this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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While I generally agree with the overall sentiment and like the idea of UBI, saying we're the only species that pays to exist doesn't seem right. We're the only one that uses money, so of course we're the only species that has would pay money to exist. However, other species all over the world, many right outside our doorsteps, live much harder lives than we do and pay with their lives if they make a mistake. If I had to choose between working a job and being out in the great outdoors having to farm/hunt/craft and such to survive, I'd choose having a job, which is a choice we all pretty much make anyways. At any point I could quit my job, walk out the door, and live with just the clothes on my back... and I would probably not be able to hack it. It's not much of a choice and it's pretty much coercion, but the choice is there.
I don't think this is true when you can get arrested for trying to sleep outside or even just being I'm one place for too long. Vagrancy laws have been around for a very long time and have always been predatory. They used to be able to make someone a slave for not having a home. In the US our 13th amendment says you can legally be made a (prison) slave for committing "a crime".
I didn't write the original post, but did post it and it's informative how much people get caught on that phrase. My take is that people are paying a gatekeeper. It's not about "does it take effort to live" or an appeal to return to nature. It's, "you have to work to live, plus you have to work extra so someone else doesn't have to work."
Not sure I'd lead with that specific phrase in the future, but it does seem to have generated a lot of interest and discussion.
Yeah, I get the overall idea, I'm just being pedantic. You can't just live your life without paying somebody for the privilege of existence, we're basically still medieval peasants paying a Lord for the right to live in his fiefdom. If you look over a map of the US/Western world, probably very square foot of land is owned by somebody somewhere. We're trading the value of our labor, which has been artificially suppressed for the value of a piece of property, which have been artificially inflated. It's all very one-sided and benefits people who provide seemingly no real value to society.
I don't think it really is pedantic. The premise of the post was that humanity is somehow unnatural and that leads to our suffering. That universal basic income is somehow more natural. Everything in this world needs to work to survive. Life is not a given. Nature is savage. Brutal and oft uncaring. Often in nature children are eaten for breakfast, the sick are left behind to die alone, and the old starve to death. The few exceptions are created by the creatures who strive towards a social community – like Humans. Something like universal basic income could only be possible because of our efforts thus far. It's an opportunity that's never existed before. We just have to seize it.
Working for oneself (the way wild critters do it) is fundamentally different from paying to exist. Capitalism creates a minority of people for whom all the necessary work of staying alive is simply done by other people, and a majority of people who must do more work than would be strictly necessary to sustain themselves because they have to sustain themselves and the people whose only contribution is that they've been arbitrarily designated the "owners" of the things we need to live. That's what we mean by "humans are the only species that has to pay to exist". In order for me to live, I have to create more real, material wealth than is actually necessary for my survival because someone else is entitled to use the threat of violence in order to keep me from the wealth I create (the only real definition of ownership is the right to use violence to enforce exclusivity).