That's the problem with fractional reserve banking it's making up money for those who lend theirs. It's about extracting value from those who work for those who accumulate. It's not a tbf, it's a this is also an issue in every area of our society.

The problem is you can't exploit comfortable people, so the uber rich would only be super rich, and that's not good enough for them...

That’s a fair point. But in a world that values money above all else, that’s not just a divide in wealth and ownership but a divide in power.

Socialism in principle sounds great, but most times it's been implemented it's suffered from the same problem as capitalism - the people with power are greedy and use their power to manipulate and oppress the populace.

This is true, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is self-contradictory and impossible IMHO. Because as soon as a member of the proletariat is a dictator, they are now no longer a member of the proletariat.

Now you don't need a dictator, you can enact socialist policies democratically. This is very slow and kind of difficult, because the capitalists will lobby and fight so hard against it, and you need to maintain public support.

I wish all .de instances a very get off my federation

What you're saying can happen has literally never happened in human history though, right?

There's a reason why the nonviolent revolution Wikipedia article is essentially empty, right?

(I'm not downvoting you BTW, I upvoted.)

I love what you said about believing in agency: knowing what power is ultimately in our hands would change the world for the better.

Holy shit, what an anti-Semitic piece of shit you are. Absolutely classless.

It doesn't matter that you think this sort of "logic" leads to conspiratorial thinking. There is a "they" and it's the ruling class. The ruling class, and its defenders, is made up of a lot of people and institutions who create, dictate, and govern the systems that keep them and their power firmly in place. Sorry that society is a bit more complicated than you want it to be. Reality is a hard pill to bite sometimes for you racists.

And if you knew anything about anything, you'd know that democratically elected leaders are toppled by their ruling classes and/or outside forces (i.e. US) when something doesn't go in the interest of the ruling class. To think somehow the US is immune from this is absolutely delusional thinking. Not surprising you're into Western exceptionalism with your views on race.

And again, I just want to reiterate how much of a bottom barrel racist scum you are.

Direct action.

It actually is. We all have problems. Humanity formed society to solve problems. Society has been hijacked (for a loooong time in many different ways) to extract value from others. Some people want to combat that.

Some "have their own problems to deal with"

Unless you're politically well connected or have nine figures in the bank, you aren't wielding significant power to make systemic changes.

It literally does, according to the person who coined the term and socialist political economic theory up to the present.

Have you read any marx? Any marx whatsoever?

We are talking about people who have the capital in society to make actual systemic changes to society. Such as restructuring our economy to value lives, wellbeing, and sustainability over profit.

Quite obviously 80% of people do not have that capital.

You are cherrypicking statistics, seemingly to deliberately miss the point.

Global comparisons of income mean exactly nothing to the quality of life of people living within their country.

Even people deemed in that global top 20% are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and are unable to leverage that to make changes.

The only benefits that I think would have to stay, are those with "unlimited" downside, like healthcare.

UBI can potentially replace specific benefits for housing or general living expenses, but it can't really replace healthcare.

Guess we better institute rent controls first then

If a country with a population of around a million (or even as small as 100k) enacted UBI I would take those results to be representative of a societal change.

I honestly doubt you would. The typical arguments of:

• it's not comparable to a country of 350M, they're barely as big as $cityWithOver1Million
• their society is very different from ours
• their implementation is different from what we could ever manage
• the circumstances were different

would come around.

You're making exemplary conservative arguments to stalemate progress by creating a chicken and egg problem.

• Won't accept results of change in a small environment because they aren't representative of change in large environment
• Demand results of change in a large environment before applying them to large environment
• Won't apply changes to large environment because results of change in large environment don't exist

It was determined the cost economically was far higher than the returns.

Not quite.

In the end the project ran for four years, concluding in 1979, but the data collection lasted for only two years and virtually no analysis was done by project staff. New governments at both federal and provincial levels reflected the changing intellectual and economic climate. Neither the Progressive Conservative government of Joe Clark in Ottawa nor Sterling Lyon’s Tories in Manitoba were interested in continuing the GAI experiments. The fate of the original data—boxes and boxes of paper files on families containing questionnaires related to all aspects of social and economic functioning—was unclear. They were stored in an unpublicized location by the Department of National Health and Welfare. In the end, only the Winnipeg sample, and only the labour market aspects of that sample, was ever made available. The Dauphin data, collected at great expense and some controversy from participants in the first large scale social experiment ever conducted in Canada, were never examined.

