Exosemantics, Therefore Universal Basic Income Probably Isn’t Egalitarian
Written by Hadley Bennett Posted in Uncategorized
Last week, I argued that ideologies are proxies for thedes. There are about five posts more queued up in my head, which all unpack the concept in different ways, but I’ll only explore one here. It’ll help keep the blood from leaking out of your ears, owing to all the autism.
Ideologies are proxies for thedes, and so are policy instruments. Employ a little bit of Bayesian reasoning for a moment. If you encounter someone who refuses to label themselves while simultaneously advocating for extensive health and safety regulations in the workplace, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, a progressive income tax structure, government-provided daycare, gender parity, anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, and so on, it’s almost certain that the person identifies as a run-of-the-mill vanilla liberal.
The heuristic works. But what happens when we need to delve a little deeper? What happens is that we discard the apparent necessary link between policy instruments and ideologies. It appears necessary because it works so often, but there are times where you push the lever and the heuristic misfires, so it’s instructive to lay out conditions of its operation. In other words, when it misfires, back to the manual. Instead of just pulling the lever again—back to the manual.
The manual states that while policy instruments function as a good heuristic for ideologies and thedes, they can be conceptually detached from ideologies and thedes because intentionality, a crucial component of the equation, can’t be necessarily assumed to be a constant.
Prohibition is a policy goal, X is a policy instrument. Both the bootleggers and the Baptists support X, although the intentionality is plainly different.
After all, I’m just describing what neoreaction is most known for: appropriating leftist concepts without itself being leftist, mostly because the conclusions drawn from the concepts are different, but also because the intentionality imparted to the appropriated concepts is radically different. Concepts aren’t much different from policy instruments in any relevant sort of way in this case, so really, the argument that minimum wage is a hammer—and not a Satanic Sickle by essence—shouldn’t be that controversial.
You know the drill. The hammer isn’t intrinsically good or bad, but if you see the hammer being used by progressives, it’s easy to mistakenly think that the hammer is intrinsically linked with progressivism.
Thede logic is useful up to a certain point, but it isn’t higher-order enough—especially if I need to explore interesting uses for the minimum wage which progressives would froth at the mouth over while being dragged to the madhouse. At that point, thede logic should be discarded in favor of a higher-order, dispassionate pragmatism which looks at generating certain outcomes rather than throwing exosemantic gang signs.
Let me just illustrate the distinction for a minute in the phrase: “Libertarianism is for straight, white males.” Is that true? Well, by thede logic it actually is. And what’s more important for most people?—the description of thede dynamics or the intrinsic logic of libertarianism as such? Obviously libertarianism as such can accommodate other races, and gays, and females, but pointing that out is too miss the point—it’s too higher-order, and so it’s a wrong response, relative to the original question. Most people are forever confined to the realm of thede logic, which is why they endlessly wring their hands about the libertarian view of golf, tennis, God, and X.
News-flash: libertarianism as such has nothing to say about golf. The libertarian view of golf is for people who can only think in terms of thede logic. What does the inquiry really mean? Something like this: what do libertarians personally think about golf?
So does it make sense to call Bismarck a socialist because he instituted the welfare state in order to nip a socialist revolution in the bud? Hardly. I’d say more of a crafty pragmatist, that is, assuming other alternatives weren’t feasible. In a particular environment, if I can empirically link the minimum wage to reduced levels of violence, then I take reduced violence to be a higher priority than higher employment.
That’s a big ‘if’ of course. With that in mind, I disagree with Henry Dampier’s most recent post here at Social Matter:
“On the right, especially the outer right, it makes no sense to advocate for basic income policies while also claiming to be against egalitarianism.”
This would be true if the argument could be convincingly made that the only possible reason or motivation for universal basic income is egalitarian in nature. Not thedeishly egalitarian. Egalitarian as such. And hell, that may be true for universal basic income, but it is unlikely to be true for almost every other policy instrument, mostly because policy instruments are incredibly complex and can’t be boiled down to singular effects.
At the end of the day, thede logic and intrinsic logic are different. Exosemantic policies on a higher-order level can be detached from thedes and treated like hammers: Use As Needed, and They Ain’t Intrinsically Attached To That Bad Thede Or Ideology.
The only criticism I can level at this is grammatical, and even then it might be a matter of taste. I would have written ‘high-enough order’ instead of ‘higher-order enough.’
I expect UBI would destroy a country’s industrial base. I will continue to claim neo-Luddites are wrong until one of their predictions come true. All industrial products depend critically on low-skill labour, which will be bid up by the UBI. This will make basic products more expensive, requiring a higher UBI, which will subsequently bid labour even higher, and so on until the country produces nothing or the UBI is abolished.
Equivalently, fewer people making stuff means less total stuff to distribute.
Notably, while American industrial labour has stagnated or even started to chip at decline, America is not really losing jobs to China: the productivity has increased and American industrial capacity was climbing as recently as a couple years ago.
Ironically, a non-universal, particularist basic income is unquestionably better than welfare. Implementing it in towns that have already lost their industrial core solves more problems than it creates.
Right collectivism would probably take a much different form that UBI. Of course whether UBI “works” (for some values of work) remains an empirical question. But those on the right have a habit of distrusting empirical answers. The true nth order effects are not likely to be measurable… until it is too late.
There is much to be said for carving out means of raising the productivity of the marginal. I don’t think Dampier would deny this. I suspect he thinks there are better ways to accomplish it than UBI.