So, Alex Gourevitch, a leftist scholar who apparently writes for Jacobin, went on Karl Widerquist's program to serve as a critic to UBI. Because, obviously, it isn't fair for his class to only represent the positive side of UBI, he wants to address the negative side of UBI. And this guy is a critic. Now, I'm going to give this guy credit. I've dealt with a lot of quite frankly BAD arguments against UBI, including from the far left. And this guy IS a far leftist, to get that out there. He wants a form of democratic socialism in place of a UBI centered "human centered capitalism" as I would call it. The reason i give this guy credit is because he doesn't just quote leftist philosophy at me, going on about how lenin said those who dont work dont eat, or going on about jobs programs, blah blah blah. He actually is sympathetic to the ideas of UBI and indepentarianism. But, he doesn't think UBI is the best way to achieve these goals.
He addresses 2 major arguments in his address. What he calls the pragmatic argument against UBI and the utopian argument against UBI. The pragmatic argument being an argument of pragmatism, and the utopian argument being one of ideals.
To first address his pragmatic argument, he would argue that for an emancipatory UBI to have the public will, and the support of the people, you would have the support of a class conscious movement, and that you might as well just go for socialism. basically, he's arguing, if you have the public support for UBI, you have the public support for socialism, so you should just go for socialism. There is a bit of a value laden perspective here, implying socialism is BETTER. We can address his utopian argument either, but I think he's wrong on this.
First of all, when we talk pragmatism, there's multiple forms of pragmatism. He seems to be speaking specifically of political pragmatism. On that front, I have mixed views. On the one hand, I would agree with him, if anything, let me strengthen his arguments a bit. In our current political environment, democratic socialism would likely get support before a UBI would. And here's why. let's exclude the right, as the right is just bonkers and not open to either. But...UBI isnt very popular either on the left or the right. The right opposes it for all the normal reasons, giving people money is wrong, work is good, blah blah blah. The left...there's a weird uncanny valley UBI and my own ideology fall into that seems to turn off everyone. The centrists hate UBI because it's not pragmatic, and they want worthless policies that dont do anything. But then the left hates it because it's not left enough. I want to remind people of one simple fact. IN 2020, Bernie Sanders, a self described democratic socialist, was the runner up in the democratic primary. And it's been argued that he could've won if not for dem intervention. He has, conservatively, 1/3 of the democratic party support, and that number could be bumped up to 40-45% if he was actually given fair treatment among the dems. he might even WIN. Now, will everyone in that group want hardcore socialism? NO. Most of those guys will be fair weather socdems. But they would be comfortable enough with a self described socialist that he would win big time. Nationally, how would Bernie do in a general election? it's hard to say but I think he would have a fair shot to win. I would argue in 2016 he would overperform vs hillary, in 2020 he might underperform vs biden. That's my overall assessment. So...what about Andrew Yang? Well, look at what I wrote over the last year about the democrats. They're split into 3 groups. The moderates, the idpol people, the progressives (progressives being bernie friendly). Yang, the UBI oriented "human centered capitalist", is in NONE of these categories. In the 2020 primaries he got like 2% support. In the NYC race, he was in 4th place, at like 13% support. So let me just say, first of all, that from a purely political standpoint, we're looking at a democratic socialist winning BEFORE a UBI guy. I'm not sure that trend will hold in 2024. I think bernie is leaving a power vacuum I'm not sure anyone has the shoes to fill. Nina Turner has had trouble winning congressional races, and the best I've heard other than her for the dems is Marriane Williamson, who I would say is closer to Yang than to Bernie IMO. And Yang, the UBI he's going for his own party. So, it's possible socialism ISN"T supported.
At the same time, I think this argument is somewhat bogus. As I kind of implied above, even though a socialist can theoretically win before a UBI guy wins, socialism isn't gonna have broad support in the country at large. And honestly, just looking at what he says about business interests...uh....is an emancipatory UBI of say, $13k a year since that's what I advocate for, going to get as much resistance from the business classes as literally SIEZING THEIR BUSINESSES?! Probably not. Now, on the one hand, it goes the other way too. One thing this guy overlooks is most socialists are jobists. They have work ethic. They often believe everyone has a moral requirement and duty to work. And UBI is more comfortable among the anti workers. At the same time...again, it can go the other way. Yang arguably is more able to get his agenda past some business people than Bernie would. Yang can go on fox news and talk to tucker carlson about white opioid addicts in the mid west and the plight of the young white male who can't find a job. Now, are those right wing white populists anti work? No, but Yang has the credentials to go to those people and push a UBI, which would be emanicipatory, while going on about siezing the means of production would just get shot down. It's all about the messaging. Either way if I had to guess what businesses would hate more, it's the guy who would wanna socialize them, not the guy who takes 20% of their money. Now, to be fair, that leads to a misconception that alex has. He had some idea that businesses would pay for the entire UBI. Unless you do this in a roundabout VAT way which translates to "consumers fund the UBI", that aint gonna happen. UBI taxes tend to hit the population equally and are relatively flat when sustainable. This leads to them being deemed "regressive" by the "left". Will there be resistance to UBI? Sure, but not like there would be to actual socialism.
