Some have argued that slavery is defined by the ability of a slave owner to steal and sell children and that therefore wage slavery is a whiny emo term because McDonald’s can’t sell their employees children to Wendy’s. But the fact is the 1% DO buy and sell (y)our children because it saddles them with original debt and gives them a false choice every bit as loaded as the choice a slave faces: Suffer profitably for us, suffer punitively, or die.
I for example, having ethics and will power, decided while still a virgin to never have children until I could afford to have them as a free person. That means not being dependent on the whim of an employer or a public school system with regard to how that child develops. This is a freedom that actually only the very rich in today’s world have.
Virtually no one in the developed world has that freedom. And the few that potentially might, have been brain wiped by that same education system and media such that they think indenturing their children to this system is not only wise, but morally urgent. Many of the rich are keen to indoctrinate their larva, saddling them with a different kind of original debt.
Original debt is the original sin of the modern world’s church.
Children are born non-people (as proved by the facts that they can’t vote and they can legally be whipped at will virtually anywhere on earth) and they even if considered citizens would still be considered worthless because by default they are “uneducated.” Which as Frank Zappa and Ray Bradbury will tell you, just means mostly unburdened by student loan debt.
People of the bootlicking variety are keen to point out how awesome compulsory education is simply because it’s costly to impose but free for the victim. But that’s the first step of original debt. It’s the collective version of the cliche abusive guardian railing about how hard it is to feed/cloth a child, therefore they should be grateful and obedient.
Which would make sense to some degree if it was an actual choice for the ward. That lack of choice is the essence of slavery.
This concept of owing a debt to your owners flies in the face of any objective non-arbitrary definition of human rights because it attaches a price tag to being born as if it was a choice.
In a sense a pet literally has more choice because a dog or a cat actually can choose to leave and the result doesn’t necessarily mean torture and death, though for a pet deep in human controlled territory or a harsh setting it could mean that.
Put simply, I didn’t ask to be born. There are two ways generally you can parse that. You can either kill me when I don’t comply. (Amusingly acknowledged with the cliche threat, I brought you into this world I can take you out.) Or you can recognize that my being alive is a debt to be paid by someone other than me. In my case the debt is paid by my parents but this isn’t fair for several reasons. Firstly, all three of us live under government rule. They ultimately have authority over every aspect of our lives. I am not allowed to so much as build a fire in my front yard or dig a well without a permit. (They have literally gone so far as to demand I paint my house a certain color.) Thus I have been utterly stripped of any real ability to provide for myself independently.
Both for ethical reasons and for diversity reasons participation in the “job” market needs to be a real choice between two or more viable alternatives.
It is morally urgent for society to accept responsibility and allow for the choice to opt out. Anything else is by definition true slavery. I should as a human by default own a share of the planet’s value equal to it’s total value divided by it’s population. “The per capita PPP GWP was approximately US$12,400.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
If I were given that by default in exchange for playing by the rules, then we could talk about employment being a choice. We could then talk about capitalism in Horatio Alger pluck and determination terms. All the self improvement and ambition rhetoric would apply.
But it doesn’t so long as the choice is dental torture and slow starvation, or being a wage/debt slave.
If my “choice” is choose an owner, be it corporate, clerical, or government, or be homeless, excommunicated, or imprisoned, then I had about as much choice as the slave who could at best choose who caused their death, or which form of torture to endure.
Until it’s actually possible for someone to live in society at the expense of society as a kind of collective inheritance, then “citizens” are nothing but slaves, with varying degrees of perks.
What if the solution, the real meaningful qualitative and quantitative solution to poverty is as easy as cutting them a check drawn from the wealthiest people and companies?
Well, it is. Read on.
Update: 2017-01-24 1017 AM (I really need to restructure and rewrite this, but it’s a mammoth task.)
“I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr
“…hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions. . . . Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.” ~Joseph Townsend
“Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.” ~Patrick Colquhoun
It seems obvious when you think about it from a problem solving perspective. If poverty means a lack of money, what’s the obvious way to correct for a lack of money? What’s the one thing that you can give to a person that is by definition 100% effective at improving their fiscal status? Money, duh.
Now what is the one thing rich people and companies equally by definition have that poor people do not? Again, money. What if the solution were that simple? What if thanks to economy of scale and diminishing returns and other facts of reality, taking money from areas of high concentration and putting it in areas of low concentration profited everyone?
What if the solution, the real meaningful qualitative and quantitative solution to poverty is as easy as cutting them a check drawn from the wealthiest people and companies?
