If people received a universal basic income, would people still engage in prostitution and the like?

If people received a universal basic income, would people still engage in prostitution and the like?

Other urls found in this thread:

qz.com/876985/finland-hopes-to-dispel-one-of-the-biggest-critiques-of-a-basic-income/
budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS Report - Welfare Spending The Largest Item In The Federal Budget.pdf
works.bepress.com/widerquist/75/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Yes.

probably. they would be spending all of their universal basic income on frivolities. you cannot help stupid.

That's a dumb question.

some of them are forced on them

not all prostitutes are being trafficked but it exists

Yes

Luxury and status will always be pursued.

It completely depends on what the details of the UBI is and how it affects the long term. If it's an inflation bomb, then no-one would receive much benefit and nothing would change.

If it just affects low-income folks also, then nothing would change.

Sadly

Yes, lots of addicts spend $100+ a day just on drugs. They would never get that much, that's like 15/hour full time. And since prostitution and drug dealing is all their drug addled brains are capable of, that's what they will keep doing.

Also, inflation. Whatever you get for free, everyone gets for free and it will be worthless soon.

UBI regardless of perceived worth or overall savings or earnings. Everyone would receive the same amount which would be continually updated to reflect real world costs and inflation. Enough to have all costs of accomodation, bills, food, clothing etc all covered.

You have to examine how people become addicts. It's a complex issue. Many prostitutes become so just to get through the day.

Let's say they receive tokens instead

And many addicts become prostitutes because they can't make enough to support their habits any other way.

Your point?

Ok then - I'd say a UBI like that would mostly help street kids who have no choice but to sell their bodies. They say more than half of all runaways resort to prostitution within 48 hours. They have zero resources and can't/don't plan their getaway.

Why are some people trying to numb themselves so much. Sometimes it's because of the requirements of capitalist society

Why just kids? Because adults should have it all figured out?

That would just drive inflation more than anything else. Even more so when you lose all your min. wage workers because you can make more on welfare than you can working a menial job. You will have a lot more unemployment and the people who still do work those jobs will have to be paid a lot more as an incentive. That sounds nice until you consider that literally everything you buy comes into contact with minimum wage hands at some point, usually more than once or twice.

Everything will cost more because we will have to keep paying people more and more to work instead of going on welfare, which gives more and more every year to match inflation, so we have to pay workers even more to stay competitive, which drives up prices and the cycle continues on and on.

>If people received a universal basic income
Where would the money come from?

Pretty much. Runaways are far worse off than normal adults. So the biggest drop in prostitution you'd see would be with underage kids, which would be a great thing.

You'd probably see a drop in adult prostitution too, but I'd bet it wouldn't be nearly as much.

But then just increase minimum wage. And give UBI recipients tokens. The nature of money is make believe anyway...

Socalism dosent work fag

Where does it come from now? Oh yeah, thin air. Remember when bitcoin cash created billions at the click of a button? We're all trippin

Beyond this and that there is a field, I'll meet you there

And Capitalism does? lol

>thin air. Remember when bitcoin cash created billions at the click of a button
You need to look up "Ponzi" Money for Bitcoin was created from a hidden tax on the stupid and the gullible. Nothing was created.

People that haven't need support and care, the lack of highlights our inhumanity. Not all of us make choices, we are born into this complicated existence

Look up fiat currency

Not relevant. Bitcoin has more in common with tulip bulbs than cash

How is cash any more real. Bitcoin is a lesson

Like a pyramid scheme? Like capitalist society?

>How is cash any more real
Your cash is backed by the country that issued it. Bitcoin has.....nothing

You need to look up your own citation

>Like a pyramid scheme?
Yes
>Like capitalist society?
No. Capitalism creates wealth. You may not like how it's distributed, which is a whole other conversation

Yes, you're understanding what I'm saying. Younger people have less choices than adults, especially those from broken or abusive homes. They have very few choices. Money gives people choices. It's a shame that UBI has so many problems, it would definitely lower human suffering.

You're dumb

Creates wealth at the expense of others, which is unsustainable.
Anyways it's coming, better times ahead.

Ur trippin broo

Yes, people are already paid unemployment and welfare while illegally selling drugs and not being taxed for it.

