I don’t know how relevant this is now, but here’s a link to another post where I expressed my thoughts on what kind of pitfalls you might most likely face – https://lemmy.world/post/36867409
By the way, what is this phenomenon on Lemmy? Let’s say people are reluctant to read and comment on old posts published just a couple of days or a week ago, but with new ones, it’s a completely different story. What kind of psychology is this? Or it seemed to me?
If that is the argument, it is a pretty damning rebuke of a UBI.
Someone needs to work for housing and food to exist. If a UBI causes everyone to not work (including those producing food, etc), there will very quickly not be food and other necissities.
No sane UBI plan will do this. The goal is to cover Basic needs, not replace working. What it does attempt to do away with is the requirement to work yourself to the bone to barely survive. Working to pay for things more than the basics is still expected.
A useful side effect is to rebalance the power dynamics between larger companies and their employees. It’s a lot harder to abuse someone if they won’t be homeless within 3 months if they quit.
I have been workshopping a “Universal Ranked Income” concept, where UBI provides all necessities, while capitalism is used for luxury goods. For example, you get free generic shampoo and conditioner. If you want versions that are scented or have different properties, you spend money. All money is for getting upgrades to lifestyle - bigger beds, vehicles, houses, ect, but the state provides free but boring goods and services as a baseline. Capitalism has to compete against free.
The way I figure, doing it this way allows us to have the best qualities of capitalism, while preventing the hostage leverage that needing food, shelter, and general wellbeing that corporations exploit against people. By ensuring people have what they need, they can essentially unionize by default - the corporations can’t force them nor their families to genuinely suffer for refusing to work bad jobs.
Unfortunately, there are complaints about my concept creating ‘castes’, since I want absolute limitations on wealth, fixed incomes, and want each job to fall into a rank of income according to difficulty, education, and risk that is involved with that type of job. IMO, a national standardization of incomes and job requirements that employers can’t manipulate is key to egalitarianism.
That would effectively create a planned economy. In theory it could work. Unfortunately, the human element cripples it. How do you rank the value of doctors against cleaners? How do you rank bananas against bread? The core elements were tried with communism, and found to fall severely short.
What has been found, in Africa, with micro loans/grants is that people are a LOT more efficient at maximising value locally than a lot of applied rules. Giving them money (e.g. to start a business) is a lot more effective than giving them resources directly. It uses capitalism to optimise on the local scale.
One of the key things with UBI is letting people and businesses sort things out on the small scale. While capitalism has massive issues, it’s VERY good at sorting this sort of problem.
My personal preference would be a closed loop tax based system. Basically, a fixed percentage of money earned (e.g. 15%) is taxed on everyone. That is then distributed on a per capita basis. There would be a cutoff point where you pay more than you receive. The big advantage is that it’s dynamic to the economy. If the economy shrinks, then UBI shrinks with it, encouraging people to work more to compensate. It provides a floor of income, letting people negotiate working conditions, without the fear of homelessness. It also channels money from the rich, where it moves slowly, to the poor, where it has a far higher velocity.
Keeping people in grinding poverty is an essential function of capitalism tho.