Basic Income Experiment Defies Economists

Federico Pistono, 4 min 35 sec

"Exactly the opposite of what the best economists predicted."

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1183-1185

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
Merle Travis, chorus of the song Sixteen Tons

We don’t work for mining companies that pay in scrip redeemable only at the company store. But we work our asses off and end up with credit cards that hit us with 19.99 percent interest, $40 late fees, and other hidden charges so heavy it’s possible – even common – to pay for years and actually owe more than you started with.

We work even longer hours than our fathers, pay higher taxes, depend on two salaries to keep one household together, shove our alienated children into daycare and government education camps, watch our money steadily inflate away, and suffer mightily from a raft of job-related mental and physical ills

What’s changed but the details? For all our material possessions, we’re in the same old cycle of working, hurting, and losing.
...
We take it as a given that jobs = good, that high stocks = good, and that working harder and spending lots of money = more jobs and higher stocks.

Then we go off to jobs we mostly detest. Or jobs we enjoy, but that stress us out, take us away from our families, and turn our home hours into a frenzied burden, in which we have to struggle to do everything from entertain ourselves to making artificial quality time with kids who barely know us.

There’s something wrong with this picture.
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Jobs suck. Corporate employment sucks. A life crammed into 9-to-5 boxes sucks. Gray cubicles are nothing but an update on William Blake’s dark satanic mills.
Dark Satanic Cubicles – It’s time to smash the job culture!
James Tuttle | 
Center For A Stateless Society

Peter Barnes: Even though good-paying jobs are in decline, there’s a lot of wealth in our economy. It produces an enormous amount of wealth. So the economy, as a whole, is okay, but the money isn’t flowing to labor.

So if we want to have a middle-class we have to take somehow from the wealth that we actually do have, and spread it around in ways that aren’t tied to people’s time-clock labor. All right, so what is all that extra wealth out there that doesn’t come from labor? A lot of it, if you really start to dig deeper, below the surface, is wealth that is either stuff that we inherit—like all the gifts of nature; the soil, the water, the air, the minerals, the trees, etc. Also, a lot of our wealth comes from stuff that society created—all of our science, knowledge, techologies, that stuff.

Plus, and here’s the key to it, there’s a lot of social infrastructure—such as the financial systems, or legal systems, our copyrights and patent laws. All of these create enormous amounts of wealth. This is wealth that is not created by individuals, not created by private corporations, but created by society. So what I’m saying is that some of that wealth should be shared equally among everybody. And that would be the basis for supplementing labor income.

It’s kind of like in board game Monopoly, which I refer to a few times in the book. The game is supposed to be a great metaphor for capitalism. It is in lots of ways, but there are two other aspects of Monopoly that are quite interesting and not present in our current capitalist system, which is the fact that everybody starts off with the same amount of capital. Now that’s nice. That would make for an interesting and fair economic system. Plus everyone gets money every time they go around the board. That keeps the game going. Without that, in Monopoly, people wouldn’t have enough to play the game. Those features ought to be part of our real-world economy. Everybody needs cash to play the game and to survive, and to have a basis on which to build, especially as I said, in these times when labor income just is not enough.
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There’s no redistribution—although you did use that word. I prefer to think of what this system would be as a kind of predistribution. In other words, the government isn’t taking money from anybody, but it’s assuring that income is distributed more fairly in the first place.
AlterNet / By Steven Rosenfeld 
Finally, A Simple Plan That Can Reverse Inequality and Save America's Sinking Middle-Class

A basic income.
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If this is implemented before the impending robotics revolution takes all labor based jobs, it will free people from manual labor and allow them to pursue their creative, social, and personal interests on a scale no one has ever seen before. It will also accelerate robotics research even further, since companies that require laborers will no longer have them, they will truly need robots to fill those positions. We can either wait for job loss to occur on a greater level as robots push people out of their jobs, or we can implement the basic income first and let robots fill in the empty spots. This is absolutely necessary....
SocialCoin: A Cryptocurrency for a Global Basic Income
SIRAJ RAVE

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1180-1182

Just two men  made more investment income in  2013 than the entire year's  welfare budget (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), commonly referred to as 'welfare').

Just 400 individuals  made more investment income in 2013 than the  entire safety net (SNAP, WIC (Women, Infants, Children), Child Nutrition, Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Security Income, TANF, and Housing).

