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RE: The Progressive Case for Greatly Replacing the Welfare State with Unconditional Basic Income

in #basicincome6 years ago

I think socialism can only evolve properly in a bubble, or if the whole world was socialist, along the original lines of thinking of when socialism could actually be successful. Competitive forces kind of squash the notion when it comes to head with capitalistic nations that compete for resources more ruthlessly. Social democracy is nice, nearly anything is better than most of what's out there in the world now. I personally think that things should be taxed so heavily as to make most things unproductive, if we roll in the absolute costs of producing things then maybe we can save the world some destruction. Combine that with an educated population that understands the damage their consumption does and we're looking at a brighter future. Great to see other thinkers on the site talking about this kind of stuff.

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Definitely. We need cap and trade and Pigouvian taxes, that will make the negative externalities be reflected in the final cost of products. That Noam Chomsky line is pretty much spot on: 'under existing capitalism, we have the socialization of costs and the privatization of profits.' We need to use taxation in order to keep corporations from being able to socialize costs.