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I wish that were true today. Charitable donations get into the news as noteworthy because they are rare, and they don't hold a candle to the aid that governments provide. And the reason for that is exactly what your original statement was, people don't want their money taken away and given to someone else. Many people don't even want tax dollars to go to help "those people over there". Changing that at a cultural values level has been an ongoing struggle for a few hundred years, with no end in sight.

This is why most serious UBI proponents are trying to identify revenue streams that don't take money away from person A and give it to person B. Having a government or other collective economic entity set up a Bitcoin miner and distributing the profits to all citizens within that municipality would be an alternative that wouldn't be coerced at all. It would just be part of the system.

Hazey 1y ago

Yeah that was my point about the values. Some cultures, like China at least traditionally, take care of their family members, even the degenerates. Only those completely left out would need public help.

Those values can grow or deteriorate based on the incentives. The current fiat welfare state incentivizes dumping everyone onto it and only caring for yourself, especially when the money to help others is already being extracted by force and there is no social value to it and to try is competing with the state that has already monopolized and institutionalized it.

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Hazey 1y ago

To say that people in general are not capable of or will always choose not to take care of others is the exact same argument as saying nobody is responsible enough to custody their own money.

Chad Lupkes 1y ago

I can see that. Because the value of fiat is always going down, there's a lot more effort being made to keep as much as possible so we will always have enough. Not as much motivation to share it. Reverse gravity, and suddenly there is more motivation to share and make sure that everyone has enough, not just us.