1) No, they didn't.

2) America in 2026 is not the USSR in the 20th century, so even if they did, our circumstances are very different from theirs.

3) UBI was only the first suggestion; you completely failed to address the other and then jumped to a black-and-white conclusion.

The general thrust of my proposition was that people shouldn't have to submit to an artificial system of manufactured competition and unnecessary "productivity" in order to access goods that are objectively abundant. When people realize that and make the necessary compromises, they won't have to worry about shipping useless AI-assisted slop for "income security" and can focus on using AI to build consequential and useful software.

Please do not get bogged down in whatever kneejerk anti-UBI thought-loop your misaligned amygdala is screaming at you.

1) you'd have to expand on your refutation here. The soviets absolutely did decide top down how much bread each person deserved and how much it cost. They used that type of data to help decide how much grain to have farmers grow, where and when to ship it for bread production, and in part how much to pay people so they could buy their allocation of bread. Not directly a UBI, but functionally very similar with the caveat being they forced people to work in predefined jobs for a set pay rate.

2) I didn't say the US is the USSR. I pointed to a clear example where a UBI-like structure was tried and failed. Feel free to call out specific differences that may help it work better today in the US, I'm genuinely curious despite my skeptism.

3) I can respond to the others as well, but that isn't necessary to have an interesting debate or discussion on any one topic. If one was required to respond to all raised ideas they could try to shut down all conversation by threading together a long list of hard to discuss topics, avoiding responses to any one topic.

I do agree people can avoid having to submit to AI or ML systems though. We ultimately all make our decisions, some more impactful than others, and if we end up in a dystopian future with no jobs and AIs/robots in charge of the world we made that bed for ourselves.

I'm not bogged down in any kneejerk reactions and I'm not parroting what I've heard air bags saying elsewhere. I've read up on the topic, the history of the USSR, and read Marx writings (well the translations, I speak some Dutch but no German). We may disagree, but my views aren't uneducated reactions.

1) You are describing something that is not UBI, and calling it UBI anyway. A rationing system that is not fungible and that varies allocation is not universal, and not income as capitalism knows it. The Soviet planned economy was categorically not UBI. Full stop.

2) >I pointed to a clear example where a UBI-like structure was tried and failed.

You did not.

3) That's not applicable here. Why did you respond to the UBI issue only?

>I do agree people can avoid having to submit to AI or ML systems though.

I didn't speak to this at all. The "artificial system of manufactured competition and unnecessary 'productivity'" is independent of AI and ML and has existed for several decades.

>my views aren't uneducated reactions.

See 1.

My conclusion is that you actually aren't interested in a conversation. You haven't responded earnestly or considerately to anything in my initial post except the portion suggesting UBI, which you dismissed with a faulty presence.

Here is my suggestion: talk about something else from that post. Anything else. Do not revisit the UBI topic.

The only reason the Soviets didn't have a true UBI is because they realised they still needed people to work and they wouldn't if you gave them what they needed for free. That's why I said they had what was effectively a UBI, they decided what people needed or were entitled to and created a system that would give them only that. The fact that they forced people to work is an implementation detail that we'd likely run into in the US today as well, we couldn't afford for the government to cut checks and no one work.

I did respond earnestly, whether you accept it or if I'm explaining myself poorly. You have yet to propose how a UBI would actually work, or pointed to an example of it ever having worked in the past. Socialism and Marxism have been tried, the don't work. And yes, UBI is an idea that goes back to Marx's writings.

Per Claude: On the central factual dispute, fuzzythrowaway is right and _heimdall is wrong. The Soviet system was not a UBI, and the claim that it was “tried and failed” doesn’t hold up.

1. “The Soviets tried a UBI-like system and it failed”

The Soviet system was the opposite of a UBI in almost every defining respect.

It was conditional on work. During the 1929–35 rationing period, rationing applied only to people employed in state-owned industries and their family members, and politically disenfranchised “lishentsy” were deprived of rations entirely. There were four ration tiers, and the lower ones couldn’t get basic items like meat and fish. That is a tiered, employment-linked allocation, not a universal one.

Work was legally compulsory. The 1936 Constitution made work an obligation of every able-bodied citizen, on the principle that those who don’t work don’t eat. It also defined the system’s distribution principle as payment according to one’s work. A 1961 RSFSR decree went further and targeted people avoiding “socially useful work.” Joseph Brodsky was tried for “parasitism” in 1964. A system that punishes people for not working can’t be called a UBI.

It wasn’t cash, and it wasn’t the standing system. Rationing was in-kind and episodic. Bread rationing ended in early 1935 and all food rationing by October 1935, then returned in wartime and again during perestroika.

_heimdall’s fallback (that the Soviets lacked a “true UBI” only because they needed people to work, which was “an implementation detail”) concedes the point. Unconditionality is the defining feature of a UBI, not a detail. His causal logic also fails. The Soviet economy’s problems came from state control of production and prices, and a cash transfer leaves prices to the market. That is why Milton Friedman backed a negative income tax: he thought it would address poverty without expanding the state bureaucracy he opposed.

His claim that UBI “goes back to Marx” and so shares socialism’s failures is also unsupported. The histories I found trace the idea through Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1796/97), Thomas Spence, Joseph Charlier, and later Friedman and Stigler’s negative income tax. In 1968, more than 1,200 economists, including Tobin, Samuelson and Galbraith, signed a call for income guarantees. Marx isn’t in that lineage. Even if he were, a policy’s origin doesn’t determine whether it works.

2. “No one has shown a UBI working” Alaska is the best long-run case. Residents have received a universal, unconditional dividend since 1982, and a peer-reviewed study found no effect on employment and a 1.8-point (17%) rise in part-time work.

3. Other claims _heimdall’s AI/ML reply: fuzzythrowaway’s point was about an economic system that forces people into manufactured competition. _heimdall answered a different claim, about submitting to AI and ML systems. _heimdall’s false dichotomy: he says either post-scarcity utopia or continued competition for resources. UBI proposals assume scarcity continues, so the dichotomy doesn’t engage with them. _heimdall’s “top-down help never lasts”: he gives no evidence. Alaska’s dividend has run for over four decades, and the Social Security Act dates to 1935.

Claude correctly understands my earlier points and expands upon them with the history I was referencing and the rationale I was constructing. Perhaps it puts it more persuasively.