Well, then, just out of shot in the third panel of the cartoon there can be a box for someone to sit on if they need it, made by a carpenter whose livelihood no longer depends on his making one box per person willy-nilly whether they are needed or not because he gets UBI. :)
This sounds rather like that proverb I can't remember right now, whose gist is that just because we can't make things perfect that's no reason not to make them better if we can. We can certainly do a lot better right now than we have been doing. Some historical monuments need disabled access (as indeed does the remarkably ugly listed building in Westbury which houses Lloyds Bank, whose wheelchair-bound customers at the moment have, I kid you not, to discuss their private business on the steeply sloping pavement outside) and if it destroys the ambiance it's just too bad. Others may be manageable without.
The cartoon may indeed be overly simplistic as a blueprint for social improvement. It may be that "fairness" is something you can't make a system of universally applicable rules for, that case by case is the only way to get it right as often as possible. What the cartoon does, in a way that's resonated with a fair number of people besides me, is to indicate a wrong and a right way to go about thinking around the problem.
Who gets to decide? The people adversely affected, and the people with the power to make the decisions, working together with the support of society as a whole. It wouldn't be perfect, and some people would still be less than happy, and some things wouldn't work at all. It may be life can't be made completely fair for everyone. I don't know.
But we could do a lot better than we are doing now if we could only thwart and disempower those who are actively working against any kind of fairness at all.
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This sounds rather like that proverb I can't remember right now, whose gist is that just because we can't make things perfect that's no reason not to make them better if we can. We can certainly do a lot better right now than we have been doing. Some historical monuments need disabled access (as indeed does the remarkably ugly listed building in Westbury which houses Lloyds Bank, whose wheelchair-bound customers at the moment have, I kid you not, to discuss their private business on the steeply sloping pavement outside) and if it destroys the ambiance it's just too bad. Others may be manageable without.
The cartoon may indeed be overly simplistic as a blueprint for social improvement. It may be that "fairness" is something you can't make a system of universally applicable rules for, that case by case is the only way to get it right as often as possible. What the cartoon does, in a way that's resonated with a fair number of people besides me, is to indicate a wrong and a right way to go about thinking around the problem.
Who gets to decide? The people adversely affected, and the people with the power to make the decisions, working together with the support of society as a whole. It wouldn't be perfect, and some people would still be less than happy, and some things wouldn't work at all. It may be life can't be made completely fair for everyone. I don't know.
But we could do a lot better than we are doing now if we could only thwart and disempower those who are actively working against any kind of fairness at all.