
Why Universal Basic Income Is a Terrible Idea - judah
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436621/universal-basic-income-ubi-terrible-idea
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informatimago
"the worth of the respectable working life".

There is nothing intrinsically respectable or valuable in a "working life". A
"working life" is basically being a slave. Granted nowadays employees are not
"owned" by their employers, but the have the big advantage over slaves that
nowadays employers don't have to provide for their needs, they just have to
pay them.

Nonetheless, the modern slave must find employment to get money and be able to
house, clothe and feed himself and his family, and often he even has to find
multiple employments. And 50 million of them don't!

What is respectable, is to inherit a rent situation established by the work of
one's parents.

What is leftist is to think that living off one's rent is not respectable,
only because in the 19th century, only a few of us could inherit of such a
rent.

But nowadays, only one percent of the population needs to work in agriculture
to feed a country. Currently less than 15% of the population needs to work in
factories to provide the country with material goods. A little more are still
needed to transport those goods, but it is obvious to every body that
manufacturing and transporting material goods will soon be entirely automatic
and performed with less than 1% of the population.

Everybody will just become rentiers, and our slaves will be robots.

Already, democrates, socialists, leftists, cannot find any support in a
working class which is so minoritary in our economies. This is one of the
reasons why they started to import so many immigrants to replace the vote of
the workers.

And this is the crux of the problem here: the parents of people from third
world countries didn't work hard to provide for their childrens, for the
current third world population (apart obviously, and quite ironically, the
descendents of African slaves exploited in America, who shall become rentiers
as well as the rest of us). Without a bloated wellfare state, third world
immigrants don't inherit any rent. But we don't need them to work in our
roboticized economies.

So the question is whether our rent would be enough, and if we rentiers would
be willing, to share with the world population?

And this is actually to THAT question the Swiss answered "no" 3 to 1! (The
question of immigration was predominant when the UBI referendum occured).

