Without bureaucrats you don't get regulations keeping your food and transportation, amongst a great many other things, safe. Without lawyers you have no way to redress civil complaints and your justice system devolves to a guilty until proven innocent system. Without politicians you have anarchy. Without a military you get conquered. Without banks you don't have trade.

Goes without sayin it's a double edged sword they can be useful but care needs to be taken that they don't work against public good. Military swallows trillions of dollars with nothing to show for it. Starts excessive fights with net negative results that only makes the world more unstable and less safer. Financial institutions are great to have but they are not punished when they make mistakes. We bail them out but when we fail they just take our house and car. Also when trillions go missing from the treasury and no one is held accountable I consider that theft and incompetence.

Not an advocate for some kind of anarchy but I am not a fan of an incompetent government that steals either.

Most nations don't spend obscene amounts on their military. Indeed most nations allow their miliaries to decay from underfunding except at times of war. The US is fairly unique in military spending, mostly because the US is always at war. It could definitely do with some trimming. Unfortunately the issues start with US foreign policy which is to always be at war. Simply cutting funding would only put American soldiers at risk. For all the activity the US takes part in, even the US military is underfunded and US soldiers are more at risk than they should be. The military isn't a problem in and of itself.

Financial institutions having access to welfare when citizens don't is definitely a big problem. Corruption is a big problem. But doing away with government and financial institutions won't fix anything. There are other options. One of the best is transparency. Make all politicians finances public record. Any politician who fails to disclose anything is permanently barred from office on the spot. More transparency in general would be of great value to society.

Fully agree financial transparency is the way to go. I wouldn't be concerned one bit with military spending if it provided actual accountability and justified with good reasons for those spendings but pentagon keeps failing audits and I don't feel any bit safer. Just pick up a newspaper to read how yet another foreign country is more pissed off because of our "military help". I agree the problem is layers deep and foreign policy needs to change but at the very least we could make them give us why there is such a massive waste. Our military can account for the soldiers and most weapons number of tanks and planes what we can't account for is what happens to the rest of the money. If you ask me to give you $1000 to feed 3 people some lunch and you comeback with a few cheeseburgers and some fries I want a receipt how you spent the money you said you needed to protect us. That tells me something shady is happening. For all I know you spent the rest on a bj and some cocaine. So a simple solution is I am going to give you only $100 until you can show me what my tax dollars are buying.

Just to make it clear I don't want to do away with government, financial institutions or the military I just want them to be effective, transparent and not wasteful like they are now. Put them on a short leash trim the fat.

Free food in dumpsters

UBI just sounds like repackaged welfare.

What's wrong with the system now (I know it's unsustainable with entitlements but lets assume the math makes sense) where the people that actually need aid get it? Old, disabled, kids, fat people, etc. I think we should encourage work if we can as a society and don't really see the point to fast-track not working by pre-emptively giving money. Our current labor force participation rate is down from ~67% in 2000 to ~62.5% currently, while unemployment rate is at historic lows. You know what that means? There's a lot of open jobs but more and more people are choosing not to work. In 20, 30, 50 years sure it may be time and appropriate to implement if we have machines and AI doing vast majority of the work, but for now there's still millions of job openings with certain sectors like leisure & hospitality absolutely begging for bodies to work there.

We literally had a trial run not that long ago with Covid. People got free checks and many small/mid sized businesses that wanted to work literally had to cut back hours/services because they couldn't get people.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Aug 29 2023 09:04am

Wages in those jobs are shit that's why noone wants them.

the biggest issue with waiting is if you wait to implement a program once it's needed it never goes well. it's why restaurants do soft openings, and products do beta tests. we need to develop a localized UBI program similar to disaster relief system we have now. massive factory that employs a hefty percent of the town shuts down, roll it out, see what happens.

if we wait until the tipping point it will be an unmitigated disaster we'll be flying blind through.

Covid was the beta test and it had huge negative consequences. Aside from growing our aggregate total debt by 1/3 in 2 years, it also had a dramatic effect on small businesses being able to actually find people to work.

I have a ton of examples of people I personally know who either found ways to get fired to collect unemployment or straight up told their employers they can only work part time to qualify for various covid-era benefits.

The negative effects are documented while they future risks are really unknown. We shouldn't start operating on the patient prematurely and remove a leg before actually knowing it's actually gangrened.

that's absurd. like saying shoving a gallon of vodka down your throat is a good beta test for responsible drinking.

to use your example: i'm not talking about operating on a patient before knowing it's garnered. i'm talking about doing xrays now, taking blood tests, then doing the absolute minimal once it proves necessary. i even gave an example of a factory that employs most of a town closing down as a chance to swoop in like disaster relief.

but hey, just picture a future when it is needed. the year is 2043, we've waited until this day to act. the president tries to enacy policy via executive order, it's shot down by legal challenge. it then goes to congress, they deliberate for 6 months, come up with almost nothing and the president vetoes. it goes back. finally an Obamacare type heavily lobbied plan clears vote, and gets put into law. and it goes just about as well as obamacare did.

we dont need UBI now, we need plans and structure, THEN and only then we'll need a beta test.