Either would be an upgrade at this point.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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Liberals; no one working 40 hours a week should live in poverty, bit what are you gonna do?
Everyone conscious has the ability to preform some type of labor so…. Let’s just skip this stupid argument and just say UBI.
UBI keeps capitalism and thus inequality. It’s a zero sum game where people’s wealth will flow towards the rich, enabling them in future to amass power to undo UBI and repeat the mistakes we have now.
Better solution is to ditch currency and focus on meeting people’s wellbeing needs directly.
You can’t ditch currency. Currency isn’t some grand invention of the state. It’s the direct result of beings valuing things at different amounts at different times. Technically current is using any stand in to ease the trade barrier but colloquially some people use love as a currency. Many kinds of social animals trade and what they trade could be deemed currency.
You can absolutely do away with currency if the current mode of production got abolished. Currency itself is a necessity in a society that produces commodities for exchange, which creates rise for social constructs such as value, value forms like money, the possibility for an innate crisis and so on.
The first 2 chapters of Capital explains this, the commodity production system was a historical development rather than something coming out of nature (no chemist was able to find value through microscope), and we can certainly produce things to satisfy needs rather than exchange, with a much lower amount of work hours needed to do so.
You can 100% ditch currency, you don’t not need a trade or barter based system. Humans have been operating on a gift economy model for hundreds of thousands of years, currency and trading is a blip in our history.
People are capable of supporting each other without profit incentives.
So let's say I really want to investigate superconducting magnets, because I really like that field and want to do research. I need processed rare earth products that only exist on the other side of the globe.
In your gift economy, how would I proceed to acquire those?
I suspect these policies often assume that either we live in startrek or we’re back to the woods and have no need for superconducting magnets :-/
surely no other people have any benefit or incentive to find those superconductors and so no one would be willing to aid you in your research, including people who could get those minerals, right?
Is being flippant part of the economic model or an extra? Doesn't get me closer to those hard to extract materials that are in very short supply.
You shouldn't state this as fact. It's not, archaeologists have been arguing between the formalist and substantavist theories of economic models for decades now. You seem to be favoring the formalist view, but there is a strong arguement to be made that market principles such as supply and demand existed deeper in the past as well.
While there may not have been currency, the historic economics of humanity were certainly greater than a gift economy model.
I'm confident that if you waved a magic wand and removed currency, an hour later it would be reinvented via "hey, will you do me this favor? I'll owe you one" -> "You already owe me one. But I guess you'll owe me two? Let me write this down"
Yup. Gets even easier once all the emancipatory technology innovations cease being classified, suppressed and secreted to maintain the corporate monopolisation rigged game of kleptarchy. When that stops, obsoleting currency/money becomes a greater viable potential, if not just removes some areas from profiteering. Such things are not cosmic fundamentals. Greedy eyes are on water, air, sunlight.
I imagine quality would improve and enshitification would cease, without corrupt fiat currency driving churn. And [as we currently are, it's an] accelerating churn at that, in a desperate race to the bottom. Unsustainable. Essential vital necessity to move beyond it.
UBI may be a stepping stone, perhaps a step away from reducing currency/money to mere resource accounting, on to greater things yet. But yes, not if left in the hands of the current oligarchs, nor in any such system that so readily gives oligarchs absolute power.
Sublimation out of their rigged game trap may come fast [, or not at all, only piecemeal placatium fakery].
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No. Currency is convenience and convenience wins 99% of the time.
Yeah I’ll pass thanks, currency and capitalism is killing the planet and us along with it.
Nothing easier than being dead tho I guess.
Can you explain your non- currency economy for those of us without that much imagination?
Does trade still exist?
If so what is the medium of exchange?
How is value evaluated?
Unfortunately it seems that proponents of these systems fail to deliver when we get to practical issues - I'm open-minded enough to consider the thought, but I too have a bunch of questions that seem will go unaddressed.
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From this side of life, seems true. Can't say the dead agree, but they're not complaining much.
Bring on the convenience of the emancipation by technology, provisioning each and all free energy and energy-to-matter transfer, effectively "star trek replicators".
Star Trek however needed most governments to collapse as a result of WW3 and Vulcans showing up to help rebuild afterwards.
We got WW3 almost covered, just not that sure about those Vulcans ...
Oh, and there is nothing zero sum about it. That’s kind of the point of a good teade
That’s exactly zero sum, one person gains from one persons losses. I pay/you profit, loss/win.
That’s how currency works unless you’re suggesting we just print money off any time we need to make a purchase.
