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You're confusing UBI with "Bullshit Jobs" both of which are actually quite different. In bullshit jobs the workers still need to show up to the office and pretend to work in order to collect a check, while in UBI people can go out and party and still collect their check.
With regards to cost, having a metro train is a special case, but you can compare wmata's cost per revenue mile to what it would cost to outsource it to some contract operator like veolia or whatever. I wouldn't be surprised if they are horrifically incompetent but I'd imagine the numbers are not as bad as you think.
In terms of profit, buses aren't meant to make a profit, for better or for worse. We don't live in ancapistan so we have to accept some government services given away at below market rates, such as buses, running water, streetlights, roads, etc.
WMATA isn't run on UBI or Bullshit Jobs. For every lazy inspector photo-copying old measurements there are construction workers, maintenance patrols, janitors, cops, lawyers, managers. White-collar jobs like "managers" might sound like a bad joke but it's not a do-nothing job in a system that is constantly aging and wearing out, where every metro stop needs to be serviced, every service causes chaos throughout the entire network, and there's not even a reliable operating budget out of which to make decisions. These are all hands-on jobs and the existence of sloppy workers just collecting a paycheck is not unusual by any historical example. (Even big Silicon Valley companies pay some of their employees just to sit around all day because they prefer that to having them working for a competitor.)
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As a side note, society might be much better off if the UBI laws required that people had to do some kind of busy work in order to collect their check.
For example, suppose one way you could get your UBI was by playing Fortnight for 6 hours a day. The requirement would arguably give people a much greater feeling of meaning in their lives (even if the work is ultimately meaningless) and it would also keep them off the streets.
This only makes sense if the required busywork can be done at little additional cost and doesn't come at the expense of useful activities you might otherwise employ.
For example, if you need to drive into work every day, then you waste a lot of energy/money burning fossil fuels, wearing out your car, wearing out the road, etc. for no economic benefit.
If you have children that you put in daycare (often also subsidized) then perhaps it would be better for society if you took care of them yourself instead of working a bullshit job of little economic value.
The philosophy behind UBI is that while giving people a guaranteed income may decrease economic activity, it would improve society in other ways: people have more time for exercise and cooking from scratch so they become healthier, they will have more time for reading so they will become better informed, they will create art, they become more active in the community, e.g. volunteering to maintain parks, pick up litter, caring for the elderly, and so on.
I'm a little skeptical about the extent to which these things would actually happen, but a clear prerequisite is that people actually have the free time and energy to do those things. That means you cannot put UBI recipients to work on useless activities, or you have all the downsides and none of the upsides.
Yeah, but most people will just scroll TikTok and eat slop. When they get bored they will do crime. There are plenty of countries with mass unemployment and it does not appear to cause some great blossoming of culture and spiritual living. A UBI future looks like the crime levels of South Africa, a populace that rapidly forgets what little republican virtue remains, and a resentful productive class that flees abroad or sullenly stops investing.
I see you've met my clients. The copybook heading that seems more and more true as I get older is "idle hands are the devil's workshop."
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I don't think that would improve society at all.
Sure, but given what the above would result in (and how limited applications of this in free societies have all generated this problem), UBI is incompatible with a society built on equal rights- the golden geese generating the productivity will not survive.
At least the Communists (and socialists more broadly) are honest about this (as are the "you will own nothing and be happy" WEF-ers).
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A fun thought experiment is analyzing everything concretely done in an economic sector and redoing the cluster analysis. Existing clusters (companies) should be profitable and do many unprofitable things along the way (which they might argue ultimately help the bottom line) but you can reslice in different ways to share some services or remove things which merely compete without value add (e.g. advertising to counter the competition's ads). It's a bit difficult to determine what's ultimately accreative economic activity, just looking at the current clustering.
In a different world, with better policing/less crime making public transit more user friendly and with some union busting, to allow low hanging cost savings like train automation, the relative subsidies could fall while the social benefit grows - and the overall economy would waste less on transportation: roads are one thing, but car's depreciate quickly. Just imagine where we'd be with 7 decades of compounded investments instead!
Beware. If you do such analysis thoroughly with full historical perspective, if you follow all tracks and climb through all rabbit holes, you find out that not only our current system has nothing in common with "free market", that corporations and state institutions are just different tentacles of the same monster, and it has was always that been that way in all recorded history.
