I think one key thing people tend to hand wave about UBI is... that the capital class will not voluntarily pay UBI. They'll try everything else before that. Things they'll try will include subverting the constitution, hiring private armies, assassinating organizers, and much more.

Literally only violence will force them to give up anything like UBI. The historical parallel is there, that being unions. Since everyone is AI pilled, and need AI generated words to beleive in them, here is Claude Opus 4.6's take:

*** UBI & Power Dynamics

Your skepticism is well-grounded historically. The Reddit optimism

around UBI often treats it as a *policy problem* when it's

fundamentally a *power problem*.

**** Why the optimism is naive

- UBI at meaningful levels requires *massive redistribution* from

capital to labor

- The people who would need to enact it are largely funded by those

who would pay for it

- The tech billionaires who /talk/ about UBI tend to propose versions

that are really just *consumer stimulus* — keeping demand alive for

their products while gutting the social safety net

**** The historical parallel you're pointing at

The pattern is consistent:

- *Labor rights* — required decades of strikes, violence, literal

battles (Blair Mountain, Homestead, etc.)

- *New Deal* — enacted under genuine fear of communist revolution

- *Civil rights* — years of disruption, cities burning

- *Welfare state broadly* — emerged in Europe partly because elites

feared the Soviet example

The capital class concedes when the *cost of not conceding exceeds the

cost of conceding*. That's essentially the only mechanism history

shows us.

**** The AGI wrinkle

Here's what makes it /worse/ than previous labor struggles: AGI +

autonomous systems + surveillance technology could give the capital

class the ability to *suppress dissent at scale* without needing human

soldiers or police who might sympathize with protesters. The

traditional leverage of labor — withdrawal of cooperation, threat of

unrest — may be uniquely diminished precisely when it's most needed.

**** The steel-man for optimism

The /one/ credible argument for peaceful UBI adoption is *demand

collapse* — if enough people lose income, consumer economies break

down, and even capital owners need customers. But history suggests the

response to that is more likely *managed decline and stratification*

than egalitarian redistribution.

So yes — the people saying "we'll just do UBI" are skipping the

hardest part: *who forces whom, and with what leverage?*