Zero sum presumes that there is no net gain or net loss, but trade results in both.
A 'good' trade, the kind that economists tout as a benefit, results in both parties gaining, because both parties receive objects they value more than the objects traded away, especially within contexts like comparative advantage.
A 'bad' trade, the kind that many leftists observe and are aware of, results in one party gaining at the other's disproportionate expense - such as capitalists damaging actual economic activity by extracting all the value they can extort from their workers.
A zero-sum trade is theoretically possible, but generally not the case even with the extreme abstraction of currency.
I can make good shoes. I make bad pastries.
You make good pastries. You make bad shoes.
I make you shoes. You make me pastries. Now I have good shoes and pastries. You also have good shoes and pastries. Everyone wins.
That’s bartering not currency.
An even better system is, you can make shoes so you make people shoes. I can make pastries so I make people pastries. There’s no requirement to exchange, we can just make stuff for people and they can likewise do the same.
That’s a gift economy, people cooperating together for the benefit of everyone.
That sounds really lovely, but for some of us, we wouldn't even be able to get our families to participate. Consider the families that make their adult kids pay rent, even though they own the house the live in. I'd think that doing things like laundry, cleaning, cooking, picking up prescriptions, groceries, etc. should suffice for contributing to the household. Thankfully, that's how it worked when I was an adult living with my parents - I didn't pay rent, but I was often a "gopher" that was sent out to do errands on behalf of my mom. It was annoying, but I figured that by doing such things I was supporting my family just as they were supporting me, and there was an unspoken agreement about it.
Unfortunately, not all families/households operate like that, at least here in the highly-individualized US. If some parents won't extend a gift economy within their own families, it'd be an uphill battle to get them to apply it toward people they aren't related to.
Currency is an abstraction for all the goods and services you might barter. I can sell you a pair of shoes for 1 currency unit, then buy your pastries for 1 currency unit. The result is the same.
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The mechanism of markets is that the price of goods follows the law of supply and demand. Prices are a universal signal to producers that they should produce more/less of a good.
Without currency you need a mechanism to replace this. Given your previous posts in favour of anarchism, I’m guessing you don’t favour central planning. So what mechanism for determining how much and of what kinds of goods should be produced, do you prefer?
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Everybody is not equal. Sorry to break it to ya. We can lessen the disparity between highest and lowest income, but there will always be a rift. Some people just don't output at much value as others.
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UBI will just cause inflation, it increases aggregate demand without increasing aggregate supply. More dollars chasing the same amount of goods leads to inflation.
It also doesn't really address inequality, anyone's relative position on the income hierarchy doesn't change, if I make $500 more than another guy before UBI, I'll still make $500 more than them after UBI, and your position on the income hierarchy determines your standard of living, not your absolute income. Eg. If you get a raise that matches inflation your absolute income may have gone up, but your relative income stayed the same and thus so did your standard of living.
We need to stop focusing on money and focus on the systems of production and hierarchy that actually determine our living standards. Money is just an expression of those structures, it's downstream, and changing that won't change the actual structures.
Wouldn't inflation be a good immediate signal on which systems of production need to be fixed first? E.g. housing prices spike = need more housing
Also, if someone earns 1000 and you earn 500 before an UBI of 500, they earn 2x as much as you before and 1.5x after.
Maybe but we already know we need more housing, no need to spend a bunch of money to find that out, especially if that money can be spent on actually building housing. There are plenty of other stats and signals we can use to determine what to produce which don't require bringing inflation into the mix that can cut into peoples savings.
Also, if someone earns 1000 and you earn 500 before an UBI of 500, they earn 2x as much as you before and 1.5x after.
Yes but your ability to outbid that other person stays the same. In a market system your access to limited goods and services is determined by your ability to outbid others to gain those goods and services.
Take housing for example, say I can spend $500 on housing for a shitty apartment and another person can spend $1,000 on housing for a good apartment, and there's another unhoused person who can't afford any housing.
Now give each of these people $500, like you said the relative gap has shrinked but the place in the hierarchy stays the same. The person with the good apartment will bid up prices to keep me from moving into their unit, and I'd be forced to bid up for my unit to make sure the unhoused person doesn't get it. The distribution of housing would stay the same, assuming no new housing gets built, and all the money just goes to the landlord.
Why are you assuming an extra shitty apartment that cost $500 wouldn’t be built, now that the unhoused person has some money to pay with?
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Yup.
and both are de-attached from reality, so they have something in common
Reality is when we give help out to megapastors because "God told them to not pay taxes this year."
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