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UBI on top of universal healthcare is far better happiness promotion, violence elimination, than all of the non-health proposals.
public housing is always rationed, and usually ghetoization. It is rarely implemented as government funded abundance of housing that is small to be affordable, and in competition to private scarce supply that maximizes profits and lobbying power to keep housing scarce. Promoting housing abundance along with UBI is path for zero cost government programs where market prices of homes sold cover costs.
strong unions is concerned with high paying jobs for union members, at higher priority than expanding union membership. Less employment. UBI provides universal labour bargaining power including strike pay for organized labour. The freedom to say no and survive is a freedom that is far more important than coercion of companies to support labour unions? or just cheering on labour organization movements.
universal childcare is usually proposed as an institutional/licensed program designed to provide full time employment at living wage levels. UBI empowers people to both pay for childcare, but also be happy to look after fellow parents kids on a rotating basis for people empowered to choose 4 day workweeks, or lets a granny be happy to supplement UBI with a few hours of babysitting without needing to create a giant empire to achieve full time job creation scheme. Motivation for universal childcare is that “bureaucratic tax funded worker empire” with incidental benefits to parents.
free college is necessarily a rationed service. Affordable college with UBI is a pathway for people qualified for college, and who appreciate value over alternative opportunies they could choose instead of college if value is not there, is still a choice most qualified young people would make. Importantly for UBI, young teens can have hope that affording college gives them a future… a reason to study and be engaged in school.
…but think of the billionaires, then they couldn’t buy politicians, control the media, and buy bigger yachts.
No thanks, they should pay more taxes for all the good they get out of society and it’s structure
They don’t want less crime they want more so they can exert force over the population
Yes. I don’t remember the name of the civilization, but there was an entirely “peaceful” society that existed for several hundred years, until Christopher Columbus showed up, and raped and murdered them all.
No group of people has ever been peaceful with each other, let’s stop this anti-west fantasy and start talking about real problems, like how to fix democracies and capitalism
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/north-american-indigenous-warfare-and-ritual-violence
https://newsofstjohn.com/the-taino-legacy-of-a-peaceful-joyous-and-ingenious-people/
Try again, and stop erasing history. They were unique because they lived on an isolated island, so they didn’t have neighbors to make war with.
Oh, and I was misinformed, Columbus didn’t wipe them all out, just most of them. Some still exist and have resumed their ancestral ways, apparently.
And when they got close, they killed each other. So to my point, maybe some people should just live on a different planet
You didn’t bother reading the source. No they didn’t. Stop trying to whitewash history. They had ceremonial battles that included wooden “weapons” to resolve disputes. They didn’t kill each other.
And you’re just using a trite anti-west agenda talking point. The archaeological records shows existence of precolonial war
https://courses.washington.edu/war101/readings/Lambert--archy of N Am warfare.pdf
Sure between other nations of Native Americans, on the main continent. This One group lived on one of the larger Carribean islands, managed to not have any war, because no one else came out that far.
I’m NOT talking about any of the other nations that existed on the continents. You asked for an example and I’ve given you the only historical example I can think of. I don’t even include the Sentinel Islanders here, because while they haven’t been recorded to have participated in a war, they are clearly hostile to outsiders. The Taino didn’t respond with any hostility, to the point that Columbus made a remark in his diary that they would be easy to make slaves of the people, since they had no will to fight back. They were a communal society that didn’t have neighbors to fight with. They also lacked the gold and silver that CC was looking to pillage.
So humans are so shitty even if one group is able to miraculously come up with a non-violent society (perhaps partially due to geographic isolation, they will be found by the violent humans?
My two thoughts on this:
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If I ask people for a million dollars to higher cops they’ll give it to me easy, if I ask for 100k to reduce crime through community outreach - it’s a huge fight
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That experiment where a class needs to unanimously agree to all recieve 98% final grade but 30% of them absolutely refuse to give themselves a leg up if that also means someone else gets it and they didn’t work as hard.
