So, I'm subbed to the Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies on youtube as they often put out a lot of high quality academic discussions on UBI related topics. And today they had a discussion on UBI vs UBS. I've been critical of UBS in the past, and while this discussion didn't change my mind at all, it is worth commenting on as they might have provided a more even handed account for it than I have, as I basically blasted it as reminiscent of "communism".
The backdrop of the discussion is a green economy and what kind of welfare state would be best in a post growth economy. I would argue for a UBI. Heck, I've regularly advocated not just for UBI to give people the right to say no, but also have advocated for reducing work weeks in recent years as well. Given GDP is what it is, and life should be more than number on line go up, it makes sense that as we become more productive, we reduce working hours to give people more leisure rather than just growing like an uncontrolled cancer. This is a good idea for the environment too. As David Graeber wrote shortly before his death, "to save the world, we are going to have to stop working." So yeah. UBI, post growth economy, all of this stuff makes sense for me, and obviously, I want a version of UBI to be at the forefront of this, NOT UBS.
This discussion seemed biased toward the left, and included a lot of criticisms of UBI including "taking resources away from funding essential services", "be(ing) abolished more easily than UBS", and it "doesn't sufficiently challenge the logic of capitalism", as if that is a bad thing. To respond to each briefly.
1) On other services, I would allow them to continue existing, I do believe some services should complement UBI and believe my own UBI plan actually properly addresses the concerns between UBI and the existing safety nets.
2) It depends how it's implemented. If you push it as a tax credit and then abolish everything else, yes, repealing one IRS implemented tax refund idea is a lot easier to abolish than 100 agencies all doing different things. But at the same time, when I think UBI I think social security. The "third rail" of politics that no one dares screw with lest they make themselves unelectable. I really think the concern over UBI being abolished easily is really just part of the nonsense "trojan horse" arguments the left throws out there, and isn't based on reality, but based on projections of how bad "capitalism" is and how their ideas are somehow better and magically immune to all pressures.
3) This is going to be going into the larger point I want to make with this article, but whether you support UBI or UBS really is a litmus test for your larger ideology. Who do you distrust more, the state, or markets? For socialist minded people, the answer is capitalism. For the left, everything wrong ever seems to come down to capitalism. Anything under capitalism will inherently be eroded by malevolent forces, whereas everything under socialism is sunshine and rainbows.
But...my perspective is a bit different. Keep in mind, I started off as a small government conservative, and while I have become more positive toward the state's role in the economy, the idea of the government distributing resources directly to people does not inspire much confidence and reminds me of the bread lines of the USSR, or more recently, the government delivering vegetables to peoples' apartments after being welded in because of COVID. I like markets, I like freedom. I understand we cna't have a pure free market, I'm not a right winger after all, but honestly the UBI vs UBS debate really seems to exist on the backdrop of "do you prefer an economy that is primarily capitalistic, with programs and reforms and institutions to curb its worse excesses, or do you want a society that's primarily socialistic with the government having a much more active role in managing the economy?
Another way to put it is this, who do you think has the propensity to screw up more, markets or the state? For leftists, the answer is the market, with the state being the savior. For capitalists, people trust markets over a large and bureaucratic government.
I still tend to lean toward the capitalist kind of thinking, which is why i dont get along with many kinds of leftists these days. It's also why i was banned from r/antiwork. Despite being anti work, because I failed their purity tests of being a tried and true "leftist", and instead simply want a better form of capitalism, I'm evil to them.
But to me, socialist minded people are misguided. THe more complex government programs and the more bureaucracy behind them, the more there is at risk going wrong, and at worst, they can be purely tyrannical. To go back to the "anti work" idea, my worst fear is that these services will be sabotaged in a million of different ways to make people using such services miserable, and to force people to work. Money, if you notice is what makes up the best of the social programs. Social insurance programs like social security and unemployment use money. Peoples' independence and autonomy is respected, such programs are seen as "entitlements" based on past contributions. Welfare programs often use in kind aid because they believe the poor are too stupid and irresponsible to make their own decisions. Even worse, it seems to come with a certain logic that if you want to be given big boy currency, you need to get a big boy job and freaking earn your way. Meanwhile welfare is created to be intentionally degrading and unattractive to the end user. I fear that this is one potential fate of these universal services.
