Guest Post by The Zman
There have always been certain issues that function as litmus tests, in that there is a factually correct position and many factually incorrect positions. Those wrong position, however, tell us things about the person holding them. Gun control is the best example. The right position is based on a mountain of data collected over generations. The wrong positions range from uninformed to the mendacious. As a result, the gun issues is a good litmus test. A person wrong on guns is telling us things about themselves.
The universal basic income is shaping up to be another one of those litmus test issues, where the self-righteous and fashionable use it to advertise their virtue and edginess, but also tell us about their ignorance. The other day, the leader of America’s hipster intellectuals, Claire Lehmann dramatically announced she is now on board with the universal basic income. In fact, Andrew Yang’s goofy Asian hipster populism platform is starting to become the cool thing among our edgy trend setters.
The giveaway at this point, with this issue, is in that linked Quillette post. “There are reasonable arguments to be leveled in good faith against the UBI platform, which Yang has dubbed “The Freedom Dividend,” but what was once considered a utopian pipe-dream is beginning to sound more plausible in light of the unfolding tectonic economic and technological shifts.” Are there reasonable arguments made in bad faith? That line makes clear that one side is virtue signaling, hoping the other side plays the role of skeptic.
What’s shaping up is the UBI is going to be the hipster beard for the politically active millennials, who dream of living as the Eloi. As was brilliantly explained before, it can’t possibly work as expected, but that is part of the attraction. That’s always part of the appeal to utopianism. The believers are emotionally wedded to the idea because the Promised Land always feels just out of reach. The world without work, where everyone is free to self-actualize and get a gold star from teacher is the millennial dream.
The math of UBI is really not worth discussing, however, as the people excited by it are incapable of grasping it anyway. They are simply using the issue to stake out what they think is the moral high ground. Yang is a very smart guy, who grew up studying the people now flocking to these sorts of ideas. The alt-right thinks they meme’d him into existence, but Yang looks a lot like an East Asian Obama. That is, he is the sort of minority who flatters upper-middle class white Progressives just be existing.
The real problem with the UBI is it is part of the larger trend of infantilizing people, turning them into wards of the custodial state. A society where everyone is watched, where everyone has their speech monitored, where everyone is on an allowance, is called a prison. That’s how prisons work. Given the tender sensibilities of the next generation, this world is evolving into a daycare center. Ideas like UBI are not about economics. They are about normalizing the custodial state. UBI is Faust’s poodle.
The problems that UBI are supposed to address are real and concerning. Automation is replacing labor at an alarming rate. Sure, the robot future is wildly exaggerated, mostly by people who have no experience in the real world. Most people reading this, for example, will not live to see robot trucks roaming the highways. Still automation is a serious issue facing the West. The consequences are frightening, not for material reasons, but because they will force the West to face up to the reality of culture and social organization.
You’ll note that in the linked Quillette article, there is no mention of immigration. The latest data show that Trump’s alleged jobs boom is mostly just a boom in migrants finding work in America. End immigration and automation suddenly is a different issue. In fact, it becomes a tolerable issue, because a society willing and able to put its own interest ahead of strangers is able to rationally address the sorts of welfare schemes required to support friends and neighbors. That’s the fear that truly haunts our ruling class.
In fact, the fear of facing up to the basic questions every society must address is what is behind the fear of automation and technology. When Tucker Carlson told Ben Shapiro that he would happily ban certain forms of automation, Shapiro nearly burst into tears because he lives in fear of ever having to face the questions Carlson raised. When you face the questions “Who are we and what sort of society do we want?”, things like automation and social welfare become less frightening. UBI is a way to avoid facing those questions.
Litmus tests like gun control or now UBI offer an opportunity to introduce the subjects that our betters would prefer not to discuss. UBI is a door that opens to a debate about who we are and what kind of society we want. That inevitably leads to the question of who gets to decide and why. That debate is always a part of what defines a society. For the modern West, it is a part that has no conscious place in our political life. Talking about the details may not be a lot of fun, but even a deal with the devil has opportunities.
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The redistribution of taxes from your pocket to non-working poor (black, brown or white) is in fact, UBI. In a country where the poorest are actually richer than the majority of people in other parts of the world must mean that UBI is real.
The fact that it is not called UBI means nothing. The purpose is not so much to benefit the poor suckers as it is to insure the prosperity of the folks who sell to them. UBI will help keep Walmarts and liquor stores afloat for a while longer. It will keep the real estate folks from foreclosure panic and might help the finance companies holding car notes.
