As a leftist, UBI is a concept that both excites and scares me. It is a last ditch effort to save a consumer economy, and further removes people from labor organizing. With price hikes and unethical corporations and governments, a UBI could simply become a way to increase the price of every object and service, while also preventing the one method through which average people have ever genuinely impacted change: the union and strike. How do we unionize around ourself when we are removed from work? It’s a scary concept.

I love the idea of removing the means of survival from meaningless work, and I truly believe that is the direction we need to go if we wish to continue basing our economy off of consumerism and money (which, frankly, I don’t think we need to do), but in order for it work and be anything other than an actual nightmarescape, UBI has to be coupled (in some concrete, irreversible way) with things like price controls, rent controls, and some way for people to functionally unionize as citizens outside of their respective employment.

But all that said, we can’t even get single payer healthcare in the US, so this is more of a “what they should do in Europe” situation, as here in the US the answer to “will we get a UBI” is “go fucking die in a hole, you disgusting poor. But not that hole. That’s my hole.”