(((nataluna)))

It’s because some people are convinced that this is “rewarding the criminals” and that morally disgusts them. “But they didn’t commit a crime yet” you say?? The same people believe that anyone who would have stolen to survive is just already a kind of mentally wicked subhuman different from themselves, and they would in fact want all of those put in prison before they even do anything wrong. This is why you can’t use logic or reason here. You can’t appeal to compassion someone chose not to have.

Man I wish universal basic income was a thing so people could just leave jobs they’re unhappy at and wouldn’t have to worry about not affording their basic needs while they look for something new or so that people could actually explore their passion projects like only the rich and powerful can just take time off to write or work on art or go back to school and even if you’re having mental health problems you can’t just take an extended vacation a lot of places still don’t consider mental health as actual illness anyway fuck capitalism am i right brother?

The best part of UBI is that you don’t need to see a cent of that money to enjoy the benefits it would provide. Just the shear ability to be able say “I don’t have to work here if I don’t want to” would give ALL workers the bargaining power to demand more from their employers, higher pay, more benefits. It would be amazing!

good news if you’re a European citizen: there’s a European Citizens’ Initiative currently collecting signatures to establish unconditional basic income in the EU!

i quote,

for it to pass, it needs at least 1 million signatures total + minimal participation threshold in at least 7 countries. as of today (September 9th 2021) it’s at a little bit above 146k signatures total and 6 more countries need to reach the participation threshold

if you’re a EU citizen please consider signing here (it’s a quick process! you enter your nationality then follow the instructions, took me 5 minutes yesterday)

if you’re not or can’t sign please consider passing on the info to EU citizens you know!! if we manage to get this implemented, it could really improve quality of life for everyone living in the EU

Even though i dont live in europe i hope they make this happen

reminder that this is CURRENTLY ONGOING

End of the collection period: 25/06/2022

Tbh it gets a little exhausting seeing so much emphasis on “Raise the minimum wage! Pay workers for their labour!” and then dead silence about unemployed people and people who are unable to work and disabled people. We deserve a liveable income too.

petition to move from "nobody working full-time should be unable to survive!" to "nobody should be dependent on the ability to spend 40+ hours a week at their job to survive"

if you or someone you know has experienced the ordeal of humanity you are entitled to financial compensation

universal basic income

“We should realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Poor People’s Campaign was a 1968 effort to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States. It was organized by Martin Luther King, Jr., and was the last campaign he was working on before he was assassinated in April 1968. King shifted his focus to these issues after observing that gains in civil rights had not improved the material conditions of life for many African Americans.

The Poor People’s Campaign was a multiracial effort—including African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Appalachian White people, and Native Americans—aimed at alleviating poverty regardless of race. Just as King began his multiracial campaign for economic justice he was murdered.

http://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/

i haven’t read through it completely, but posting the link for your curiosity...

“wouldn’t you rather earn something than have it just handed to you?”

Yeah when it comes to actual awards and fancy goods, but when it comes to basic needs, basic human decency, and accomodations, those things should always be handed to people. No one should have to “earn” those things.Value people as people, not base it on how much they produce. 

yeah but that creates a severe dependency that could be exploited easily, and creates a slippery slope @musical-clarity

Actually studies show that people who live in places with universal income (who are given money with no strings attached just for being citizens) do far better work than those who don’t and are more enthusiastic to do work.

This is because they still want nice things and will work for those but the part of their energy that was devoted to worrying about if they have enough money to pay the rent and bills this month is now freed up to do other things.

Some people will always be lazy and take advantage of the system, but they are always a tiny percentage and it seems ridiculous to me to punish the majority and severly hamstring their abilities just because a handful of people will simply live of basic income rather than work.

Do you have sources? I’m trying to convince a friend

Providing Personalised Support to Rough Sleepers. An Evaluation of the City of London Pilot by Juliette Hough and Becky Rice (2010)  - This is a study on what happens when you just give homeless people money instead of setting up expensive bureaucratic programs. Spoilers: the vast majority of people get off the streets.

Policy Brief: Impacts of Unconditional Cash Transfers by Johannes Haushofery and Jeremy Shapiroz - A look at the new trend of charities just giving people in need money and letting them get on with it. (Case study is a charity called GiveDirectly)

Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods. A review of Global Evidence by the World Bank Policy Research Working Group - This study shows that poor people who are just given money do not spend any more than they usually would on luxury goods such as alcohol and tobacco and in some cases the spending on these items actually decreases.

