MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘dystopia’

In This Dystopia, Opposing A Genocide Is Considered Worse Than Committing One

Posted by M. C. on April 25, 2024

That’s how crazy they need us to be to keep us supporting a globe-spanning empire that literally cannot exist without nonstop violence and tyranny. They need us thinking up is down and black is white.

Caitlin Johnstone

https://substack.com/inbox/post/143952121

All the frenzied shrieking about pro-Palestine protests at universities these last few days makes it clear that our civilization is so twisted and insane that it sees protesting a genocide as far worse than committing one. Which is about as backwards as any society could possibly be.

Seriously, try to imagine a crazier, more upside-down civilization than one which gets more angry at people protesting genocidal atrocities than it does at people committing them. A civilization where people wear their pants on their head and walk backwards all day? That would be less crazy. A civilization where the dogs own the people and the children go to work while the parents go to school? That would be less crazy.

It’s as wrong as you can possibly get anything in this world. It’s actually hard to imagine how anyone could get anything more wrong. If you’ve accepted daily massacres of innocent civilians as the baseline normal and appropriate thing, and regard any opposition to this as a freakish and evil abomination, then you’re as screwed up and confused about reality as any other stark raving lunatic in town. Maybe worse.

To view nonstop mass military slaughter as moral and opposition thereto as immoral is to live in a mental moral universe that has been flipped on its head. It’s to inhabit a reality tunnel that has become completely divorced from reality. But that’s the kind of mainstream worldview that the political-media class in this society are working to indoctrinate us into day in and day out throughout our entire lives.

I just saw a tweet from the commentator Briahna Joy Gray saying that in order to find any mention in The New York Times of the hundreds of Palestinians in mass graves that are being discovered in Gaza, she had to scroll past no fewer than four stories about pro-Palestine protests on college campuses — including two op-eds which criticized the protesters. 

See the rest here

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You Only Need To Cage A Bird If It Knows That It Can Fly

Posted by M. C. on February 21, 2024

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

Once people are no longer buying into power-serving narratives, we will gain the ability to begin working toward the creation of a truth-based society that works for everyone. But this will never happen as long as we are being successfully manipulated into believing that this model for human civilization is acceptable and serves our interests. The very first step is un-jacking our brains from the propaganda matrix.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/02/no_author/you-only-need-to-cage-a-bird-if-it-knows-that-it-can-fly

One point I keep trying to drive home here in as many ways as I can is that this is the dystopia we were warned about. The main difference between this mind-controlled dystopia and the fictional dystopias in novels like 1984 is that in 1984 people knew they weren’t living in a free society, whereas in this dystopia the people believe they are free.

In Orwell’s dystopia people knew they weren’t free and had to use doublethink to stay out of trouble with their rulers. In this dystopia people have no idea how pervasively they’re being dominated by their rulers; they think they came up with their ideas, worldview and political positions on their own, when in reality those belief systems were constructed inside their skulls by a profoundly sophisticated propaganda machine without their even knowing it.

All mainstream and semi-mainstream political factions are owned and operated by the powerful, and propaganda is used to get the public subscribing to them to advance the interests of the powerful. Because the overwhelming majority of us have been manipulated into espousing one of these power-serving belief systems (they give you multiple choices depending on your ideological disposition), the more overtly totalitarian measures described by dystopian novelists are unnecessary. You only need to cage a bird if it knows that it can fly.

But make no mistake: our society is no more free than those in the dark futures imagined by storytellers. If our minds are not free, then we are not free. If we’re being successfully manipulated into thinking, speaking, acting, voting, working and consuming in accordance with the wishes of the powerful, then we’re just as locked down as we would be if we had chains around our necks. Collectively we could not be any more aligned with the will of the powerful than we already are, even if our brains were replaced with computer chips.