Persevere enough, and you will see yourself swiftly moving from right bottom corner to left bottom corner of political compass, you will be throwing away black-gold flags and portraits of Ayn Rand and replacing them black-red banners and pictures of more imposing Russians
Except then you'll know you screwed up massively somewhere along the way, because empirically Communism fucks up everything it touches. And regardless of the economic system, Russia is always fucked up.
Bottom left corner is anarcho-communism, not Lenin and Stalin, but Bakunin and Kropotkin. You can truthfully object that no viable example of autonomous self governing classless, stateless and moneyless worker community ever existed, but this is even more true about hard core anarcho capitalism.
It might not be truly autonomous and stateless, but you can join a commune today and get 80% of the way there. Many people have... and almost all them gave it up when it proved unworkable and dumb, and not because of the compromises they had to make to exist within a capitalist society. I have no issue with voluntary communities living in (just about) any way they please, and I'm happy for the people who can find happiness there... but the evidence is that it just doesn't work for the vast majority of people even after self-selecting for the people who want to make it work the most.
(The community that's similarly 80% of the way to anarcho-capitalism is... pre-Civil War America, I think? Not no public spending or government action, but much, much less. Though it looks so good in comparison I'm afraid I've put my thumb on the scale somehow.)
Yes, typical anarcho communist community ends as bizarre sex cult in peace time or just another bandit gang in war zone, while anarcho capitalist community ends in massive scam and rug pull (AFAIK no one yet attempted to build anarcho capitalist paradise during some shithole country civil war).
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I think the Frontier is at least a part of what's putting a thumb on your scale. Both the fact that it was there, and the fact that technologies of transportation and communication didn't allow for any meaningful control over it.
Anarcho-capitalism-lite looks way better when anyone who doesn't like your society can go five miles down the road or get on the railway and find a parcel of beautiful, fertile land upon which the sweat of a man's brow is enough to give him a decent life. It breaks down when it is no longer possible to Exit from a situation you find intolerable and therefore you have to Voice your complaints and coerce people to fix them, and live with the attempts of others to do likewise.
Ah, that is part of what makes it appealing, for sure. But communes have strong Exit rights too, so I don't think it's obviously biasing the comparison. Is the argument that Exit is more important for anarcho-capitalism-lite given reduced Voice? I'm not actually sure Voice is reduced in ancap societies -- you have all the tools of persuasion and politics to get your way and you can pay to get it too, whereas in ancom you only have the former.
This might seem superficially counterintuitive: Sure, in ancom you don't have money, but you also don't have to work for money. Doesn't it cancel out? But in fact theory predicts this result: You are rewarded for your service to the interests of others with influence over others' actions in turn. This has the natural effect of maximizing total utility, as each individual makes money doing what most efficiently enables them to help others and spends money on the help they most want. In other terms, trade is positive sum: both parties are better off for it, both get more value out than they put in. So forbidding (or failing to adequately facilitate) trade reduces total utility.
The communist ethos may be 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,' but getting one's needs (and wants) satisfied is the whole incentive for providing one's ability. If you remove that incentive, people just aren't going to try as hard. Auth-left can force them (which is just slavery, and is inefficient and destabilizing in the same ways, but isn't completely unworkable), but lib-left can't, really. So the only way it can ever really work is if people want it to.
What I mean is that anarcho-communism doesn’t work at all (probably) and that anarcho-capitalism worked a lot better when you had the internal ability within a broadly ancap American society to say ‘fuck you I’m making my own log cabin’ and have that work out pretty ok most of the time.
In general one problem with trying to make alternative societies now is that you are likely to be doing it somewhere inhospitable that nobody else wants to be. Having a virgin, fertile continent makes such things easier.
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Doesn’t anarchocapitalism have a tiny number of historical examples? Notably medieval Iceland.
If you want to call medieval Iceland (society rather unpleasant by modern standards, but so were all contemporary societies) an example of thriving anarcho-capitalism, then numerous egalitarian tribal societies where land was held in common are examples of successful anarcho-communism.
Anyway, none of these societies were viable when organized state showed up in the neighborhood. This is the hard problem of anarchy of all kinds, unsolved for 5000 years.
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There are different kinds of not making a profit. If the expenses are reasonable, but the government wants to give it away at below expense, that's one kind. If the expenses are unreasonable, though, that's a "not making a profit" which should be unacceptable even for government services. Paying people to do nothing useful is in the latter category.
I wish my accountant would see it like this.
Why? I am not talking about a financial distinction, which your accountant would care about, but a policy distinction.
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