this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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UBI keeps capitalism and thus inequality. It’s a zero sum game where people’s wealth will flow towards the rich, enabling them in future to amass power to undo UBI and repeat the mistakes we have now.
Better solution is to ditch currency and focus on meeting people’s wellbeing needs directly.
You can’t ditch currency. Currency isn’t some grand invention of the state. It’s the direct result of beings valuing things at different amounts at different times. Technically current is using any stand in to ease the trade barrier but colloquially some people use love as a currency. Many kinds of social animals trade and what they trade could be deemed currency.
You can 100% ditch currency, you don’t not need a trade or barter based system. Humans have been operating on a gift economy model for hundreds of thousands of years, currency and trading is a blip in our history.
People are capable of supporting each other without profit incentives.
So let's say I really want to investigate superconducting magnets, because I really like that field and want to do research. I need processed rare earth products that only exist on the other side of the globe.
In your gift economy, how would I proceed to acquire those?
I suspect these policies often assume that either we live in startrek or we’re back to the woods and have no need for superconducting magnets :-/
surely no other people have any benefit or incentive to find those superconductors and so no one would be willing to aid you in your research, including people who could get those minerals, right?
Is being flippant part of the economic model or an extra? Doesn't get me closer to those hard to extract materials that are in very short supply.
You shouldn't state this as fact. It's not, archaeologists have been arguing between the formalist and substantavist theories of economic models for decades now. You seem to be favoring the formalist view, but there is a strong arguement to be made that market principles such as supply and demand existed deeper in the past as well.
While there may not have been currency, the historic economics of humanity were certainly greater than a gift economy model.
Yup. Gets even easier once all the emancipatory technology innovations cease being classified, suppressed and secreted to maintain the corporate monopolisation rigged game of kleptarchy. When that stops, obsoleting currency/money becomes a greater viable potential, if not just removes some areas from profiteering. Such things are not cosmic fundamentals. Greedy eyes are on water, air, sunlight.
I imagine quality would improve and enshitification would cease, without corrupt fiat currency driving churn. And [as we currently are, it's an] accelerating churn at that, in a desperate race to the bottom. Unsustainable. Essential vital necessity to move beyond it.
UBI may be a stepping stone, perhaps a step away from reducing currency/money to mere resource accounting, on to greater things yet. But yes, not if left in the hands of the current oligarchs, nor in any such system that so readily gives oligarchs absolute power.
Sublimation out of their rigged game trap may come fast [, or not at all, only piecemeal placatium fakery].
Great, now please scale this up to all of human civilisation and society with all of its mind-bogglingly complex logistics and infrastructure, ever changing needs, countless adversarials and requirements for advanced science.
Its a nice idea but doesnt feel very applicable unless the entire human race just kinda has a change of heart.
Okay, there is literally nothing about it that can’t be scaled up except for capitalism being the predominant system backed by violence.
You can absolutely do away with currency if the current mode of production got abolished. Currency itself is a necessity in a society that produces commodities for exchange, which creates rise for social constructs such as value, value forms like money, the possibility for an innate crisis and so on.
The first 2 chapters of Capital explains this, the commodity production system was a historical development rather than something coming out of nature (no chemist was able to find value through microscope), and we can certainly produce things to satisfy needs rather than exchange, with a much lower amount of work hours needed to do so.
No. Currency is convenience and convenience wins 99% of the time.
Yeah I’ll pass thanks, currency and capitalism is killing the planet and us along with it.
Nothing easier than being dead tho I guess.
From this side of life, seems true. Can't say the dead agree, but they're not complaining much.
Bring on the convenience of the emancipation by technology, provisioning each and all free energy and energy-to-matter transfer, effectively "star trek replicators".
Star Trek however needed most governments to collapse as a result of WW3 and Vulcans showing up to help rebuild afterwards.
We got WW3 almost covered, just not that sure about those Vulcans ...
The mechanism of markets is that the price of goods follows the law of supply and demand. Prices are a universal signal to producers that they should produce more/less of a good.
Without currency you need a mechanism to replace this. Given your previous posts in favour of anarchism, I’m guessing you don’t favour central planning. So what mechanism for determining how much and of what kinds of goods should be produced, do you prefer?
Given I’m an anarchist, I value a gift economy where we stop assigning value to goods and focus on providing for wellbeing.
How much a person should have is as much as they need.
But that's not what a gift economy inherently results in.
Yes it is.
Unless you have something concrete to prove all societies (even the current ones still existing) that engage in such practices inevitably must change away from such a system, that isn’t just a “this happened a few times historically so it must always be true even though there are still gift economies operating today” I don’t want to hear it.
Oh, and there is nothing zero sum about it. That’s kind of the point of a good teade
That’s exactly zero sum, one person gains from one persons losses. I pay/you profit, loss/win.
That’s how currency works unless you’re suggesting we just print money off any time we need to make a purchase.
I can make good shoes. I make bad pastries.
You make good pastries. You make bad shoes.
I make you shoes. You make me pastries. Now I have good shoes and pastries. You also have good shoes and pastries. Everyone wins.
That’s bartering not currency.
An even better system is, you can make shoes so you make people shoes. I can make pastries so I make people pastries. There’s no requirement to exchange, we can just make stuff for people and they can likewise do the same.
That’s a gift economy, people cooperating together for the benefit of everyone.
Currency is an abstraction for all the goods and services you might barter. I can sell you a pair of shoes for 1 currency unit, then buy your pastries for 1 currency unit. The result is the same.
That sounds really lovely, but for some of us, we wouldn't even be able to get our families to participate. Consider the families that make their adult kids pay rent, even though they own the house the live in. I'd think that doing things like laundry, cleaning, cooking, picking up prescriptions, groceries, etc. should suffice for contributing to the household. Thankfully, that's how it worked when I was an adult living with my parents - I didn't pay rent, but I was often a "gopher" that was sent out to do errands on behalf of my mom. It was annoying, but I figured that by doing such things I was supporting my family just as they were supporting me, and there was an unspoken agreement about it.
Unfortunately, not all families/households operate like that, at least here in the highly-individualized US. If some parents won't extend a gift economy within their own families, it'd be an uphill battle to get them to apply it toward people they aren't related to.
Here's a hypothetical:
I'm in a feud with the person who runs the pasture land. He won't kill his cattle/sheep if it's to provide leather for my shoes. Everyone else likes him and his milk and they tell me to bury the hatchet.
But he insists on ever thicker and higher quality boots because the pasture he "works" is so overgrown and muddy from poor maintenence. This cuts into my ability to supply quality shoes for everyone else so I can't do it.
Of course, I stutter and don't do well with public speaking but he has a silver tongue. I can't even lay out half the facts before he's convinced the town that I'm a lazy parasite and a bad shoemaker; I'm exiled. I will now die starving and alone. The town will waste time and energy wearing through low quality woven shoes, content with the thought that they're not wasting milk cows on that shitty cobbler.
If there was a market/bartering economy: