The problem is that small towns are a dead-end. They are economically underwater, spending money to consume the industrial/technological products produced by the rest of society, but without producing much or any of their own with which to earn the money to pay for their consumption. The factories are gone, victims of cheaper labor elsewhere, so there's no manufacturing. Agriculture is all done by faraway megacorporations, so they don't really sell much if any food (and the small farmers who remain exist mostly because of subsidies). Most services produced are consumed locally, not exported. On that note, small towns have virtually zero cultural or artistic output that can be exported, and there is no tourism. So where are the moneymaking industries that attract outside wealth and provide small-town residents with the incomes necessary to import goods and services from elsewhere?Maddy wrote:Well, let me pose a question. Who is it, REALLY, who wants to be relieved from the burden of work? For all I can tell, it's coming mainly from the young, elitist, college-educated, technologically-oriented crowd. It's these people that seem to be drawn to the vision of a fully-automated future and the prospect of never having to work. To me, it's an obvious example of shitting where you sleep; it's these very people and their obsession with technology that have turned the work world into something that is repugnant even to them.
Ironically, small towns already largely subsist on UBI/CD income; we just call it "Social Security." Retired and disabled people living in small towns are instrumental to bringing in much-needed cash to provide purchasing power for everyone else. Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and all the other programs help, too. They already constitute a crude UBI/CD for economically underwater parts of the country.
Small-town living may be more satisfying, but it's not a future that humanity can look forward to. Modern material goods and services are too strong a lure. Once you have factory-made clothing and motor vehicles and coffee and air conditioning and power tools and cell phones and internet access and fresh out-of-season fruits and vegetables, you don't want to give them up. Nobody does. And to consume them, you need to be economically valuable, beyond the level of being a waiter, housekeeper, or supermarket checkout clerk.
Modern productive work is indeed largely soulless and dehumanizing, but this isn't some new revelation; people have known about this for centuries. It was articulated by Marx, Veblen, and many other intellectual giants before our grandparents were born.
But there's no going back without losing almost everything. The entire world relies on industrial/technological productivity, despite its fundamentally alienating character. We need alienating industrial farming or else billions of people will die. We need alienating industrial manufacturing or else the flow of goods ends. We need alienating white-collar work for our telecommunication infrastructure and all the bureaucracy that supports everything else. Etc.
We have to accept this and move forward; that's the philosophical underpinning of UBI/CD. Since we can't all go back to living in small towns without a massive reduction in both population and standard of living, how do we prevent the fruits of all our productivity from accumulating at the very top and provoking a revolution that kills us all? And since the entire developed world has been moving in the direction of direct payments and subsidies anyway, how can we streamline this system?
