Why do we need the Freedom Dividend?

[PETRUS]

20. Makes sense.

I'd like to share my thoughts about UBI with you. For one thing, writing about something helps me to organize and clarify what's in my head, and I haven't yet gone through that exercise on this topic. Also, I'd very much like to hear your opinions about what I have to say (of course, nobody here is obligated to respond to anything, and if don't feel like giving me feedback I won't be insulted). A number of my thoughts follow the pattern of "on the one hand x, but on the other hand y," and it would be useful to me to know what that sounds like to someone else.

In no particular order:

One of my negative reactions to UBI proposals stems from my discomfort with passive income. It's one of the problems I have with capitalism - around a third of national income is capital income, i.e., money collected simply by owning assets, which is therefore money not going to the people whose labor is making the assets productive. (Sometimes that's a blurry line. I myself own a business and also devote 60 or more hours a week to it.) On the other hand, I also believe that everyone is born with equal rights to the earth and its resources, but the economy does not operate according to that principle. Thomas Paine talked about that in "Agrarian Justice," proposing cash as compensation for those who are essentially dispossessed, and a UBI is conceptually similar. Further (as Evelyn Yang pointed out in something else you posted recently), society depends on a lot of unpaid labor, and a UBI would be one way to compensate people who are contributing but not receiving a market income.

I also worry about the political sustainability of UBI. Would it be eroded over time, much the same way the "New Deal" has been whittled away and the purchasing power of the minimum wage hasn't been maintained? On the other hand, that sort of concern could apply to all sorts of other policies and doing nothing isn't helpful at all, so maybe it's not worth fretting about.

Also, and I realize this is a minority opinion in the US, I think markets are a terrible way to organize society. They're certainly a simple and powerful way to coordinate a large and complex economy, but there are a lot of destructive side-effects. I think market imperatives are one of the main reasons we're facing climate change and other issues of ecological overshoot. Personally, I'd like to figure out a way to decommodify as much as we can (there's ample real world evidence that this is possible for things like education and healthcare, and I'd like to think there are ways to do it in other areas). A UBI doesn't replace the market, it just gives more people more options to participate. On the other hand, apart from proposals like Medicare for all, I don't have a lot of practical suggestions about how to replace markets. I'm temperamentally opposed to top-down administration or "central planning," and the evidence suggests that's an ill-advised approach anyway.

Those aren't necessarily all my thoughts about UBI, but I've covered the main bits of what's been going on in my head. To sum up where all this had led me: I'm inclined to support a UBI as part of a basket of policy changes that also includes thinks like a higher minimum wage, a much more progressive tax code, and Medicare for all. Your thoughts?