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Oh man, most of those were in place during the so called “golden age” of America. Maybe this is what the red hats have been fighting for all this time! /s
Why would the US want to limit their pool of slave labour?
I was told automation would reduce the need for labor. Why bother getting more pops? They should be encouraging birth control so there are less dissidents and embrace the certainty of steel.
Yes, but no one can get fabulously rich off this.
If people have nothing to lose, they’re gonna act like they have nothing to lose…
Like, it’s basic psychology. Resource scarcity changes how our brains work, it’s literally Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
I hit rock bottom. Was broke.
My thoughts on stealing changed entirely. I couldn’t care less. I had bigger concerns than other people’s property. Most people steal out of desperation and when you’re desperate, your moral compass disappears.
Society is perpetually 9 missed meals away from collapse.
Big if true
The Nordic countries.
There’s a reason that Toronto is labelled one of the top safest cities in the world as well.
Toronto is becoming unaffordable for the working class. High cost of living is what is breaking the US too. I don’t really know why people want to seek asylum in the west. I guess if you’re okay sharing the floor of a room with a few other people on sleeping pads then the rest of the world must be an event worse shithole. You have to work two hours just to afford lunch.
My daughter has a boyfriend who lives on the outskirts of London. He was shocked at the cost of things in fucking Cincinnati. Ohio is in the cheaper half of US states.
For people seeking asylum, the choices are usually “kinda shitty conditions in a nice city” vs “abject poverty and life threatening conditions back home”. It’s not really a question which one is better. Toronto has issues, but the tap water won’t give you cholera, nobody is going to stab you for your bag of rice, and that room you are sharing is not going to be bombed.
There’s a lot of work to be done to make it a city that’s livable for everyone, but please don’t fall for bullshit narratives.
I get it. I grew up with a best friend who lived with 9 people in a one bedroom apartment, I played marbles with him and his brothers so many times in the early '80s. It was better than their homeland.
The US is predatory in the healthcare industry, the housing industry, the food industry and the education industry, but that is a generalization. If there’s a narrative, it’s that the American dream is anything but a lottery at this point. At least it is safer than much of the world, for now. Outside of a dozen or so gang riddled cities, the murder rates are pretty low.
The only reason some people don’t like the Nordic model is because it has the word Nordic in it. If instead it was the Marxist model, I am sure they’d say it sprung forth from gods own asshole
well and they also don’t like that the nordic countries are profiteers of neocolonialism. but still worlds better than the Anglophone model of profiteering from neocolonialism and the home country gets no benefit, just a small handful of rich people.
Countries have been dicks to each other for fucking ever. Get over it. Many other counties did and are now doing just fine. Look at India or China or Brazil. The fact is that many countries which cry about colonialism still use it to distract their poor people from the corruption of their governments and leaders. There’s near overlap between being most corrupt on a corruption index and receiving the most aid from other countries
you need to read some history books about how those corrupt governments got into place. what you are describing is the shift in overt fuckery (Leopold chopping off hands) to covert fuckery (interfering in foreign elections to get favorable corrupt officials installed) associated with neocolonialism. the solution isn’t to “get over it” which… wow what a fuckin’ insensitive thing to say about slavery and the deaths of thousands or millions. it’s to pay reparations and build a workable future instead of burning the world to the ground
I am not being insensitive, I am saying that there are nations who suffered and are doing well now because their leaders know how to govern.
A lot of the cry bully stuff Marxists do is to create guilt and make people in democratic nations hate their governments. They know that their corrupt leaders are not going to fix anything. If the leaders cared about their people, they’d figure out a way to work with the rest of the world, like the leaders in China, India, Brazil etc
praising india? wildly corrupt government and worse monpolys than anywhere else
Why you are coming at Marxists and praising China in the same breath? You know Marxists want what China has? A government that responds to the interests of the working class instead of the capitalists, where rent can be as low as 300/mo for a 2bd, and new homes averaging ~50K/2bd in cities the size of NYC? And occasionally jails or executes a few of them just to keep them on their toes?
