Universal Basic Income

Universal Basic Income (or UBI for short) is a policy proposition that everyone recieve some baseline salary simply for existing. This salary would cover basic needs and ensure that no-one go without food, shelter, or care.

Most current propositions call for the state to distribute this funding.

There is a rightwing and leftwing version of UBI. The rightwing version does not combine it with any regulation or accompanying benifits. For example, health care would not be free and universal in the rightwing version but rather left up to the market. This would enable insurance companies and health care providers to appropriate the entirety of the distributed funds for themselves — gouging prices as high as they can. Regular people would not be freed from a choice between wage slavery and destitution under this model.

The leftwing version of UBI combines it with universal health care and other benefits. The phenomenon outlined above would still be a concern. Anyone who has had to get a car repair after a stimulus check will be familiar with the idea that if a seller knows how much you received, their price will update accordingly. Still, if housing, food, and health care are seen as rights. UBI could perhaps enable people to live with considerably more freedom than we have seen in recent memory.

Reproductive labor

We tend to glorify the work of factory workers when talking about work. This is true on the left and on the right. We also tend to elide compensation with value. Even corporate lawyers can be said to produce something and since they are highly paid it must be important!

However, the most important work in society is often entirely unpaid. This is the work of making, educating, and caring for human beings. This work literally creates society. There is an important intersection with feminism here: the reproductive work above is all stereotypically considered "women's work" and devalued accordingly. It was feminist scholars criticizing Marx who coined the phrase "reproductive labor".

Service to caring labor is also ideally the point of all other work. Why else create things unless we are serving a need — our own or someone else's.

However, the way we think about value is backwards. We tend to think that if something is highly paid it must be important. Often the opposite is true. In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber argued that we are all aware of this to some degree and that it causes us spiritual harm. Arguments about profit and value beg the question in the sense of the phrase as describing a fallacy: money is a measure of value therefore highly compensated work must be valuable. When profit is allowed to become the measure of value all sorts of insanity is possible: - the destruction of "surplus" goods to control price - the financialization of the economy (ie the takeover of the FIRE sector)

The dissonance we have around value and values often comes up when we talk about education. I think it was Graeber that pointed out that we talk about the value of education in shaping the workforce as if this is the sole purpose of learning. We don't talk about the value of education in making free human beings. This was the original meaning of liberal arts — the education that a person needs in order to function as a free member of society.