This is a bizarre generalization. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people who supported UBI before its moment in the political spotlight in the last five years are not as sanguine about unions as the average person on the left. This certainly describes me: I believe in heavy redistribution and taxation (especially of land!) but think that the left (which I consider myself a part of) has a consistent problem with being too arrogant to recognize how complex people's lives are, and damaging the worse-off in the name of helping them.

Insisting that support for unions and support for UBI must be linked is the same energy as insisting that more tightly restricting what food stamp recipients can buy is "helping" them.

Both unions and UBI try to address the same problem: make it so that people do not have to choose between abuse and starvation.

But they are completely different approaches to this problem. For example, unions do not protect unemployed people, while UBI protects everyone. On the other hand, a union is something you could create tomorrow at your workplace without waiting for the rest of the country to change their minds.

In some sense, they are competing solutions, because if we had UBI, unions would be less necessary, because everyone who feels abused would have the opportunity to walk away... without ruining their life.

Exactly, which is why the conflation of the two is so silly. There's a very tiny portion of humanity who actually _want_ others to starve, so competing solutions to the problem can easily show up in different views of the world.

Many people have a very simple-minded view of both politics and the world in general, which leads them to a low-resolution model that lumps things into two massive buckets and assume that everyone else takes their set of beliefs wholesale from one of the buckets.