Once we realize the issue is at its core a wealth inequality issue, the next question, as we slowly wake up, will be the best way to fix it. This post contains a few of my thoughts on how to accomplish that. I’ve made the same proposal in various places, but I can’t recall where right off.
What I expect to occur if this were implemented is something like the following, explained by a YouTube commenter…
“Progressive taxation was put in place by Roosevelt DURING the Depression in 1934, he taxed all income $25K+ 90% it would be like 250K+ today. The result is that the wealthy started hiring people to avoid PAYING NINETY % That caused unemployment to decline from 25% to NINE % by 1936 still a RECORD DROP to this day. The taxes were FLATTENED by Coolidge in the 20’s and that HELPED cause the mess.”
My solution is partly a kind of progressive tax. It makes sense because your 50th (or your 1,000th) million doesn’t change your life a fraction as much as your first million. Or put more obviously, the rich can afford to pay more both quantitatively, and qualitatively due to diminishing returns.
My idea is that, plus a general payment. That makes sense because we intrinsically realize we have an unconditional responsibility to each other by default, but we don’t express it behaviorally in any fundamental pro-active way. Though we do express it reactively, for instance we agree on making it illegal to kill anyone who isn’t directly about to kill you. This is obviously supporting the assumption that regardless of who you are, you deserve a certain measure of respect from all living humans.
Every social safety net and charitable act contains some element of that. But these nets and acts are stopgaps, and ad-hoc. What is needed is a systemic solution, and I think I have it. It’s not new, but it’s never really been tried, and I think the time is rapidly approaching.
This video goes into a bit of detail on the problem and ends by suggesting discussion but offers no opinion on a possible solution. This is my proposal for said solution.
In my opinion, the problem with capitalism is that it is incomplete. It cannot by definition answer large scale tragedy of the commons issues. Any system composed entirely of agents acting in their own interest (which is all willful human action) will self sabotage at some point because of the nature of reality.
What we need to do is add an element of general service. (Which I often compare to a water cycle, as in evaporation and precipitation.) I propose a wealth cap plus a general payment to all to be funded by overage of the cap (say 100-1000X the average).
In this way we can tolerate the tragedy and contradictions intrinsic to capitalism because the brackets at the bottom and top prevent total failure and they scale to the size of the problem. (Like a perfect bilge pump.)
Then all we’d have to do really is guard against intentional sabotage of the system, or corruption of that system. And this could easily be accomplished I believe with the existing set of checks and balances.
Edit: And by “the nature of reality” I mean: Any system which seeks diversity (as capitalism is designed to do by allowing in theory any kind of commerce) in a context where tragedy of the commons are possible, will eventually experience that possibility.
Previous solutions fail because they become manifestations of self interest and thus become items in the same set, merely additional capitalists. The solution has to be everyone, and it has to be irreverent of any individual unit’s self interest.
Edit: I recently had cause to restate this idea elsewhere, and I think I did a better job that time. So I’m pasting it here as well in case what I wrote above is insufficient.
The problem with capitalism is that it does not take into account the tragedy of the commons, of which wealth gap expansion and corruption are merely symptoms.
Capitalism as it stands is like a water cycle without evaporation or rain. Add those two things and the ecosystem will thrive sufficient to address the remaining problems in an ethically acceptable way.
See also: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html
Addition: a lot of the rhetoric aimed at people in American culture assumes a strictly voluntary aspect. As if poverty is a consequence of laziness and the like, but I’ve always found it amazing that people accept that work is a “choice” when the punishment for not working is homelessness and the horror that entails.
To me that’s no more a choice that handing over your wallet when being mugged or perhaps a bit more accurately, picking cotton or risking the whip.
I mean even slavery was a choice if you want to get THAT technical about it. Plenty of people simply refused to be slaves and were killed or tortured to death. As with a mugging, you can always attempt to fight them off.
But it’s understood in all other walks of American life, as demonstrated by the ubiquity of the phrase “I had no choice” that for a choice to be real it must permit at least a passingly endurable alternative.
Which is what would ensue if there were a basic level of income provided for all law abiding citizens sufficient to live in reasonable comfort and safety.
Ironically, while many 1% puppets argue that this state of affairs would lead to mass laziness and degeneracy I believe the opposite would occur as suddenly every bit of work ethic and class mobility rhetoric would suddenly have radically improved moral authority since “getting off your ass” would become a real choice as opposed to a passive distributed mugging.
Further, patriotism would likely mushroom because suddenly people would be in it together, like working for a company with generous profit sharing policies. As opposed to working for a boss who treats you little better than office equipment.