“Cash Transfers for Children. Investing into the Future” An Editorial article in The Lancet - This is the study that out and out says giving people money makes them less lazy and less dependant on the state. Direct quote:

The Town With No Poverty by Evelyn Forget - A look at the case study of Dauphin Manitoba that introduced “mincome” to the poorest citizens to bring everyone above the poverty line.

Why Not Guarantee Everyone a Job? Why Negative Income Tax Experiments of the 1970s Were Successful by Allan Sheahen (warning this link is a download link, not a webpage) - Study of a similar “mincome” experiment in Denver that found that when people did stop working as many hours as they had done before the money it was because they were furthering their education or working hours better suited to raising their children. One woman who had dropped out of High School to get a job in order to provide for her children went back into education and ended up with a psychology degree and a job as a researcher.

“Daniel Moynihan and President-Elect Nixon: How Charity Didn’t Begin at Home” by Peter Passell and Leonard Ross for The New York Times - This is a look at how President Richard Nixon (Yes, that Richard Nixon) wanted to introduce basic income to the USA and was defeated by ignorant congressmen and senators that trusted their gut over the clear evidence. 

The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend: An Experiment in Wealth Distribution by Scott Goldsmith - This is a look at Alaska’s policy of using the State oil revenue to give every single citizen $1000 a year.

Relationships Between poverty and Psychopathology - A study that outlines how growing up poor exposes children to a myriad of psychological problems and mental illnesses.

Assessing the Economic and Non-Economic Impacts of Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, North Carolina - The Harrah Cherokee Casino is widely studied and a resounding success as a case study for Basic Income.

An Estimate of the cost of child poverty in 2013 by Donald Hirsch - This is a British study that estimates child poverty costs £29 billion (£44 Billion-ish). Basically child poverty is massively expensive for governments and Basic Income could essentially pay for itself by removing these expenses.

When Pundits Blamed White People for a Culture of Poverty by Matt Bruenig - Article that discusses how the idea that poor people are lazy and deserve to suffer is racist, classist and morally dangerous.

Rediscovering Poverty: How We Cured ‘The Culture of Poverty’ Not Poverty Itself by Barbara Ehrenreich - An article on how trying to improve the morals of the poor so they can work harder and get themselves out of poverty is a ridiculous waste of time and money and quite frankly an insult to the people we force into these programs. My favourite waste of money that Ehrenreich points out is the $250 million dollars that President Clinton set aside for ‘Chastity Training’ for impoverished single mothers, the US government in the 90s simply assuming that poor women were too stupid to understand where babies came from and that’s why they were poor, rather than, you know, having no money, no support structures and no affordable child care and healthcare.

In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law by Fred Block and Margaret Somers - Speenhamland was a town in the UK where a Universal Income was introduced at the end of the 18th Century. After a few years it was declared a terrible failure and proof that poor people are evil and lazy and should be punished for being poor not helped out of poverty. Speenhamland led to the creation of Workhouses and the abolition of the Poor Laws that had worked as a form of social welfare up to that point. For 150 years Speenhamland was used by politicians and academics all over the world as proof that poor people were almost pathologically incapable of being trusted with their own money. Except the whole thing was a lie. The man sent to study Speenhamland hated the project and was unable to correctly interpret the data or factor in cultural issues that were also affecting the town. Modern researchers almost unanimously agree that Speenhamland was a success but the damage that 150 years of ignorance has done is deep and long lasting.

All of these examples and hundreds more can be found in Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman which lays out the argument for this issue far better than I ever could and also discusses issues such as raising the minimum wage and drastically cutting working hours. 

@keep-counting-stars have fun debating your friend. 

politicians will always be against universal income, because people who are anxious and exhausted are easier to control.

don’t wait for politicians to take the initiative. they won’t. it’s not in their best interests.

“wouldn’t you rather earn something than have it just handed to you?”

Yeah when it comes to actual awards and fancy goods, but when it comes to basic needs, basic human decency, and accomodations, those things should always be handed to people. No one should have to “earn” those things.Value people as people, not base it on how much they produce. 

yeah but that creates a severe dependency that could be exploited easily, and creates a slippery slope @musical-clarity

Actually studies show that people who live in places with universal income (who are given money with no strings attached just for being citizens) do far better work than those who don’t and are more enthusiastic to do work.

