UBI would be a lot more acceptable if it didn't discourage charity within the community. If under a certain threshold of income, people could opt out and get full tax refunds for their charity, what have you, this would make a lot more sense to a lot more people.
I think that this is entirely wrongheaded; how do you figure that it discourages charity? I would certainly give more if I had more to give. To my church, and to the poor in general.
Maybe you are right. I'll cover one point for now. I'm not too proud to accept help for my own sake and others, but I am sure not interested in other people's earnings, not that way. I find the prospect of it disgusting, would rather go hungry. I don't think that's all that uncommon right now. On this one, its the mentality that strikes me most, that we have to come to feel entitled as a people, to other people's earnings. There's nothing charitable about that, and our children may be surrounded by people satisfied that someone committing evil according to our wants is considered as "charity" enough. Now that I think about it, I wonder if it coincides with our defeat as a society. Maybe we're giving up on justice, and the bastards just wrote a check. How do you justify this?
I think that you've adopted a set of conceptions about how labor, value, and production work that have made you easy to exploit. Capitalism, as a system, accumulates money in the hands of usurers, while, economically, value is created by laborers and prices are set by the market. This is all explored in Adam Smith, and the economic history of Florence is a great example of how this confiscatory process plays out. How is it just for the surplus value created by labor to accumulate disproportionately in the hands of people who had nothing to do with that labor? I find that very difficult to justify, and I find the idea that trying to get a bigger share is unjust to be heinous. Because it assumes that an economic and political system founded on usury is just, when I hold that it is the opposite. The Marxists were wrong about a lot of things, but their criticisms of capitalism, which raped and pillaged the cultural and material treasures of Europe, and later the world, were often spot on. It is an evil system because it pretends at amorality, enables dispossession, and then pretends that dispossession is some unavoidable, natural consequence. It isn't, because economics isn't a naturalistic science, it's a moral one because it concerns man's interaction with the material world. We get to decide what that interaction looks like because economics are inextricably tied to politics.
