You don’t need to be political to “qualitatively parse” what I wrote. I didn’t even say anything about politics, I talked about government power and the tendency for governments to want to increase their power and control, as well as the fact that people working in the government and especially at higher-up levels are concerned primarily (only) with increasing their own power, control and status.
How is any of that difficult for you to “qualitatively parse”? Freedom, human dignity and not being a slave to a totalitarian state are not ideas you need to have a “political take” on. These are logical, fundamental issues.
Maybe you wouldn’t mind being a slave, that would not surprise me. Lots of very techie, mechanistic-autistic materialistic atheist sort of people seem well encapsulated under that umbrella of personality types. Not that I am saying you are any of those things necessarily since I don’t know you that well yet. But I have noticed the remarkably reliable tendency that people who do fit one or more of those types “techie, mechanistic-autistic, materialistic, atheist” tend to have these non-chalant attitudes toward state government power and the totalitarianism of the state. They at least claim not to care that much, or that it’s not really a problem at all.
If you think “relative stability and prosperity” will come from surrendering your economic power to the State, think again. You will get just the opposite. Those examples you mentioned don’t apply. The modern governments and totalitarian states of the world are not “Athens”, although the decadence and degeneracy and laziness that led to Athens’ downfall could be applicable somewhat to the modern west today. And prosperity in any of these regions and times did not occur because the government/state gave everyone what they needed to survive. People need to work productively, to produce, because that equates to adding value into the world around them. If you give them enough housing, clothing, food and water to live on they will simply stop working, stop producing value. Where, then, would the value come from to keep them housed, clothed and fed?
The only reason UBI is an issue now, supposedly, is because of advanced technology and how insanely well it multiplies the output value-creation of economic productive processes. Supposedly this would lead to enough excess value being created by relatively few people that everyone else can be given what they need to survive on a basic level. Maybe that is true, maybe not. Or maybe even a smaller amount of UBI, not enough to live on but enough to help out, is more realistic. Even that would lead people to work less and would not get around the problem of the government “owning you” in terms of your material needs and stability in your life.
Why do you think people with disabilities always vote for larger government, larger taxes, more benefits? Because they are the beneficiaries, they don’t care that the entire society is going into unpayable debt or that more and more money is being stolen from others who actually worked for it and produced value for the world around them. They don’t even care about government atrocities or tyranny so long as it’s not impacting them personally, all they care about is the free benefits and free cash keeps coming into their pockets.
What kind of retarded way is that to structure a society of supposedly intelligent, free people? You don’t need to be political to understand the basic logic of a moral hazard and the tragedy of the commons.