edit: if it was not clear, facebook is in fact part of society (by definition) and their responsibility is proportional to their role in society, no more no less.
Yes, and taxes + UBI would represent that proportion. This meme is also only ridiculous because of the $100 figure. What if someone paid you $20k to fuck off. $100k to fuck off?
Sorry for the discourse, my polisci past is flaring up but I do in fact explain why I support this (silly) tweet.
There are some kinds of nonviolent behavior we don't allow because we (I guess we is majority of society?) think it's wrong, often around issues of financial exploitation. For example, even if you are mentally sound you can't sell yourself into indentured servitude because that tends to only happen when someone with power exploits someone desperate, often (but not always) due to reasons out of their control.
UBI is basically an artificial wage. Like a lot of things in life, a wage is a negotiation between two entities of vastly different levels of power. As every public company proudly proclaims, the value of what employees do for them is far far less then the value the employees receive.
Why do you think those workers accept this fact? They like getting less value than they generated? It's clearly the result of an exploitative power dynamic - one side has to work or not eat, the other does not.
If you think someone should not have medicine and food dangled over their head in work negations, the answer is workers need to be paid in real value of the capital that they create and that needs to law.
I hope one day our wages are looked back on like no minimum wage, the 6 day 14+ hr work day, child labor, indentured servitude, slavery and etc which were often viewed as normal at their time but now disgusting.
This GIF is mocking the idea of UBI and while for sure a silly meme, has an element of truth IMO.
Why would it need to be law? Since, in your view, capital / management / entrepreneurship contribute nothing of value, workers should have no problem creating successful businesses without them. Particularly if UBI takes care of basic needs during the early stages.
Why do feel the need to misrepresent my argument? When did I say that management contributes nothing of value? Of all the arguments I was expecting, this one surprises me as it makes no sense.
Capitalism works on leveraging advantage to pay workers less than the value that they create. Do you have anything to say about that, or are you going to continue to suggest magic discount coupons (UBI) which are worth less than the value a worker creates are something besides slavery with extra steps?
Feel free to scoff/mock me for questioning sacred holy capitalism - when immoral ideals are questioned and no logical answer is available, history tells us emotion and feelings are the standard responses.
A thing is worth its market-clearing price. Facebook has $15B in revenue and pays $12B in expenses (for the sake or argument, it's all payroll). I claim the workers are getting exactly what they're worth, and the remaining $3B is the value contributed by capital/management. Your claim seems to be that workers created the full $15B in value, and the $3B is being stolen from them. Apologies if you meant something else.
If that's true, Facebook's workforce could quit tomorrow, go build a competitor, and claim the full $15B for themselves. Why don't they do that?
The traditional Communist argument has been that they can't because capital owns the means of production. Factory workers would happily go start their own factory, but they can't afford the machines to fill it. That argument doesn't work too well here: the means of production needed to build Facebook are accessible even to college students. Basically an editor, a scripting language, a web server, and some linux boxes.
Another reasonable argument is that they can't because they need to eat. The time it would take between quitting their jobs at Facebook, Inc. and seeing revenue from Facebook Co-Op would exhaust their savings. That is a problem UBI can solve. It's not that UBI pays what you are worth, but that it removes the urgency that sometimes prevents people from getting their full value in the market.
This idea - that workers create all the value in a company, not just the subset they are paid for - is testable. If you're sure it's true and you want everyone else to believe it, then I think you'd want to run the experiment. UBI could be a way of doing that. Could also do grants that pay living expenses during entrepreneurial activity, or just straight-up house and feed co-op founders without asking for an equity stake.
edit: if it was not clear, facebook is in fact part of society (by definition) and their responsibility is proportional to their role in society, no more no less.