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this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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Futurology
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If you get UBI, you get to choose how to spend it. I'm not sure where the notion of a company store would come in?
See? We've literally been conditioned to the point that the idea of addressing inequity makes some of us blow a microchip, and then come the incoherent, non-relevant buzz terms they couldn't define with access to a library and a gun to their heads.
Company Stores!
Marxist Leninist commie pinko socialism!
Picking winners and losers!
Venezuela!
And to be clear, I'm not trying to further divide, I still want these poor, deluded bastards to get a UBI. That's whats so sad, they've been conditioned to want others to suffer to feel more successful by comparison. Jesus Christ horses, fucking drink! You'll feel better!
Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I feel like someone's going to try to find a way to "farm" UBI the same way many other things have been farmed in the past. I chose "company store" to represent that because collusion could make prices of necessities just adjust to compensate.
I think you might be, but I get it.
Fact is, organizations do farm stuff like that whenever they can. Think prison commissary and telephone charges. They have a literal captive group of consumers who have no choice whatsoever. Oil companies and their gasoline.
When you broaden both the group of consumers to "everyone," and the things to be consumed to "everything," and the time frame to "always," it becomes nigh impossible for enough businesses to be on the same page with price gouging. Will there be some businesses that do? Of course. There already are. Enabling the people who are already being gouged to have more purchasing power - meaning more choices in what they purchase, who they purchase from, transportation, housing, healthcare, all sorts of things - that makes it harder for businesses to gouge, especially when we're talking about a wide swath of product and service types.