HACKER Q&A
📣 aristofun

UBI is immoral utopia – prove me wrong


1. Money is an equivalent of value that people trade with each other.

2. Value is something to be produced by people, i.e. something that requires work to be done (even if by pumping oil, or setting up AI systems, or protecting oil from neighbouring tribe...)

3. Why those who do the work would just pay for free loaders? Why is it considered to be moral at all?

And why being a free loader (assuming you are capable of doing work) is not immoral from any position?

On the most general common sense level, regardless of your political views or economical system...

  👤 eimrine Accepted Answer ✓
You do see that pumping oil is not just a somebody's work and nothing more.
👤 smoldesu
On some level, the United States already distributes a form of basic income via welfare. A lot of people already apply for it, but very few of those are freeloaders per-se; they're using a government service to supplant homelessness or destitution. Whether you consider it an abusive system or not, it exists; the logical leap of expanding it into UBI is not very large.

Now, I don't personally think UBI is a good idea, but I do think valuing people based on the whims of a free market is a terrible idea. Something better has to be proposed, or else the income gap will increase and the populist sentiment will further side with UBI. Your move, Voltaire.

👤 allears
When you talk about "moral" you're implying a personal system of beliefs. Putting your ideas of right and wrong aside for a moment, do you think your life would be improved if there was less crime, fewer homeless, safer neighborhoods, etc? The idea of supporting poor people by those of us with a little more money is not only advocated by most major religions, it's actually an effective strategy for improving the general quality of life. If there are fewer desperate people in the world, who knows in what ways things might improve?
👤 rini17
Debt existed before money (based on plenty of anthropology research among other) and money was actually invented to more easily manage and satisfy it. Not to measure "value", that was a retroactive definition added much later.

Now, lacking any possibility to discharge debt was considered immoral in many religious and philosophical texts since antiquity. Similar arguments and reasons should apply to (im)morality of "undeserved" income.