Universal services is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but isnt good in reality. It likely would not perform up to ideals. Meanwhile I honestly believe a proper UBI would not create the apocalyptic problems with capitalism that its critics say it will. They just tend to have a hate boner for markets and want the state to run everything, whereas I kinda recognize both institutions have pros and cons and UBI finds the right balance.
To be fair, later in the presentation they admit that UBS might not live up to its ideals. After all, they mention we will need active democratic governance to ensure UBS works properly. But when do we EVER have active citizen oversight of social programs directly? These things are overseen by layers upon layers of bureaucracies and paper pushers that are largely unaccountable to the public. This is one reason to believe UBS will never work as well as expected.
And even if we had it, I dont trust a lot of people to democratically govern in a direct way. Keep in mind half of the US are conservative. Do you really trust those morons in charge of this stuff? No, we need to implement this idea as a right of all citizens (UBI) and then make it as immune to political screwery as possible. I dont trust the government to do a good job here. The more complex we make ideas the more problems they develop. It's better just to give people cash and then to let them decide what they themselves want.
While there may be issues, for example, they mentioned an overheated housing market...yeah. That happens when people want to buy housing and there isnt enough available. All societies need to ration housing. It's better to do it under capitalist principles because if the USSR has taught us anything it's that it sucked at building housing, and it also restricted freedom of movement to some extent in order to compensate for the issues capitlaism has. Capitalism has more freedom, but sometimes that means that due to supply and demand prices go up. It's better than the socialist alternative.
They also mentioned from a green perspective that vouchers did a better job at accomplishing green goals than cash, but again, cash gives people freedom to choose within the market, whereas vouchers can only be spent on specific things and are relatively paternalistic and authoritarian approaches to nudging people to make the "right" decisions. UBI being unconditional is supposed to represent freedom. Whereas these lefties kinda want a more traditional paternalistic state.
This is actually the kind of stuff that turned me off as an ex conservative. Like, the idea that the left would basically come in and sieze control of the economy and then use it to force us to live a certain way. This is a huge reason why the right gets away saying things that climate change is an communist hoax. Because from their perspective lefties want to make a crisis in order to control peoples' behaviors. it's also why they fought covid restrictions so hard. They saw it as a government attempt to control peoples' behavior through economics. As a lot of people see it when you reduce economic freedom under "socialist" schemes, you reduce real freedom, because you need economic freedom to accomplish real freedom.
I dont necessarily disagree. But that's why my ideal approach to welfare is a UBI. I want to give people money, and then let them live their lives. Leftists lose the plot when they wanna push their weirdo commie sounding green ideas like having the government control every aspect of the economy and provide goods and services directly. I get it in the case of a market failure. It's been shown governments being involved in things like healthcare and education are good things. But EVERYTHING?! No, I don't like that at all.
For as much as people romanticize UBS, there's so much that can go wrong there. IMplementation is key and the more complex the implementation there is, the more that can go wrong. I like simple solutions where the outcome can be controlled. Give people cash and let them live their lives. Based. Give people in kind services of questionable quality and use that access to control every aspect of their lives, not based.
There's a reason I have the ideas I do. We need a UBI to give people freedom. But then we have to actually give them the freedom to do what they want. Including, if they want, work. My long term hopes is that over time more people will prefer leisure to work and that we can move away from work, but in the immediate to short term? Giving people the CHOICE is good enough to me. It's the lazies vs crazies debate Van Parijs likes to push. You got the lazies who dont wanna work and the crazies who do. Ideally you make a society where people get what they want. And UBI accomplishes that goal. If people want to work for more money, or just because they wanna, they can. If they wanna stay home and do nothing, they can (as long as society remains productive enough to sustain that at least). I want people to have what they want.
I do think that overall, a post work economy is going to be necessary long term to be sustainable climate wise, but we need to get people to voluntarily agree to it. If we try to impose eco-communism on people with UBS and paternalism, you're just gonna create riots that make what we saw during COVID child's play. And the left will be radioactive for 40 years after that. No one will wanna touch them and anything they do will be called "communism." Just like after the Carter administration. We're STILL dealing with the fallout of the left falling apart in the 1960s and 1970s.
No. We need to do this the UBI way. We can't give LITERAL socialists the time of day here. Their ideas don't work well, they'll be deeply unpopular with the american people, it's better to accomplish goals while being for freedom the whole time. My ideas expand freedom. I want to accomplish goals while giving people a choice. I don't want to impose a single way of life on people whether they want it or not.
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