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liberal is not left
(quokk.au)
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this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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Memes of Production
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UBI keeps capitalism and thus inequality. It’s a zero sum game where people’s wealth will flow towards the rich, enabling them in future to amass power to undo UBI and repeat the mistakes we have now.
Better solution is to ditch currency and focus on meeting people’s wellbeing needs directly.
Oh, and there is nothing zero sum about it. That’s kind of the point of a good teade
That’s exactly zero sum, one person gains from one persons losses. I pay/you profit, loss/win.
That’s how currency works unless you’re suggesting we just print money off any time we need to make a purchase.
I can make good shoes. I make bad pastries.
You make good pastries. You make bad shoes.
I make you shoes. You make me pastries. Now I have good shoes and pastries. You also have good shoes and pastries. Everyone wins.
That’s bartering not currency.
An even better system is, you can make shoes so you make people shoes. I can make pastries so I make people pastries. There’s no requirement to exchange, we can just make stuff for people and they can likewise do the same.
That’s a gift economy, people cooperating together for the benefit of everyone.
Currency is an abstraction for all the goods and services you might barter. I can sell you a pair of shoes for 1 currency unit, then buy your pastries for 1 currency unit. The result is the same.
Here's a hypothetical:
I'm in a feud with the person who runs the pasture land. He won't kill his cattle/sheep if it's to provide leather for my shoes. Everyone else likes him and his milk and they tell me to bury the hatchet.
But he insists on ever thicker and higher quality boots because the pasture he "works" is so overgrown and muddy from poor maintenence. This cuts into my ability to supply quality shoes for everyone else so I can't do it.
Of course, I stutter and don't do well with public speaking but he has a silver tongue. I can't even lay out half the facts before he's convinced the town that I'm a lazy parasite and a bad shoemaker; I'm exiled. I will now die starving and alone. The town will waste time and energy wearing through low quality woven shoes, content with the thought that they're not wasting milk cows on that shitty cobbler.
If there was a market/bartering economy:
That sounds really lovely, but for some of us, we wouldn't even be able to get our families to participate. Consider the families that make their adult kids pay rent, even though they own the house the live in. I'd think that doing things like laundry, cleaning, cooking, picking up prescriptions, groceries, etc. should suffice for contributing to the household. Thankfully, that's how it worked when I was an adult living with my parents - I didn't pay rent, but I was often a "gopher" that was sent out to do errands on behalf of my mom. It was annoying, but I figured that by doing such things I was supporting my family just as they were supporting me, and there was an unspoken agreement about it.
Unfortunately, not all families/households operate like that, at least here in the highly-individualized US. If some parents won't extend a gift economy within their own families, it'd be an uphill battle to get them to apply it toward people they aren't related to.