It would be hard to whine about dead beats sapping the system when you receive the exact same benefits. This would also open the door for safely scaling back if not eliminating some social safety nets. Not to mention the dividends paid system wide as people would suddenly have a tolerable fall back point from which to invest.
Everyone could start a small business or play the stock market and if they bomb totally they know they’ll always have the baseline income to survive on. The only thing you’d have to watch out for is debt. But with everyone getting a baseline income how credit ratings are determined could also safely be reformed. Predatory lending and the student loan bubble could be addressed.
And on and on.
And to those who would say or imply this is somehow unamerican…
1. Scientific research proves over and over again that simply giving people money, unconditionally, (a) is highly effective at ending poverty and (b) is significantly cheaper than any other form of welfare.
2. A universal basic income would make for significantly “smaller government” in terms of budget, paperwork, regulation, and government-paid employees.
3. If there has been any failure on the part of supporters of these ideas, it has been a lack of confidence; it is frequently the case that these programs are far more successful than even their supporters had expected. This has led to successful programs being killed on at least two occasions, rather than being expanded as they should have been.
4. Example experiments:
– a. London, UK, 2009: 13 long-term homeless men are each given 3000 pounds cash, unconditionally.
– b. Uganda, 2008: the government gave about $400 to almost 12,000 youths between the ages of 16 and 35.
– c. northern Uganda: the government gives $150 to 1,800 poor women.
– d: Dauphin, Canada, 1973 – the “Mincome” project: families below the poverty line — about 1000 families, or 30% of the population — received a monthly paycheck equivalent to about $18k/year (adjusted for inflation). After 4 years, a newly-elected conservative government nixed the project (citing cost, of course) and wouldn’t even pay to have the data analyzed. Supporters of the project were afraid that the data might confirm conservative claims of its failure, so they didn’t press for analysis either. In 2009, a researcher was finally (after 5 years of requests) to gain access to the data — and found that it had been a huge success.
– e. US: PA/IN/NC/Seattle/Denver, 1964 In a major social experiment (with controls), 10,000 families receive basic income (amount unspecified), unconditionally. By 1970, there was widespread support (popular and political) for using the program as a nationwide model and mostly eliminating other existing social support programs, but then it emerged that divorce rates in Seattle had gone up among the income recipients, and the Senate axed the idea. This later turned out to be a calculation error: divorce rates had not changed.
5. Outcomes from these experiments:
* Recipients spent the money wisely, effectively, and frugally.
* Recipients did not use the money for drink, drugs, gambling, or other vices.
* Direct income was more cost-effective than other aid programs, often by a large factor. It was also more effective than aid-worker salaries.
* Homelessness was reduced.
* Other income increased.
* Employment either increased (Uganda) or only decreased slightly (9% – US).
* Birth rate declined.
* Birth weights improved.
* Hospital visits declined 8.5%
* School performance and attendance improved for children; some adults returned to school to acquire further skills.
6. Conservative claims contradicted by the results of these experiments:
* Investment in poverty does not work.
* “Utopian” social experiments don’t work.
* People won’t work if you give them money unconditionally.
* People will waste their money if it isn’t “earned”.
* Providing a universal basic income is unaffordable.
* A universal income will have the opposite of its intended effect.
—–
The life of a person with one billion dollars is qualitatively identical to a person with two billion dollars. Explore the argument against a flat tax to understand how wealth behaves in this way. Economy of scale and diminishing returns prevents this from being a zero sum game. This is actually good news because it explains why every non-biased empirical examination supports a UBI.
It means that a UBI is not only possible, but ultimately profitable qualitatively for all parties. A rising tide lifts all ships. This isn’t more slices of the same pizza, or even proportionally more pizza per person, but better pizza all around. The wealthy would do well to study these concepts. The principal of diminishing returns applies not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Basic economics class typically makes this clear with a beer enjoyment analogy.
Also money has critical mass. Reasonably handled, income at a certain point becomes effectively self renewing. Charging a billionaire half is neither qualitatively nor quantitatively equivalent to charging a homeless man half. Giving a million to a billionaire as opposed to a homeless person is equivalently dissimilar.
The opportunity cost of allowing the rich (be they corporate or human) to hoard wealth without limit will eventually be more than humanity can afford to pay and a choice will have to be made. If the obscenely wealthy think that we as a species will choose to cull ourselves in order to allow them to keep surplus money they by definition can’t even enjoy, they aren’t just wrong, they are suicidally delusional.
