Push To Implement Basic Income For All

[Mike Gorman]

The concept of our society providing a 'living income' for all has been touted for at least 200 hundred years, going beyond the current ideas of 'social security' and the welfare state. This idea proposes that we can implement a truly practical solution to poverty & homelessness by issuing all citizens with a base income. This has been largely rejected by conservative elements as being a 'Utopian' pipe dream, and is counter-intuitive for a lot of practically minded people.

However the problems of poverty & homelessness persist even within the most affluent of countries; surely we can look at this idea with fresh eyes and the benefit of our dynamic modern 'disruption' paradigm?

Not Socialism, not a pipe dream, not economic naivety. This man came up with the idea some time ago, many are saying it is time to re-visit his ideas

Well this is a genuine movement, there are people looking at this idea and accepting that it can indeed be a reality, a new era for human dignity and potential.

We as Avalonians, people who are engaged with alternative perspectives, new ideas and ingenious innovation should look at this and see where we can promote, augment and develop this revolutionary concept; so that human-kind may be free of crushing poverty and the limitations of 'not having enough'! A website to view
I'd be interested in your thoughts.

[Draco]

One idea but not the hole solution is to stop competing with each other, and help more than beat, aid instead of control. just removing competing aspect from society would be one step in riding of class division and restoring social harmony. No means will it instantly fix poverty or bring peace but got to start somewhere.

[risveglio]

Posted by Draco (here)
One idea but not the hole solution is to stop competing with each other, and help more than beat, aid instead of control. just removing competing aspect from society would be one step in riding of class division and restoring social harmony. No means will it instantly fix poverty or bring peace but got to start somewhere.

Also a great way to keep us completely stagnant.

[Draco]

Also a great way to keep us completely stagnant.[/QUOTE]

This is true under the current model which needs to change , progress can still be achieved in new ways. More transparency community projects in stead of competitions and corporations in control. These are only a few suggestions with more input for the think tank possibility are endless.

[Carmody]

To play the counterargument, as it needs be said:

How to deal with animal level desire/instinct into overbreeding?

This is a subject that is entirely in the same envelope of agenda.

No self control of breeding, no income.

Not even a twitch of nastiness or even emotion in my remark, but it's entirely, logically, in the same breath as the idea of a universal basic income.

[Ernie Nemeth]

This is not a solution. To pay people a basic salary is to forever enable their sense of entitlement. Money is slavery. How about stop taxing the poor? Anyone whose earnings fall below the poverty level, which is about $30,000 in Canada, should be exempt from paying taxes. That would be a help. I don't want to be dependant on the government for my income. I can hustle work and money on my own just fine. Emphasis on hustle. De-emphasis on a "job".

Or even better, to free the world of their ridiculous indebtedness: forgive all nations their debts. One of Harper's last actions, Canada's former Prime Minister, was to pay the central bank $20,000,000,000. Then the Liberals borrowed $40,000,000,000 for infrastructure upgrades. There's your problem - spending money you don't have.

Also, taxes allow the government into our lives on a massive scale. That is why they like the idea of paying everyone a stipend. Then everyone must report every last nickel (used to be penny but those are out of circulation) and the government can feel justified to snoop into our private lives to make sure we haven't tried to take advantage of their largesse.

I say buy local, shop local and support your local businesses. And those with money - you could call up the big boys (say a big-shot contractor), find out what they charge then call up your local little guy and offer them that amount for their work. Now you are helping, not hindering. Don't talk them down because, since you have got money, you do not deserve a deal and should never hunt for one. it's called enriching the little guy. The converse is taking advantage of the little guy. Which one better fits your mind-set?

Finally, we could do this whole civilization thing completely differently and abolish money outright and start working for ourselves and our communities. We are rich but our birthright has been stolen from us. If only we could understand just how rich we are, just how rich this world is! If we did, we would realize the extent of the bamboozling we have been subject to. Wake up world, we are rich and our riches have been stolen from us while we slept!

[amor]

Think of the mentally ill thrown out on the street to live many years ago. Think of the elderly poor who struggled all their lives to hold a job and who try to live on much less than $11,000 a year who must pay for house and car insurance, lawn cutting by law, utilities each of which rise yearly by $20, worthless health insurance with so many co-payments and other charges, Medicare at $104/month, $149 yearly deduction before so called pay per provider add on policies which restrict your doctors to very few and then additional charges are made. A hospital stay is set at ten thousand dollars a night; therefore Medicare Part A charges a set amount of $300 approx for just so many days. You are given 15 minutes to cover a myriad of complaints because you were unable to afford a doctor for 32 years and leave without any help. If you don't own a roof over your head, forget it. House repairs mean that your food budget is cut for many months, small as it was.