This is another reason people don't like illegal immigrants. I pay $10,000 in taxes a year while they pay none regardless of income.

>Creates wealth at the expense of others
You don't understand how it works.

Person A has a good idea, sets up a company, but has no money
Person B has some money, so he agrees to lend some to person A in return for a percentage of the company
Person A uses the money to develop his idea, and starts selling it to others, who want the product
Person A starts to make money, and gives some of the dividends to person B as part-owner.
Time passes.
Person A is now wealthy with the income from selling his idea. Person B has received more back in dividends than he lent and still owns a percentage of the company.
Person A's company now has a value as a thriving concern.
Everyone involved is more wealthy, both in cash and assets terms.

Explain how wealth was created at the expense of any others.

people should get off their lazy asses and work for a living

fuck universal basic income, it ought to be called Basic Buy Lazy Peoples Votes

the bigger picture

too many details in your answer, make simpler please

>Ur trippin broo
About Bitcoin having no value? or about fiat currency being backed by the issuing country.

Difficult to work out from your stoner neet post

>the bigger picture
Ah, OK
Continuing my analogy
Person A is now investing in developing more of his ideas, this time using the income from the company to fund them
Person A starts selling these new products, bu he doesn't have enough time to satisfy the increased demand
Person C lives in the same town as Person A, doesn't have any ideas but is consciencous
Person A offers Person C a job to make one of the products, and invests some time and money from his company to train person C
Person C becomes proficient and gets a good wage from Person A for making the new product
The company now has more products, is making more profit and is worth more
As Owner, Person A is now more wealthy
Person B receives bigger dividends from his share
Person C has an income, has more money as a result, and perhaps Person A might offer him some shares in the company, so he has a stake

So now we have involved the general population as well. At whose expense was this wealth made?

>Person B has some money
Person B's dad, Person C, has unlimited money and gives it away for free.

>unlimited money
And a unicorn breeding farm

i call bullshit

I want free money,pls gib

Read the thread - he's saying free money is only for prostitutes.

Let the government sell all its power/riding mowers and replace them with these.

Pay people $15 an hour to push a reel mower around the school grounds, park, etc.

universal income doesnt work:
>give everyone a certain amount of money every month
>nobody does shit for that kind of money anymore
>companies have to raise wages to attract/keep workers
>prices go up
>ceratin amount of money becomes almost worthless
>repeat

It's absurd, but it would be better than straight-up UBI. And people would be healthier because of the exercise.

Maybe we can set up treadmills for people to generate power...

Looks like slogan boy realised he'd taken on the left wing "capitalists are bad" meme without actually understanding how the system he thinks is unsustainable works

UBI is whatever is needed to properly live. That provides all the basics and I suppose would allow some people to be idle. However, most would likely work to obtain more. People earning in excess of $100K still work full time even though they only need a quarter of that to survive.
Anything that you do for money that you would not do otherwise is equivalent to prostitution for this exercise. Prostitution is particularly objectionable, so it pays pretty well -- well enough that people will do it. That is not going to change with UBI any more than anything else.
BTW, UBI is already happening and will continue. The only question is how much agony will we take on getting to a point where the vast majority is OK with their share of the pie.

less greenhouse gasses too...no powe mowers.

In the winter, pay people to shovel snow by hand.

read this guy

What I find morally objectionable with UBI is that people would spend it on drugs. And because it's tax money, we'd be essentially sponsoring the drug cartels.

Granted, there's already under-the-table shit going on in that department, but UBI would literally just be handing money right to the cartels.

You'd have to have the government completely taking over the drug trade and legalizing everything.

What I find morally objectionable is that no man has a right to the fruits of another man's labor.

Of course it does. We already have it, essentially, it is just shitty, demeaning and inefficiently and unfairly delivered.
In case you have not noticed, we don't need everybody to work in order to produce the wealth we have. The demand for human workers continues to fall as production continues to rise. More than half of all the jobs in my country are 'service jobs' already.

Actually, I'm ok with some of that fruits of labor stuff. If I fall on hard times, it's really nice to know that there's some kind of system out there that has my back to a certain extent. It's the basis for normal society to look out for each other, just extended to the entire country and formalized.