There is no more need for dystopian fiction, because the dystopia has already arrived. It’s here. In fact, dystopian fiction is actually destructive because it causes people to imagine that dystopia is a threat that exists somewhere off in the future instead of right here and now all around us.

We don’t need dystopian fiction for the same reason we wouldn’t need imaginary swords-and-sorcery fantasy novels if we we lived in a world of wizards and dragons. People living in dystopian societies do not need dystopian fiction, they need dystopian facts. Dystopian journalism. Dystopian documentaries. Dystopian polemics. We just need true information and reality-based ideas to counter the lies and manipulation we’re inundated with from day to day.

We cannot be free until we have used the power of our numbers to shrug off the control of our dystopian overlords, and we’ll never do that as long as a critical majority of us are unable to see how profoundly unfree we really are. There’s no escaping the mind control matrix of imperial propaganda until you can see the lines of code it is made of.

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We Think This Dystopia Is Normal Like People In Abusive Relationships Think It’s Normal

Posted by M. C. on February 16, 2024

Caitlin Johnstone

But real freedom is just on the other side of that fear. All we’ve got to do is become sufficiently conscious of what’s really going on here.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/141695354

Westerners who don’t appreciate the extreme dysfunctionality of western civilization are like someone in an abusive marriage who hasn’t yet recognized that there’s a problem, or someone who had a violent and chaotic childhood who still thinks their home life was basically normal.

All of us understand that there are problems with our society, and most of us understand that a lot of of those problems are severe. But few westerners really get just how bad it is. How pervasively diseased it is.

In reality, we are living in a profoundly sick dystopia that is built on a foundation of human corpses and fueled by an endless river of human blood. Our news media are propaganda services, our entertainment is brainwashing, and our mainstream culture is social engineering, all built to keep us turning the gears of a vast globe-dominating empire.

There’s a widespread assumption throughout the western world that while things might not be perfect our society is certainly much better than what people experience in a nation like China, smugly believing ourselves to be a free society full of free thinkers and free people in contrast with those unfortunate thought-controlled communist conformists. In fact western civilization is one giant thought-controlled conformity machine where people’s minds are shaped by mass-scale psychological manipulation far more effectively than anywhere else in the world, exactly because westerners don’t know this is happening and believe they are free.

Western minds don’t like to be told this, because it goes against everything they’ve been trained to believe about their nation, their society, and their world. Obviously we are much freer here than those poor saps to the east; here in the west we are free to choose between 197 flavors of frosted breakfast cereal and 20,000 different superhero movies. We are free to choose between voting for warmongering capitalist authoritarian Democrats or warmongering capitalist authoritarian Republicans. We are free to sell our labor at a fraction of the value it generates to any exploitative ecocidal employer of our choosing. We are free to think whatever thoughts we’ve been trained to think by our education systems, mass media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. We are free to speak our minds, which have been shaped and conditioned to serve the interests of the powerful and never to say anything that falls outside the Overton window of acceptable opinion.

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You Don’t Have To Choose Between Happiness And Being Informed

Posted by M. C. on July 9, 2023

To help you see what I am pointing to, imagine if you were experiencing nothing. Imagine if you were just a disembodied expanse of consciousness, with nothing to see, hear, feel, touch, taste or smell. No thoughts to think, no feelings to feel.

Then imagine after an eternity spent in that state, you suddenly got to experience this world. All the sights, sounds, feelings, beauty. All the thoughts, words, creativity, connections, relationships. Imagine how mind-blowing that would be. How delightful. How appreciated.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/120929825

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

I write about some dark, dark things in this space, and it’s common to receive expressions of despair in response to the subjects I focus on.

This is perfectly understandable. Not only is our world hurtling toward nuclear armageddon and environmental collapse while surging authoritarianism threatens our ability to even talk about these things with each other, but most people are completely oblivious to it all. Even relatively politically engaged people tend to believe society’s biggest problems are things like sexism or drag shows, and they generally support one of the two mainstream political factions who are both driving us toward destruction.

