this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
138 points (98.6% liked)
Canada
7185 readers
315 users here now
What's going on Canada?
Communities
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
- Alberta
- British Columbia
- Manitoba
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland and Labrador
- Northwest Territories
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut
- Ontario
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Saskatchewan
- Yukon
🏙️ Cities / Local Communities
- Calgary (AB)
- Edmonton (AB)
- Greater Sudbury (ON)
- Halifax (NS)
- Hamilton (ON)
- Kootenays (BC)
- London (ON)
- Mississauga (ON)
- Montreal (QC)
- Nanaimo (BC)
- Oceanside (BC)
- Ottawa (ON)
- Port Alberni (BC)
- Regina (SK)
- Saskatoon (SK)
- Thunder Bay (ON)
- Toronto (ON)
- Vancouver (BC)
- Vancouver Island (BC)
- Victoria (BC)
- Waterloo (ON)
- Winnipeg (MB)
🏒 Sports
Hockey
- List of All Teams: Post on /c/hockey
- General Community: /c/Hockey
- Calgary Flames
- Edmonton Oilers
- Montréal Canadiens
- Ottawa Senators
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Vancouver Canucks
- Winnipeg Jets
Football (NFL)
- List of All Teams:
unknown
Football (CFL)
- List of All Teams:
unknown
Baseball
- List of All Teams:
unknown - Toronto Blue Jays
Basketball
- List of All Teams:
unknown - Toronto Raptors
Soccer
- List of All Teams:
unknown - General Community: /c/CanadaSoccer
- Toronto FC
💻 Universities
💵 Finance / Shopping
- Personal Finance Canada
- BAPCSalesCanada
- Canadian Investor
- Buy Canadian
- Quebec Finance
- Churning Canada
🗣️ Politics
- Canada Politics
- General:
- By Province:
🍁 Social and Culture
Rules
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think the school of economics you're following here is wrong in what it values, but I don't have the energy to try to refute this on a point-for-point basis.
Profit margins are more important than humans.
- frost biker
You're wasting your time at this point, he's got a 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire' attitude without a shred of empathy.
Okay, I'll put it in simpler terms: when governments implement unsustainable policies, it is the working class that ultimately pays the price. Just look at history.
And when governments ignore the economic needs of everyone except the rich for too long, the result tends to be violence. The US is perilously close to that now, and we're not doing much better. D'you really want a revolution, with all the blood-in-the-streets nastiness that entails? We need to change the game somehow, and UBI is one way of doing it. Not the only way, granted, but the political will doesn't seem to be there for any of the others either.
Only at extremes far beyond of what we are seeing today. Other places in the world have substantially larger Gini coefficients and that hasn't translated into violence.
What basis do you have to assert that?
A false dichotomy.
You are assuming that a UBI would be beneficial to the working class. I have presented multiple reasons why that is questionable, and you haven't addressed any one of them.
That's because your individual points all derive from focusing on the wrong things.
What people want is prosperity—the sense of flourishing and being successful at life. Unfortunately, that's very difficult to measure, because definitions of "success" are idiosyncratic and widely variable. So we measure money as a proxy for prosperity. The problem is, it's a very bad proxy, one that can actually pull in the opposite direction of the thing it's supposed to be a proxy for. Which is what appears to be happening here.
You're trying to look at this from the point of view of macroeconomics, which is the study of large-scale money flows. Money flows. Except that programs like UBI are not designed to optimise money flows, they're an attempt to improve median prosperity, even if that results in poorer mean financial outcomes.
I admit my previous post was a bit on the hyperbolic side, but you're treating this as though the situation were a case study in an economics class. Which it isn't.