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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Okay, but other species aren't even able to pay to exist. If a human wants them dead, they dead —unless they the property of another human being of course.
They're also at the mercy of nature and all it entails. And nature is fucking brutal.
And they do pay to exist, just not money. They spend their time seeking food, expend their calories seeking more, risk their well-being to defend what they have from competitors, etc.
And that's how we would live too without exchanging money for good and services. It's just a resource, and no species is free from having to gather and manage resources.
No free lunch
You're right, we all need to acquire resources. The thing is that by law, we don't have the ability to use property without the owners' permission. So unlike a butterfly or something, we can't just do our thing, we have to give over some portion of our energy and acquired resources to other people.
Many people worked hard to start a business or buy land. But not all of them, many people's wealth has some proportion derived from other people's labor. It would be impossible to sort out individually whether an individual "ought" to have what they have. But to avoid reverting to the "natural" state (I'm stronger / there are more of us so I / we are going to take this) we should guarantee that all people have some minimum standard of living.
Even in nature there is property. A lion will defend its territory from other motherfuckers. They will even kill. There is "property" in nature and it's fucking brutal. The butterfly example is ridiculous. You can't compare 1 butterfly with 1 human. A butterfly does not need a lot of resource but human does.
Property is what you're able to keep without having to defend it constantly. There is no property in nature.
You're right nature is brutal. Do we want our lives to be like that? If a homeless person sees a billionaire should they kill them and take over their mansion?
No. The point of society is that we can all have better lives working together than by living as animals.
What I'm saying is that we are not the only species that "pay" to exist. Money is the abstraction of work. That first sentence is a joke, it's ridiculous, it's infuriating. It's not an argument to anything.
I’m with you on this. I get where they’re coming from and we are being taken advantage of but the argument being used is lacking in cognative thoroughness, it’s like a surface or second layer thought being mistaken as deep thinking. I think there’s enough automation in the world that we all could be living much freer lives with more time for building connections, learning and creating rather than having to spend all available waking hours repeating soul crushing tasks to simply pay for food, shelter and some basic future security. Trying to push this idea with flawed arguments is dumb because there are so many flawless ones available.
Honestly, there is probably a good justification to be made that they should. Billionaires hoarding money are a big part of why the homeless exist.
You can compare a “butterfly just doing its thing” to a human though you are right in that don’t need anywhere near as much resource even when factoring in size and lifespan. Even still it follows the same idea, take the plants around it for example. You could argue for many insects and animals this is a limited renewable resource (property albeit unclaimed). The butterfly must work to acquire the nectar. If another animal comes and eats those plants the butterfly must now work harder to acquire the same amount of resources.
You act as if paying to exist is a privilege. It is a requirement of being a human in our society. A requirement that functionally requires you to be exploited by those who won the birth lottery.
It is a privilege in contrast to other species, the exact juxtaposition done by the OP. It's like complaining that the free man has to pay for room and board while the slave doesn't. I've heard exact arguments like this from slavery apologists, that slaves had it really good actually.
How exactly are other species relevant to how we structure our society? It is true that humans are the top dog in the circle of life, but how is that relevant?
I said nothing about slavery, why are you changing the subject?
EDIT: I guess I missed the first sentence in the OP about species. I think caring about how other species do things is just a red herring to draw attention.
I think they’re trying to say if you were to take you and your family and delete all of society and drop you in alongside all the other natural species, you would find your life is probably going to be way more work than it is now even under the shit heads exploiting us. I’m not saying it’s ok at all, it’s fucked and I’m all for fixing that but the idea that nature is somehow easier or better has many flaws. It has some benifits but if it was so much better I don’t think we would have bothered to build societies and security like we have
Also, you could easily not have to pay to exist. You'd just be living a hard hard life out in the sticks or be taken care of in jail with the tradeoff of a lack of freedom.
People in prison are hardly taken care of. Read up on healthcare in prisons, for example.
Taken care of was not the right phrase, only in the sense that you'll keep existing for no money. Quality of life for a free existence is not going to be pretty any way you slice it.
Yeah. This is a terrible argument. Sounds great to ubi supporters.
All I'm reading from the OP is "gimme gimme gimme"
There are good arguments in favor of UBI but this is just whiny.