This is because they still want nice things and will work for those but the part of their energy that was devoted to worrying about if they have enough money to pay the rent and bills this month is now freed up to do other things.

Some people will always be lazy and take advantage of the system, but they are always a tiny percentage and it seems ridiculous to me to punish the majority and severly hamstring their abilities just because a handful of people will simply live of basic income rather than work.

It’s been tested a couple times. In Canada, in some European countries, and the results are always the same. There are two groups of people who show a statistically significant (Greater than one half of one percent, or 1 in 200) increase in Not Working and living off the guaranteed income. Parents of Children under school age, and full time students. Among ALL other groups, employment actually INCREASED. Why? Because guaranteed minimum income means that homeless people can get at least a basic low end apartment. It’s hard if not impossible to get an above board job without a permanent fixed address. Also more people were able to have and maintain a BANK ACCOUNT. It is often hard to get a decent job without an account that can accept Direct Deposit for paychecks. Also, lost work time due to illness and injury decreased across the board. It turns out if people are getting a decent amount of money each month they can A> afford to eat better, and B> obtain decent medical attention both preventative and emergency. Crazy right? So why hasn’t it caught on? Because it doesn’t directly benefit the people in power, and it increases THEIR PERSONAL taxes, their CORPORATE TAXES, and thus decreases their PERSONAL INCOME. So, because Jeff Bezos and Alan Greenspan might fall from making 100 billion dollars a year to making 99.8 billion dollars a year, it’s a hard NO and we can all fucking die.. The End.

tl;dr

reblogging for the addition

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the establishment (and their media) like to celebrate MLK’s love of imperial America and centrist economic doctrine. The symbol celebrated bares little resemblance to the actual man and his ideas.

There is a reason the FBI orchestrated a well-resourced campaign to destroy King that ultimately culminated in J. Edgar Hoover having a letter sent to King to push King to commit suicide.

The reason is Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. opposed capitalism and the American empire.

In the last campaign before his assassination, King campaigned for a democratic socialist agenda. Called the Poor People’s Campaign, demands included a guaranteed job, retribution of land and capital, and more inclusion of the poor in state decision-making.

Yes, taking land and money from rich people and giving it to poor people was part of King’s dream.

King’s own views of capitalism are often sanitized in textbooks and mainstream media stories, but he could not have been for explicit:

“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then,” King declared. “You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

King’s anti-capitalist views cannot really be bifurcated from his struggle for racial justice as they come from the same spiritual conception of the world. For King, capitalism was part of materialism. which was part of a deadly triplet.

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” King asserted.

King also backed a universal basic income, believing it was a better solution to fighting poverty than the programs put forward by President Lyndon Johnson’s War On Poverty.

In his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”, King made his position on fighting poverty and a UBI crystal clear, “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

(Continue Reading)

If you would go out of your way to argue how easy it is for capital to automate away jobs when labor costs become too high, then you should probably know that you’re giving all kinds of credibility to those of us who advocate fully-automated luxury communism. I mean, think about it: you’re arguing that so much of human labor ISN’T NECESSARY because said jobs can be done by machines, and yet you STILL want the bulk of humanity to pointlessly scrape by laboring for the capitalist class, receiving meager wages to buy the shit they helped generate in the first place. The above billboard is a THREAT. Let’s not mince words – that billboard is bourgeois propaganda designed to turn the working class against each other and against the broader goals of resource democratization. “If you fight for a basic livable wage, just know that you’re easily replaceable, peon!”

This is what leftists mean when they say that capitalism is an economic system filled to the brim with tensions and contradictions; it’s also what they mean when they say that capitalism inevitably produces its own gravediggers. Automation is one of those gravediggers, and it’s a major one at that. As more and more jobs become automated in the coming decades, the working class will face widespread dispossession, ramping up revolutionary class consciousness in the process. At that point, capitalism will either focus on generating more superfluous jobs for people to work or set about instituting a universal basic income – regardless, the point is to keep enough scraps flowing downward so that people don’t call for a broader system change. In this way, capitalism’s ruling class can maintain control over the wealth-producing means of production and imperialist capital accumulation can continue unrestrained.