This study involved using one small town, Dauphin, as a a test for what happens when everyone in the population qualifies for the basic income. The study ran out of money long before the researchers originally thought it would, and the majority of the data wasn't analyzed until relatively recently.

The general result found in all the experiments was that secondary earners tended to take some part of the increased family income in the form of more time for household production, particularly staying home with newborns. Effectively, married women used the GAI to finance longer maternity leaves. Tertiary earners, largely adolescent males, reduced their hours of work dramatically, but the largest decreases occurred because they began to enter the workforce later. This delay in taking a first job at an older age suggests that some of these adolescent males might be spending more years in school. The biggest effects, that is, could be seen as either an economic cost in the form of work disincentives or an economic benefit in the form of human capital accumulation.

New mothers and teenagers weren't required to spend as much time working

Money flowed to Dauphin families from MINCOME between 1974 and 1978. During the experiment, Dauphin students in grade 11 seemed more likely to continue to grade 12 than their rural or urban counterparts, while both before and after the experiment they were less likely than their urban counterparts and not significantly more or less likely than their rural counterparts to complete highschool. Grade 11 enrolments as a percentage of the previous year grade 10 enrolments show a similar pattern.

Highschool graduation rates went up

Overall, the measured impact was larger than one might have expected when only about a third of families qualified for support at any one time and many of the supplements would have been small. ...At the very least, the suggestive finding that hospitalization rates among Dauphin subjects fell by 8.5 percent relative to the comparison group is worth examining more closely in an era characterized by concern about the increasing burden of health care costs. In 1978, Canada spent $7.5 billion on hospital costs; in 2010 it was estimated to have spent $55 billion—8.5 percent of which adds up to more than $4.6 billion. While we recognize that one must be careful in generalizing potential health system savings, particularly because we use hospitals differently today than we did in 1978, the potential saving in hospital costs associated with a GAI seems worthy of consideration.

And hospitalization rates went down. There were other effects, like small businesses opening during the period of MINCOME and shutting down after, a possible decline in women under 25 having children, but none of this was evaluated for whether it was worth the money or not.

in the US you could call anything socialism and people would automatically hate it

They gave the money to people living on friends couches. That is not exactly homeless but was considered a roommate at one time. Ubi is universal. It is in the name. Give it to every person regardless of status and see how effective it is compared to the money spent. I bet it is a poor return.

Addiction Disorders: The relationship between addiction and homelessness is complex and controversial. While rates of alcohol and drug abuse are disproportionately high among the homeless population, the increase in homelessness over the past two decades cannot be explained by addiction alone. Many people who are addicted to alcohol and drugs never become homeless, but people who are poor and addicted are clearly at increased risk of homelessness. Addiction does increase the risk of displacement for the precariously housed; in the absence of appropriate treatment, it may doom one's chances of getting housing once on the streets. Homeless people often face insurmountable barriers to obtaining health care, including addictive disorder treatment services and recovery supports. Source

It is believed that only about 20 to 40 percent of homeless have a substance abuse issue. In fact, abuse is rarely the sole cause of homelessness and more often is a response to it because living on the street puts the person in frequent contact with users and dealers.

The prevalence of mental illness and substance use among those experiencing homelessness is clear, but Kushel cautions that the vast majority of mental illness among the study participants is anxiety and depression. It’s likely the lack of resources exacerbates those conditions, rather than the illness causing the homelessness, she says.

“I think that the driving issue is clearly the deep poverty, that the median [monthly] household income for everyone in the household in the six months before homelessness was $960, in a state with the highest housing costs in the country,” she says. Other studies have noted that the end of pandemic stimulus payments and rising inflation has led to rents outpacing wages. The study notes that in 2023, California had only 24 units of affordable housing available for every 100 extremely low-income households.Source

Just because you know one or two people that were homeless and also had problems with addiction, doesn't mean the addiction caused their homelessness.

You don't have a plan, you have a wish list. How do you want to achieve your list?

Using insults doesn't refute my points. Why not coordinate as citizens?