Not sure where I found this. Maybe here. Well it’s here now that’s for sure.
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Seriously. I want a world where everyone can have the basics of subsistence without qualifications. UBI is one way to do it, but even direct provision is fine.
Universal healthcare is an obvious one, but for as wealthy as developed countries are, providing basic food and shelter shouldn’t be that difficult either. For food and shelter, I think we should just offer anyone that wants it the basics of life.
Every county should have a government depot in it that you can go and get a certain quantity of basic staples per month. Rice, beans, flour, that kind of thing. It need not be fancy or the best food on Earth, but enough of what people need to keep them alive. And you keep the demand for the service reasonable not by putting in place applications and qualifications, but simply by personal preference. Not many millionaires are going to go down to the depot every month and get their government-issued bag of rice, even if they could if they wanted.
Same thing with housing. There should be state-run dorms or boarding houses in every city in the country. Need a place to stay? Go down to the city dorm. I would build them just like college dorms - small shared rooms with bunk beds and communal cooking/bathing facilities. And anyone, from the richest to the poorest, can stay there if they need to. If Bezos wants to go live in the government dorm, he can. You keep demand for it low, and the cost of providing it reasonable, through personal choice. Most people don’t actually want to live their whole life in a dorm room. Keep things clean. Keep them sanitary. But keep them simple and utilitarian.
Even within existing capitalist societies, we can provide for the basics of life for everyone. And instead of putting strict requirements, you open the programs up to all. You keep the demand for the services low by focusing on utilitarian versions of the benefits you provide. Anyone down on their luck can stay in the government dorm if they want, but very few people actually want to unless they really need to.
We were yoked to the plow, since life first began,
And always expected to carry the can
Xennial checking in with an update to the format:
Boomers could literally feed a family of 4 and pay a mortgage working at a grocery store.
Some. Some had it good. It’s true that back in the day a single income could sustain a family. That stopped being true for many 50-some years ago. My parents were tail end boomers. In the 80s, they were able to buy a small house right next to a top-5 city for crime and raise 3 kids on a blue collar job supplemented with part time cashier work. In the 90s, expenses started needing two full time positions. In the early 2000s (after a move of necessity), I had to chip in for a third of the mortgage. Now that (refinanced) house is falling apart, my mom can no longer work, and my dad is dead. There are millions with similar stories.
Is my mom a racist piece of shit that nods along to Fox while blaming everyone else for her bad situation? Yup. But that’s not a boomer thing. It’s not a generational thing. That’s a culture war thing. The same culture war being propagated by the people who actually pulled up the ladders behind them. The same ones who have been waging a class war and winning handily in part because of the culture war distractions.
Some loony was going off the other day about how X was just as bad as the boomers because of Musk, Fuckerberg, etc. Same shit, different decade.
Society has bred sociopaths for countless generations. The most ruthless get the most rewards. The less successful sociopaths strive to be more sociopathic, so that one day they too can win harder. And this behavior gets modeled and tweaked over time until people grow up thinking it’s perfectly natural to crush others in pursuit of success. “Sucks to suck, I got mine.” All of this is very visible and only becoming more acute due to social Darwinism and the swamp of bullhorns that is the internet.
But for every greedy fuck that’s actively making things worse, they have countless peers that are just trying to live their lives. Some live them fighting the culture war. Some live them fighting back. They may hate each other. But they have more in common with each other than they ever will with those that have been waging class war since before any of us were born.
Forget the generational shit. Recognize the culture wars for what they are. And may every miserable psychopathic shit on the winning side of the class war find themselves staring at the inside of a wicker basket. Briefly.
Not all of them. There were entire segments of the population excluded from the huge amounts of wealth in the years following ww2. The battle for women to enter the workforce in the 60s/70s was primarily a fight for white women, black women were forced to work because of poverty immediately following emancipation and ever since. Not only that, but the intersection of 2 political minorities means that finding work was hard af for them.
People do forget that not everybody innUS benefited from post war boom.
It is a blind spot for middle class esp suburban whites who lived in segregated communities
