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The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

(thewalrus.ca)
300 points pseudolus | 3 comments | 28 Jun 25 22:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.607s | source
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BrenBarn ◴[29 Jun 25 06:43 UTC] No.44410806[source]▶
> I heard one answer more than any other: the government should introduce universal basic income. This would indeed afford artists the security to create art, but it’s also extremely fanciful.

Until we start viewing "fanciful" ideas as realistic, our problems will persist. This article is another in the long series of observations of seemingly distinct problems which are actually facets of a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high. It's not just that musicians, or actors, or grocery store baggers, or taxi drivers, or whatever, can't make a living, it's that the set of things you can do to make a living is narrowing more and more. Broad-based solutions like basic income, wealth taxes, breaking up large market players, etc., will do far more for us than attempting piecemeal tweaks to this or that industry.

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GLdRH ◴[29 Jun 25 06:47 UTC] No.44410825[source]▶
Except that socialism has failed already.

Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

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noelwelsh ◴[29 Jun 25 07:09 UTC] No.44410910[source]▶
Socialism is community ownership of resources. UBI is not socialism. It is income redistribution.

Your morals are very strange if they don't include care for others.

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1. GLdRH ◴[29 Jun 25 07:15 UTC] No.44410928[source]▶
UBI is not about "care". That's just the typical left-wing compassion framing.

I don't want to abolish all taxes, I'm not a libertarian. But giving away the money you took from somebody else needs a justification (for example to pay for the roads). And I find "income redistribution" for the sake of it not an acceptable goal.

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2. ryandrake ◴[29 Jun 25 07:38 UTC] No.44411033[source]▶
Why is paying for roads justifiable, but providing people a safety net not justifiable?
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3. Workaccount2 ◴[29 Jun 25 19:53 UTC] No.44415843[source]▶
Because people don't treat it as a "safety net" and instead use it as a "living net".

There is some contingent of people who will just not participate in society no matter what. So the question becomes where do we set the bar - the lower this bar, the smaller that contingent.