Political Memes

We're just the only ones who pay to exist with money.

Better to pay than fight tooth and nail for survival. Everything pays in one way or another.

Henry George had it right - Just Tax Land

Free Stuff is Good, Actually

Universal basic income does not fix inequality, it doesn't take existing accumulated wealth into account. You get X amount per month, yay, food. Jeff Bezos gets the same and throws it on the money pile without blinking an eye. It will lead to more inflation and you'll still be poor compared to who's wealthy. Socially corrected incomes are a way better tool for battling inequality, and in today's world's, it shouldn't anymore cost a million-person bureaucracy to run a wealth-distributing system either.

Not necessarily. All species need to scavenge for their own subsistence unless they want to die, so there is a motivation there to go out and get food (i.e. other species), among other resources from the environment specific to their capabilities.

There is no free lunch.

BUT species don't necessarily have to exchange resources with others to live in their habitat. They might need to defend it from other organisms of their same species or of other species, or they can share it with those. Exchange relationships can also arise, but they aren't necessary to happen.

Habitat can of course degrade over time, so there is a motivation to maintain and repair that habitat or move to a more suitable one nearby or far away.

This is all to say that humans, the exceptional beings we are at solving problems and doing amazing things, should be able to invent ways to get around entropy and inconvenience, which we have to a degree: not perfectly, though.

Regarding this article, I'm not sure I want people to own land for the sake of "owning". Perhaps a case can be made where people who use the land apportioned to them get to keep it over time (see what the Nordic countries are doing). This would exclude land and homes people have in other states or countries.

Not sure what the other consequences of this practice are tho, so I welcome any feedback anyone might have

Yeah, I've been pointing this out since it kinda clicked in my mind and I realized this (which, to my shame, took quite a while).

Most of us are not born free because to have a roof over our heads and food in our table we have to work within the system and get paid what the system allows us to get, since we can't just occupy a piece of land, build a house and farm it.

We have at best "limited" freedom, depending on nationality (for example, an EU passport lets you easilly try to live in in quite a list of countries), opportunities (i.e. is Education free and good quality were you grew up) and the biggest one, how much money and connections do mommy and daddy have - all of which dictate the options available to us, but only a tiny number (the sons and daughters of the rich) have full freedom.

EDIT: I'm actually a believer in Basic Income, but this is a silly argument. Bad arguments do a disservice to the idea of Basic Income and make the battle uphill that much harder.

I read this two days ago when it was posted, and it didn't sit well with me because it didn't make sense. I hand to think about it for while about why it didn't make sense, but I have it now.

Lets break this down:

We’re the only species who must pay to exist

We're really the only species that uses money regularly. So at first glance the literal statement is true but irrelevant: We're the only species that must pay, because we're the only species that uses money. So the literal definition is that other species don't have to pay. True, but they don't get to use money to store work. Our society has determined that "money" is a method to store "work".

What the author is saying in spirit is: We're the only species who has to work to exist.

If indeed I have the author's meaning right, then this is clearly false. Every other species has to do some level of work to exist. Even parasites will not have a second generation without working to procreate. This brings us to the author's next statement:

In a private property system where all the land was claimed by others before we were born, and everything we need to stay alive costs money....

If you're willing to lower yourself to an animal that doesn't use money with all of the freedom and consequences that comes with that, you don't need to spend a time on land, food, shelter or ANYTHING. There are huge swaths of land all over the world where you could live in the wilderness likely your entire life and never see another human being who will bother you. Most of northern Canada and northern Russia and completely unpopulated for hundreds of hectares. Same with lots of the middle part of Australia. If you're willing to live off the land without modern medicine, communication, entertainment, or societal infrastructure then there's no one out there to force you to pay for anything.

The author goes off the rails in suggesting an non-human species, which has no benefits of humanity, has to pay for nothing but lives and dies off the land and at the will of other predators and nature, is equal to the life of a human in modern society with modern medicine, agriculture, law, defense, technology and entertainment.

To the author: If you want to live like a non-human species (an animal) there are plenty of places you can do that. No one will stop you. No one will make you pay anything. Have at it! ~~If you want the benefits of other people's work in a society, then you have to contribute something back to that society that society values.*~~ EDIT: I'm removing the last sentence because it needs more context for a much larger argument. The rest of my post stands.