Basic Income, a new human right

[mrcash2009 0]

I don't care if people are superrich and have more (even much more) than a billion. I hope they enjoy it and i'm glad for them. The problem is that there are also super poor people.

Problem is most people see it that way and also those getting into/towards that bracket (or wanting to climb to it) its at that point the super poor are ends up being this thing for someone else to deal with, IE: "I earned this" or "they earned it" type of view, if your poorer/struggling you didn't do enough so tough luck. Unfortunately its a case of pulling the ladder up after you in many cases based on money terms (Vacuums of wealth). Not everyone but that's the "trend" so to speak. So to say someone who has allot should have less seems more of an outcry than what actually happens to the poor end on a much larger scale.

Human nature kicks in, its easier to say allot of things when your comfortable or lucky enough to be more well off, you can see that from the conservative lot in the UK right now. Having said that I agree Myke but just wanted to expand on that acceptance of having more part.

Edited October 2, 2013 by mrcash2009
225

[binkster 0]

I cant believe what some are saying in here... Did anyone ever take economics?

Free=Inflation.

Right now the US Fed is digitizing (printing) money over 85 billion a month with the bond buying program.

We have become dependent on this bond buying program. I wonder whats going to happen when that stops?

I saw an article the other day that said more people are on food stamps than are working full-time... Just 10 years ago $100 went a long way in the grocery store.

Now $100 doesnt buy crap.... INFLATION

We cant even keep up with our current problems.

This makes me think that liberals are creating more poor people for their votes...

Just like the "Obama Phone". Our government thinks owning a cell phone is a right.

If you tax the rich anymore your going to take away any ambition to be succesfull.

I do agree there needs to be a good ballance of socialism/conservatism but not our current government.

So for you people that think a basic income should be a right... You should really look into economics

[Vigil Vindex 64]

"Economics" is what got us here in the first place. If we tax the rich then there will be no more ambition? I have ambition, and it's not to make money. I alone prove you are wrong, not to mention the rest of the human race who isn't selfish and self centered.

[[frl]myke 14]

If you tax the rich anymore your going to take away any ambition to be succesfull.

Don't always think in extremes. Of course it awlays must be possible to become rich or even superrich. "More taxes" doesn't autmoaticall mean "you can't get rich anymore". How old was Bill Gates when he earned his first Million? Steve Jobs? Mark Zuckerberg? Would it have hurt them if it took one year longer?

Basic income isn't meant to get rich. It is meant to pay the basic needs like food and shelter. If you want your yearly vacation, go work. If you want a car, go work. If you need a fancy PC, go work for it. If you want to be rich, go work really hard for it.

[Mattar_Tharkari 10]

Myke;2524533']Basic income isn't meant to get rich. It is meant to pay the basic needs like food and shelter. If you want your yearly vacation' date=' go work. If you want a car, go work. If you need a fancy PC, go work for it. If you want to be rich, go work really hard for it.[/quote']

UK already has this and provides much more on top (including cars in some cases (mobility) and PC's) if the family has children? Anywhere in the EU that doesn't?

As said before economics does play a part in this as does basic maths, if you took all the money and disposable assets in the world and divided it equally (M3 Value) we would all get $9000 each. As the population increases that value decreases.

If we simply taxed the rich to attempt to provide a basic income for all there wouldn't be enough to buy a burger and fries, it doesn't add up, there is no mythical pot of money at the end of the rich rainbow. There is only enough money if you tax everyone.

Edited October 3, 2013 by Mattar_Tharkari

[Vigil Vindex 64]

You talk about money as if it is some finite resource. Obviously you are so wrapped up in the money game you can't even see it for what it is. It's an abstraction, and an arbitrary one at that. The real issue is the valuable (useful) resources on the planet. Talk about dividing equally the resources like gold, iron, minerals etc, not money. Basic math won't help you if you can't even accept that money is a man made idea, not some universal law of nature. May as well pack up the whole human race because it is too expensive. Let's start killing babies in their womb because they are too expensive. Not enough money to pay all the greedy selfish people who own the land to grow the food to feed the world. The problem is people who are more interested in making the math work so that the money game can continue. It has nothing to do with the reality that there are abundant resources here on the planet.

PS. Whoever is telling you the UK gives out free cars is an idiot, and so is anyone who believes it. Mobility is for disabled people, not for unemployed people.

