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That’s why the developed world is taking about universal basic income and not minimum wage. Guess the US will get there at some point too. If they stop falling back into the dark ages at some point.
UBI without a minimum wage promote workplaces that don’t respect worker’s labour, and socializes while privatizing profits. It would basically be the issue Germany had with social support before minimum wage was introduced. We need both UBI and a minimum wage.
what we need with ubi is a progressive tax structure that is across all forms of income equally. In the us the top rate is just above 6 figures and never goes higher and if its from investments it gets taxed in a different system designed for no taxes to be paid (same with corporate)
Does higher minimum wage make workplaces respect worker’s labor more?
Why would people work for an abusive employer when they don’t particularly need to work at all?
Because most people want more than basic survival? Having food and a roof over your head come very low on the pyramid of needs.
The whole premise of the argument is that the workers in question are getting paid shit wages, so they’re barely getting more than basic survival anyway. So I ask again, why would people put up with that when they could be using that time to look for a new job, learn new skills, become self-employed, etc.? How could giving workers the leverage to quit without the fear of becoming homeless possibly result in them having less leverage over employers than they do now?
Where does not being abused every day stack up? I’d rather just sit at home than that.
Leftist memes be like
Hell yeah brother raises fist
Yep…
ancaps: “muh NAP”
ancoms: “please get away from our commune, thank you”
Norway doesn’t have a minimum wage because the unions don’t want one. They believe having a set minimum wage sets a low anchor for negotiating, and that they can negotiate higher wages without one.
Select industries do have a minimum wage for their specific field, though. And there’s a legal minimum you must pay teens working in summer internships, because they’re not unionized and often get lowballed.
This is probably gonna bite them in a long run when neoliberalism will chew through union power.
IMHO this strategy helps to prevent chewing. Workers will say “I need this union for a high wage” instead of “what do we even need these union dues for anymore”.
You can’t really compare US and Norwegian unions apples to apples. They don’t work the same way. In Norway they’re way more mainstream, work closer with the government, and they don’t employ people. There are no “union shops”, and no vote to join a union. You just join one while employed directly with your employer.
You can still negotiate your own compensation, but the union may also negotiate raises for the entire workplace separately (including for non-members). In a way you could say the union negotiates a workplace-specific minimum wage.
The risk of union workers getting fired and replaced with scabs is far less in Norway, because there is much stronger worker protection. These protections apply to everyone, not just the unionized workers, but they were achieved due to unions, years ago.
I don’t think you necessarily can draw any conclusions about strategy for Norwegian unions based on experience with US unions, or vice versa. They’re just different beasts.
Note: Apologies if some of this is mildly incorrect, I have not been directly involved with union work in either country, and so I only have a high-level view of it all. Someone more experienced should be able to give more detailed information about union strategy in either country.
UBI is kind of cool but it has some massive flaws. For example: Landlords and groceries can just raise prices to bring the cost of living up and since there are no rent/price controls (because “that would be communism”) we’ll be right back to where we started. What you want is Universal Basic Services. Anything you need to live is free. Literally impossible for anyone to game that system and equally impossible for people to slip through the gaps, but it’s also never going to happen because “that would be communism”
So yeah this is why capitalism has go to, because any attempt at actually making a just and fair society will be dismissed as “being communism”
UBI is a way to make capitalism more fair. One important fact about capitalism that seemingly everyone forgot is that competition is a requirement for it to work.
If there is fierce competition in all markets, even if everyone is getting UBI, price hikes are impossible.
It’s a fantasy though. An extremely competitive market would be nice, but in reality it would be a race to the bottom and those who started with more cash would win out, buy up or starve the competition and monopolise, giving them the extra space to be lazy and pass on profits to their shareholders, who dictate increased prices to increase their margins.
That’s where you have to tax monopolies.
Monopolies will resist but it takes only some expropriations to motivate shareholders that they push for law-abiding behavior.
This doesn’t stop anything though again. Unless you tax them out of business, they will still be a monopoly and will fix prices for their profit. Less profit is still profit.
If you tax them too high they will either seek recourse via illegally bribing politicians (or “lobbying”) to have those taxes removed, or monopolise with legally distinct businesses where wealth is concentrated in the few regardless.
Right, they are a monopoly until there is competition. That’s OK. You tax them higher until it becomes profitable for a competitor. That’s not ‘out of business’, just high enough.
