Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotation Of The Week 196

"Guaranteed Annual Income."

Martin Luther King

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotation 195

…[M]orals are no less socially imposed than laws, and should be no less subject to examination and criticism.
...
-- questions I consider essential to the project of human freedom: Do "family values" produce socially submissive, sexually frustrated people whose unconscious rage, mixed with guilt, surfaces as aggressive moralism? Do we glorify constant work and look with suspicion on idleness because we need to, even in a world where technology is increasingly severing the link between productivity and human labor? Or are we punishing ourselves for guilty desires -- and are we therefore less likely to question the conditions of our work, and whose purposes it serves?
Ellen Willis
Their Libertarianism and Ours

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 193, 194

The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how any single virtue, stubbornly maintained gradually changes into a destructive vice. Our success, our industry, our habit of work have produced our economic nemesis. Work made modern cultures great, but now threatens to usurp our souls, to inundate the earth in things and trash, to destroy our capacity to love and wonder.
Sam Keen




The provision of a constitutionally guaranteed right to an income is the only way to prevent the emergence of a technologically dehumanized consumer society. This proposal for a guaranteed income is not a solution to problems but rather a precondition for solutions: in some ways it is rather like the introduction of limited liability in the middle of the nineteenth century. Limited liability allowed the company to take risks; a guaranteed income will allow the individual to take risks in order to promote his [sic] self-development in the interest of himself and his society.
Robert Theobald,
Free Men [sic] And Free Markets