[Mattar_Tharkari 10]

PS. Whoever is telling you the UK gives out free cars is an idiot, and so is anyone who believes it. Mobility is for disabled people, not for unemployed people.

I assumed the universal right would extend to the disabled as well. I know what mobility is for and that is exactly what I meant by "some cases". As for the rest - lol - not thought out as usual - abundant resources is not a reality. Ever wondered how much gold is in the world?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21969100

If you split the difference between the upper and lower estimates there and divide it by the world population you get about 191g of gold each.

Taking the middle value for 18 Carat - today's price is $31.53 per gram - that's: $6022.23 in your pocket.

Add that to the $9000 we got from sharing all the money out equally and it still isn't worth it.

At least gold is easily transportable, how would you divide up the other minerals? Not everyone can store several tonnes of iron/copper/aluminium ore. Perhaps we could issue share certificates and use them like .......... money? ooops!!!

Edited October 3, 2013 by Mattar_Tharkari

[scrim 1]

If you tax the rich anymore your going to take away any ambition to be succesfull.

Talked with my parents a while back about taxes and such. Combined, they make about $20,000US before tax per month. Live in Sweden, paying more taxes than they would've in the States. They say they want to have higher taxes, including for them. And 20 grand a month is hardly being rich.

But I suppose since you say otherwise, that discussion must've been a figment of my imagination. Thanks for setting me straight about my memories!

[Amra 10]

There are a lot of people who spend their free time to make something good and usefull (for example addons for Arma, free software, a bench in local park) and they aren't motivated by money. Most of them aren't even rich, they just have clothes, food and shelter and sure they'll have it tommorow. So why not to satisfy basic needs for more people (underlining is for Mattar_Tharkari because he continues to force the idea to share world's wealth equally while thread name is "Basic Income, ...")?

[Mattar_Tharkari 10]

There are a lot of people who spend their free time to make something good and usefull (for example addons for Arma, free software, a bench in local park) and they aren't motivated by money. Most of them aren't even rich, they just have clothes, food and shelter and sure they'll have it tommorow. So why not to satisfy basic needs for more people (underlining is for Mattar_Tharkari because he continues to force the idea to share world's wealth equally while thread name is "Basic Income, ...")?

No I am saying the opposite in response to that idea that was posted by others. eg this - bet he didn't know all the money in the world/population = $9000?

The top 100 richest people have enough money to end poverty in a blink of an eye.

http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressrelease/2013-01-19/annual-income-richest-100-people-enough-end-global-poverty-four-times\

The 10.000 richest people in the world have enough money to change human reality as we know it. Every single living soul on this planet could live a fortunate life.

Then the next idea was money doesn't matter - devide the gold etc:

The real issue is the valuable (useful) resources on the planet. Talk about dividing equally the resources like gold, iron, minerals etc, not money. Basic math won't help you if you can't even accept that money is a man made idea, not some universal law of nature.

Well it's easy to divide the gold as there is so little, ~ 191g each - as for the rest how he thinks it's practical I don't know, you end up with a money system again and the worst kind of economic collapse and chaos? All of these harebrained schemes are effectively "Year 0" plans. Destroy everything for a single idea - it would be nice to know what happens next after everyone has their little pile of money as nothing else would be working.

As for basic needs - many nations have a good welfare system already, excluding a perptual living wage for those fit to work, which seems fair to me. If you live somewhere that doesn't have a welfare system perhaps your government is losing too much money through corruption and mismanagement to be able to afford it? You have my deepest sympathies, but as we have seen recently there is no realistic possibility of forcing certain governments to honour any basic human right, even something as important as 'right to life'.

Edited October 5, 2013 by Mattar_Tharkari

[Vigil Vindex 64]

No wonder the world is fucked if people want to argue forever about how there is not enough money or resources for the human race to thrive and survive, all the while those that have hoard away the goods. They want to perpetuate the inequality, by maintaining their money games, by claiming there isn't enough for everyone, all while they have what they need to survive, tough luck for the rest of us I guess since they are comfortable. It's those that claim there is not enough land to grow enough food to feed everyone that are the problem, the defeatists. We need solutions, not some guess-timate that there will never be enough for everyone so we should just give up on wanting something better.

