So, this is the second chapter of the book I mentioned previously, and it's worth responding to too.
Honestly, while there are a lot of parallels between my ideology and morality and Flanigan's, there's a lot of differences as well.
Basically, her argument for UBI is something akin to what I or Karl Widerquist would make. That the problem with society is property rights coerce people to participate in society and work. However, she comes at it from a fairly anarchistic perspective, something not uncommon in these circles. Left/social libertarianism is like a milder form of anarchism, one dedicated to reform over revolution. And most anti work type people do lean anarchist. I'm more moderate, but that's because my approach is different, and that's something I plan to discuss in this article somewhat.
Still, there's a lot of problems with Flanigan's theory in my opinion. First, she seems to base her views in natural rights theory. And natural rights theory is, quite frankly, BS. It's just a bunch of people claiming certain social conventions exist, and trying to either inject god into them, making them de facto divine command theory, or otherwise just claiming they exist in nature. This goes against my secular worldview in which all social conventions are human made, and all are subjective and subject to change. I'm far more consequentialist in my viewpoint, and tend to focus on achieving the consequences I find desirable, rather than getting caught up in philosophical circlejerking.
I mean, to go back to my article on dogmatism recently, I feel like this is the core issue with the ideologues I described. A lot of them put their philosophy above everything. They just see the world in that one way, and that's the correct way, and every other way is the wrong way, and they determine the morality of everything by how well it conforms with that perspective.
And sadly, in justifying her ideas regarding compensating people for coercion, she goes in a common direction many left libertarians who have ideas similar to me tend to go, and it's something I fundamentally disagree with. They go back to the ownership of land, and seem to think that a UBI should come from compensation for land ownership. I get why this is tempting. Perhaps the earliest and most essential form of property ownership comes from land. And the fact is, some people owning land and denying it to others does make people less free, eventually coercing people to work for those who own land to survive. But say we tax land to provide for this UBI. Well, I discussed the actual meat of such proposals in detail, and I generally don't favor them. This is one of those ideas that sounds great on paper, but in theory, not really.
But that's the problem with many philosophies that dont really work in practice super well. They work on paper. Philosophers love to do their little mental...you know exercises constructing their theories of justice, and in practice, sometimes these policies just don't work.
To reiterate previous criticisms I made, if UBI is just compensation for the property rights system intended to free people from coercion, taxing land is coercive, as people occupy 3 dimensional space, and taxation of land is basically taxing existence. It's bad enough people need to pay rent seekers for the right to dwell in someone else's property, but to pay simply for occupying one's own? All LVT does, in practice, is make the government a landlord.
And this is what separates me from most theorists in this realm of philosophy. I agree, property rights coerce people to work. UBI is just compensation for those property rights. But for me, I care about actually being able to put these policies into practice to actually accomplish what we set out to accomplish. A lot of philosophers just feel fit to mentally...you know, going on about their theories of justice and morality, and this makes them very rigid and deontological. I see this a lot in georgist communities, where they, like right libs, feel like taxing labor is just absolute evil, but taxing land is just. I care more about the consequences of the tax, and whether the tax actually accomplishes what we want. ANd for me, taxing land indiscriminately inherently leads to a situation that offsets the very compensation we're trying to provide, while taxing labor....doesn't. I know a lot of people dont like the idea of taxing labor, believing, dogmatically, that people are entitled to what they work for, but honestly, i tend to be more utilitarian about it, for me, the purpose of that moral truism is that if we DIDN'T reward people for working, then people wouldn't work. There's nothing special or magical about being entitled to the entire product of one's labor. Heck, such a moral truism is how we get a situation in which we're forced to work to begin with. it's only when we all pull together and are mroe flexible on that do we actually allow true liberty to exist. Sure, workers should be compensated for labor. But they should be compensated for labor, because if they weren't, there would be no point in laboring. ya know? Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Same with incentives to work and any moral truisms that surround that.
I know that this idea slays a major sacred cow a lot of the work worshippers tend to base their entire ideologies around, but that's why we need a new ideology, and why my ideology is different.
To be fair, Flannigan did not endorse any specific plan to pay for UBI, and seemed agnostic on how to accomplish and pay for it, but her philosophizing seemed to lean heavily into the LVT ideas I've already discussed and fundamentally disagree with. it's good that, at the end of the day she is more morally flexible, and I have to give her points for that, but yeah, I mean, if you follow her logic its clear what her preferred approach to pay for UBI is, potentially.
That said, all in all, good essay, bad essay? It was okay. I mean, I do have some agreement with her, but i acknowledge the basis for my own morality is much different here, and my approach to policy and actually trying to achieve the results we're trying to accomplish is important here. That's one of those things that separates me from ideologues IMO. Ideologues philosophize these grand moral systems and then are super inflexible in approaching them or discussing the details surrounding them. I actually care about the details of implementation. Not doing so is how you get communist "good in theory bad in practice" syndrome where you read all of this "theory" but still have no idea how to get there in the concrete.
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