[ExI] Universal Income

[Stuart LaForge]

Tara Maya wrote:

>Maybe I don’t understand how Universal Income supposed to work.

Nah. I think you understand it just fine.


>Some Middle Marties decide to take it easy, because why bother, and some
>suffer temporary set backs that drop them into Poor Jacks, and some go
work >for Politician Pete or Paul pushing paper, and there are less and
less >Middle Marties paying for the pool that funds UI. Neither Poor
Jack, nor >Politician Pete, nor, at this point, even Rich Dick pays into
the pool, so >it’s all the backs of the middle class, which will
therefore shrink. At >least it could be said of Rich Dick that he is
contributing to making and >selling things, but the number of people who
drop of out of productive >labor to leech off the system would inevitably
grow, until you basically >have no middle class left, only the rich
leeches and the poor leeches and >the government leeches.


>At that point, there’s a bloody revolution instead of an election, and
>thousands die.
>
>Not a great system, as far as I can see. What I am missing here?

Not much except there is an option to forget the UI and have the bloody
revolution up front. Also you seem to miss the possibility that the robots
and AI doing almost all of the productive labor will have already killed
the middle-class by the time UI gets adopted. With the possible exception
of Romney's millionaire middle-class, the middle class will only exist in
developing countries.

But cheer up, bright-eyes. :-) I can't imagine congress approving UI
unless bloody revolution was eminent anyway. In which case it would
qualify as "kicking the can down the road" which is something congress is
actually good at. In the mean time, I bid you "semper paratus", "molon
labe", "coitus more ferarum", and so forth . . .

Stuart LaForge