For these reasons, “more jobs” and universal basic incomes are not enough. We need to democratize the broader social infrastructure and eliminate the profit system. If you recognize how possible it is to automate away human labor, then you should defenestrate yourself out of the Overton Window and use some political imagination – cut out the unnecessary jobs, automate all the labor you can, produce for human need rather than elite profit, and you end up with drastically reduced working hours and bountiful leisure time. This is the essence of fully-automated luxury communism – the natural conclusion of the conditions that capitalism set in motion.

Be wary of automation in the present climate, but always trace it back to the class struggle. Robots taking our jobs SHOULD be cause for celebration; why should we treat these potential liberators as harbingers of dispossession? Technological advancements are pushing us exponentially towards a de facto post-scarcity world, where everyone’s needs can be comfortably met alongside their desires for community and leisure and entertainment, and yet we’re held back by Empire’s insistence on keeping the means of production hoarded under the command of a superfluous ruling class. As long as we are divided into capitalists and workers, humanity will never know full liberation.

TL;DR: automating jobs will eventually get rid of working for profit, cut down the class system, and give everybody time to focus on whatever they want to do.

Exactly, with automation will actually come more jobs and better paying jobs to manage those technologist. Technology always statistically creates more jobs than it destroys.

Okay but that’s also what we want to avoid. It’s not about resigning ourselves to HAVING to work a job just so we can access resources – it should be about determining what jobs are actually necessary for meeting people’s needs and for the maintenance of society, what jobs can be automated away, and how to properly transition towards a system that produces for need rather than for profit (and hopefully eventually reaching a point of abundant post-scarcity that money itself could be feasibly abolished from there), all accomplished by democratic control of the means of production and the infrastructure. I’m sick of this liberal discourse that keeps shifting all these radical developments in technology back towards the status quo, where the wealth-producing machines are still controlled by elites and where we have to just keep inventing new jobs for people to work so they can access resources. If feudalism couldn’t cope with the advancements in technology that eventually made feudal relations obsolete, then capitalism won’t be able to cope with the coming advancements in technology as well, try as it might – scarcity will have to be enforced (more so than it is now), more pointless jobs will be created, and politicians will opt for redistributive universal basic incomes in an attempt to stabilize the whole thing. We need to seize the opportunity to put the exponentially-increasing reach of technology to work for the benefit of humanity, not just for human benefit when it’s convenient to capitalists.

So this post reminded me of something from my childhood, and I couldn’t place what, until I remembered this joke from the Jetsons:

Now in the show this is obviously a statement about how easy Mr Jetson has it in the future’s workforce, but it more effectively highlights the absurdity of a capitalist system once technology has become able to automate entry-level labor: no one NEEDS Mr Jetson to do anything, but because his value in society is entirely based on income and thus employment, they need to FABRICATE a role for him to fill. In reality the only human necessary to keep the plant running is (maybe) Mr. Spacely, but goodness knows we can’t let EVERYONE enjoy an upper-middle class income in management, so they give him a bunch of useless peons to boss around all day.

The capitalist system the Jetsons live in finds THIS absurd future preferable to a system where everyone’s basic needs are met using the massive surplus generated by a fully automated workforce. The people who paid for the billboard in the original post above are even LESS sympathetic, as they’d apparently blame US for “making” them fire 90% of their employees in order to remain competitive. What a grand system, this capitalism.

also in regards to that post above about automation creating “better jobs”: automation today is not like the automation of the 20th century. it’s getting rid of more jobs much faster than it’s creating any. if an electronic cashier is putting human cashiers out of business, those people can’t just up and learn coding or IT. it’s not that simple.

at the end of the day though? I’m tired of talking about jobs. I’m tired of hearing politicians say “more jobs,” like pointless and inefficient positions that exist solely to give someone a job are anything to be proud of “creating.” I’m telling y'all it’s inevitable that luxury communism will come once we stop placing so much importance on the Almighty Job

this post helps me wake up in the morning

So, who maintains all the machines necessary for automation

A society with a highly automated and democratic economy would probably have curriculums that teach the essentials to students. The education system’s structural purpose is preparing students to take part in the economy. Early/long school days and hours of homework under capitalism serve the purpose of preparing students for the drudgery of wage labor – working extra hours or “taking work home with them”, as well as taking orders from bosses and “knowing their place”. An automated/democratic economy would have different structural needs, and would therefore have a different education system.

Of course work will always be necessary, but I don’t understand this self-defeating “gotcha” that tries to refute post-capitalism by implying some work would still need to be done. It’s like….yeah? So? It’s about cutting down the hours as much as possible and then letting people live.