Why stop at money and gold, how about food? Are you going to tell us if we divided up all the food we would would end up with 2 apples and a grain of rice each and therefor we must be wrong? Are we so short sighted that we will pass up equality because this planet doesn't have enough gold to please some people.

PS. Actually 191g of gold for EVERYONE sounds like a good deal, because i have 0g of gold right now. I would rather have something than nothing. Not to mention there must be more gold out in the universe so I will have my share of that too please, WE ALL WILL!

PPS. "Right to life" is what I am arguing for. "Pay to live" is what you are supporting.

Edited October 5, 2013 by ssechaud

[Mattar_Tharkari 10]

Spoken like a true comrade lol. I guess that goes beyond blue sky thinking into black sky thinking lol. Typical to label someone as defeatist when little issues like finite resources are pointed out. Chairman Mao and several others tried farming collectives - didn't work out well did it?

[instagoat 133]

With the right kind of food source, we can produce excess amounts of calories for the current population. Unfortunately that would mean we need to harvest insect larvae, and at least in the west it would be hard to convince people of that being a good idea.

Spoken like a true comrade lol. I guess that goes beyond blue sky thinking into black sky thinking lol. Typical to label someone as defeatist when little issues like finite resources are pointed out. Chairman Mao and several others tried farming collectives - didn't work out well did it?

Resources aren't limited, they are just hard to get at. What farming collectives have to do with resource scarcity, I don't know either. There were reasons why the collective farming initiatives failed, but those are not related to resources, but socio-economical reasons, such as the fact that the massive overproduction was wasted on a complete lack of mechanized transport. The Ukraine produced tons of food during the Holodomor, but nobody had the equipment to bring that food anywhere, so it stayed in the fields to rot. And where it didn't, Stalin had bluecaps standing by to prevent the food from reaching the rebellious peasantry. Chinese food production suffered because of maos gross incompetence in leading a country, he was a general who had nil clue of how to lead and organize progressive developments in a country that was virtually without industry at the time.

Essentially, all communist countries are prime examples of what happens if you try to force a country through the force of weapons to turn into something else. The illusion of marxism being "scientific" helped with that. However...

Any modern view of economics is also just as "scientific", ie, not scientific at all. The Idea of claiming that anarcho-capitalist Ideas will work is just as idiotic as claiming that hardline communist Ideas will work: they both rely on grossly oversimplifying assumptions and ignorance of human psychology, as well as natural effects of friction, imbalance and frankly, chaos. The current system does not work either: no system with top down control can work unless you assume zero lagtime and that everybody everywhere fells the right decisions at the right time. Unfortunately, no one has enough information, much of that information is wrong, nobody has tools to "correctly" (We don't even know what correct is in economy, it completely depends on your economic school of thought) implement their plans to work with that information and nobody can project what the result of their implementations and decisions will be.

The only thing that economic forecasts have succeeded in is getting it wrong, all the time, every time, and you only get clever people making obvious statements with 20 20 hindsight once the events have occured. It is worse than the weather.

The good thing about money is that we have control over the amount in the system. The value however is extremely dependent on -subjective- perception of 3rd parties with relation to their own real assets. Because of that, it doesn't matter how much money the government hands out to people who need it (as they did with the banking bailouts, where 700 billion dollars were just summoned from thin air.) as long as the market's perception and acceptance of the currency remains in high esteem.

Also, I agree with some people that by now we have reached the stage where the work people do begins to have less value than the Ideas they have. Instead of forcing people to toil all their lives, often throwing away a massive amount of their life in draining and bothersome pursuits that could be more economically and effectively done by machines, give them a basic income, and send them to school. Establish a system of reward that does not rely on eternally transferring value tokens from A to B, creating pools of wealth and pools of poverty, but rather a system that goes toward -rewarding- people, rather than just being a driver for people to prevent their fear of starving to death.

People do not work because it is fun (That is a nice addition for many, but certainly not everybody), but because without work, in an elbows-out no welfare society, they would literally starve to death. If they would be guaranteed not to starve, and work was a truly free enterprise to pursue at ones liberty, I think the effects on society would be immediately beneficial.

Unfortunately, as with all systems of economy, we cannot know beforehand, and so we have to try it out. Contrary to pretty much anything else proposed, this hasn't been tried yet, while communism and hardcore capitalism have, and both have been found to be detrimental to most participants in such a society.