I did not grow up like that and I expect the majority of readers here did not either. It is galling to think that the things our parents busted their ass to acquire are now handed out like Halloween candy to any moron threatening a nasty trick (riots and looting) if his bag isn’t filled with goodies.
Outstanding point of view, EC. I just had that exact conversation with someone today
Could you explain the obsession with illegal immigration? I know it has been going on forever, Even so, Hispanics are counted at 45 million or 15% of the population. Of that, some 11 million are illegal immigrants. There are also many legal entrants. My opinion on that is mixed. It used to piss me off but now, I don’t know.
I would say the people who should be more offended about immigration should be the Native Americans.
If you take a bird’s eye view of things, humans are like the microorganisms working to consume a carcass. There is much activity, the purpose is inscrutable but something is changed from one state to another. Bacteria developed the ability to poison the competition. Otherwise, it’s a free for all. That was the American ideal, similar to Mullholland’s remark about the new LA aqueduct: There it is. Take it.
The whole obsession with illegal immigration is a straw man argument. The problem is immigration as a whole. Big business has turned immigration into big business. It’s sucking us dry and destroying the America that you and I both knew. It doesn’t matter if it’s legal or illegal, it’s all the same to me. You’ve lived in Texas and California, I’ve always lived in Florida, the hispanic thing is no big deal. But when you take the poorest people in the world, bring them here and give them enormous resources while destroying our communities by not insisting they work in and assimulate, and then big business takes it back away from them. That causes a ton of resentment. We should have a moratorium on immigration for at least 20 years. Any immigration. We don’t need more people. We meet more people working. We need more people speaking English. We need more people aspiring to be a card-carrying member of a polite first world society. The way they deflect scrutiny from the real problem is to say things like, nobody’s against legal immigration. I sure as fuck am. Until they get rid of the incentives and the corruption of our entire society in the name of foreigners we don’t need them here.
If, at the time Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, we would have ring-fenced North America, and not cut China into the deal, we could have absorbed third world Mexico and I’ll bet the standard of living would have been the same as the United States and Canada by now. You could have just opened the borders completely and let North Americans live and do business wherever the fuck they wanted. It would have been fine, America had about 275 million people at that time and Mexico had about 75 million. No problemo. But 275 million people can absorb 75 million hard-working basically peaceful people easily. They can’t absorb 3 billion from Asia. That’s where the deal went bad. That’s why our society is so fucked. And then after we brought Mexico into the fold, we could have worked our way down through Central America one country at a time.
I draw a big distinction between legal and illegal immigration- even given the fact that our laws are crafted to serve monied interests. We have at least some ability through our representatives to tailor the laws to serve the current citizens – the indigenous as well as the descendants of immigrants and enslaved people. We can’t take all 7 billion Earthlings. Also, as a conservative, I’m intrinsically repulsed by disorder.
So Iska, Trump says he wants to bring more people than ever here, but he wants to give them legal status. Is our problem too many bodies, or is our problem semantics? It doesn’t matter anymore, honestly. The incentive to bring them here is so they can become a welfare parasite for big business to prey on. Legal or illegal, it doesn’t matter anymore. The question I’m asking you is, do we need more welfare parasites? And how does the title that the government gives them make one better than the other?
If they announced they were going to double the number of Somalians coming into Minnesota, and I believe all of them are legal right now, would that make you happy because they’re legal? Or would you think, maybe we have enough Somalians already.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-13/while-everyone-sleeps-courts-are-abolishing-all-immigration-enforcement
I see your point, we have enough already, but if they announced that, we could fight against it within the system. There’s also the issue of scale. It takes a lot of effort, paperwork and expense to fly in “refugees” from the other side of the world. We seem to have had roughly the same 100,000 or so Somalis in MN for the last 15 years. They helped Ilhan Omar secure the democrat nomination in the 5th District (thereby guaranteeing a general election win) but they did the same for Keith Ellison 12 years earlier. If we shared an open border with Somalia like we do with Mexico, we’d have shit ton more Somalis due to illegal immigration.
Iska -but if they announced that, we could fight against it within the system. I guess it will never dawn on you that it is “their” system that they continue to flaunt their lawlessness with unfettered impunity. Poor sheeple, they’ll never be able to break the chains that bind them to a life of blind subservience. Oh, and don’t forget to cast your ballot for the “lesser of two evils” next time. I’m quite sure that will fix everything.
Too much legal immigration can be a problem, but it’s a separate problem from illegal immigration, and by definition, the laws by which legal immigration happens can be adjusted. If we accept illegal immigration, it will expand inexorably. It’s already changed from being mostly Mexicans to include Central and South Americans. Left unchecked, the numbers will substantially increase of those from other continents who fly to Mexico and steal into the US.