This also ignores any kind of pragmatism other than political pragmatism. I quite frankly don't give a crap about political pragmatism. I dont let the overton window define me, when I talk pragmatism, I talk actual policy pragmatism. UBI is a much more simple and direct policy to implement than socialism is. UBI is a single policy, socialism would be hundreds of different bills doing different things. UBI has a simplicity and transparency that's unrivaled. Take just the socdem "socialism" Bernie pushes. He supports so much money for M4A. Then so much for free college. And so much for daycare. And so much for housing, etc. Now imagine actually transitioning our economy into a literal socialist economy. You would need to pass tons of bills establishing different agencies, and different bureaucracies, you would need to work out all fo the logistics. Unless you mean a coop version of socialism, which would be market socialism. And a huge reason im not big on market socialism is because it's NOT emancipatory. People would still be required to work, their paychecks would still be tied to institutions. It just replaces one oppressive regime for another. And I'd give Alex enough credit to know that, as his argumentation explicitly included emancipation from work. When you really sit down and look at what it would take for socialism to work, you would need to draw up a whole new system, from scratch. And that would require mountains more work and planning to accomplish properly than just giving people a UBI and letting the market decide would. So I actually don't agree that if we implemented a UBI, we would accomplish socialism, so you might as well accomplish socialism. He has this misunderstanding that just mobilizing people to a point of being able to change things is socialism. No, it's just a movement and that movement can accomplish many of things. Socialism itself, is far more complex, far more difficult to actually put into writing, and put into practice. It would require a much more radical restructuring of society, and it's unclear if the end result would be worth it. I know that those who have tried this before...didn't get results I'd be happy with. Again, unless you're talking market socialism, and market socialism is really just....capitalism 1.5. To be fair so is UBI based human centered capitalism, but in a different way. Market socialism wouldn't solve the coercion aspect of capitalism. It would be one of those on paper, according to some dude's theory, hey we're "liberated" now, but...am I really? Nope. I'm still tied to jobs, I'm still tied to institutions. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. So...to me, this argument falls flat on its face, and while I get what he's trying to say, I'm not convinced that it would be more practical...from a policy perspective. Socialism is far more radical in practice, and would be much more difficult to implement, and would require mountains more effort. While I could see a Bernie Sanders type "socialist" winning an election before I see Andrew Yang winning one given how the current demographics are, that just doesn't mean much to me. I mean, Bernie is just social democracy anyway. Actual socialism, as in nationalizing the economy, would get way more opposition in practice, and be way more difficult to implement in practice.
Which brings us to the second argument, the utopian argument. In his second argument, he seems to address more logistical problems with UBI, but they seem to have to do with how do we decide what labor has to be done, and how do we ensure it does get done? And for me, this is just where this dude loses the plot. Look, dude, I'm a capitalist. And this is where MARKETS are useful tools. How do we decide what has to be done? We've already done this with coronavirus. We separated "essential labor" from nonessential labor. We shut all nonessential work down, and we let the essential work be done, albeit by the same coercive means. While in a capitalist economy with markets there would be no hard requirements determining what labor has to be done, that's the point. The point of capitalism is to have more freedom, and that involves more voluntary relations. if people want to work on passion projects, or operate businesses that don't have to exist, and it's voluntary to do that, because they have a UBI that they can live on and say no, but still choose to do the work, why not let them work? Capitalism would work the same way it's always worked. By supply and demand. And if nonessential businesses go out of business, or jack their rates up because they can't attract labor and need to raise prices in order to get labor to be done, then so be it. I don't believe if a business is nonessential and relies on coercion, that it should exist if it would go out of business without that coercion. Now, if ESSENTIAL businesses need labor to be done, and they're struggling, well, the way we do that is through UBI itself.
If we have a labor participation rate of 60% with no UBI, and adding a $20000 UBI reduces that rate to 40%, and we need, say, 50% of people working, then that UBI is too high and here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna have people taking their UBI to the store and buying food, say a box of pasta is $2 now. Okay, well, because they can't get workers to make pasta, and cant get workers to work in the shipping, and they cant get workers to work in the store, pasta might go up to like $3 a box. But that isn't good, that's inflationary. So that would mean to account for this, that next year the UBI would need to be raised to $30000 to get the same amount of goods. But, the higher UBI perpetuates the labor shortage, forcing businesses to raise the cost of pasta to $4.50. And so on and so forth. This is a wage price spiral, and the worst case scenario of a UBI. It would happen if the UBI is too high, and as such dsicourages work too much. Essentially, you have a product, cost of product goes up astronomical levels to account for increased labor costs, but that just causes more pressure on wages to keep people working, which raises prices further, and it's a feedback loop. If you have this happening, you probably made UBI too high. It wouldnt be bad if nonessential or luxury items did this, if anything low prices being subsidized by wage slavery and coercion is bad. But if this starts happening in essential economies that need to exist, this is bad. So what happens is that when pasta raises to $3 a box, and everything increases in price 50%, well, you cap the UBI at $20k. Ideally you wouldnt start as such a crazy high amount anyway, but generally speaking, it would mean $13,333 is a more stable amount. That's the amount of UBI we can give, before prices start spiralling out of control.