But without a good plan and management, it can get completely out of hand. Like Friedman said, the easiest money to spend is the money that comes from someone else and is for someone else.

Well the cartels as they are now are a creature of the pointless war on drugs -- essentially a war on our own people. Drugs should be decriminalized. At that point their price basically falls to nothing. People would not spend all of their UBI on drugs because there would be no way they could consume that much.
Anyway, people take drugs because drugs make them feel better. If they felt OK in the first place they would pursue other activities like the rest of us. If you were homeless with aching teeth and festering wounds sleeping in a pile of rags with absolutely no hope of things getting better you might take drugs too.

>What I find morally objectionable is that no man has a right to the fruits of another man's labor.

You're typing on the fruits of another man's labor right now. What gives you the right to use a phone/computer that one man built but you gave money to another person entirely?

Labor is some magical essence. It's just work, which is paid for at a predetermined rate, agreed to by both parties.

There would still be sex workers, they'd just demand higher pay. Porn would still exist, as would prostitutes, but there might be less of them since they wouldn't need to work those fields and could instead better invest their time.

Yep, just like prohibition created the Mob, the war on drugs created the cartels.

>Drugs should be decriminalized.
I'm starting to think that may be the only way, but it makes me sad because addiction robs people of their humanity. They become no better than an animal. I would not want to live in a society with more addicts. It would almost be better to just move them to a deserted island with weekly deliveries of drugs.

But, I do disagree with the whole "homeless" characterization. Most addicts are not like that. And homelessness is a result of drugs, not the other way around.

He sold his labor to the third party, got a paycheck, so he has no further rights to the computer.

I agree with you and with Friedman.
Much of what surrounds us came from the labor of people long since gone. Much of the rest of it comes from automation of one kind or another.
What I would like to see is basically everybody can keep whatever the fuck they have and we continue forward creating wealth as quickly as we can (so scrub patents and copyrights and trade barriers) with the aim of distributing stuff for everyone.
Most of the world are not shallow self-interested greedy fucks who always ask "what's in it for me". The few who are can go fuck themselves.

These guys are all, "but muh labor... muh labor" like it's some sort of magical property. They don't want their labor taken without compensation (even though it's not), but they have no qualms about taking supplies and materials from others without paying for it. Fucking thieves, the whole lot of socialists.

I have a voluntary agreement with my employer to work for a certain amount of money, but the taxes are involuntary. The government forces me to pay them, and if I don't, men with guns will come to my house and take me away.

Nobody wakes up in the morning with the aim to become a dysfunctional pariah. People take drugs because drugs make them feel better. For whatever reason, they just don't feel good enough already. Change their circumstances (problems with their body chemistry is a circumstance not a choice) enough and at least some of them will feel better.
There are going to be sad, self-destructive individuals for whom all you can do is make them comfortable. We should do that because it is the right thing to do, but it is also just better for everybody.
What cracks me up is the many people parroting the horseshit they have been fed that works directly against their own interests rather than stopping to think it all through for themselves. The arguments of your masters serve them, not you. One of their most seductive arguments is that you can go from being a field nigger to a house nigger and even a master. Pro-tip:most of you can't even be a house nigger and your fight to become one is part of what keeps all of you down.

It's only voluntary because you're not in the right level of government with the right friends, LOL.

UBI is a tool to be used by governments to enforce their political,social,and economic will on the people. It is a tool for control. Speak out against the government? Revoke the ubi. Have wrong think? Revoked. Break a nebulous law? Revoked. You are sacrificing freedom for litteral savery.

>Nobody wakes up in the morning with the aim to become a dysfunctional pariah
True, for most people, that's not the goal. But intention and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee. I'm a pretty functional thinker and if someone's just plain broken in the head, the only thing you can do, as you've said, is just make them comfortable and away from those they'd hurt. Almost like CPS, but for adults. I guess that's what I'm advocating.

But I'm not able to follow what you're saying after "What cracks me up". You completely lost me at that point, I can't see how that relates to addiction.

>Whatever you get for free, everyone gets for free and it will be worthless soon.
It's not like they would print money for UBI, the dollar would still have a limited supply.