Trump’s rhetoric about increasing legal immigration is, I suspect, the product of three influences/impulses: 1) he is, as you say, being influenced by the globalist corporate influences 2) he intuits correctly that much of his conservative base is instinctively absolutist about law and 3) he intuits that singing the praise of legal immigration neutralizes the charge that his opposition to illegal immigration is solely due to racism. He did champion Tom Cotton’s RAISE Act that would have switched us over to a merit-based system like Canada or Australia. I believe that’s what Trump wants even if he doesn’t know how to get it enacted.
My sentiments exactly.
The American Indian has more in common with the ancestors of the Maya, Inca and Aztecs than with Caucasians. I can’t imagine they’d be anything but overjoyed to see the events currently unfolding.
Soooo, we open the borders to allow millions of low IQ immigrants into a country (our’s) that is automating the low IQ jobs out of existence. Then, we pay them all to do nothing? What could go wrong? I laugh at the nonsense and cry at the reality. Where are my Fentanyl patches, I can’t take it any more?
I always wondered what kind of work the unskilled U.S. Citizens would do if all our jobs are sent offshore and then machines do most of the rest?
Crime.
…..
Though, on further reflection, we’ll probably just have another series of global wars to cull the populace.
Hell Steve , try some Kratom . I buy it at my local vitamin shoppe . Works pretty good for pain and it’s still legal !
It all comes back to that, doesn’t it? There are some 45 million Hispanics and another 45 million blacks. Assuming they are all on welfare, as folks like to imagine, why the hell are you still worried about a small number of illegals? That’s a shit-ton of blame to lay on them. They are almost a bugaboo that haunts your nights. Trumpy has really brainwashed you if you think all your problems come from illegal immigration.
Why are you so worried about low IQ jobs being automated, do you feel threatened?
It’s the principle of the thing. And of course, most black and brown people of working age work.
“a small number of illegals”??? We have anywhere from 10-22 MILLION illegal hispanics in this country. We have no idea who or where they are yet, I get felt up by TSA when I wanna visit my sister. WTF? If you have no border control you have no country. How hard an idea is that to understand?
You get felt up by the TSA because of 9/11. Of course you have been brainwashed into thinking 9/11 is not the droid you’re looking for,
It would be fun to find a site where people support this stuff and ask questions and play the devil’s advocate. So many people are popping up with totally unrealistic ideas that are about impossible to pay for.
They would ban you from the site. They can’t provide an intelligent response and would be REALLY pissed that you pointed it out.
in february i rented one of my houses to a cuban couple(legal) who have been here less then a year–both work their ass off & are talking about buying a house when they get their green cards,which they are eligible for in about a year-
but there ain’t no jobs fer welfare bums,are there?
disband the fsa !!!
edit–forgot to say that yesterday i caught the end of a news story that the social security administration is going to start using investigators to catch disability cheats– not sure if it’s for new claims,old claims,or both–
The end begins.
“The math of UBI is really not worth discussing”
That statement presumes that the author has done the math (or examined the math done by others) and knows, objectively, that is doesn’t add up. I would be interested in seeing that math (the actual math – not “talk about” the math).
OK, about 325,000,000 people x $12,000 per year each = $3,900,000,000,000 per year.
This is roughly equivalent to the entire current Federal budget (though roughly 2/3 of that is already social program spending – and about half of this social program spending goes to social security).
If they went with $650/month, I suppose it’s close to a wash.
The reality is that the Free Shit Army would want what they are already getting now, plus $1000 cash per month.
The only reason to support UBI is because it will be a catastrophic failure: It’s turbo-charged accelerationism.
You’re like a Shiite “Twelver” hoping for chaos to usher in the Mahdi.
Really, UBI started out as a joke, but the Left has grabbed the idea and is running with it. Now it’s just a matter of making some popcorn and finding a good spot to watch the train wreck as it happens.
Law of Conservation (Physics): Consumption = UBI * Everybody
>> Magic AI Production + (Individual Production * (Everybody – Everybody) ) = 0
But that is impossible, by orders of magnitude, because production cannot fall below consumption in the real world. Variable rates over time don’t change that. The math in this case is so basic it’s philosophy: A implies B implies C, but A and C can’t both be true. There is no actual math with actual numbers, and an abstract thinker would know that. Any mandatory wealth transfer to the masses is not possible except to liquidate something. The West in this case. Trolling libtard? Why would anyone take your demand for proof by real world numbers seriously? There’s this story called The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs. It’s so simple a child could understand it.
