Journal Rick Schumann's Journal: Why UBI Won't Work: Not The Usual Reasons

There are many of you who wish for so-called 'Universal Basic Income', citing the coming 'robot apocalypse' that will allegedly take everyone's jobs, and you think that free money from the government is going to solve all your problems. I've mocked and ridiculed you for thinking it could possibly work, and warned you repeatedly that it would be a disaster. I've pointed out the math that shows it would bankrupt the United States. I've theorized that it would just destroy the Middle Class, leaving only the Poor and the Rich, with a gulf so deep and wide between the two, that no one would ever be able to cross it, and that in a generation or two, no one would even be capable of even thinking of crossing it, having forgotten what it takes to stand on your own two feet -- and for those of you who don't already see it, my words fell on deaf ears.

Let me tell you something different.

Ask yourself this question: How many times has merely throwing money at a social problem solved it? The answer is 'Not often enough to mention'. So it would go with 'UBI'.
You want the fantasy of the Star Trek society to become a reality; you want to live in a post-scarcity world, where energy is cheap and abundant enough that there's no point in charging for it, there's no money to pay anyway because they've dispensed with it, and all your basic needs are served by matter replicators that convert abundant free energy to whatever you need: food, clothing, tools, and so on. There's no war. There's little crime because there's no need for crime. The Galaxy is open to you! You can pursue whatever you want. That's the world you want, right?

Remember above where I said "throwing money at problems rarely solves them"? You have to change HEARTS AND MINDS OF EVERYONE if you want that bright Utopian future, and we are NOT ANYWHERE NEAR BEING THERE, NOT YET. We still have war; there are people dying even as I write this; lust for power is a major motivator! We still have money; money literally makes the world go 'round! Greed is rampant. Take a close, hard look at how people treat each other: Don't believe in some Invisible Sky-God the same way as the people in the next country over? Well, your God is a Jealous God, and demands that you force them to believe as you do, or they must die! Your neighbors have more resoures than you do? Better attack them and take it! You feel some other country is screwing you over in trade? Better screw them over even harder! Do you actually see what's going on here? Do you REALLY THINK that throwing money at ANY of these problems is going to get these people to stop, solve these problems? Think again.

Here's the bottom line: We need to evolve as a species, leaving behind the desire to be violent to our neighbors, leaving behind superstition and mysticism, and embrace real knowledge, real truth, and the FACT that due to our transportation techologies, and especially the Internet, the Earth is too small for us to continue acting this way. A HUNDRED YEARS AGO it was already getting too damned small; why do you think Nazi Germany and Japan were able to wage such a war that no nation on the planet was able to ignore it? We're all even functionally closer today than we were a hundred years ago and look how much worse it really is! One hundred years ago, the total population of humans on Earth was less than 2 billion. It's more than three times that now and there's no end in sight. Again, I ask you to consider: Do you really think throwing a little money at people is going to solve ANYONE'S problems now? Without changing anything else?

Giving people free money is not going to magically make them into different people. You're trying to put the cart before the horse. People need to change first; we have to create the Utopia within ourselves, first -- EVERYONE ON EARTH -- and then we can talk about a world where no one has to work, and everyone can live their lives for free -- because there won't be anyone attacking anyone else, or trying to hoard money and power.

Also, remember this: On the Earth of Star Trek, we went through World War III and other things that damned near ended us, before the Utopia began. To be quite blunt about it, many of you think you can just skip all that and go right to eating cake. It never works that way.