And the richest 1%  made more from their investments in 2013 than the total cost of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the entire safety net.
AlterNet / By Paul Buchheit
3 Facts that Poverty-Deniers Don't Want to Hear

Plagued by endemic poverty, many young people in Nepal leave to work abroad. But the backbreaking labor they find there often results in death.

In Nepal, a Better Life With a Steep Price 

By GARDINER HARRIS

New York Times

August 14, 2014

The infantilising diktats of the workplace destroy our self-respect. Those who end up at the bottom of the pile are assailed by guilt and shame. The self-attribution fallacy cuts both ways: just as we congratulate ourselves for our success, we blame ourselves for our failure, even if we have little to do with it.

So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed – it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.
By George Monbiot
The Guardian 
Sick of This Market-Driven World? You Should Be

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1177-1179

I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.

The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.

Suddenly I have a lot more money and a lot less time, which means I have a lot more in common with the typical working North American than I did a few months ago. While I was abroad I wouldn’t have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Now that kind of stuff feels like it’s out of the question. Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days!

The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. It’s also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that’s really all the time I have on a weekday.

This seems like a problem with a simple answer: work less so I’d have more free time. I’ve already proven to myself that I can live a fulfilling lifestyle with less than I make right now. Unfortunately, this is close to impossible in my industry, and most others. You work 40-plus hours or you work zero. My clients and contractors are all firmly entrenched in the standard-workday culture, so it isn’t practical to ask them not to ask anything of me after 1pm, even if I could convince my employer not to.

The Real Reason For The 40-Hour Workweek

Raptitude

DAVID CAIN, RAPTITUDE

JUN. 27, 2014

[emphasis JS]

A well meaning, hard working person might very well fail miserably… or maybe they do not have the cut-throat mentality or have an ethical disagreement with the way competition works in the market. There are many, many other variations than “incompetence” to justify a person’s lack of ability in the economic context and to think it is hence justified to remove people’s ability to have a quality standard of living because they don’t “fit” the model – is structural bigotry, pure and simple.

Peter Joseph

People are questioning the old conventional wisdom. For decades, even most progressives believed that any policy designed to promote equality should also be consistent with "the work ethic," by which people usually meant that we have to make the poor jump through hoops and show their willingness to do the lowest paid, most degrading jobs before they could be eligible for one cent of help. Many people are now beginning to realize that policies based on that idea are not progressive. They are great for low wage employers, but they put human beings at the mercy of employers. Once we get that awful idea out of our heads, we can talk about policies that can ensure that every single human being has access to the resources they need to survive. As Bertrand Russel said nearly 100 years ago, "A certain small income, sufficient for necessities, should be secured for all, whether they work or not, and that a larger income should be given to those who are willing to engage in some work which the community recognizes as useful. On this basis we may build further."

Karl Widerquist

THANKS TO SCOTT SANTENS,

THE SPACESHIP EARTH TIMES

[emphasis JS]

Zeitgeist's Peter Joseph on Basic Income

Peter Joseph, 1 min, 50 secs

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1174-1176

Here’s an unusual but extraordinarily graphic description of the current state of the labor market: If you lined up all of the unemployed shoulder-to-shoulder, the queue of people looking for work would stretch all the way from New York out past San Francisco.

An Unemployment Line, From Coast to Coast

AUG. 1, 2014

Justin Wolfers

New York Times

The shift from a psychology of scarcity to that of abundance is one of the most important steps in human development. A psychology of scarcity produces anxiety, envy, egotism (to be seen most drastically in peasant cultures all over the world). A psychology of abundance produces initiative, faith in life and solidarity. The fact is that most men [sic] are still geared psychologically to the economic facts of scarcity, when the industrial world is in the process of entering a new era of economic abundance. But because of this psychological "lag" many people cannot even understand new ideas as presented in the concept of a guaranteed income, because traditional ideas are usually determined by feelings that originated in previous forms of social existence.

Erich Fromm

[emphasis JS]

Small wonder that economic analysis based on monetary measures of economic activity fails so miserably. Economics can be referred to as science only in the lightest of terms. The Science of Economics is sort of a standing joke. The reason is that its practitioners are using a rubber band for a ruler.
Technocracy Inc.

[emphasis JS]