Conversation

i'm sick to death of supposedly enlightened people going "UBI won't work, what we really need is universal housing / food / etc". because what that tells me is that to those people, individual agency is an optional extra, rather than the essential component of freedom i (and most anarchists throughout history, in fairness) understand it to be

without agency, universal housing & food is just charity, dependent on the whims of the assigning authorities. without agency, you might as well be locking people in prisons... or concentration camps.

now if you want to talk about better ways of ensuring that people can control their own circumstances and plot their own course to a better future than UBI, i'm all for hearing about it. but if that comes down to "all you have to do is make your case in front of the right people..." then you're part of the problem. if you can't even get past your own entrenched ableism and unconscious privilege, how the hell are you going to build a better future for anyone who doesn't look like you?

i have a nagging suspicion that anyone who says "the answer is universal housing / food / etc" fondly imagines a future where they're on the committee making the allocations. i don't think for a second they could conceive of having to be the person standing before that committee, having to justify a basic requirement for their quality of life to a panel of people who have no way of conceiving of that requirement as anything but an inexplicable luxury - and knowing that life would be a hell of a lot easier if only they knew someone who knew someone on that panel...

*because that's how these things always pan out*.

it's a product of the fundamental misconception that power is bad because the wrong small group of people have it, rather than recognising that concentrated power is bad for everyone, wielder and victim alike, and that the only way to ensure that we never again find ourselves in a situation where a few people can ride roughshod over the destinies of everyone is to redistribute power down to the individual level, and only allow such structures to arise as preserve that atomisation.