And this is of course because we live in a mind-controlled dystopia where everything is fake and stupid. Western civilization is dominated by a power structure that has invested more heavily in “soft power” (mass-scale psychological manipulation) than any other power structure in history. It pervades our media, our internet services, our art — literally all of mainstream culture. 

The politicians lie, the news media lie, the movies lie, the internet lies, the advertisements lie, the shows between the advertisements lie. They lie about our world, they lie about our government, they lie about what’s important, how we should think, what we should value, and how we should measure our level of success and worthiness as human beings. That’s what you get when you live in a civilization that’s made of lies, under an empire that’s held together by lies.

So of course people who see this express despair. When you first punch through the lies and start to gain an understanding of what’s really going on, it can be really unpleasant at first. It feels like what it probably felt like to be a lucid thinker back in much less enlightened times when civilization was dominated by religion and superstition. Lonely. Depressing. As Terence McKenna said, “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

But it gets better. Or at least it does if you allow it to. 

It’s not that society starts feeling less fraudulent (it doesn’t), and it’s not that you get used to how fake and dishonest it all is (you don’t). Things like political conversations, movies, celebrity awards shows, even the kinds of jokes comedians tell are still experienced as coming from a backward dream world whose circumstances are completely different from waking reality, and the smell of propaganda brainwashing still pervades it all. But it does get better.

What gets better is that once you’ve unplugged your mind from the matrix of imperial mind control, you stop looking for happiness, connection and satisfaction in the places the matrix trained you to look for it. 

See the rest here

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The War on Reality – OffGuardian

Posted by M. C. on July 2, 2021

The War on Reality is not an attempt to replace reality with a fake reality. Or it is that, but that is only one part of it. Its real goal is to render reality arbitrary, to strip it of its epistemological authority, to turn it into a “floating signifier,” a word that has no objective referent, which, of course, technically, it already is. You cannot take a picture of reality. It is a concept.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/30/the-war-on-reality/

CJ Hopkins

So, the War on Reality is going splendidly. Societies all across the world have been split into opposing, irreconcilable realities.

Neighbors, friends, and even family members are bitterly divided into two hostile camps, each regarding the other as paranoid psychotics, delusional fanatics, dangerous idiots, and, in any event, as mortal enemies.

In the UK, Germany, and many other countries, and in numerous states throughout the US, a “state of emergency” remains in effect. An apocalyptic virus is on the loose. Mutant variants are spreading like wildfire.

Most of society is still shut down or subject to emergency health restrictions. People are still walking around in public with plastic face shields and medical-looking masks. The police are showing up at people’s homes to arrest them for “illegally gathering outdoors.” 

Any deviation from official reality is being censored by the Internet corporations. Constitutional rights are still suspended. Entire populations are being coerced into being injected with experimental “vaccines.” Pseudo-medical segregation systems are being brought online.

And so on…you’re familiar with the details.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, and a few other countries, and in various other states throughout the US, there is no apocalyptic pandemic. People are just going about their lives as normal. OK, sure, there is a nasty virus going around, so people are taking common sense precautions, as people typically do for any nasty virus, but there is no “state of emergency” in effect, and no reason to radically transform society into a paranoid, pathologized-totalitarian dystopia.

This state of affairs, in which two contradictory, mutually-exclusive realities exist, is…well, it’s impossible, and so it cannot continue. Either there exists a devastating global pandemic that justifies a global “state of emergency,” the suspension of constitutional rights, and the other totalitarian “emergency measures” we have been subjected to since March of 2020 or there doesn’t.

It really is as simple as that.

Except that it isn’t as simple as that.