Houses are too large and expensive. Many homeless would be very comfortable to live in a 14 ft. x 14 ft. studio with a little patio. Government legislates huge sums of money for some project and steals most of it; the tax payers are then stuck with their largess. Shame. Shame. Shame.

[ozmirage]

Here's a test of basic intelligence to go with "basic income."

In one group, [A] everyone is EQUALLY WEALTHY. No one "needs money," so no one bothers to go work, sweat, strain, make an effort, mine, farm, fabricate, transport and trade usable goods and services.

In the other group, [B] everyone is prodigiously productive, producing, trading and enjoying surplus usable goods and services.

Which one will survive?

Obviously Group [B].
Group [A] has gone extinct, unless everyone wakes up and gets productive despite not needing money (nor a "basic income").

Which group needs a "basic income" to be prosperous?
Neither.

[Rocky_Shorz]

with automation comes unemployment.

Manufacturing is going robotic, replacing 1000 employees with a machine, the owner gets rich, those sucking on it's teet in the stock market get their slice, and it's ok good for business...

but wait what about the 999 that were laid off by this machine, shouldn't it pay for their living, removing slave labor payment and replacing it with a basic sustainable living?

that is where old school Capitolistic thinking smashes into reality.

someone has to pay for those no longer needed to turn the wheel...


my parents spent the money to put in drip systems and desert landscaping to save money on their water Bill. they used $15 in water last month and were charged $90 to cover transport and wastewater. $105

a business up the street that uses $10K of water each month is charged the same for transport

is that fair?

our nation isn't built on being fair.

everyone pays their fair share, someone decided $90 is a fair share for everyone to pay...

the people wanting the public to pay their share, own the airways and the politicians...

the time is coming where this free ride is over, and yet another free ride needs to start at the same time.

start building urban vertical farms to create needed industry, lowering the price on healthy foods so everyone can afford them.

the transition from here to there, won't be easy, but it has to happen...

[christian]

A basic income means that unproductive people are by law entitled to the property and produce of productive people.

Read that a couple of times, until it really sinks in.

A basic income means that creativity will be punished and consumerism will be rewarded.

Interesting side note: "The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of 'a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty'."

[Rocky_Shorz]

someone was saying the cost of administering the welfare system cost more than the benefits paid, just by removing the system of deciding who deserves help, could double the aid being paid. Make it a given everyone deserves help when needed. Start state banks, and accounts of the unemployed are filled, income deposited will trigger a stop to the automatic payment system. Real interest is paid to depositors drawing in everyone tired of paying banks to use our money to get richer.

Are we really supposed to thank bankers for all they have done for us?

[ozmirage]

Posted by Rocky_Shorz (here)
with automation comes unemployment.

That is correct - but only for money mad systems.

Under money madness, there are only THREE ways to get money :

1. Trade (labor, property),
2. Charity (private, public),
3. Predation (extortion, theft, crime).

When laborers can no longer labor, and exhaust charity, all that remains is predation - which is an unacceptable option (officially). Ergo, the collectivists argue that PUBLIC CHARITY is the remedy.

But relying on government to impose compulsory charity (socialism) is not wise. Penalizing the productive for the benefit of the nonproductive shatters the unity of a culture, pitting the recipients against the donors, in a never ending battle over who takes or keeps what was earned. Worse, it compels people to support those they would never wish to. In other words, forcing the good to support the bad. No donor should be compelled to support those who are repugnant, disgusting or otherwise unacceptable to their conscience. All because of money madness and the ingrained “need” for a share of that scarce, finite money token... under the control of the money masters.

How does one deal with unemployment outside of money madness?

Since prosperity is based on production, trade and enjoyment of surplus usable goods and services, and the function of money is to facilitate trade by holding equitable value until a future trade, we can implement the opposite of giving money to the unemployed workers.

The FOURTH WAY

We can implement organic liberty money. That’s where the producer (laborer, businessman, industrialist) creates the money token that is used to buy that which he does / produces / possesses. The money token can be coin, paper or electronic entries.

For example, instead of public charity taken from another worker, let the prospective worker issue a promissory note (coupon) denominated in hours of labor, with which he trades for his necessities. When a prospective employer tenders his note back to him, he discharges his obligation and extinguishes that note. Of course, this will only work for honorable people whose word is their bond. Anyone who tries to “game” the system will lose credibility and can’t emit their own organic money.

Instead of begging for credit from usurers, entrepreneurs can finance their operation by issuing private promissory notes denominated in what they can produce, and use them to buy labor and materials. By "spending" their own money into circulation, they create a ready base of customers who will tender those notes for the particular product or service. And if they need employees, they can also trade for labor notes, and save on advertising, etc, etc.

