European Citizen's Initiative for UBI
Where do I sign against this?<p>This is just FIRE without the money. Did you read the actual proposal? They explicitly want to give a middle class life to everyone, with zero obligation from the individual.<p>This is complete insanity.<p>Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful. Kids are idiots (past me included), and if they knew they had the option to do nothing productive, then that&#x27;s what a very significant proportion would do: nothing.<p>So you&#x27;ll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free.<p>You know what, why NOT be a teenage parent and never do anything productive? There&#x27;s no downside.<p>Or if you&#x27;re one of the ones being productive, when you hit 30 and get a child, suddenly why bother going back to work ever?<p>Do you know how many people would be &quot;artists&quot; or &quot;authors&quot; if they could? They really believe in themselves, and write poems their whole life, publish books, paint stuff. But it&#x27;s all shit. Literally nobody wanted what 99% of them did. But they had no obligation to produce anything anybody else wanted.<p>I&#x27;m for a strong social safety net and reducing inequality, but UBI is insanity until we actually have achieved Star Trek level of abundance.<p>UBI assumes that everything that people want that gives them fulfilment is actually useful to anybody else.<p>Neil Breen is funny because there&#x27;s only one of him. Europe has what, 800M people? There would easily be 5M Neil Breens, but even missing the mark on unintentionally funny.<p>And NONE of them would be forced to &quot;get their life together&quot;. Their life IS together, they&#x27;re &quot;film makers&quot;.<p>So we would have like 25% otherwise productive people dropping out completely, and another 50% switching to something that makes them fulfilled, but contributes nothing.<p>And we can&#x27;t keep the world running on the backs of the 25%.<p>Another problem is that UBI becomes a level of power. People start planning their life after not needing it, and then politicians decide to not make it grow by inflation. Or they bump it up and make future generations pay for it. C.f. pension systems, medicare, and BBC funding for some unintended political side effects.<p>UBI is absolutely bananas.