But you can also accept the monopoly if the offer is transparent and good enough.
The colluding is a problem. It is the problem. It’s unavoidable. In every system there is corruption. This cannot be solved but has to be dealt with case by case.
For the very problems you stated, I’m in favor of UBI. Capital would take some time to adjust to the new system and for a moment, misery would be alleviated for a metric shitload of people. When it’s ripped from our hands by greedy capitalists, it could act as a unifying, radicalizing force and bring us closer to a revolution. There’s a loooot more to it than my few sentences. But a UBI given to everyone with no means testing would be an objectively good thing. And its a bit like Pandora’s box. Once it’s here, you can’t take it away without serious social ramifications. I’ll leave a couple of articles that touch on this because it’s something the left ought to be taking more seriously, however I haven’t had a chance to read the two of them all the way through yet. I’m at work and things just got busy but here ya go one, two
I like the idea of UBI too. I hope it happens and that we transition into a UBS model once its success is shown to the world. That being said it’s important to front that with me not being in support of the neofeudal UBI that silicon valley techbros push for. That would be a disaster.
Hard agree on all points. It’s a bit of a bummer that Andrew yang of all people was the one to start the national conversation about UBI because his whole deal just pollutes the discussion from the jump
It did at least introduce the concept to a lot of people, especially to those who have otherwise never have heard of it.
Kind of like what Bernard Sandman did. He introduced people to a bastardized version of socialism but that still got people talking.
Also for a guy with a Math pin he ignored key parts of the UBI research he used for his position and repeatedly misrepresented the figures in it.
The projection that the economy would grow because of UBI was in the part of the Roosevelt Institute study that posited the money would just appear from the sky whereas the growth rates projected from tax financed UBI were almost zero as would be expected.
gigabit internet should be free for everyone imo
Yeah, why TF is the internet so shitty in US? I get 500 Mbps down/10 Mbps up for $80/month. It’s disgusting. I’d rather have 100 Mbps symmetric. Or better yet, 500 Mbps symmetric. My parents pay around $20/month for that, and they live in rural India. Even they got fiber, but I have to deal with fucking coax cables. The only local provider with fiber and symmetric speeds doesn’t operate in my side of the town. Why does everything in US have to be designed to fuck the end consumer? It’s really frustrating.
I wish all cable cartels a very Nationalize that shit
It’s super frustrating that my state banned the ability for cities to have municipal internet, it makes organizing to make gigabit Internet a municipal utility much harder
that is batshit insane what good reason would there be to ban it
Because telecom companies secured their monopoly after a whiff of community organizing
the closest thing we have now in the us afaik is public libraries, but even those aren’t getting much support these days :(
must be even more annoying with that stuff about book banning in some states!
To be fair, it’s pretty communist. The problem with anything like that in America, is that anything remotely “communist” is regarded as bad because of the cold war (and other various conflicts with Nazi/communist countries) where anything communist became associated with being a traitor. So supporting communist anything, even if it’s genuinely a universal good, makes you a target for people who think you’re supporting stuff like what China/Russia/former communist countries did (when they were communist)… most of the problems in those countries aren’t related to communism, but rather authoritarianism that serves to underpin most communist regimes; which, bluntly put, is how most capitalism operates. Without something like unions, or organized labor, or collective agreements (usually a result of a union), the boss has 100% of the power over what you do, when you do it, how you do it, and what you’ll be paid for the task. Literally a small group (aka, the board of directors and c-suite) have total authoritarian control over what happens and you have zero say in it. Either you agree to their terms, or gtfo, and find another authoritarian business to work for on their terms.
But nobody talks about the authoritarianism in modern society, people are either on the “eat the rich” or “communism is bad” bandwagon with both extremes having their own problems and misunderstandings about what they’re actually fighting for and against.
I’m against authoritarianism, and in favor of Communist control (aka, for the people, by the people), and while that’s a nice sentiment in the American Constitution, it’s the authoritarian business owners that either make up, or otherwise bribe or own the entirety of the government. Good game everyone.
Anything you need to live is free. Literally impossible for anyone to game that system
Let me introduce you to government corruption
I felt like it should be paired with government contracts for something akin to a private dorm room (room, cafeteria with meal plan, laundry, computer lab, wifi, etc.) that negotiates a price that is then what the ubi is pegged at. Folks are guaranteed being able to have at least that option or can utilize it for something else.