The currently wealthy would be wise to unilaterally support a UBI system that leaves them with little to no qualitative impact relative to what they enjoy now prior to the point where everyone else is forced to force it on them. Because make no mistake. That time will arrive, either as the resources at the bottom of the economic food chain dry up faster than we can innovate functional replacements, or as the psychopathic obsessive corruption process currently utilized by the wealth grows sufficiently successful that it captures wealth faster than it can be created.
Put simply, any market based economic system without a UBI and a progressive tax to fund it is in the long term intrinsically unsustainable for the same reason a water cycle in which there is no evaporation or precipitation ceases to be a cycle.
More over, any argument against a UBI unethically and directly condones horror and dismisses the suffering of others based on arbitrary criteria of what constitutes “deserving” it.
It is ethically self evident to any rational being that no one “deserves” the sorts of tortures and losses of life that are directly relevant to economic starvation and lives of de facto slavery.
“There is no discussion of the possibility that the value of the grant will be eroded because of the effects of the grant on the price of various goods that lower-income people buy.”
Firstly, a UBI without a wealth cap, preferably manifested as a progressive tax up to 100%, like the energy cost of trying to reach the speed of light, is nothing but a right wing straw man argument at best. It is designed to fail.
A UBI implemented in a vacuum as Charles apparently suggests, could and therefor would be completely countered by corporate greed and de facto price fixing the likes of which has already destroyed class mobility in my culture.
The margins on all trade accessible to the common citizen are effectively closed by the market function coupled with psychopathic wealth obsession.
This is in my view the chief reason class mobility in a free market economy tends towards annihilation and has in the time since our founding almost completely died.
Also I’d like to just quickly say that education isn’t the answer either, any more than loans and simply working longer hours is, because education has a limit as well and the easy way to see that is how many billionaires had a PhD before their first billion. Education doesn’t produce wealth any more than a loan does. It simply allows a person to extract a slightly larger portion of wealth allocated by the rest of the system for compensation of labor. And even with no upper limit on mental capacity and ability, and infinite capacity of all participants in education, (which is obviously not the case anyway) you’d still have pressure from the rest of the system to reduce that labor cost. This is part of why the value of a degree falls every year.
Focusing on this or that to fix the middle class is temporary, at best. To solve the problem you must either A. Create an infinite amount of natural resources, which isn’t going to happen, or to B. Directly link wealth acquisition to wealth provision. The economic cycle must be a cycle. It cannot be a spiral and be sustainable at the same time. It cannot be a virtuous or a vicious cycle.This is proven even at the partial scale. When you link provision with acquisition, you get flow, and flow is how economic health is defined. It’s not even dirt simple folks, it’s water simple.
Even post singularity there will be a limit. The hard limits of physical reality. Entropy will still win in the ultra long run unless the rules permit highly exotic meta options beyond the realm of even Sci-Fi such as exiting the universe for greener pastures, or custom making a new one from a shopping list of traits, or editing the fundamental laws themselves somehow.
In anycase in the present, no longer can anyone honestly call America the land of opportunity with a straight face and an informed mind and a UBI without a wealth cap to fund it merely delays the inevitable.
EBay for example makes it virtually impossible to resell anything you acquire from a corporate distributor because they are a de facto monopoly. You have to add a 20% markup right up front just to cover their fees. Selling locally is impossible because you’re always a bike ride away from one of their outlets. Either that or you’re paying a 50% consignment store cut, or you’re paying for space in a mall or whatever. The best you could do temporarily is a yard sale, but for that you must own or at least rent/lease land or space, and if you continue the practice you’ll face opposition from the government which likes to control everything and take a piece of all action, in this case via taxes and licenses. And don’t even think about liability and all the lawyers just waiting for blood in the water.
If you could afford to compete in that context, you’re either not poor or you’re on the down hill run into debt slavery. Thus bootstrapping becomes the myth that it has. The margins being crushed by these and other forces make being a small businessman impossible for anyone who doesn’t already have money.
Entry level jobs require participation in aid programs to break even. (Ask walmart employees.) Shifting aid to a UBI would change nothing for the working poor. It would still be impossible for them to have savings. The Walmarts of the world would adjust pay to compensate, especially since they’d now have increased political capitol to do so. (See below.)
