Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia
By Scott Alexander
May 17, 2018 at 12:45AM
via Slate Star Codex http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic-jobs-against-hijacking-utopia/
"long" but well worth your time...
" Capitalists deserve to keep the value they create, but they also owe rent on common resources which they enclose and monopolize (eg land, raw materials). That rent gets paid to the State (as representative of the people who are denied use of the commons) in the form of taxes. The State then redistributes it to all the people who would otherwise be able to enjoy the monopolized resources – eg everybody. I think this process where businesses pay off the government for their raw materials is pretty similar to the process where they pay off the investors for their seed money, and that the whole thing fits within capitalism pretty nicely.
I don't think the government taking a big role in the economy for Your Own Good can ever really fit within capitalism, at least not the parts of it that I consider valuable. I would consider a basic jobs guarantee, if it lasted, to be a victory for socialism over the parts of capitalism I hold dear – the final triumph of the old Soviet joke about how "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us". If you want an image of the future, imagine a glassy-eyed DMV employee staring at a clock, counting down the hours until she can go home – forever.
And that's what we're debating here – an image of the future. "