I’ve never heard of UBS before, I hope it takes off
(I mean it absolutely will take off… in a post capitalist society. Hopefully it takes off long before then though)
You can do your part by fighting for socialized housing (tenants collectively own the property and rent goes to upgrades) and municipal cable. The rewards are well worth it. You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) wait around for a bloody revolution to fight back against capitalism. Every little thing you can do to wrench power from the capitalist class even something small like joining a union helps a lot if we all do it.
Landlords and groceries can just raise prices to bring the cost of living up
Sigh. People make this braindead argument every single time this subject comes up. No they can’t. Markets do not work that way. It’s literally just a repackaged argument against minimum wage and it has been thoroughly debunked in that context.
Unless you live in a city with rent stabilization, yes landlords will do that. Groceries will likely not have that problem, because of other market conditions. The first to increase their rents will be luxury apartments. Once the Internet is done laughing their asses off about $5000 rent, other landlords will use realpage to gauge the market and increase in tandem. Landlords literally do not care if their property is occupied, because the money is in the land and we’ve commoditized housing.
Don’t try to mischaracterize me. For UBI to work, we need national rent stabilization and significant efforts to build non-market housing across the nation. I’m not against UBI, but it can’t just be added without other changes.
Then… it sounds like you are against UBI.
Saying we should do X and Y before we do Z, is functionally the same as opposing Z itself. Shit, that is how most polices are rejected.
“We can’t send money overseas, we need to take care of our own first, or things will never get better”
“We can’t increase funding for our own services, we need to find out how to optimize their spending first, or things will never get better”
“We can’t impose extra regulations on services, we need to do that on the vendor/supplier level, or things will never get better”
“We can’t impose extra regulations on vendors/suppliers, because most of them are overseas, we need to spend resources overseas to stop it at the source, or things will never get better”
On, and on, and on we go. Meanwhile, people starve. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
I never specified in either direction which should be done first. Ideally it would be an omnibus bill, but both should happen. The order doesn’t matter to me. Don’t pretend that ubi is a solution in and of itself.
So you want to tell me that companies aren’t buying out competition and with a monopoly they then rise prises as they want?
Explain to me how markets work if the only company selling or renting houses is not lowering their price when demand lowers? Or when they intentionally are not renting flats in order to keep demand high?
Have you seen how housing prices rose when interest rates were low? Markets work that way because consumers outcompete each other, at least in the housing market. You need a surplus of supply, like the corn market, to keep costs low.
Like @espi wrote, you need fierce competition in all markets.
We should do away with using money for necessities. You want a pool, pay for it. A safe and sanitary living space? Free. Stop making people rely on something with no inherent value.
How do you determine what is a necessity and how much of that necessity is free?
Is electricity a necessity? Should it be free for everyone? Should the person who owns the massive mansion get it all paid for? If we say its only for a certain amount of electricity, does the person who doesn’t use all of their allocated amount get compensation somehow?
What about food then? I don’t think anyone would think lobster and caviar should be free. So let’s just do food basics like cheese. Artisan cheese is expensive. So we need paid for artisan cheese and basic government funded cheese product. So now we have a two tier food system where poor people live off gruel and soylent green, while the rich can afford real food.
The only way to solve these issues is to find agreed method of representing value that people can use on what they want.
No one can complain that someone else is getting something for free, because they also get the exact same thing. No one can defraud the system because everyone gets the exact same cheque. Well, unless you bump off grandma and collect hers too.
safe and sanitary space in Manhattan can cost the same as mansion with a pool somewhere else.
With current global world simply existing in attractive locations could be luxury.
We literally just witnessed this with COVID shutdown. Im not sure why you think people getting handed money will not increase pricing as that is usually how things work.
Not to poopoo your point too much but inflation only happened after covid because a recent war gave justification for greedflation. You can’t really argue money is losing value when CEOs are raking in record profits during an economic downturn.
It happened because a large number of people had a pool of unspent money, some/much of which was the stimulus packages, who were competing for similar goods such as housing.
We should get rid of landlords either way of course. Don’t even need UBI for that. Also get rid of billionaires.