I haven’t seen much realistic “math” so far. I have seen some very simplistic calculations (e.g. 325 million x $12K/year, etc.) designed for the most part to end further consideration. I don’t know where the $12K/year figure comes from and I don’t know why it is assumed that all 325 million get UBI.
That said, there are a few additional factors that might be considered in the equations. For example, if all manual laborers were replaced by robots (since after all we are discussing UBI in relation to replacement of workers by AI and machines) then what dividends could we expect from such replacement? If, for example,each robot can replicate the output of 5 human laborers, wouldn’t we see a net surplus of output that would offset the costs of the UBI? If each robot used fewer resources and required less capital to maintain their output levels, wouldn’t this also create a net surplus that would further offset the UBI?
I don’t think we can just wave our arms and dismiss the idea of a UBI, based solely on ideological disposition, without first knowing the numbers. That amounts to a form of religious thinking (i.e. libertarianism as religion). Also we need to consider what to do with all of the “useless eaters” that will be the result of AI and robotics. It is estimated that there are over 6 million people in the U.S. that work in transportation. If/when replaced by machines do they somehow become “lazy takers” through no fault of their own? What do you propose should become of them? Should we consider how best to help them or should we just exterminate them outright?
DJ, I think it’s from Carter’s proposal of $10K per year. It might be limited to the bottom 20% – blacks and browns. If you ain’t black, get back. If you brown, get down.
UBI will fail for at least 2 reasons. 22 trillion in acknowledged debt, 4 or 5 times more in unacknowledged debt. There is no dividend to be shared. This government is fucking broke!
Secondly it disincentives the next unit of production. I am working to get a small business up and running. I sell honey to friends and family right now. I have inquiries from more potential customers than I have product.
Given that it takes at least 2 years of time and investment to maybe generate another productive unit, why would I do that when what I have now meets my current needs and with UBI I can get a check for nothing?
“End immigration and automation suddenly is a different issue. In fact, it becomes a tolerable issue, because a society willing and able to put its own interest ahead of strangers is able to rationally address the sorts of welfare schemes required to support friends and neighbors. That’s the fear that truly haunts our ruling class.” Bingo. Knocked that one out of the park, Z.
I’m not so sure it’s a bad idea.
Pay everyone with a US passport a minimum $10,000 to start ,paid through a sales tax. ( Yes an actual passport that is impossible to forge)
Let the immigrants , green cards as well as illegals , pay the sales tax on groceries as well.
It would be a great pro active measure by Trump to put Americans first.
Tax the shit out of tomatillos and masa.
You read above where that is about $4 trillion a year, right? Going to eliminate all other forms of welfare, including SS, Medicare, food stamps, etc etc etc? If so, means you are still adding about $1.5 trillion in extra tax. And that would crater the economy. And good luck killing off all that other stuff. Because $10k each will not cover the free shit army’s free shit, so they will riot.
So, it will be in addition to the tax already taken, and the free shit paid out, not a replacement of it. Might as well just commit national suicide and be done with it.
What if I’m an American citizen that has no use for a passport? They aren’t required. And as for them being impossible to forge? PLEASE! No one is that naive.
I also went, Huh? But I hear the EU will soon require gringos to have a passport.
Been to Europe. Never going back. I was born in America and I intend to die in America. We fled Europe for reasons that seemed Good to us, and I’ve seen nothing that would lead me to question that wisdom in my lifetime…present circumstances notwithstanding.
I like the UBI. With 2 conditions:
1. Do away with the rest of the welfare state.
2. It is opt-in….available to all, but citizens have to choose taking it and taking it relinquishes the right to vote for a minimum of a decade. The takers can take the buy-off from the makers, but not control the size of the take.
3. If you take the money you lose ALL your Rights under the Constitution.
Once you sell your principles, you are nothing more than property.
Sound familiar?
Not sure you need to take all of their other rights. Not sure we need to suspend the rights codified in 4th or 5th amendment. Maybe restrict political speech or donations, but they should still have the freedom to worship in whatever way they choose (that isn’t a threat to the existing order).
I think taking their vote is enough. I would even let them whine about not getting enough…but not vote they’re not getting enough.
I have read that behind every socialist is a wanna be totalitarian dictator. Yet, I see self described conservatives and libertarians here saying things like “we should restrict their political speech”, “taking [UBI] relinquishes the right to vote”, “if you take the money you should lose ALL your rights”, etc.
Seems to me there are a few wanna be’s in this little gathering. 😉