Military housing allowance (BAH) translates to ‘rents in the commuting vicinity of a military base have a price floor set at BAH’.
UBI for landless peasants is destined to become a welfare program not for recipients, but for the parasitic elites who will feed and house them. Standards of acceptability for both will trend downwards long term, while laws against complaining about it will trend upwards.
First time I’ve had the opportunity to comment “just tax land lol”—if we’re thinking about how to craft an ideal policy situation (which we are doing, by talking about UBI), it shouldn’t be too much to posit that UBI would pair best with:
Georgism, so that the rent on land is not monopolized by landowning elites, but rather flows mainly to the public purse (perhaps this land rent is the main thing that helps fund the UBI)! More detail on georgism and how this would work can be found at this series of long but engaging blog posts: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really
Unfortunately Georgism would not be a complete solution, because of course land is not the ONLY thing that parasitic elites could seek to monopolize and rent-seek with. So you’d need an enthusiastic, competent state that could play a bit of consumer-protection whack-a-mole, trying to spot new rent-seeking monopolies and break them up. Eg, enact YIMBY policies to prevent a monopoly on housing, stimulate competition and free trade in general to prevent monopolies in goods and services, etc. It would be a dynamic situation, and there would always be a little bit of elite parasitism going on, but the more competent and human-thriving-aligned your government is, the better they’d be able to play whack-a-mole.
That said, on a larger, more philosophical level, if the economic fundamentals of society are naturally super unequal (huge number of powerless people hoping that elites take pity on them and implement an ideal UBI+georgism+etc policy regime, while a tiny portion of the population produces like 99% of all economic value), that is inherently gonna be a more precarious situation than one in which the economic fundamentals are naturally pretty egalitarian (maybe imagine a world where manual labor is in high demand, and pretty much anyone can do manual labor, so wages are naturally high across the society). The unequal society will have to rely on the stability of political institutions and human willingness to do the right thing; the naturally-equal society gets it for free.
Unfortunately, we don’t really get much control over the economic fundamentals of our civilization (which depends on stuff like technology, supply and demand driven by random exogenous factors, etc), so I think crafting an ideal policy situation is the best we can aspire to.
UBI will always have some power imbalance. if not due to how that income is provided, then by how that income is exchanged for the basic goods. if we want to universally provide for the basic needs, while avoiding that kind of power imbalance, it seems sensible to focus exactly on that: automate more and more of the housing/food production chain, and distribute the tools for that to decrease the power of whichever hierarchies might otherwise bar access to them.
so Universal Basic Income is the practical implementation for providing basic needs for as long as there’s actually a significant labor requirement in that loop: but further into the utopian future it will need to shift to Universal Basic Production, where individuals/households/communities are granted both the power and responsibility of operating whatever machinery actually does the providing.
No love for this last time I posted it, but you might appreciate Aldous Huxley’s introduction to this particular unfinished utopian fiction. I think he shared your vision, and it’s tragic to see how far we are from it.
no love for it from me either, i’m sorry to say. the “society only exists when we overcome our base sexual desires” meme is tired. my university days were simultaneously my most promiscuous and my most productive (subjectively, measured by my extra-curricular contributions to technology). that’s a sample size of 1 (or dozens? depends how you measure it), but Huxley doesn’t even claim a single sample for the opposing view — much less an experiment, despite claiming this foundational assumption as “scientific”.
are complex systems like societies path-dependent? absolutely. the example of decentralized Swedish production arising after centralized English production is intriguing, in that this diversity appears to be predicated on the two societies having been only loosely connected prior to this — suggesting that this sort of divergence become more difficult as societies become more globalized (the opposing point of view being that globalization means those people with similar, but niche, divergent interests can more easily locate and collaborate with eachother). but that’s sort of the only interesting thing i could scrape from that intro, and it’s 80% my own extrapolation.
Military housing allowance (BAH) translates to ‘rents in the commuting vicinity of a military base have a price floor set at BAH’.
UBI for landless peasants is destined to become a welfare program not for recipients, but for the parasitic elites who will feed and house them. Standards of acceptability for both will trend downwards long term, while laws against complaining about it will trend upwards.
First time I’ve had the opportunity to comment “just tax land lol”—if we’re thinking about how to craft an ideal policy situation (which we are doing, by talking about UBI), it shouldn’t be too much to posit that UBI would pair best with:
Georgism, so that the rent on land is not monopolized by landowning elites, but rather flows mainly to the public purse (perhaps this land rent is the main thing that helps fund the UBI)! More detail on georgism and how this would work can be found at this series of long but engaging blog posts: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really
Unfortunately Georgism would not be a complete solution, because of course land is not the ONLY thing that parasitic elites could seek to monopolize and rent-seek with. So you’d need an enthusiastic, competent state that could play a bit of consumer-protection whack-a-mole, trying to spot new rent-seeking monopolies and break them up. Eg, enact YIMBY policies to prevent a monopoly on housing, stimulate competition and free trade in general to prevent monopolies in goods and services, etc. It would be a dynamic situation, and there would always be a little bit of elite parasitism going on, but the more competent and human-thriving-aligned your government is, the better they’d be able to play whack-a-mole.
That said, on a larger, more philosophical level, if the economic fundamentals of society are naturally super unequal (huge number of powerless people hoping that elites take pity on them and implement an ideal UBI+georgism+etc policy regime, while a tiny portion of the population produces like 99% of all economic value), that is inherently gonna be a more precarious situation than one in which the economic fundamentals are naturally pretty egalitarian (maybe imagine a world where manual labor is in high demand, and pretty much anyone can do manual labor, so wages are naturally high across the society). The unequal society will have to rely on the stability of political institutions and human willingness to do the right thing; the naturally-equal society gets it for free.
Unfortunately, we don’t really get much control over the economic fundamentals of our civilization (which depends on stuff like technology, supply and demand driven by random exogenous factors, etc), so I think crafting an ideal policy situation is the best we can aspire to.
UBI will always have some power imbalance. if not due to how that income is provided, then by how that income is exchanged for the basic goods. if we want to universally provide for the basic needs, while avoiding that kind of power imbalance, it seems sensible to focus exactly on that: automate more and more of the housing/food production chain, and distribute the tools for that to decrease the power of whichever hierarchies might otherwise bar access to them.
so Universal Basic Income is the practical implementation for providing basic needs for as long as there’s actually a significant labor requirement in that loop: but further into the utopian future it will need to shift to Universal Basic Production, where individuals/households/communities are granted both the power and responsibility of operating whatever machinery actually does the providing.
No love for this last time I posted it, but you might appreciate Aldous Huxley’s introduction to this particular unfinished utopian fiction. I think he shared your vision, and it’s tragic to see how far we are from it.
http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Hopousia_or_The_Sexual_and_Economic_Foundations_of_a_New_Society
no love for it from me either, i’m sorry to say. the “society only exists when we overcome our base sexual desires” meme is tired. my university days were simultaneously my most promiscuous and my most productive (subjectively, measured by my extra-curricular contributions to technology). that’s a sample size of 1 (or dozens? depends how you measure it), but Huxley doesn’t even claim a single sample for the opposing view — much less an experiment, despite claiming this foundational assumption as “scientific”.
are complex systems like societies path-dependent? absolutely. the example of decentralized Swedish production arising after centralized English production is intriguing, in that this diversity appears to be predicated on the two societies having been only loosely connected prior to this — suggesting that this sort of divergence become more difficult as societies become more globalized (the opposing point of view being that globalization means those people with similar, but niche, divergent interests can more easily locate and collaborate with eachother). but that’s sort of the only interesting thing i could scrape from that intro, and it’s 80% my own extrapolation.
Maybe every alternative will have a worse power imbalance.