The ideas of „you can only own a building you live in“ and „companies can’t own residential buildings“ keep popping up in my head. Any reason that can’t be the solution?
If you want to rent, who owns those buildings? One person who lives there?
I don’t have a definitive answer for that. Right now I‘d go with that, yes. The goal would be to move away from renting as you age. Everyone should own their living space sooner or later. There are options for this. Where I live you can rent-buy something. It’s renting but you also reduce the price you‘d pay for buying it. It’s very rare though afaik.
Any reason that can’t be the solution?
Capitalist brainwashing and status quo warriors?
Probably. Do you have any deprogramming resources handy? I‘d really like to have answers to people who think we need to have rich overlords to live appropriately.
“Anarchy Works” by Peter Gelderloos is one of the most compelling arguments I’ve ever seen for debunking the idea that capitalism and trade are normal behaviors for humans, and it’s honestly a smooth and pleasant read. Just the introduction alone is enough.
Text: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works
Audiobook Introduction: https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=Ht-2t2K68ls
Audiobook Chapter 1: https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=gleMbLbbYv4
Audiobook Chapter 2: https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=PUK_PAYNtmE
Thanks for mentioning those. I‘ve checked out the book. It‘s not bad so far but I‘m not convinced just yet. :)
I don’t really read things to convince myself of anything, but there’s a lot of food for thought.
The biggest trick is to break people out of their capitalist programming. Instead of rebuttals, just ask questions.
“We need landlords”
Why?
“Because they provide housing, duh”
Ok, but what about housing do they provide? They don’t build the buildings, they just own it.
“Sure, but they do the repairs”
They do, but why do tenants have to pay someone else to live there in case a repair is needed? What if the tenants owned the building together instead?
If you think this is a simulation you can hack then I have news for you…
Asking questions is a good idea. But I‘m convinced there is a lot more needed than this.
I don’t think people think that we „need“ landlords, just that this is the system we have and they are not used to thinking for themselves.
If you remember the kids in school that were popular: they mostly had cool sneakers or were sweet talkers of some kind. None of them actually were smart or did anything particularly interesting. Same goes for CEOs today.
The reason we have capitalism (in my opinion) is because we are braindead as a group. The overwhelming majority lacks the skills to judge character, skill or even experience. We elect people without social accomplishments to public offices.
That is also why hiring in companies is such a mess. Companies looking for specific keywords in a cv or letter will never get the best specialists because the people they hire are specialists and gaming the system, not at their job.
We‘re naturally drawn to narcissists because they are good at selling themselves. We should be looking at the quiet person. They are normally 8 times better than the loudmouth.
Have a good one. Sorry for the rant.
The fact that if you need to rent you can’t because who do you rent from and where do they move to?
Landlords and groceries can just raise prices to bring the cost of living up
They already can, and do. If they do it too much, people leave that area. With a UBI, there’s nothing that says you have to live in a big city, it would be easier to move to bfe, where it’s always going to be cheaper. It’s not ideal of course to uproot and leave, but it’s possible, and it’s that possibility that keeps prices somewhat under control.
unless you have conditions that require you to have quick access to hospital, or doesn’t allow you to work in physically intensive labor like farms, or require certain infrastructure like elevators and access to wheelchairs, etc. i can see that working for some people, but not for everyone. and the people that would be left behind could be dramatically affected by this situation
Moving to more rural areas is what causes rural areas to build hospitals, and doctors to open clinics and offices. There are plenty of jobs everywhere that just involve sitting on your ass in front of a screen, or standing behind a counter. Even in rural areas.
Growth doesn’t just happen. People have to go places and build. UBI would make that process a shit ton easier.
I mean, sure… but it’s hard to build specialized medical facilities for people who need them in every rural area they decide to live, right? and it’s basically impossible to keep them running when there’s only a few people that will need them in that area, no? at some point, the places they can choose to live will be heavily informed by the disabilities they may or may not have.
eventually, you will probably end up with highly concentrated areas of people who have similar disabilities that can be treated in that area (as well as their loved ones, medics/physicians, people who provide food, transportation, etc…).
I don’t want to come across as against UBI, I think it’s a very interesting first approach. but I also definitely don’t believe it’s a solution by any , you see…
It turns out the specialized medical needs are kind of special, and they fly people to where there are facilities when they’re needed. And only affects a special portion of the population. For everyone else it doesn’t matter.
