Henry George had it right - Just Tax Land
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Universal basic income does not fix inequality, it doesn't take existing accumulated wealth into account. You get X amount per month, yay, food. Jeff Bezos gets the same and throws it on the money pile without blinking an eye. It will lead to more inflation and you'll still be poor compared to who's wealthy. Socially corrected incomes are a way better tool for battling inequality, and in today's world's, it shouldn't anymore cost a million-person bureaucracy to run a wealth-distributing system either.
If anything they'll pay loads to smart people who can help them calculate the absolute minimum, taking away your freedom to choose what to eat, when to eat, where to live, how to live etc.
I get the sentiment, but they will create the absolute worst possible outcome as it benefits them the most.
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EDIT: I'm actually a believer in Basic Income, but this is a silly argument. Bad arguments do a disservice to the idea of Basic Income and make the battle uphill that much harder.
I read this two days ago when it was posted, and it didn't sit well with me because it didn't make sense. I hand to think about it for while about why it didn't make sense, but I have it now.
Lets break this down:
We’re the only species who must pay to exist
We're really the only species that uses money regularly. So at first glance the literal statement is true but irrelevant: We're the only species that must pay, because we're the only species that uses money. So the literal definition is that other species don't have to pay. True, but they don't get to use money to store work. Our society has determined that "money" is a method to store "work".
What the author is saying in spirit is: We're the only species who has to work to exist.
If indeed I have the author's meaning right, then this is clearly false. Every other species has to do some level of work to exist. Even parasites will not have a second generation without working to procreate. This brings us to the author's next statement:
In a private property system where all the land was claimed by others before we were born, and everything we need to stay alive costs money....
If you're willing to lower yourself to an animal that doesn't use money with all of the freedom and consequences that comes with that, you don't need to spend a time on land, food, shelter or ANYTHING. There are huge swaths of land all over the world where you could live in the wilderness likely your entire life and never see another human being who will bother you. Most of northern Canada and northern Russia and completely unpopulated for hundreds of hectares. Same with lots of the middle part of Australia. If you're willing to live off the land without modern medicine, communication, entertainment, or societal infrastructure then there's no one out there to force you to pay for anything.
The author goes off the rails in suggesting an non-human species, which has no benefits of humanity, has to pay for nothing but lives and dies off the land and at the will of other predators and nature, is equal to the life of a human in modern society with modern medicine, agriculture, law, defense, technology and entertainment.
To the author: If you want to live like a non-human species (an animal) there are plenty of places you can do that. No one will stop you. No one will make you pay anything. Have at it! ~~If you want the benefits of other people's work in a society, then you have to contribute something back to that society that society values.*~~ EDIT: I'm removing the last sentence because it needs more context for a much larger argument. The rest of my post stands.
If you want the benefits of other people’s work in a society, then you have to contribute something back to that society that society values.
Although you have to contribute something that someone else will pay for such as not parenting. Our society disregards parenting even though it gains greatly from its benefit (or in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, suffers greatly when parenting is neglected) While we don't literally toss our children out to the elements, the degree to which children are disregarded is conspicuous.
And for most of us, we are expected to contribute more than we receive, as demonstrated by the plutocrats who gain from and hoard those profits. For the rest of us, we get meager benefits from living as bonded servants in society, but we don't get full benefits of mutuality. And for most of us, our benefits exclude healthcare, nutrition, etc. which should be communal. When we have the capacity to automate a particular duty, it is not the rest of us who gain from that benefit, but the elite who cease paying workers to do it.
We've yet to see a mutualistic community that assures its wealth and privileges are evenly distributed but we certainly see ones more mutualistic than the ones that have to rely on thought-terminating clichés like Living here is better than living in the wild (and yes, I suspect even all of Canada and Siberia is alloted and owned.) Living here might be better than in the wild, but it is still miserable for the most of us. It's still feudalism and slavery only with extra obfuscating steps.
And now our civilization careens towards high existential risk, and we're going to see if it really is easier to imagine the end of humanity or the end of capitalism.
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Yeah, I've been pointing this out since it kinda clicked in my mind and I realized this (which, to my shame, took quite a while).
Most of us are not born free because to have a roof over our heads and food in our table we have to work within the system and get paid what the system allows us to get, since we can't just occupy a piece of land, build a house and farm it.
We have at best "limited" freedom, depending on nationality (for example, an EU passport lets you easilly try to live in in quite a list of countries), opportunities (i.e. is Education free and good quality were you grew up) and the biggest one, how much money and connections do mommy and daddy have - all of which dictate the options available to us, but only a tiny number (the sons and daughters of the rich) have full freedom.
Not necessarily. All species need to scavenge for their own subsistence unless they want to die, so there is a motivation there to go out and get food (i.e. other species), among other resources from the environment specific to their capabilities.
There is no free lunch.
BUT species don't necessarily have to exchange resources with others to live in their habitat. They might need to defend it from other organisms of their same species or of other species, or they can share it with those. Exchange relationships can also arise, but they aren't necessary to happen.
Habitat can of course degrade over time, so there is a motivation to maintain and repair that habitat or move to a more suitable one nearby or far away.
This is all to say that humans, the exceptional beings we are at solving problems and doing amazing things, should be able to invent ways to get around entropy and inconvenience, which we have to a degree: not perfectly, though.
Regarding this article, I'm not sure I want people to own land for the sake of "owning". Perhaps a case can be made where people who use the land apportioned to them get to keep it over time (see what the Nordic countries are doing). This would exclude land and homes people have in other states or countries.
Not sure what the other consequences of this practice are tho, so I welcome any feedback anyone might have
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Image Transcription:
Hachyderm post by user Scott Santens @[email protected] reading
"We're the only species who must pay to exist.
"In a private property system where all the land was claimed by others before we were born, and everything we need to stay alive costs money, unconditional #basicincome is a basic 👏 human 👏 right 👏 to the resources we all need to exist."
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