as a result of the products of capitalism, is not right. It's not right to chug Coca Cola as if it is water, it's not right to spend hours every day staring at pointless content on glowing rectangles, and it's not right that we all eat and consume as much resources as possible while exercising and outputting as little as possible. Our sources of entertainment are superficial and the long term victim of all of it is, is our physical and mental health, as well as our time and the quality of the environment we live in.

Aren't those that want to work, already working? And those that don't want to work but are doing the bare minimum to keep their job are still accomplishing something.

So only keeping the motivated people would make net production go down, I'd think.

Not at all. Many people who want to work cannot find work and many (maybe most) people haven't found work they enjoy but do want to work.

Those who are working the bare minimum in many cases are holding back efficiency where somebody more enthusiastic would be working in their place.

Every decade or so, capitalism’s critics rediscover the dream of a universal basic income (UBI), a stipend for all. The latest revival [1] goes further: what if this modest reform could turn capitalism into its opposite? In a recent academic proposal, unconditional basic income is imagined as a “capitalist road to communism.” If people no longer had to sell their labor to survive, the system itself, the authors suggest, would evolve peacefully beyond markets and profit.

> beyond markets

The competitive markets is what keeps the system in check. That's like arguing for a strong government beyond checks and balances.

This is exactly what happened in Poland 1950-1989. We had no goods because government was too strong, too blind to see that there are stock shortages, (also goods were exported to Russia), so every person had their "kartki" - vouchers for food but there was no food. You could "buy" meat with them each week but not more often, but they were rendered useless because there was not enough meat. People were creating a second internal market and trading with each other, which in the turn was forbidden and people were persecuted. That's the communism yo

And in the GDR. And I guess under all? other communistic regimes as well.

We also have no problem with government redistribution in practice as long as it goes to the market.

We pretend the government buying a stake in Intel is not redistribution.

It is the perfect example of how we "believe" in markets unless we believe an entity is too important to be left to the market.

INTC stock price is up so that is used "proof" this was the right thing to do because "the market is always right".

Actually, as someone who dislikes capitalism, I don't like UBI. I think UBI is something which allows capitalism to continue even after it's sell-by-date. Historically, like a couple of years ago, my view wasn't weird among critics of capitalism either. We saw UBI as a liberal stabilization policy.

Sort of like how public education too, is a policy that is straight-up communism 'to each according to his need', and something which is required in order to stabilize a capitalist system.

But I don't want communism. I want socialism 'to each according to his contribution'. Of course, the Marxists believe that that's just a temporary phase and will fade away into communism, but I think you can get many kinds of communism, some rather bad, and although I don't agree with the Marxists on this point, and want socialism for itself, I also think the path through a 'to each according to his contribution' phase is likely to lead to better kinds of communism than what you'd out of a stabilized capitalism that ends up adopting more and more elements of communism to stabilize itself.

You wrote:

> UBI is something which allows capitalism to continue even after...

Strong agree with this statement. UBI is (yet another) monkey patch.

OC writes:

> Economic systems do not evolve like software updates; they shift like tectonic plates. They hold steady for long periods, storing pressure, then rupture.

Yup. Our economy is a complex adaptive system. Any equilibrium is short-lived and will soon collapse (aka chaos).

The recurring need to resuscitate (resurrect) our economy is the norm. More so as it has become larger and more complex.

Requiring hot fixes like debt forgiveness (help the little people) and bailouts (elites feeding at the public trough).

This cycle, pattern, trait, whatever of our classic liberal capitalism is intrinsic.

I am totally fine with it. Whatever keeps the trains running.

The aspect that pisses me off is the growing inequity. I strongly prefer debt forgiveness over bailouts. But, hey, that's just me.

Alas, we consider wealthiness a moral trait, so our political economy disallows straight up debt forgiveness (cuz moral hazard, derp derp). Bailouts are the sole remaining option (totally not a moral hazard).

The short periods when our nation does (ever so slightly) favor Labor over Capital, it's been in the form of handouts (eg Farmstead Act) and govt spending (Keynesianism 1.0 (FDR, LBJ) and 2.0 (Biden)).

You wrote:

> I want socialism 'to each according to his contribution'.

What about the young, disabled, and infirm? What even counts as disabled? Ad nauseum...

I've thought long and hard about this. Socialism, Communism, Liberal Capitalism, oh my!

TBH, I can't make sense of any of it. The complex dance involving morality, government, society, economies, etc. Any reading recommendations? The more modern, the better. TIA.

I did manage to distill what I want to just 2 points and 1 IDK:

   1) Help people help themselves, as best able.

   2) Also, help people who cannot help themselves.

   ?) TBD WRT anti-social behavior. I'll support anything that actually works.

I don't care what form of society, politics, or economy can achieve what I want. I don't care what the norm of "everyone helping everyone" is called.

Okay, rant over. Peace.

Yes, absolutely, even if I want socialism, some welfare state stuff is of course necessary not to have an absolutely horrid society. We'll have to pay pensioners and take care of people who end up born with Down's Syndrome etc.

Also, some of your quotes aren't actually from my comment, have you run this through an LLM or something?

Sorry "OP" probably should have been "OC" for original content. And it probably should've been a separate reply (avoiding topic drift).

Oh, I see.

No, it's not confusing it all, I just sort of filed your comment as slightly disordered and then didn't give it the focus it needed, so I missed it, but it's perfectly sensible.

As a counterpoint to this article, I suggest this one written by a Marxist back in 2015.

https://jacobin.com/2015/12/erik-olin-wright-real-utopias-an...

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