I still like the idea of clawing back mineral and water rights and paying for basic services out of the money payed by industry for the right to dirty our air and water. As a citizen you're entitled to compensation for the smoke you're breathing.

People talk about how socially progressive Scandinavia is but they have a shitload of petroleum resources and that money goes into social programs.

I'd love to make companies pay for their products' entire lifecycle, including disposal and cleanup. It's not right that a company can manufacture future-trash, sell it, and then absolve itself of the negative externality when the customer throws the product away and off it goes into a landfill.

If a company's process produces waste, it should bear the entire cost of leaving the environment the way they found it rather than just pumping the waste into it. If a company's products are not reused, it should bear the cost of taking the used product back and restoring the world to the way it was before the product was built.

this reminds me of retropunk and the hundred rabbits

Yep, we should charge every farm for all the poop that people that eat their food make

Fruit farmers are furious.

> People talk about how socially progressive Scandinavia is but they have a shitload of petroleum resources and that money goes into social programs

Of all the Scandinavian countries, only Norway has any oil resources of significance.

The Scandinavian welfare model is primarily tax-funded.

My quick look at Swedish exports shows that the largest export is finished equipment at 14%, fuel exports at 7.1, 4.8% wood and paper, 3.6% iron and steel, of which I'm sure a lot of that equipment is made. 3.4% plastics, which is just oil in another form.

It looks like you're right and their oil exports are all import/export rather than domestic, but that's still a good bit of mineral wealth.

Yes Sweden has non-trivial mineral resources, but nothing like e.g. China, Russia or Australia though.

The Scandinavian social programs are funded by high taxation. It is mostly a result of political prioritization, and not a windfall of natural resources.

There's been enormous pushback, pushes for privatizing (ruining) it, underfunding it from Congress, an absolute refusal to remove the criminally low income cap on contributions, etc.

One could make the argument that the modern Republican Party has in fact largely been shaped by this pushback.

>There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.

The racist moral panic over "welfare queens" seems to be a counter example.

And the same person who posts about that on Facebook will the next day post “keep your government hands off my social security check.”

Minorities don’t just get social security. People don’t get social security if they don’t work or don’t have a spouse who worked. They pay in to the system via payroll taxes. With UBI who is going to pay into that? UBI just seems like a pipe dream.

With UBI, everyone is going to pay into that via taxes. It's not any different from other forms of welfare.