I am intellectually honest about what China has achieved
wait, _neo_colonialism? we did do some minor superpower stuff in the 1700s together with the rest of europe, but what have we been doing recently?
The “Global North” is largely de-industrialized and mainly functions by exporting industrial Capital to the “Global South.” The US is chief among these Global North countries as world Hegemon, but the Nordics do it too, especially with regards to predatory debt traps through IMF loans. Hudson’s Super-Imperialism goes over this, but is US-focused.
the nordics are heavily industrialized though. our economies are mostly based on exporting metals, minerals and wood, as well as products made thereof, including heavy machinery, medical-grade steel, oil, and so on. yes the IMF sucks for having a destabilizing effect but that’s not really something an area with half the population of canada can do much about. we don’t have that much influence on the global stage.
I think you should read these articles by The Guardian and Al Jazeera respectively. Norway, for example, has one of the largest Sovereign Wealth Funds. At a country-level, the Nordics heavily financially invest in and profit off of countries in the Global South, like investment bankers. This in turn expropriates large amounts of money, which are used to fund safety nets. The welfare in the Nordics is funded by the Global South.
yes, norway is an insanely rich oil nation. the fund is called “oljefondet”. it comes from oil sales.
as for SDI, since it’s normalised and based on development, the nordic countries falling is only natural, since emerging economies are doing the stuff we did in the 70s. it doesn’t mean we’re getting worse, it means they’re rapidly getting better. ideally, SDI regresses to the mean.
also none of those articles mention that third point?
One reason to downvote is actually that Marxism doesn’t have huge marketing buzz in favour of it. It’s not a label that would increase popularity.
Look, on the one hand I know they don’t have popular support. To me it’s less about supporting some hipster culture simply because it’s small, but more about getting annoyed by an idea being posited as inherently correct or morally superior
we’re going through a massive organised crime wave at the moment.
coincidentally we’ve also been dismantling our social systems since the 90s and put a shitload of immigrants in the same poor neighbourhoods away from everyone else.
i’m sure it’s unrelated.
coincidentally we’ve also been dismantling our social systems since the 90s
80’s. Like, 1980.
I think that he’s saying that the Nordic countries have been dismantling their social systems. 1980 was when it really picked steam in the US. But conservative politicians had been trying to dismantle them even before FDR was dead.
Good point, sorry, just knee-jerk hating on Reagan. :)
As one should. Carry on.
In Australia we created ghettos in the 80s and 90s. It wasn’t great.
I’m sure someone will be along in a moment to remind us that these ghettos were just one link in the chain of shit things Europeans did to first Australians.
Iceland be much like this…
Exactly. Most people get into crime because their backs are to the wall. They’re stuck in debt due to medical treatments they had to get, they’re struggling to pay obscene rent prices and risk being kicked out their home - there’s plenty of reasons, and much of it is down to poverty.
If you give people legitimate, easily accessible support nets that are enough to actually survive on, then you’ll get less crime. It’s rather simple.
This is stupid, there will always be crime. These things should be happening simply because that’s actually TAKING CARE OF YOU’RE CITIZENS.
Lessening crime was never thier objective, it’s just a double speak in support of the prison system.
Create conditions for “have nots” to be drawn to crime
Arrest them
Have a penal system that utilizes their labor
???
MAGA Paradise
What you people don’t understand is that this is the right wing plan to introduce neoslavery with extra steps. As they continue to gut the government and safeguards, they’re going to lean HARD into prison labor and detainment camp labor to replace migrant labor and working poor labor.
It’s based on their percept that they’re superior and the people that end up here are subhuman, so they deserve to be slaves to enhance their supremacy.
Basically, wealth inequality.
It should be very difficult to be very poor or very wealthy.
