That said, to address your point head on, is it possible in the US for everyone to move on to "bigger and better" things? I don't think so which is why we have so many adults with families in min. wage or lowing paying jobs. There is no pool of well paying jobs for them all to move into, there is no magic solution where everyone can have their needs met just by pulling harder on their bootstraps.
So the question then becomes: should a person (or two people) working a full time job be able to provide for themselves and their family? I think the answer to that question is yes. You might disagree, but I don't think its fair to write them off as having a "fantasy".
What I don't understand is why many see it as acceptable for any business to pay less than a living wage under any circumstance, it's just a roundabout way of making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force
that's because remuneration isn't based on value, it's based on market conditions. value merely provides an upper bound. as an extreme example, clean water provides near infinite value to you (you need water to survive, so you're willing to pay infinite dollars for it), yet you can get it from your tap at less than a penny per gallon.
>What I don't understand is why many see it as acceptable for any business to pay less than a living wage under any circumstance, it's just a roundabout way of making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force
But those people on welfare would receive welfare regardless of whether they're hired or not? I don't see how that's "making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force".
44% of U.S. workers are employed in low wage jobs with a median annual wage of $18,000. [1]
Sure we can staff fast food with only 16-19 year olds but what about every other sector of the service industry and the myriad of other "low skill" jobs? are there 40 million plus "high skill" jobs out there waiting for the taking? The answer is no. [2]
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minimum-wage-2019-almost-half-o...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/11/21/low-wag...
No, I don't think this is accurate. They wanted to abolish work for everyone, not for a select few.
They use a specific definition of work, so they maybe aren't necessarily anti-work in the way you are thinking.
This may not be the case now, but that can change.
I'm always wary of paraphrasing Graeber, but it's possible that living in a world where a small handful of individuals own the majority of the wealth has led to the market rewarding various jobs in a way that creates more misery than is strictly necessary - for example corporate lawyers being paid hundreds of thousands because they can help billionaires get even richer, while farmers producing the most important of all resources, food, are constantly hovering around the poverty line.
EDIT: and as a mathematician, I would appreciate a proof of your "mathematically impossible" proposition. :)
:) :) :)
I'm obviously too retarded for such an advanced concept, but in my head there's no scenario where a utopian UBI-based society is possible, even with more advanced tech. To allow everyone to have food, shelter, and other necessities regardless of their usefulness to society, at the very least we'd have to have severe birth rate restrictions, strong law enforcement, and other fun authoritarian systems that would no longer qualify the environment as a utopia in the eyes of UBI supporters.
Seems like yet another liberal pipe dream that is entirely disconnected from reality, though I'd love to be proven wrong, if anyone has some good reading suggestions on this subject.
Moreover, what's to stop rich people from selling their land? Or abandoning it and moving to another country?
UBI doesn't make any sense to me as CONCEPT. Sure you can find some creative ways to raise some money this year and give it to the poor (or everyone), but how do you create a such a system that continues to function over years and decades?
Money that is given to someone just for existing inherently has no value, so it cannot possibly have much purchasing power. The only things it can buy are things that are subsidized by the government anyway and exists already, such as low income housing and food-stamp-eligible food. What I don't understand is that people seem to think UBI would somehow result in a higher standard of living for people who are already in low income housing and on food stamps, and I just can't think of a mechanism for that.
You seem to be presuming inelastic supply of all of the stuff they'd ever buy. This is relatively true for some stuff (housing supply in the largest urban markets).
But, most of these things are elastic and/or have larger world markets to bid against. Food, consumer goods, housing in other markets, etc. Therefore, while a UBI would be somewhat inflationary, it would still increase the purchasing power of the poor and lower middle class.
> The only things it can buy are things that are subsidized by the government anyway and exists already, such as low income housing and food-stamp-eligible food.
This isn't true, but this is the biggest benefit to UBI: unwind the administrative apparatus involved with entitlements, and remove the lower income regions which have over 100% effective marginal tax rates. A complicated patchwork of programs can be simplified and reduced in scope (SNAP, section 8, EITC, disability insurance, etc..) and we can ensure that people always have a positive marginal incentive to work. Milton Friedman himself proposed a UBI in a form of a "negative income tax" to avoid these economic distortions.
What type of living conditions are we looking to guarantee? If your baseline is "prehistoric living conditions", I'm sure it's quite affordable. If it's "21st century middle class america" it will be ruinously expensive. Incremental improvements in technology can eventually bring us to a point where we can afford to give arbitrary fixed standard of living to everyone, but not if that standard of living is constantly increasing.