Communism is when the government owns all property and all factors of production. UBI does not involve the government taking over anything.
Very likely ends badly, as voters seek to increase UBI to infinity.
Considering how much doubt there is among UBI in the first place, I don't know why you would assume politicians and voters would just want to endlessly increase the size of monthly payments.
Sure it does. In this case the money for UBI has to come from somewhere. It will come in the form of extremely high taxes. If the government gets to keep more than 50% of your income, then they are a majority shareholder in your individual output. They retain extraordinary power and control over you. And that could ratchet up all the way to 100% theoretically under the UBI system. There really is nothing stopping it from happening other than voter sentiment.
There might not be favorable sentiment now, but sentiment can change. But I do suspect that if you implement such a system, society will become dependent on that system. And it will be ratcheted up to pander to populace. It would be a powerful tool for politicians to garner favor. I've seen it done in other countries that openly embraced socialism and populism. It ends in economic catastrophe for nearly everyone.
The teams also asked whether people who haven’t been infected with SARS-CoV-2 also produce cells that combat it. Thiel and colleagues analyzed blood from 68 uninfected people and found that 34% hosted helper T cells that recognized SARS-CoV-2. The La Jolla team detected this crossreactivity in about half of stored blood samples collected between 2015 and 2018, well before the current pandemic began. The researchers think these cells were likely triggered by past infection with one of the four human coronaviruses that cause colds; proteins in these viruses resemble those of SARS-CoV-2.
If this is confirmed, this strikes me as something that could be a big deal. Interested to hear virologists and immunologists chime in on this.
As time goes on, things seem to line up with what Michael Levitt has been saying for a while now. Namely, that populations are reaching "saturation" pretty uniformly. And while he hasn't a clue what's causing it - he's ventured a guess at some type of innate immunity.
Back in mid-March:
> In Wuhan, which had the highest number of infection cases in the Hubei province, everyone had a chance of getting infected, but only 3% caught it,” he explained. “Even on the Diamond Princess (the virus-stricken cruise ship), the infection rate did not top 20%.” Based on these statistics, Levitt said, he concluded that many people are just naturally immune to the virus.
In retrospect we know that the Diamond Princess numbers are wrong (the Chinese numbers are likely wrong too). Asymptomatic spread is probably much larger than what we could initially tell.
This study claims half the Diamond Princess infections were undetected - the infection rate was double.
Communism is when the government owns all property and all factors of production. UBI does not involve the government taking over anything.
Very likely ends badly, as voters seek to increase UBI to infinity.
Considering how much doubt there is among UBI in the first place, I don't know why you would assume politicians and voters would just want to endlessly increase the size of monthly payments.