See the rest here

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Watch “Welcome To Dystopia: Biden To Use ‘Private’ Firms To Spy On Americans” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on May 4, 2021

CNN and other outlets reported yesterday that the Biden Administration is looking to get around laws restricting domestic spying on Americans by “partnering” with “private” entities and organizations to outsource the spying. The justification is the claimed rise in “domestic terrorism,” as evidenced by what Biden has called “the greatest threat to our democracy since the Civil War,” AKA the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.

https://youtu.be/8pkLIy5nQuk

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The Purpose of the Orchestrated Covid “Pandemic” Is To Create a Dystopia in which there Is No Human Independence – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on November 5, 2020

The divisions in the world serve the agenda of the Global Elite. It is them or us. At the moment the Global Elite hold the cards and the power.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/11/paul-craig-roberts/the-purpose-of-the-orchestrated-covid-pandemic-is-to-create-a-dystopia-in-which-there-is-no-human-independence/

By Paul Craig Roberts

PaulCraigRoberts.org

The Digital Revolution is being used to destroy us.

The Nazism of Bill Gates is so Extreme as to make Hitler look like Jesus.

Our Intended Future or a Conspiracy Theory?

Christians will notice that our situation is Biblical. Plagues are being unleashed. Every form of sexual perversion has been legitimized except pedophilia, and as pedophilia is believed to be a widespread practice among the degenerate elites, its eventual acceptance is assured.  It is heterosexual sex that is being delegitimized as “toxic masculinity” and “oppression of women.”  We are to be injected with microchips and turned into robots dependent on centrally controlled digital currency.  (In the URL below Microsoft’s International Patent for a “cryptocurrency system using body activity data” is described.)

White people are not the enemies of black people, nor are blacks the enemies of whites.  Gentiles are not the enemies of Jews.  Russia, China, and Japan are not the enemies of Americans and Europeans. We all have the same enemy–the Global Elite.  The divisions in the world serve the agenda of the Global Elite.  It is them or us.  At the moment the Global Elite hold the cards and the power.

The Global Takeover Is Underway

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.

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Characters in fiction aren’t allowed to be flawed anymore | The Daily Bell

Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2020

It’s a moving target anyway. Meet all their demands today, and tomorrow comes with a new list of ever more asinine criteria for how their idea of a utopian society should be created.

And anyway, I bet you have noticed, as I have, that the real live people I interact with on a daily basis are worlds away from what the cabal and corporate media attempt to convince us is “mainstream.”

https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/characters-in-fiction-arent-allowed-to-be-flawed-anymore/

By Joe Jarvis –

A screenwriter has apologized for a “racist” scene in a short film she made in 2013.

In it, three teenage characters put ash on their faces as part of an alleged Mayan ritual. At one point the teen boy asks, “is this racist?”

The scene had nothing to do with “black-face” except for the jest from the fictional teen character. (“Black-face” is when someone colors their face to do a stereotypical imitation of a black person, like the governor of Virginia.)

So now we are two steps removed from any actual racism. Because A) it wasn’t blackface, and B) it was fiction!

Writers aren’t allowed to create teen characters who might do something weird, offensive, or even make crude jokes?

Writers take note– if you write any fictional characters with flaws, those flaws will now be attributed to real life you.

In addition to politics and economics, I also write fiction.

In a serial I wrote called The Gulf, one of the characters sexually assaults another character.

Will I now be dragged in front of the #MeToo mob to answer for my character’s crimes?

Or perhaps it is only the like-able characters we root for who can’t have any flaws.

So no complex struggles with right or wrong. We’ll give the good guys white hats, and the bad guys black hats. 100% pure good, and total evil.

This is actually the same thing the Social Justice Warriors are demanding from real life humans right now. Any transgression, no matter how small, no matter the context, no matter how much time has passed, must be punished by the current draconian standards of mob justice.

These people are Puritans, just like the ones who hanged the “witches” at Salem. Instead of worshipping god, they worship a fluid and evolving dogma based around special victim groups, with new crimes worthy of the gallows everyday.

But here’s the thing: humans without flaws are really boring, whether we are talking about real life or fiction.

And one more thing these humorless puritans miss– humor is what unites people.

