Is this what happened to the Indus Valley Civilization?
The mayor of Stockton, California–a city that went bankrupt just six years ago–wants to try an “experiment” of doling out a “Universal Basic Income” of $500 a month, “no strings attached,” to certain elements among “the poor” (https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/01/22/stockton-gets-ready-to-experiment-with-universal-basic-income/).
It’s just an “experiment,” mind you. For one year, “several dozen Stockton families would get $500 a month, no strings attached.” The goal is to gather data on the “economic and social impacts of giving people a basic income,” especially the impacts on, well, “self-esteem and identity.” There is also a “hope” that this experiment will be so wonderfully successful, it will “encourage other places to give it a try.”
Coulda fooled me. I thought it might’ve been an experiment to see how many times one city can go bankrupt in a single decade.
Leftids have been hallucinating about a Universal Basic Income for years now. See, they say, nobody’s gonna work anymore anyhow, ’cause robots gonna be doin’ all the work, so why not pay everybody to sit around playing video games or writing cowboy poetry? What could be more sublime than a kind of perpetual infancy–dependent on government handouts all your life? And you better do what Mommy tells you, or you don’t get no goodies!
Can you imagine the first city to make a UBI an actual public program? It will draw illegal aliens like iron filings to a magnet. It will draw every ne’er-do-well for hundreds of miles around.
But what if you can’t live on $500 a month? Wouldn’t that make it just money down the drain? If you hand someone $6,000 a year and he still goes under, what have you gotten for your money?
Shut up, you racist.
This reminds me of the suggestion awhile back by several cities – San Francisco and D.C. among them – to pay criminals not to commit crimes. Absurd!
The duplicity in this is waist deep. If they are only giving it to a handful of people it is not, by definition, universal. Now, giving someone free money will have a predictable effect on their self-esteem; it will damage their self-esteem. Offer them $500 per month in return for performing some viable service to the community and it might increase their self-esteem, but money for nothing doesn’t help with self esteem in any way.
I am sorry to say I have known, and do know, people who would lust for that and lap it up like the water of life itself–so they could watch more sports and play more video games. As to their self-esteem, well, they may not even know what that is. And they wouldn’t care.
I’ve met people like this; they’re in their 30’s and have never worked, just live off federal & state programs and the charity of family members. They think they’re cool.
We had one right next door for a while, and that was very tiresome. He never kept a job for more than a couple of days. Just went around the country fathering out-of-wedlock children, spent most of his time playing video games and watching football. He had more outfits than a drag queen.
Hmm…. No word on where this “free” money is going to come from. Are the mayor and council members going to take it out of their own pockets? As I recall, they were all earning in excess of half a million a year.
I think we can probably guess where the money will come from–although there is said to be a $1 million donation from some foundation that wants to study the results.
I have a good idea what will happen. It will produce a useless class that is uneducated, unmotived, and completely dependant on the government. Why work if you could have free handouts? Reminds me of the proles in 1984, but at least they worked.
Whether they wanted to or not!
Maybe more like the Eloi in “The Time Machine.”
Yup, I’ve used them as an analogy before too. I think we will become too dependant upon technology and it’s going to become a snare to humanity once robotics, automation, an AI start taking over huge segments of the workforce. Not just low skilled jobs, but high skilled jobs as well. For instance, robots that can perform surgery. That’s why they are pushing Universal Basic Income. But it makes mankind sort of obsolete without a purpose, that can’t end well.
$500 a month in California is “crumbs” because things are so expensive there. It’s one of the reasons I left California in 1976. The house I grew up in was built in 1953 and cost my parents $16,000, but it sold in 2000 for half a million. That’s why in the 1980’s the gov’t pushed for people being able to buy houses with no money down because hardly anyone could afford the 20% down-payment.
My mother almost had a fit when I told her the first house we lived in sold for over $400,000.
Sold recently, that is. My father bought it in 1950.
While one city wants to give away ‘free’ money, another city raided the home of a kindhearted chef who was feeding the homeless:
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/cops-raid-licensed-chefs-home-steal-his-cooking-equipment-for-feeding-the-homeless_02032018
He offended against the liberals’ god, the government.