In other words, only producers have the power to create money - the medium of exchange used to trade that which they produce. No parasite like government or usurers / bankers are allowed to create money.

Organic money is freed of the limitation of scarce species and debt-credit. Unfortunately, if implemented on a wide scale, it would have the effect of destroying the fungibility of the worthless Federal Reserve Notes (no par value). In short, billionaires become zero-aires.

How sad.

(Addendum : since only non-socialists have the power to create organic money, the pool of donors would swiftly shrink, leaving the recipient class with two options - become producers or seek private charity.)

[T Smith]

Posted by christian (here)
A basic income means that unproductive people are by law entitled to the property and produce of productive people.

We have that system already... it's called the income tax. But an even more insidious system of bilking the property and produce of productive people is inflation, caused by the collusion between big government and central bankers. The income tax itself technically has nothing to do with taking from the productive; it's simply a means to reign in and manage the real culprit, which is out-of-control inflation.

The elephant in the room, which I haven't heard any of the critics address, is what happens to the "basic price" of those basic necessities once you give everyone a "basic income"?

You can give every person in the world a salary of $1,000 per month, even $2,000.00 per month, but what good will it do when the allotted stipend won't even cover the cost of food, clothing, and shelter?

[Carmody]

So we can see that the answers and questions are not simple. Any system will have errors and spillage.

Removing the resource limit (over unity energies) while maintaining an atmosphere that curbs population explosion (legal limits, possibly, but that's a flammable area), might be a component of coming change.

Next problem, is that over unity materials automatically beget a world wide phenomenon of discovery and work in those areas and some of them are pure unbridled destruction and decimation. down to being able to tear the fabric of reality apart. As Joseph P Farrell says, some of them make nukes look like firecrackers--- and that's just a small corner of the situation. Ultimate power means exactly that, ultimate power. Practically.....individualized.


It gets worse. Much much worse. Worse than 99.9999% of the public understands.

So, it's a bridge of getting into a open world, with no resource problems, no population explosion, no environmental decimation, all peoples moving into the loss of ego and massive mental expansion, the removal of all fear and layered control system religions, combined with technological expansion on the individual power level that is wholly capable of tearing the world to shreds, literally..a technological expansion that is completely out anyone's ability to control.

The people need to be opened and relaxed, all at the same time, and then the technology can come on line. Any other recipe is basically a unbridled disaster. Unity in motion and thought, IS required for this sort of transition.

So we may be looking at an alien introduction scenario, in order to shatter all organized religion and break the back of human warfare, combined with whatever else unites all humans in a drastic increase in awareness.

Then the freedom and technology. As the will to over-breed ends with the end of poverty, and the end of (organized) religion. No room for popes or Allah, god, so on. Such things may remain but they must be shattered and transformed, first. How people exist in the scope of their religion and projection of that mindset, it's overall current meme, has to go. It can change, but the shattering of it has to come first, as it is a component of the world's decimation, and blocks the world's stepping into and expansion into what is coming.

Note the elitist control of such structures and their lack of desire to let go of their tools, methods, and ways.

Essentially, it means the people must feel comfortable, enabled, and their desires fulfilled. Which means each potential person who might individually "eat the world" through added comforts (houses, boats, planes, belongings, etc...and bearing many children.... must be calmed down, without the world eating expansion of personal belongings and desires being fulfilled to the limit of their underlying biological desires.

That their thoughts being controlled by their biological aspects, as it is now, that must be changed. So, some internal insanity is on the horizon, for each individual, as they go through a deep fundamental shift. (when reorganizing the mind on deep levels, it feels like and is a form of insanity, the mind is simultaneously tearing itself down and making it new, all while one exists and expresses through -and in it)

The idea of a universal income is nice but, I'm not sure how it integrates into the problems that humanity faces at this time.

[Carmody]

meanwhile, in the so called real world, which is utterly meaningless horse****, that is completely disconnected, and spends it's time arguing over things that mean nothing..you've got this sort of thing.

Or this sort of thing, or this.

And it's drivel. All of it is drivel. Lives begin and end with it, lives shift with it and people all stare and pay attention and talk about it..but it is drivel. Meaningless disconnected drivel, that has no connection to any of what are the real problems we are facing, in what is, let's face it, a holographic reality, that is on one plane of reality--out of many. One where the connection to it as being singular and all that is, is being forced, via making a self locked loop, out of the conditions that exist within it.

So people talk about universal incomes or not, it's complications regarding finance and resource...the world at war, newspapers, starvation, murder, insanity..etc, but really, it has nothing to do with reality but as a block on understanding reality.