People who get along tend to laugh at the same jokes, and find the same things funny.

It is impossible to feel comfortable around someone if you constantly have to watch what you say, or censor yourself. If what you are saying is truly not offensive, this is even worse. And it leads to self-segregation– why stay around people who don’t let you be yourself, who get angry at nothing, who try to control what you say or even the way you think?

Here’s how to deal with the Puritans, the SJWs, the Bolsheviks– ignore them. Feel free to entirely wall yourself off from their world. That’s allowed.

Or engage and troll if that is something you find fun. Keep making jokes, sharing memes, and laughing at them.

But never play by their rules.

It’s a moving target anyway. Meet all their demands today, and tomorrow comes with a new list of ever more asinine criteria for how their idea of a utopian society should be created.

And anyway, I bet you have noticed, as I have, that the real live people I interact with on a daily basis are worlds away from what the cabal and corporate media attempt to convince us is “mainstream.”

Honestly, paying attention to the news these days is as much fiction as my story The Gulf. The difference is, at least my fiction is set in a better future.

And it’s an entirely possible future– choosing our own government, for example, on a floating “Seastead” if we’d like, where we can always exit and join a society with a better fit.

And they still have problems– corrupt executives, cult societies, and prison islands.

After all, the quest for utopia has always ended in dystopia. I’ll take an honest, flawed, live and let live society any day, over the self righteous Puritans out for mob-rule social justice.

 

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A Letter to the Future | Minds

Posted by M. C. on April 13, 2020

https://www.minds.com/CorbettReport/blog/a-letter-to-the-future-1095603499362070528

by James Corbett
corbettreport.com

“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”

WWI conspirator Edward Grey

I do not write these words for my contemporaries. We are the damned. It is our lot now to watch as the lamp of liberty is extinguished, our burden to bear witness to the final flickering of the flame of freedom.

No, I don’t write these words for my peers; I write them for those yet to come. The inhabitants of that future dystopia whose birth pangs we are experiencing. The remnant of once-free humanity who might—through some miracle I can’t even imagine—come across this electronic message in a bottle.

I know that it’s almost hopeless. That the chance of these words surviving the coming internet purge are slim at best. That even if—against all odds—this message does wash up on your digital shores, that the chance of these words being understood by you is even slimmer. Not because you don’t understand English, but because you no longer use these words I’m writing: Freedom. Humanity. Individual.

Still, I am here to record the end of an era. So I will press on in the hope against hope that someone, somewhere in that future Digital Dark Age will have eyes to see and ears to hear.

The darkness is descending.

Let there be no mistake: We all know this.

We know what it means when 17 million Americans—a full 10% of the workforce—are added to the unemployment rolls in a mere three weeks. When they are joined by millions more newly unemployed ex-workers all around the globe. When modern-day bread lines stretch for miles in the heart of America’s once-proud cities. When the phony baloney fiat funny money debt rises over $24 trillion and the Fed’s Sovietization of the economy is complete.

We know what it means when police start shooting people dead for not wearing a mask. When drones police quarantines from the sky and robots police lockdowns on the ground. When governments admit to tracking every movement of every citizen and begin internal checkpoints where digital immunity passports determine who may pass and who must stay in their home.

We know what it means when billionaires start telling us that only their new experimental mRNA vaccines will be able to release us from this nightmare. When they threaten to mark us with invisible ink tattoos to ID the vaccinated. When they tell us that we will not be able to buy or sell or participate in the economy until we can prove our “immunity”.

It means that the Corona World Order has arrived.

Oh, sure, some still deny it. But they are only fooling themselves. They’re afraid to admit that it’s true. Many are still under the old conditioning that told them to bleat “conspiracy theorist” at anyone questioning authority.

