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Not giving everyone basic income recreates violent structures like Chinese Social credit score.

Sammeroff 19 Antony Sammeroff November 14, 2019. Antony Sammeroff co-hosts the Scottish Liberty Podcast and has featured prominently on other libertarian themed shows including The Tom Woods Show, Lions of Liberty, School Sucks Podcast, and many more. His book Universal Basic Income Universal Basic Income: A Dream Come True for Despots (https://mises.org/wire/universal-basic-income-dream-come-true-despots)

In China people can have their social credit score docked for posting fake news online. We may, of course, ask, fake according to whom? After all, the Chinese government maintains that the Tienanmen Square Massacre of 1989 was “fake news” drummed up by the West to undermine the regime. Closer to home, the mainstream media was entirely complicit in selling the war on Iraq to the public, but I very much doubt we will see people being sanctioned for posting news from mainstream sources such as the BBC or MSNBC. Our leaders are above falsifying our historic records and sending embarrassing incidents down the memory hole for permanent deletion. The purse strings of the universal basic income also present a grave threat to freedom of speech. Anyone who has been following the “woke wars” on Twitter and other social media platforms will have heard of people receiving lifetime bans for tweeting things like “Men are never women.” Now whether you believe such a message is transphobic or otherwise, you may at least believe that someone has the right to tweet it, and be duly educated as to the wrongs of their action by other users. The universal basic income could easily become the new weapon to wield against those who hold unpopular opinions or those that are simply no longer politically correct. It will be first used to strike against unpopular groups such as racists, misogynists, homophobes, and bigots. Not many people will come to their defense when they lose their basic income for spreading hate. But one day you yourself may hold an unpopular opinion that is relatively benign. Maybe you will say that people shouldn’t have their basic income docked just because they say unpopular things on the internet. You will not just be slapped with a Twitter ban, you will potentially lose $1000 a month.

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