Edited October 6, 2013 by InstaGoat

[gammadust 12]

Essentially, all communist countries are prime examples of what happens if you try to force a country through the force of weapons to turn into something else. The illusion of marxism being "scientific" helped with that.

I really have to agree. In as much as communism, or any other proposed social system, being forced upon an unmatured or unwilling social fabric is bound to fail. But i would rephrase the reason above as: The illusion of marxism being "scientific" alone leading to that effect.

Most prominent marxist texts warn for the very fact of there being "objective conditions" and "subjective conditions". This constitutes the self-admission of its own theoretical limits, much less the pratical ones. What marxist followers attempted in its behalf is many times confused with marxism itself. I would also advance that deepening this confusion is also in the aims of dominating ideologies.

Marxism elected as "objective" those conditions deriving from, the observation of fact, in the existence of distinguishable social relations under the Capitalist system. One could observe many, marxism selected as the most determining those following the division between owning "means of production" and owning "work force", and claiming the latter as the ultimate source of wealth (since a mean of production may only exist after work force be applied in its creation). Sometimes this observed division is not clearcut (ie. liberal workers such as a Photographers, Designers, etc.), in any case, these allow for significant observable particularities when adopting the social categorization in capitalists and workers. As far as this goes, effective science can be created, scientific method can be applied. This is not to imply it can never fail or reach wrong conclusions, science is in constant movement as is not "instantaneous".

On the other hand, it elects as "subjective" those conditions which derive of the awareness society's members have of own interests, individual and colective, of own social organization and ambitions. Independently of how members of society gain consciousness to the "objective" conditions ("means of production" / "work force"), by marxists deemed the most determinant, so will society frame itself as a whole at a given time, "writing" its history in the process.

However...

Marxism "risked" more in its conclusions (~150 years ago), the most polemical being: that the capitalist system is unsustainable, not only in regards to resources and its management (the objective conditions), but how the social relation between worker/capitalist would inevitably be stressed beyond possibilities and break (the subjective side). One has to concede some credit to the theory here, even if one does not fully grasps it (i don't). The matter of fact is that in many advanced Capitalist systems, both the sustainability is verifiably breaking and the social relation as well (marxists would claim as the expected consequence). For a social science and therefore quite limited in its deterministic abilities, not bad a performance in its expectations, be them in the broader strokes but even to the extent of some details.

On the subject of Basic Unconditional Income...

Welfare measures, are part of the social contract of many western societies, despite capitalist in their core nature, social-democracy was able to advance a certain status quo which "humanizes" capitalism, or in other words, aims to artificialy compensate for the unbalances capitalism introduces. Our societies have reached a state where the compensation measures to maintain social stability are evermore necessary and increasingly expensive. Ironically, it is exacly where those social unbalances are comparatively less aggravated that these type of measures are more advanced and easier to conquer. Objectively higher amount of resources to allocate towards those measures, on one hand, and subjectively higher social consciousness of society's members demanding and exerting sufficient force to implement them, on the other. Feel free to relate this with the above observation in regards to objective and subjective conditions (i won't claim it is mere coincidence). Example: Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult.

However noble and necessary, it does not directly address the problem at it's core. If nothing else because of it's limited effect in global terms, but ultimately because capitalism, as has been proving societies, will keep introducing further and more damaging unbalances.

The social breakdown we're observing contains in itself seeds of revolutionary relevance. Revolutionary because they may fundamentaly change current social relations (be them as categorized by marxists or others). Yet, it does not necessarily mean changing towards any specific and humanely acceptable social system. But that there is an undeniable social energy pushing for change. How and if members of the society will push in the same broad direction is at this point in history anyone's guess.

What will be the nature of the future determining social relation, is object of all man's dreams.

Edited October 6, 2013 by gammadust

[Mattar_Tharkari 10]

Resources aren't limited, they are just hard to get at. What farming collectives have to do with resource scarcity, I don't know either.

Guy above me mentioned sharing out all the food equally along with all the money and the gold - farming collective? Once everything is shared out and we all have our little pile of money and a bowl of rice, economies and governments have collapsed - who will be paying for mining asteroids in space? (Oh I had better explain that as someone who can't read threads will get confused. It refers to the the hard to reach resources you mentioned, in your post, 1st line below the quote.)