Holy fuck. You are actually saying that giving everyone direct control of what they need to live so they are liberated from wage slavery is even worse and more slavey somehow than being a homeless person *aspiring* to wage slavery.
The government is *our* servant, not our master. The fact that it is reversing our roles should make you want to change the government, not keep it the way it is.
It is very unlikely that anybody on this board would not be substantially better off with a UBI.

>you can make more on welfare than you can working a menial job
the whole point of UBI is that it isn't taken away if someone gets a job, you retard

Wal-Mart is alread trying to get rid of it's cashiers in favor of self-checkout lines. I say we have a good 10-20 years before the dollar rules king and employing people as cashiers becomes unprofitable for retain chains, regardless of UBI.

taxes, the same place that welfare and social security come from currently

Sure they would. People are still going to want a little extra money for things.

Well currently the tax take doesn't give the recipients of welfare or social security enough money to actually live on. Where will the rest come from when you apply UBI to everyone

That would be true if the modern state wasn't actively working against the people. Do you really want the modern state in all its forms to be given the ultimate power? I for one do not. Our governments only work to further their own goals by any means necessary.

Yeah, the discussion would be a lot better if people arguing against UBI actually understood what it was. In fairness, though, it has been so badly presented, often incorrectly, people could be forgiven for being confused.
People don't want jobs. They want an income that allows them to buy what they wish. Our goal should be automating away any work that is unpleasant to do.

You are correct to be afraid of the state. As it stands it is positively scary. That is something that needs to be fixed and soon.
UBI would only give the state the power you fear if it was able to somehow stop it from happening. If it is that powerful and out of control having or not having UBI is not going to make any difference.

First of all, UBI doesn't necessarily mean that you pay someone a living wage. Finland is currently getting good results from it's $600/mo UBI trials (roughly 7K a year)[1].

Second of all, the US government currently spends roughly 1 trillion on welfare annually. These estimates put a "$12,000 per adult and $6,000 per child" UBI at roughly 3 trillion a year[3], so a lesser UBI of ~4K a year per adult is 100% doable at our current tax rate and budget. Something like finland's UBI amounts would require higher taxes (as they have in finland), so it's a debate between whether UBI would benifit society enough to justify those tax increases.

[1]: qz.com/876985/finland-hopes-to-dispel-one-of-the-biggest-critiques-of-a-basic-income/
[2]: budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS Report - Welfare Spending The Largest Item In The Federal Budget.pdf
[3]: works.bepress.com/widerquist/75/

If you could afford to date a girl, would you need a prostitute?

for enough money, somebody always will

even if the supply of whores goes down for whatever reason, it just means prices will go up and the supply will rise back to meet the demand

he is right though, this question sounds like someone just started his philosophy 101 class and suddenly he feels like a goddamn socrates

That's where I say it is. All this talk distracting us from the real problems of western governance; corruption, corporatism, and the suppression of personal liberties. Let's work on the foundation before we give them eveything they want to control us.

lolz, i love those high school kids talking about bad government and how people should fight back

literally no high school kids ever. isn't that the age where they learn about communism

People like us could probably work together even though we disagree. We have a common concern about government over-reach, corruption, corporatism, and oppression.
I am from Canada, but I like the U.S.constitution. It is not perfect, but if they could at least enforce the fucking thing it would go a long way to curbing the most wanton excesses.
The mechanisms of the Grand Jury and Jury nullification should be used a lot more to at least keep some of this under control.
As it stands, the U.S. has completely abandoned a big chunk of the Constitution, entirely without legal justification.
Here in Canada, our constitution essentially says:
You have all the rights that follow unless we later decide otherwise.
Our constitution nullifies itself going in.

One of the big factors is corruption. Nigeria faces this problem especially so, where large chunks of the money that's supposed to see its way to the welfare of the citizens gets skimmed over and over into various official's off shore accounts. The effectiveness of a UBI, as with any social welfare program, is very much impacted by how earnest those in power are.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so difficult to fund the well being of the individuals in our country if the wealth wasn't so unevenly distributed.

Leaving thread to finally die. Thx!

The foundation of personal liberties is political power. By funding the lower class, you are giving them the power that they have been denied for centuries.

This is the real reason for political opposition to UBI. It will raise voter turnout and public awareness of politics significantly, which neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want.