Better? Perhaps. But UBI is something we can do AND actually get done. Pie in the sky ain’t much use when you’re hungry; pie in your hands is what you need during hard times.
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I never stated they had to be exclusive.
@bobtato is right about the necessity of moving basic needs out of the realm of capitalism, but it’s fine if someone wants to be an artisan on their own. Just prevent exploitation through collectivism, so a guild of basket weavers aren’t being squeezed by a core individual or set of shareholders.
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I feel that this guy really, really doesn’t understand one of the central points of UBI:
It allows employers and employees to come to the negotiating table on a far more equal footing, as the employee no longer fears starvation and homelessness if they doesn’t accept the offer.
The UBI needs to not be means tested. Every citizen in the country needs to get it. Every child’s should be invested in an account for them to get, half on their 18th birthday, half on their 27th (or so) birthday. (Perhaps half to them, half to their parents to support them- but the point is, giving everyone a chunk of money as a seed investment for college and when they are early in their careers…)
This combines with Universal Health Care in a way that will simultaneously deal with increasing automation and job loss and allow for explosive increases in both artistic and small business endevors.
It would also rock the heck out of the job market as employees and employers would come to the table much more equally: an employee would no longer fear homelessness and starvation if they didn’t accept the employment offer. My guess is that employers would have to pay a lot more for employees, and companies like Uber or McDonald’s would not be able to have their current employment practices.
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Rushkoff seems to be envisioning the kind of “neoliberal UBI” I’ve described elsewhere on this site. Sadly, this is just about the only kind of UBI that will be put in place in the U.S. as long as movement conservatives and Libertarians have a say.
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My personal take on UBI varies from day to day, but when I’m pessimistic about it, I would rather guess that it would all get eaten up by rent/mortgage increases. i.e. We all get to bid in the same housing market we had before, but now your competitors have bigger pocketbooks.
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I think my addition about banks is also worth remembering.
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Let me see if I can summarize the argument being made.
Giving poor people more money will give them less money, because giving poor people more money means that they get less money. It seems like there’s a step missing in the argument.
The assumption we’re supposed to make that doesn’t get explicitly made: rich peoples’ capital will accumulate faster because we give money to poor people. Granted, capital will continue to accumulate. But the causal relationship seems tenuous to me. Sure one can prevent capital from accumulated (e.g. with effective graduated taxation, reinstitution of loop-hole-free estate taxes, closing of tax loopholes that provide benefit to the rich without offsetting benefit to people of the US as a whole), AND provide basic income supplements.
Capital accumulation and basic income supplements are orthogonal issues.
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I think maybe that’s his larger point?
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It’s a bit naïve to say it’s money versus people. Money is the ultimately a commodity. Do you need food? You can trade money for that. You need shelter? You can trade money for that. Education, health care, whatever you need, money can get it.
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It’s the same thing as with all those hardcore libertarians thinking that if all the regulations were busted, they’d be the captains of industry instead of just another exploited worker getting paid in company scrip, eating unsafe food, and having to rely on snake oil for medical care when they start coughing out their lungs from the pollution.
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Yes. He’s just being realistic about what we can expect as long as the GOP and the techno-Libertarians have a say. There are UBI schemes that can be structured so they’re not vehicles to continue concentrating wealth at the top while propping up a Potemkin Village consumer economy, but that’s what we’ll get in the USA.
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JUst how/why are software developers “vassals”?
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Vassals with stock options and company health plans are still vassals tied to the liege lords (now including corporate entities) they serve.
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I think the missing link is accountability from the ultra-rich (private undersea internet cabling, offshore accounts, the subprime mortgage fiasco, tax cuts, etc.). Those proceeds should be first to be funneled into UBI.
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Take away the roof over my head, the food on my table, my education and my health care, but you can never take my FREEDOM!!!
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Unless I’m misreading, there seems to be a basic problem with Rushkoff’s specific concept of “universal basic assets.” The way he defines it, it’s not actually “universal.” At the end of the article he proposes a certain percentage of shares in the assets of a company for the people who work for the company. But that’s just tying everyone’s fortunes to the market even more strongly than before. Then the individual companies would really call the shots. That’s not universal anything.
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A) what the fuck are Rushkoff’s credentials that he feels like he can weigh in on this?
B) why the fuck would I listen to a child of priviledge who hasn’t worked a day of manual labor in his life poor-splain to me why paying caretakers and child-rearers is a bad thing?
JFC, stay in your goddamn lane, you parasite.
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But people do/can largely base an identity on what they do. Which under collectivism will still be subject to a vote.
I grabbed basket weaving as the nearest handy stereotype, but if we substitute things like developing the personal computer or building bikes or cars or anything that involves a group of people getting together voluntarily to engage in an activity that requires pooled resources is going to end up subject to the collective. Imagine how much further behind in computer tech we would be if early personal computer developers had to justify their use of time and resources in order to sell their “hobby” computers. The average joe would have looked at that and balked. I think people have forgotten that for a long time it was assumed that no one other than governments and large corporations had a use for computers. Who knows what unknown Next Great Thing wouldn’t emerge if people didn’t have the ability to go off on their own larks because their lark requires pooled resources.
The premise that I reject is that economic activity is necessarily separated from personal activity. It’s all on a spectrum. Just because some people hate their jobs and feel exploited doesn’t mean everyone does.
How soon people forget we’ve seen this all before: “What’s good for GM is good for America”.
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The conspiracisct would say that’s exactly what they want you to do: Settle for this so you wont fight for that.
Still, I get you. People need now, and who can fault them for that. Both?
But only if you’re allowed to have the money by the powers that be. I imagine a world where one can survive without money altogether. Naive? Probably. 