I just see blinded rats in a cage (controllers are inclusive), setting themselves on fire, banging into the walls, falling into the water and drowning, and so on.

does a universal income help end this issue and marching process which seems hell bend on cliff type endings?

Well, it depends. It depends on a lot of things. One thing for sure... No universal income can be viewed or considered in isolation. It's context has to have meaning, it's execution has to have meaning, a motion into something else, is what it can be. A universal income is not a destination, it is a transition point, in a sequence of events - at best.

[Mike]

A basic supply of food, water..and a roof over one's head should not be considered a privilege. It's a right. One *should* feel entitled to such things. There is no sensible reason why anyone should not be extended these basic dignities...whether they "earn" them or not.

This insidious idea of having to earn everything is a very distorted and perverted take on the ol protestant work ethic. But people, especially here in the states, embrace it and revere it....even tho its been manipulated to the point of keeping many of them in poverty.

There will always be so called unproductive people. There are many, many reasons for this...reasons those of us typing in the comfort of our cozy homes will never understand. It's EASY to sit here and spit statistics and throw around terms like "entitlement"....but ask yourself: have you ever been totally broke? Down and out? Homeless? Starving? In these conditions, its all empty rhetoric.

Im not suggesting we give everyone a mansion and a ferrari. Just the basics. Far from encouraging laziness, I believe these "unproductive" people would surprise us. Sure, some people would take advantage of a basic income, but others - having been extended some dignity for the first time in their lives - would thrive. Computers aside, its much easier to apply for a job with a full belly and clothes that don't double as rags.

So yeah, i'm all for it..even if the money is coming out of my pocket. I'm hardly pious, but maybe it's the catholic in me.. I dont know. Only on earth would this be considered a nuisance. On more evolved planets it would likely be seen as a spiritual opportunity.

[Rocky_Shorz]

As Trump says I would be crazy to pay taxes if I'm not forced to.

These are the people you would put in charge of creating money?

That's why the answer is state controlled banks who create the money to pay employees.

In a system that all basic necessities are met, people will want more and that drive is what brings them to productivity.

This would also allow starving artists and musicians to survive and put their energies into being creative.

What Avalon has spoke of since the beginning is the age to follow our current system.

The golden age leaves all poverty behind.

How do any of you think this would happen without caring for the poor?

[onawah]

According to some researchers ( http://marijagimbutas.com/ ) in so-called "primitive" matriarchal societies, the first priority was that everyone was provided with the necessities of life, and those societies were peaceful, respectful of the Earth, and probably a lot happier than modern societies.
Certainly, it is a different world now, but there are still tribes that live that way, I believe, and the assumption that basic human nature is not designed to live peacefully and in harmony with Nature is not supported by that research.
And I think that is a factor that should be taken into consideration, even though the probable increased ET population here has no doubt complicated things since those early times (and some of those (positive) ETs now here may be far more "human" than the average Earth human is, and the negative ETs far less human).

[Eram]

Posted by Mike (here)
A basic supply of food, water..and a roof over one's head should not be considered a privilege. It's a right. One *should* feel entitled to such things. There is no sensible reason why anyone should not be extended these basic dignities...whether they "earn" them or not.

This insidious idea of having to earn everything is a very distorted and perverted take on the ol protestant work ethic. But people, especially here in the states, embrace it and revere it....even tho its been manipulated to the point of keeping many of them in poverty.

There will always be so called unproductive people. There are many, many reasons for this...reasons those of us typing in the comfort of our cozy homes will never understand. It's EASY to sit here and spit statistics and throw around terms like "entitlement"....but ask yourself: have you ever been totally broke? Down and out? Homeless? Starving? In these conditions, its all empty rhetoric.

Im not suggesting we give everyone a mansion and a ferrari. Just the basics. Far from encouraging laziness, I believe these "unproductive" people would surprise us. Sure, some people would take advantage of a basic income, but others - having been extended some dignity for the first time in their lives - would thrive. Computers aside, its much easier to apply for a job with a full belly and clothes that don't double as rags.

So yeah, i'm all for it..even if the money is coming out of my pocket. I'm hardly pious, but maybe it's the catholic in me.. I dont know. Only on earth would this be considered a nuisance. On more evolved planets it would likely be seen as a spiritual opportunity.

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All trial versions of a basic income in Europe prove your points Mike.
unemployment, criminality and depression goes down, happiness, dignity and social contacts go up.

[Mike]

Hey thanks Eram.

Ya know, in my every day life I'm so used to people disagreeing with me that I could hardly remember what it was like to be on the same page with somebody. well, it feels pretty good actually!

I had no idea about the trial in Europe, but I appreciate you mentioning it.