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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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At any point they can start giving people a UBI and they will have the option to quit their jobs and raise a family.
The old ways of systemic slavery will not work as human societies progress, especially in our post scarcity world.
I would personally consider it very shaky ground to found a family on if my ability to support them came in the form of a government stipend I have no direct control over.
Can't we instead restore the economy to functionality rather than slapping a big "UBI" patch on the big crack in the dam?
Restoring earning power to the middle class such that a single income can support a household will give families the stability they need to start families with out handing over all the mechanisms of the economy to a single, potentially untrustworthy entity the way UBI does.
A UBI is a necessity for societies going forward.
Basically, wealth inequality is so bad now that our economies and societies no longer serve the majority of people's needs.
So wealth redistribution is required to fix the problem, the question after realizing that is how to go about it.
We can do a one time redistribution of wealth, but without fundamentally changing the system with regulations, incomes will inevitably become imbalanced again. This is what we did after the Great Depression with the jobs program that was the national parks and highway/railroad projects.
IMO it's better to just stop treating money like it's harmless to allow excess accumulation. It would be better if all wealth were perpetually redistribed via a UBI, this would permanently maintain wealth equality. This is similar to what we did after the Great Depression in regards to corporate tax rates and setting a maximum profit.
UBI is the new hotness in terms of popular modern means talked about to undo the ever-growing wealth gap, but it is completely untested in the real world. It has challenges even on paper, including the ones I alluded to above involving being exceptionally susceptible income uncertainty and government corruption.
And you are right to point out that anything we do now to correct the wealth disparity problem is wasted if we don't do enough to prevent another regression back to this same state again. I'm sure UBI could work under the right conditions, as well as many other solutions, but the real success or failure of the program will be measured based on how well and for how long it can resist attempts to dismantle it by bad-faith actors.
I am pretty sure there's a lot of agreement here on the core of the issue, I just have doubts about UBI because it puts the fate of the most vulnerable citizens with the most easily-ignored political voice even more into the hands of their government, who often do them dirty.
It's been tested dozens of times, and every time it is tested, it shows people are happier and healthier, and so is their community.
So it does work and is possible, and it would fix a ton of problems.
I think absolute ceilings and floors on income and wealth will be needed. The wealthy are basically black holes that destroys everything within reach, if given time. Preventing such singularities of excess will have to be through a system designed to give everyone UBI, while making jobs rewarding but with a fixed scope of wealth accumulation.
IMO, a system of classifying entire job classes, and giving them a fixed income rank, would make it harder for wage theft, hoarding, and corruption to happen. By making it so that everyone of a job class has a clear income regardless of location or hours, it will be easier to track who is unnaturally wealthy, thus their hoard can be more easily confiscated before it can do harm to society.
Also, through having fixed incomes, it might prevent inflation. Sellers will have to price according to income brackets, otherwise their goods cannot sell easily to a demographic. In the rankings that I proposed, a basic worker has $30k, while the highest earners get $60k after taxation. This essentially means that CEOs and other high-end careers are only double the value of a waiter's income. Goods will have to be priced accordingly, making it harder for inflation to take place.
I personally don't think it's healthy for a society to force a caste system like that. And I'm not really sure there's truth to the "if everyone gets paid the same then nobody will want to be a Dr" argument. People would still probably pursue more difficult work even without a profit incentive.
People absolutely pursue difficult work without the extra pay. Cuba has always had plenty of doctors .
I understand your position and i think that you say a respectable thought. I like the way you think but i think you're still wrong. Let me explain:
The labor market is the mechanism through which wages are determined. Human labor is bought and sold on the labor market; that means there is supply and demand. Supply comes from workers who are willing to work, while demand comes from companies who seek to employ people.
Now, as is always the case on any market that is regulated by supply and demand, if there's a higher supply, prices go down; while if there's higher demand, prices go up. Prices in the context of the labor market are the price that is paid for an hour of human labor, i.e. the hourly wage.
Now, companies don't have a constant demand for human labor at all. In fact, how much demand companies have for human labor depends largely on how much the company intends to grow. Imagine it like a house: Building a single house might take thousands of days of human labor (i.e. 8 employees for 120 days) for a single-family brick-built home, but maintaining that house takes significantly less labor (it was traditionally done by a single house-wife, and nowadays it's done in the spare after-work hours). So, growth requires intense labor input, while maintenance does NOT.
The same is true for the economy. As long as the economy grows, it requires a lot of human labor input. You have to remember that the Great Fire of London happened in 1666, and that is the starting point for large, stone-built cities in the modern age (before that most houses were built out of wood). Also since roughly that time (1800) we have the industrial revolution which has created steam engines, cars, and basically every commodity that we have today. Building all of that up from scratch required a lot of human labor input, and that is why there was such a large demand for human labor. But today, we have all these commodities and companies already built up, and maintaining them requires rather little work, which is why the demand for human labor is declining. That is a natural development and not a human-chosen development. Growth comes to an end (see also the 1970s study The Limits to Growth that discusses that) because planetary boundaries are reached, and either we find new planets to settle or we won't have growth; but without growth we will have less demand for human labor, and that means lower wages. And that's what we're already observing for the last 25 years: wages have continuously declined.
I don't think that wages could go up again; unless you move to mars and start developing the planet all over again. That's why UBI is necessary; because people still need resources to live.
As the population ages out of the work force, and fewer replacements are coming in, where's your tax base to support UBI? And if you say tax the rich, they won't be rich long with no workers to leech off of.
If the disparity in wealth is reduced thanks to UBI and taxing the rich, then they can pivot towards taxing workers who will now have more money to pay said taxes.
It literally does not make sense to avoid taxing the wealthiest citizens when the disparity in wealth is as bad as it is. Unless you're an idiot.