作者认为把全民基本收入当作解决方案源于对货币本质的误解，强调货币只是“地图”而非现实；并指出现有UBI实验规模很小，因此效果不能代表大规模实施。
Thinking that UBI will solve anything comes from a misunderstanding about money. Money is a map, not a territory. All UBI experiments have been small scale, and of course UBI works at a small scale. No shit you can give a few people money and it’s all good and they are happy. Because the people they are buying from aren’t also on UBI. But once you add in the U part…
What do you plan to buy with your free government dollars? Want to buy eggs? Sorry, the egg people stopped making eggs, they are living free on UBI. Want to buy a house? Who built it? Nobody, because they all were getting UBI and didn’t want to build houses anymore. They write poems now. There’s still old houses available, but the price for them has 20xed, well outside of what you can afford.
Belief in UBI comes from a fallacy that the economy is some natural thing. I see supermarket. Supermarket has eggs for $5. I get $10,000 UBI. I can buy 2,000 eggs. Of course this isn’t what happens. Like most things politicians invent, nobody considered the second order effects, and you will not be getting 2,000 eggs with your UBI. Cause everyone got the UBI and bought the eggs. Either no more eggs or price of eggs goes up. And even worse, many people quit work once they got the UBI. So now less eggs are made. And your whole UBI check gets you 6 or 7 eggs instead of 2,000, if that.
The root of this stupidity is that people see themselves apart from society. They don’t know where stuff comes from, it might as well be the stuff fairy that puts it on the supermarket shelves and sets prices. If the stuff fairy was real, UBI might make sense. But we live in a society. We work for each other. At least the adults do. There already is UBI in the world for some people, it’s called allowance. It’s for children and high-end prostitutes.
It reminds me of the episode of Malcolm in the Middle where Malcolm dates this dumb hot girl, and she suggests solving poverty by making every 1 dollar bill into a million dollar bill. Have the UBI people considered that idea?
What comes first, actually trying UBI or the end of democracy?
(what you actually want is for everything to be cheap to produce. but sorry, 6 citizens “have concerns” and now we have six more weeks of expensive memory. I’m glad the Chinese are ramping up memory production)