Now, you might say, some coercion in the economy still exists. Well, to make an analogy from John Bentley's "full unemployment" essay, I would say that I'd rather a partial implementation of my ideas with the expansion of them down the road, than abandoning those ideas. Basically, I support my ideas being implemented to the greatest extent possible. We have a certain amount of baseline work that NEEDS to be done. UBI would reduce peoples' willingness to labor the higher it is. We just set the UBI at or near the highest amount we can sustain. And over time, hopefully we can work on automating jobs or otherwise producing technology that would alleviate our needs. I honestly suspect that within 50 years, we could minimize our NEED for labor, if we structured society around that principle, in such a way that more people would want to work, than jobs would need to be done. And we'd probably be able to live well. Between separating essential and nonessential labor like we did via covid, and automating jobs over time, we could liberate most of humanity to the point that only those who work are those who genuinely want to. And that's all I care about. Liberating people, while maintaining the function of society. And we do this through the power of capitalism.
So when alex here seriously asks these questions, I kind of see what he's getting at, but he's doing his socialist thing again. You see, in a socialist economy, some power structure would determine what work should be done, and then they're inevitably, in absence of a UBI or market economy, ASSIGN people to it. This would be more coercive, and more stagnant. Keep in mind the big capitalist opposition to socialism in American lingo. What do we talk about? loss of liberty, central planning, stagnation and inefficiency and bureaucracy. Command economies. That's kind of where socialism once again falls flat on its face. It all sounds well and good, but ultimately, if you're gonna do away with the current system, you need to make a new system from scratch. And you're creating those issues where you have to figure them out. If I keep capitalism around, those answers are simple. They can be simplified down to basic supply and demand, and influencing factors like jobs needed and who is willing to work in that way. And I still deem incomplete freedom from a partial UBI to be a step toward real freedom, it may not be realized yet, but it's still...the least bad way to get people into those positions. if you dont use passive market means via wage slavery, and you need a coercive element, well....what are you gonna do...FORCE them? That's what socialists end up doing. They FORCE people to work. And because it isnt fair to force just SOME people to work, they force EVERYONE to work. So....they just reinvented the wheel....again. And we're no closer to emancipation. And this is why attempts at socialist economies don't liberate people, they don't free people, they end up just replacing one coercive, oppressing regime with another.
That said, this utopian argument just comes off to me as this dude playing himself. He advocates for socialism, then he asks all of these questions about how this would get done...and honestly, this is what happens when you try to reinvent an entire economy from scratch. Markets work. I dont want to get rid of them. Do they work perfectly, in all situations? No. Do they work adequately in most situations? Yes. Is there a better way of doing things? For most things no. I can be sympathetic of government run healthcare, for example, or government run education. Because markets just produce severe market failures and those economies end up being extremely exploitative and inflationary. But...for most things...markets work. And the signals are already built in. If theres a shortage of something, the price goes up. If theres a surplus, it goes down. If not enough work is being done, goods and services will be scarce, and you get inflation. The way to solve the problem is to wait for the market to equalize and set the UBI at the equalization point. If you get inflation and no one works, you made the UBI too high. The ideal UBI is a UBI that liberates people as much as possible, without causing an inflationary spiral. This is why I advocate for a UBI near the federal poverty line. Between the additional 20% or so marginal tax rates (18.5% in my latest plan) and the UBI only being just above the poverty line, the odds that most people would stop working are small, based on previous research done. Higher amounts of UBI might cause more issues.
That said, I'm gonna be honest. While this guy offered unique arguments against UBI that aren't common, and he seemed more sympathetic to indepentarian goals than most socialists would (most just completely ignore the issues with coercion completely, believing socialism in and of itself solves all inherent problems with the system and eliminates all objections to participation in said system), I'm not really convinced. First of all, I'm convinced actual socialism would gain far more resistance from the elites as seizing their businesses would be significantly more damaging to business interests than simply taxing 20% of their incomes and letting them demand higher wages. Second of all, socialism would require a full scale reworking of the economy that capitalism wouldn't, and this introduces logistical challenges, which could be solved simply by keeping "capitalism" around along with UBI. So no, socialism isn't better, I'd prefer UBI and human centered capitalism. I'm not super sympathetic toward socialism and you can probably see why here. And this ins't even getting into the fact that most socialists also arent sympathetic to indepentarian arguments. They arent anti work, they dont care if you're coerced, they deem participation to be a moral duty in society. They are just as high on that protestant work ethic garbage as most capitalists are. This particular guy is sympathetic, but still, when I work through his arguments, I can just see why socialism would fall flat on its face. It would require restructuring and reinventing an entire economy and that's going to lead to a lot greater control over the economy, which paves the way to authoritarianism. Even if 'democratic" on paper, either that democracy is gonna be lost to layers of bureaucracy to the point of meaninglessness, or it's gonna be tyranny by majority.
For UBI, all we need is popular support to elect someone to pass one bill to give it to us, and that bill just fund and distribute it. We dont need to reinvent the entire wheel here.
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