UBI

Well this is not really that big of an obstacle if a powerful political force brought forward the idea. The government can simply use inflation and regulations to lower the amount of money required to sustain a citizen.
Of course there are other issues, but this is not the main one.

This is not in any way sustainable or a good idea.
Of course we can do it with debt, we can give each person a million dollars a month. The problem is it won't last.

It's not what I said but ok. Also nice Reddit spacing.
I'm not pro UBI, mind you, but the main issue with it is not cost, it's the power that would give corporations over the government and the common citizen.

Been posting this way on 4chan since before I had even heard of Reddit.
And any argument for what UBI would end up as is useless when you realize we can't afford UBI.
Why think of the consequences of something impossible?

It's shot in the arm to try to preserve capitalism even if it becomes completely obsolete. Get society to revolve around this mechanism so it won't try to change it, even if literally any change would be for the better. I suppose that, if implemented perfectly, UBI would make the rate of profit stabilize, but in practice, just slowing it down is more than reason enough for Porky to try. It's a matter of time before capitalism makes itself untenable, if not through class struggle like Marx imagined, then at least through technological advancement. Altho it's possible the environmental apocalypse will be the death blow.

The rich have a lot of untaxed money, and most importantly, it's in their own interest to get UBI started. At some point in the future, they themselves will yank taxes back to New Deal rates. This isn't just a sacrifice on their part of course, because all that UBI money will go straight back into their pockets anyway. Basically, Porky will set aside a bit of his riches to ensure that the rest is forever safe from mmost?/all? capitalist crises.

Wrong, you only need a community, not even a state that provide UBI as money or even labour vouchers.

even if it's scraps, seize it. i will not be swayed against UBI even if porky manages to profit from it, my self-interest takes priority, as it should be.

this is banal idea and easy to accomplish. state can borrow money to itself no problem. economy is all bells and whistles anyway and if you cannot effectively siphon wealth from the top you're done for.

why not seize the productive powers of society?

It can quite easily be financed.

my question is more, can it prolong capitalism even with it's contradictions

That's the aim, it's basically pocket money that is given to you so you don't have an excuse to not fuck off every day and put gas in your car to go look for work. It's also a scheme to eliminate all other forms of welfare: you are given money on the basis of being a citizen, so you don't need old age pensions or any other fancy shit.

it won't work as a capitalism saver because it's retarded. It's like giving your kids a meager allowance so they can buy a bike to get a summer job. What happens when the summer's over? It doesn't remove the basic problem, which is capitalism consistently exploiting every sector of production to the point it doesn't yield results anymore. What happens when there's no more tertiary sector jobs? What meaningless activity will they invent? At best ubi will guarantee that the reserve army of labor doesn't starve, but even that's a stretch. It's actually a fucking nightmare because it can be revoked at any time. It already happens with unemployment subsidies. Imagine losing your livelihood because you didn't answer one call: that's reality for a lot of people.

Now this is how ubi will be implemented if it happens and not how sparkly eyed internet journalists dream it will be, but even that dream has always sounded completely retarded to me. Being paid by the government to be a citizen is basically admitting money is make believe. Why not go the step forward and dream of abolishing it?

why's this meme so popular?

class struggle is never dying as long as classes are a thing.

It's also in their interest to keep the untaxed money untaxed. This isn't the sixties, capital moves faster than the fastest airplane. Why would any capitalist not just have an account in Panama and keep operating in their original country like they're doing right now?

I didn't imply otherwise tho. I mean, maybe capitalism will die and won't be replaced by socialism, but it will have class struggle nonetheless.

Capitalism doesn't reuire only exploitation, it also requires consumption, which is exactly what UBI would "fix". Even tho people will become unnecessary for production thanks to full automation, they'll still be needed for consumption of the produced goods. But having lost all jobs to automation, they have no source of income, unless… the rich hand them a little allowance via the government, which they spend consuming said goods, and the money goes straight back to the rich anyway, plus profit, minus taxes (which will be paid to someone else and so also come back to the rich).

It's frankly an insane scenario, yet it seems to be an inevitable step in capitalism, should the bastard insist on not dying. It's an inherently self-contradictory system, so the more it tries to prolong its life, the weirder things get.

Not at all, environmental destruction means room for companies like Blackwater to take advantage of redevelopment contracts like after the invasion of Iraq.

Well no shit it pacifies the lumpen proletariat (which are the true revolutionary class).

It would only work if you have central controlled price limits or else businesses will just raise their prices.

Why is it so utopian for you when 99% of western nations have social welfare?

Who said it was utopian? It doesn't work the same way as welfare.

Yes its horrible and that is why all the western economies have collapsed like the soviet union.

UBI is the first step devolving in a dystopia where the tendancy of the rate of profit to fall combined with the inevitable concentration of ever more in ever less hands ended up creating some sort of hellscape where mankind is reduced to a horde of consumers who do nothing all day and sheepishly wait for their allowance to drop so they can purchase junk food mass-produced by their overlords who swim in billions for no good reason since they still die at the end, while devastating the environment.

Oh wait, we're in there already.

bump