This is because all these corporate middle men, cannot be removed through competitive action because they are actually organs of trademark and patent monopolies and contractual tyranny which might as well be feudal title land grants and the like. (E.G. Walmart crushing every mom and pop retail niche in the country to the same degree as a soviet state store.) So long as walmart exists it is not possible to piece meal an alternative. They have completely filled the niche. They can afford to take a loss for decades if need be to crush any locally viable competitor. And if that doesn’t work they can just influence local officials or engage in any other manner of quasi-legal competition squashing.
Thus if a UBI were implemented, barring other reform, the economic climate at the UBI/poverty level would be structured in such a Machiavellian way as to preserve the wage slave state in which we now live.
At best it would be possible to withdraw and save up for a gap jump, knowing that at the very least a fall would not lead to permanent homelessness. Like buying an established business outright for a premium or loading up on life insurance so that at least your progeny could maybe class jump when you die, though of course now you’ll be absent to teach them how to handle said money, which is why we have the notion of shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. Though instead of insurance perhaps you could build a trust.
For the middle class the UBI check would be consumed by regular interest payments leading to the kind of solvent paycheck to paycheck wage slavery where you are technically with income, but you never see it because of variable interest and automatic withholding/bill pay.
Sure the bottom rung of society would be perhaps better off, which is no small accomplishment, but they would have no where to go since the middle class would still be vanishing or treading water as the margins close to consume the UBI check like the businesses that sprang up to consume stimulus checks.
Also, every dime of income they get would even more pitilessly ripped from them using the argument that it’s ok to fleece them completely, since they have the UBI to fall back on, making middle class wage slavery a “choice” in the same sense that handing over your wallet during a mugging is a choice.
That is why the wealth cap via progressive tax is an essential component of my version of the UBI. Simply diverting funds from other aid programs in some kind of grand bargain will only change the particulars of the one way flow of money from dirt to 1%. It is not redistribution any more than streetlights are when redistribution is exactly what is needed.
A UBI would much needed rain in a parched land of hydraulic despotism no question, but you can’t supply that rain by simply rerouting water already going to these areas via irrigation. It would help no doubt, but on the whole even if there are gains to be made from increased efficiency it would still only be a temporary boon and rapidly the margins would close and any gains would again flow upward before the poor even had a chance to see them.
In order for UBI to work in the long term, in order for a culture to work in the long term, with any real degree of market freedom, you’d need precipitation to insure that no matter how efficient the top got at squeezing the margins you’d always have more money to put into the UBI or other areas to compensate.
Also, for the record, I do not support any kind of forced allocation of the UBI. Telling people what they must spend the UBI on isn’t a UBI, it’s foodstamps by proxy. Just another aid program. That’s not a real solution.
If you want everyone to have health insurance/retirement/whatever then provide it separately. It’s cheaper that way anyway.
Put simply, the idea is to obviate aid programs, not replace them.
“Reich says raising the minimum wage and expanding the earned income tax credit will deliver immediate financial relief to citizens on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. He says increasing taxes on the wealthy will underwrite the public investments needed to lift the underclass.”
“But Reich says getting money out of politics, and overturning Citizens United, is also a necessary step in the reformation of the American economy.”
I agree. These are immediate, morally urgent, and realistic steps in the correct direction, though I believe that they too are temporary unless something like a wealth cap/ubi (ops?) is hidden in the fine print. I strongly oppose this implication that universal employment is a good thing. Forcing people to earn their right to live is fundamentally opposed to the entire concept of human rights.
In a sense, the rise of the 1% is just the logical result of both sides subconsciously agreeing to this fact and making or allowing policy accordingly. Once you admit a couple key concepts, among which is this universal conscription tripe, the end result is the slow motion genocide we find ourselves in.
If this passes, I suspect I’ll for one look back on this era and see the word “lazy” to mean the same thing as “commie” and “terrorist” and that I lived through a true dark age of humanity.
This funding is more reliable than general taxation as it is based on resources that are unlikely to disappear. The land and these other resources might reduce in value but that would suggest a wider fall in economic activity and a fall in Basic Income would reflect that. However, with an increase in the value of our collective resources would see an automatic increase in the level of Basic Income paid out.
A basic income guarantee is a public policy that would provide all people a basic floor—an income that is enough to live on and that is provided irrespective of work simply because the recipient is a member of that community. It is provided to everyone, regardless of need, forever.
Since the time of Thomas More, people from across the political spectrum have expressed interest in the idea, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to theconservative economists Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek. Some argue this is the moral thing to do; others argue replacing a patchwork of existing government programs with a basic income is more efficient; technologists argue the coming robotization of the workforce makes it necessary. And it’s not just words; in countries where basic income is up for debate, trillions of dollars of social services are at stake.