Couldn’t agree w this more

In a speck of a village deep in the Finnish countryside, a man gets money for free. Each month, almost €560 (£500) is dropped into his bank account, with no strings attached. The cash is his to use as he wants. Who is his benefactor? The Helsinki government. The prelude to a thriller, perhaps, or some reality TV. But Juha Järvinen’s story is ultimately more exciting. He is a human lab rat in an experiment that could help to shape the future of the west.

Last Christmas, Järvinen was selected by the state as one of 2,000 unemployed people for a trial of universal basic income. You may have heard of UBI, or the policy of literally giving people money for nothing. It’s an idea that lights up the brains of both radical leftists – John McDonnell and Bernie Sanders – and Silicon Valley plutocrats such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. And in the long slump that has followed the banking crash, it is one of the few alternatives put forward that doesn’t taste like a reheat.

Yet hardly anyone knows what it might actually look like. For all the fuss, Finland is the first European country to launch a major dry run. It is not the purists’ UBI – which would give everyone, even billionaires, a monthly sum. Nor will Finlandpublish any results until the two-year pilot is over at the end of 2018. In the meantime, we rely on the testimony of participants such as Järvinen. Which is why I have to fly to Helsinki, then drive the five hours to meet him.

Ask Järvinen what difference money for nothing has made to his life, and you are marched over to his workshop. Inside is film-making equipment, a blackboard on which is scrawled plans for an artists’ version of Airbnb, and an entire little room where he makes shaman drums that sell for up to €900. All this while helping to bring up six children. All those free euros have driven him to work harder than ever.

None of this would have been possible before he received UBI. Until this year, Järvinen was on dole money; the Finnish equivalent of the jobcentre was always on his case about job applications and training. Ideas flow out of Järvinen as easily as water from a tap, yet he could exercise none of his initiative for fear of arousing bureaucratic scrutiny.

UNIVERSAL. BASIC. INCOME. IS. THE. SOLUTION!!!! 

Listen tho, it’s a solution that everyone can get behind. In its purest form, it’s completely egalitarian. Every citizen gets the same amount regardless of their income. It allows ALL people to meet their basic needs and thus should nearly eliminate homelessness, hunger, etc. And because it’s the same for every citizen, there’s no onerous process where you have to prove you ~~really need it~ These are the things that liberals and progressives like about it. BUT! THE FUN DOESN’T STOP THERE! 

No, this is also a libertarian solution that conservatives should be able to get behind if they can just take half a step back from their violent hatred of poor people. By implementing universal basic income, you immediately eliminate probably dozens of government agencies. All of the institutions that micromanage who gets federal/state assistance and how much and for how long and under what circumstances – gone. Everybody gets a check. It’s that simple. You need one check printing agency and that’s it. It also gives everyone the completely free choice of what to do with that money. If someone chooses to waste it and not use it to secure their basic needs, that’s completely up to them. And they will have to deal with the consequences of their actions. 

In my mind, with universal basic income, the only other major federal program we would need would be GODDAMN SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE. These two things together I think could create more freedom and equality than any other plan that doesn’t involve time travel. You have enough money to put a roof over your head and feed yourself. You can go to the doctor if you’re sick or injured. When you don’t have to worry about your basic human needs being met, there are so many more possibilities. 

Vintage IWW 4 hour workday prints

Can you imagine? Would give us so much more rest and free time.

The average office worker is only productive for 3 hours a day.

Every article talking about this study talks about how bosses can squeeze more labor out of workers, or how workers can squeeze more labor out of themselves, but the reality is that the human brain only has so much capacity to focus on unpleasant tasks, and people generally won’t work more than that without the threat of force (like in manual and service industry jobs where work is easily quantified and workers are being monitored all the time to make sure they don’t slack off; the threat of being fired and losing one’s ability to eat is the threat of force). People in hunter-gatherer societies do about that same amount of work.

@whynotrobin

The working day isn’t only about productivity, it’s about keeping you busy too, so you’ll have no time do to other things (like study, discover that you can fight back capitalism, organize, things like that).

