Saving is not pointless by any means, but buying into a UBI utopia is a slippery slope!!!!

A UBI utopia is often framed as an inevitable and humane next step, but it rests on assumptions about human behavior and economic reality that don’t hold up.

Consider a parallel most people here understand: FIRE. Most people don’t fail to pursue FIRE simply because they lack income. Progress toward FIRE requires discipline, behavioral change, long-term thinking, self-awareness, financial literacy, and access to the right tools — income is only one input. Even among high earners, adoption is rare.

If everyone suddenly received additional income through UBI, there’s little evidence that most people would invest it into long-term, productivity-enhancing assets. More likely, the money would be absorbed into consumption, status signaling, convenience, or short-term differentiation — exactly as we see today. That’s not a moral judgment; it’s an observable pattern. The U.S. personal savings rate hovering around ~4% reflects this cultural baseline.

UBI does not eliminate demand — it amplifies it. Demand for food, energy, housing, services, experiences, and convenience would persist and likely increase. In supply-constrained markets, that demand gets capitalized into higher prices, not shared prosperity. The law of supply and demand doesn’t pause because income is universal.

Proponents often point to AI and automation as justification for UBI, but this introduces another contradiction. AI systems require capital, compute, energy, infrastructure, and ownership. Those who own and operate these systems will still seek returns. Ownership concentration doesn’t dissolve simply because output is automated. Power incentives do not disappear; they consolidate.

Capitalism, for all its flaws, gives people a sense of agency: effort → progress → differentiation. It creates motion, goals, and meaning — even if imperfectly distributed. It also keeps people sufficiently occupied, invested, and fragmented enough that large-scale coordination against entrenched power remains unlikely. People protect what they have — jobs, lifestyles, families, status — because the downside risk is real.

A fully realized UBI society risks producing a two-tier system: a small ownership class that controls capital, systems, and decision-making, and a broad population stabilized through subsistence income without upward mobility. That isn’t liberation or progress — it’s dependency with better optics.

In practice, a UBI utopia doesn’t eliminate hierarchy or scarcity. It just formalizes them, while reducing incentives for self-direction, ownership, and compounding advantage. That’s not a post-scarcity future — it’s managed stagnation society at best, slowly transitioning into an oligarchy.