For fuck sake people crossed the entire US in a god damn wagon while risking being shot at by random tribes and eaten by bears. What’s stopping people now is that they can’t afford food or a place to park the damn wagon without getting harassed by the cops.
We could go back to company scrip and children in the mines. That’s where unregulation would take us
True deregulation would result in a form of psuedoregulation eventually.
Companies would abuse people and behave unethically. Workers would get angry. Eventually workers would organize and employers would have to follow worker demands to be able to continue operations.
Scrip is kinda low key a thing again. My SO works for wawa and there is definitely some scrip vibe. They have a company store, a points reward system, they will put you through school if you take classes that benefit the Corp, and the only way to move up is to basically bootlick management at weird company festivals.
It all has this very dystopian vibe of “everything within the corporation eco system” and my SO is a very principled women who is shy and kind and she refuses to take a step to elevate herself within the Corp, but getting a union going is pretty hard where we’re at, everyone is very much of the boot tasting, welfare queen bad variety.
There’s got to be some conditions. How else do I control the people?
I’ve just made an UBI community since there wasn’t any on lemmy:
[/c/[email protected]] [email protected]
Edit: I still don’t know how to link properly
Your second link should work for everyone.
UBI has failed everywhere it has been tried. It only works in your head.
How about you actually go read the reports.
Why should the majority of people settle for the leftover scraps of the capitalist class? I do see that it is possible for UBI to exist within a system where the means of production is under public ownership and democratic control, which I believe is necessary for social justice. However, if UBI is ever implemented in a fundamentally capitalist society, it only means that the wealth disparity has grown so large that the capitalists, in the act of preserving their heads on their necks, allow for a crappy standard of living for the rest. Although I could see myself welcoming UBI for a multitude of reasons, I am also scared that it would entail some form of permanent class disparity with the majority of people forever impoverished.
Okay all you commies get ready for politics 101
First don’t rely on morals to make your argument. It, unfortunately, does not change capitalist minds.
Second, frame your argument in capitalist rhetoric. For example you can say, “UBI is important to stimulate the economy by enabling Low-Income-Americans to spend more on essentials.”
Seriously, not joking, this is how you change people’s minds.
The argument “you don’t need ubi in a non-capitalist world” doesn’t work in a capitalist framing
I am a libertarian. One thing I think people of all political stripes need to do is to start judging policy proposals by their outcomes and stop judging policy proposals based on their intentions. So you want minimum wage because a higher minimum wage will lower poverty? But is raising minimum wage the right way to achieve that goal?
Here are ten studies that provide some evidence that raising minimum wage does a poor job of lowering poverty:
See the thing with every policy is that it creates unintended consequences. If you tax gas, gas becomes more expensive and the price of food goes up, if you add zoning regulations it makes it harder to build and house prices go up, if you raise wages through legislation (even though we all want to make high wages) that raises the costs to businesses and they have to raise prices or reduce labour at the margin. This has the effect of helping specifically minimum wage workers but for people without a job making it harder to find one. In the long term prices will go up to make minimum wage feel like less than it used to, necessitating the need for constant minimum wage increases. Do you really want to be fighting the same fight all the time over minimum wage only to have it raised when it’s far too late and most people are already making more than the minimum wage? What a waste of political will.
IMO UBI is a great option, Milton Friedman was famously very pro-UBI, but also need to be sensible about what regulations and laws we are passing and use a science and evidence-based approach, not one that sounds good when you first hear it.
No argument from me
We need a UBI and medicare for all.
And we need the minimum wage to be double a living wage
UBI works? When was that demonstrated?
Pretty much every study.
Please provide them then and make sure they are studying UNIVERSAL basic income and not targeted basic income. If they didn’t give it to everyone and instead selected applicants it isn’t studying UBI.
This should give you a starting point. Start reading chuckles.
That’s not a study and you might be surprised to find out Wikipedia is a shit source.
So do you have sources or are you just someone who never actually studied this subject?
Well, chase down the studies listed.
You wanted a list of studies. This is a fucking list dipshit.
This isn’t a list of studies it is a wikipedia link and if you are going to insult people’s intelligence you should probably understand the difference between a link and a study.
Or you could click the link and actually see that it references the studies by name.
If you are going to refute shit, read it.
