Well, I’m 46 and sometimes getting old is hard…

So are they!

Maybe, just maybe, the west’s political classes will realize–before its too late–that neoliberalism and funnelling the wealth of the many up to the few wasn’t such a great idea?

Ah, whom I kidding, if its a choice between democracy and less money, or fascism and more money, neoliberalism will send democracy packing.

I’ll try to explain my concern with UBI, because I’m genuinely curious:

• It seems like it lets employers off the hook for paying a living wage; in this sense, it’s like food stamps in the US: we’re socializing the costs of underpaying people
• If it isn’t paid for by increasing taxes on the top earners, this would be even more the case, since everyone but the wealthy is pooling the cost?
• I’m also confused as to how it isn’t inflationary: without either price controls on necessary goods and/or public options for housing, wouldn’t this result in companies raising the floor on prices and eating up the benefits of UBI?
• And this is the part that worries me, as someone who knows people on ODSP (Ontario, Canada’s disability-payments system): what’s to stop some jackass right-wing politician from freezing, means-testing or cutting UBI when they want to “balance the budget”?

I like the idea of UBI in principle, but my concern is that it–especially without curbing runaway inequality on the top-end and a pivot away from neoliberal “the market does everything” policies–it doesn’t really solve much at best, and at worst it’s yet another way to transfer money to the wealthy and absolve government of actually providing services.

Are we going to tax the wealthy to pay for it?

Because otherwise this is basically corporate welfare at best, and inflationary at worst.

The best, by any stretch, is Anakin vs Ventress in Tartovsky’s 2003 Clone Wars.

Lightsabers in the rain > Lightsabers in fog.

It was not until this moment that I realized that “Lemmy” was a reference to lemmings and not to, eg, the lead singer of Hawkwind and Motorhead.

And now I’m thinking about this.