We have a name for that kind: “sheep.” Or, sometimes, “sheeple.” The masses in our day are kept in the pen by the jackbooted sheepdogs of the police state and led along by the political puppets who act as their shepherds. Occasionally a wise old-timer in the flock cottons on to the game, but the shepherd has only ever fleeced the flock before, so he resigns himself to his fate. Why struggle? It’s mostly painless.

Never did the sheeple suspect that some day the shepherds would lead them to the slaughter.

It is a term of derision, of course. “Sheeple.” But I like to think that it doesn’t just speak to our stupidity. It speaks to a naivety, an innocence. We are trusting and gentle creatures by nature. Peaceable. Cooperative. That is nothing to be scorned. If it weren’t for the predators in our midst, our failings could even be counted as virtues.

But I am not here to say that. I am here to say this: Resist! Struggle! Fight!

You are not cogs in a machine, despite what the shepherds of your day may be telling you. You are free and beautiful human beings. You are not born under the authority of another. You choose how you live your life, not some bureaucrat, not some police robot, not some “immunity checkpoint” algorithm or QR code.

You do not need permission to buy or to sell or to assemble or to speak your mind or to leave your house. You are not an “asymptomatic carrier” of whatever virus your misleaders are telling you to be afraid of. You do not have to shelter in place because someone in a white lab coat told you to.

I want you to understand that, once upon a time, the government didn’t have the right to know where you were, who you were meeting with, what you were buying and what you were doing 24/7. Hell, the government didn’t even have the ability to do that.

I need you to know that there was a time when you could leave your house when you wanted. Travel where you wanted. Buy and sell as you saw fit. Meet your neighbors. Rally. Protest. Party.

Live. As free human beings are meant to live.

Oh, what am I saying? These words. This language. It makes no sense to you anymore, does it? These concepts don’t exist in your time, do they?

You go where you are told to go. You stay home when you are told to stay home. You shut up when you are told to shut up. You think what you are told to think.

I can’t blame you, after all. You’re trusting and naive and peaceful. Like a sheep.

But oh how I weep for what you have become. I tried to avert it. Please believe me. I really tried.

But the lamp of liberty is being extinguished. And I am bearing witness.

I don’t know if history is something you study anymore, but UK Foreign Secretary “Sir” Edward Grey made his observation about the lamps “going out all over Europe” at the end of the so-called “Twelve Days,” the period during the summer of 1914 in which the mainstream history books tell us that the British government was trying to avoid a World War. We are asked to believe that this prescient remark proved Grey to be a sage diplomat, wracked with grief over the pain and suffering that was about to be unleashed upon the world.

But this is history-by-the-winners of the worst kind. In truth, Grey was himself one of the conspirators that was actively working to bring the First World War about. What’s more, the source of this quotation is in fact Grey himself; it was first recorded in Grey’s own post-war memoir. Any tears shed by Grey over the extinguishing of those lamps were crocodile tears, to be sure.

One can well imagine that we will be told some years hence that Bill Gates made a similarly portentous remark at the onset of this corona crisis. Gazing out the window of his $147.5 million dollar, 66,000 square foot “Xanada 2.0” mansion at the then-epicenter of the US outbreak in Washington State, Gates’ post-coronavirus memoir will no doubt tell us that he remarked to an underling that “The lights are going out all across the globe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

But his memoir will no doubt fail to inform us that he was smirking as he said it.

To my children, or my children’s children, or whatever remnant of once-free humanity happens to unearth these words in that God-forsaken future we are goose-stepping into: I’m sorry. I failed you. We all failed you.

But remember this: As long as the blood of your forebears flow through your veins, the lamp of human freedom shall not be extinguished forever.

Let it shine, dear sheep. Let it shine.

Be seeing you

 

 

 

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The Hidden Costs of a Universal Basic Income | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on October 10, 2019

A likely outcome is a significant decline in the overall output of the economy — meaning impoverishment across the board…

https://mises.org/wire/hidden-costs-universal-basic-income?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=b9f282b0a0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-b9f282b0a0-228343965

The universal basic income (UBI) is gaining popularity as the alternative to the current welfare system. The idea is to give each citizen the same amount of money, no matter if he or she works or not. Therefore, unlike traditional welfare systems, the UBI has no means test, nor willingness-to-work test. Nobody would be then left without a livelihood even if there is no work for him. Doesn’t that sound great?

The problem is that the program must be financed somehow. Let us assume for simplicity that there are 250 million adult Americans and that each of them would receive $1,000 monthly (as presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposes). So we get a total cost of $250 billion monthly and $3 trillion annually. It would amount to about 14 percent of US GDP, or 42 percent of total government spending, or 73 percent of the federal outlays. For comparison, this is more than the total expenditure on health care, defense, and education. And yet we are talking about “just” $12,000 annually (or 19 percent of the median household salary, or 36 percent of the median personal income). Good luck with such an expensive program!

This is why the UBI is a utopian idea. Its introduction would require either a departure from universality (e.g., providing benefits only for young people), or a departure from unconditionality (e.g., the introduction of an income criterion), or reducing payment to small symbolic amounts. Other options include a radical increase in taxes, or implementing “modern monetary theory” and launching the printing press.

The first two options would distort the idea of ​​the program, transforming it into another traditional welfare program. The third scenario would not fulfill the program goals, as it would neither eradicate poverty nor significantly increase social security. And the last two options would have negative overall economic consequences that could lead to the results contrary to the intentions of the program, (e.g., an increase in the unemployment rate as a result of additional tax burden on wages), or a reduction in the amount of real benefits as a result of increased inflation. It means that the implementation of the UBI at a substantial level without incurring significant economic costs is a myth.

This is confirmed by a recent article “Basic income or a single tapering rule? Incentives, inclusiveness and affordability compared for the case of Finland” published by OECD economists on the occasion of an experiment with UBI in Finland (which was not a government program). They estimated that the replacement of the current social benefits system by the UBI in Finland would either be too expensive or would mean insufficient benefits for the most deprived and, consequently, an increase in the share of people below the poverty line from 11.5 to 14.3 percent!

The second economic problem with UBI is the negative impact on the labor supply. Economic analysis clearly suggests that an increase in non-wage income shifts the budget constraint line up and increases the reservation wage, which leads to a reduction in working time. And this is what the previous experiments with negative income tax, a concept similar to the UBI, showed — especially in case of women and youth, which were less attached to the labor market. The results are not surprising given the fact that giving people money for nothing reduces the opportunity cost of not working…

Such a perverse perspective is, however, a consequence of the view that UBI should be a right, not a privilege. That is, supporters believe that everyone should have the right to taxpayer-provided income, regardless of their contribution and the possibility of earning on the market. The problem is that someone would have to finance this program, so UBI would still be the privilege of some people at the expense of others. One person’s right to a basic income means that someone else has to pay for it.

The idea of the UBI boils down to breaking the link between income and work, i.e., freeing people from the unpleasant necessity to earn. And here we come across several problems. First thing: who will do the needed, albeit low-paid jobs, since everyone will be emancipated from the yoke of work? Is it possible to eliminate the unpleasantness of work at all or is it just the reality of the temporal world? Will robots take care of our grandmothers? A likely outcome is a significant decline in the overall output of the economy — meaning impoverishment across the board…

But there is a paradox that comes with the promise of socioeconomic independence: someone still must pay the UBI. So the dependence would not disappear — only people would become more dependent on Leviathan. Robert Nisbet writes in The Quest for Community that the desire for a sense of belonging does not disappear — if it cannot be realized within the family, neighborhoods, and regional communities, then the gap will be filled by the nation and centralized state. Are you sure this is what we want? Maybe the UBI is thus not merely a utopia we can’t afford, but it’s actually a dystopia?

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A World Without Work: Universal Basic Income's "Deal With ...

 

 

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