If you would go out of your way to argue how easy it is for capital to automate away jobs when labor costs become too high, then you should probably know that you’re giving all kinds of credibility to those of us who advocate fully-automated luxury communism. I mean, think about it: you’re arguing that so much of human labor ISN’T NECESSARY because said jobs can be done by machines, and yet you STILL want the bulk of humanity to pointlessly scrape by laboring for the capitalist class, receiving meager wages to buy the shit they helped generate in the first place. The above billboard is a THREAT. Let’s not mince words – that billboard is bourgeois propaganda designed to turn the working class against each other and against the broader goals of resource democratization. “If you fight for a basic livable wage, just know that you’re easily replaceable, peon!”

This is what leftists mean when they say that capitalism is an economic system filled to the brim with tensions and contradictions; it’s also what they mean when they say that capitalism inevitably produces its own gravediggers. Automation is one of those gravediggers, and it’s a major one at that. As more and more jobs become automated in the coming decades, the working class will face widespread dispossession, ramping up revolutionary class consciousness in the process. At that point, capitalism will either focus on generating more superfluous jobs for people to work or set about instituting a universal basic income – regardless, the point is to keep enough scraps flowing downward so that people don’t call for a broader system change. In this way, capitalism’s ruling class can maintain control over the wealth-producing means of production and imperialist capital accumulation can continue unrestrained.

For these reasons, “more jobs” and universal basic incomes are not enough. We need to democratize the broader social infrastructure and eliminate the profit system. If you recognize how possible it is to automate away human labor, then you should defenestrate yourself out of the Overton Window and use some political imagination – cut out the unnecessary jobs, automate all the labor you can, produce for human need rather than elite profit, and you end up with drastically reduced working hours and bountiful leisure time. This is the essence of fully-automated luxury communism – the natural conclusion of the conditions that capitalism set in motion.

Be wary of automation in the present climate, but always trace it back to the class struggle. Robots taking our jobs SHOULD be cause for celebration; why should we treat these potential liberators as harbingers of dispossession? Technological advancements are pushing us exponentially towards a de facto post-scarcity world, where everyone’s needs can be comfortably met alongside their desires for community and leisure and entertainment, and yet we’re held back by Empire’s insistence on keeping the means of production hoarded under the command of a superfluous ruling class. As long as we are divided into capitalists and workers, humanity will never know full liberation.

TL;DR: automating jobs will eventually get rid of working for profit, cut down the class system, and give everybody time to focus on whatever they want to do.

Exactly, with automation will actually come more jobs and better paying jobs to manage those technologist. Technology always statistically creates more jobs than it destroys.

Okay but that’s also what we want to avoid. It’s not about resigning ourselves to HAVING to work a job just so we can access resources – it should be about determining what jobs are actually necessary for meeting people’s needs and for the maintenance of society, what jobs can be automated away, and how to properly transition towards a system that produces for need rather than for profit (and hopefully eventually reaching a point of abundant post-scarcity that money itself could be feasibly abolished from there), all accomplished by democratic control of the means of production and the infrastructure. I’m sick of this liberal discourse that keeps shifting all these radical developments in technology back towards the status quo, where the wealth-producing machines are still controlled by elites and where we have to just keep inventing new jobs for people to work so they can access resources. If feudalism couldn’t cope with the advancements in technology that eventually made feudal relations obsolete, then capitalism won’t be able to cope with the coming advancements in technology as well, try as it might – scarcity will have to be enforced (more so than it is now), more pointless jobs will be created, and politicians will opt for redistributive universal basic incomes in an attempt to stabilize the whole thing. We need to seize the opportunity to put the exponentially-increasing reach of technology to work for the benefit of humanity, not just for human benefit when it’s convenient to capitalists.

So this post reminded me of something from my childhood, and I couldn’t place what, until I remembered this joke from the Jetsons:

Now in the show this is obviously a statement about how easy Mr Jetson has it in the future’s workforce, but it more effectively highlights the absurdity of a capitalist system once technology has become able to automate entry-level labor: no one NEEDS Mr Jetson to do anything, but because his value in society is entirely based on income and thus employment, they need to FABRICATE a role for him to fill. In reality the only human necessary to keep the plant running is (maybe) Mr. Spacely, but goodness knows we can’t let EVERYONE enjoy an upper-middle class income in management, so they give him a bunch of useless peons to boss around all day.

The capitalist system the Jetsons live in finds THIS absurd future preferable to a system where everyone’s basic needs are met using the massive surplus generated by a fully automated workforce. The people who paid for the billboard in the original post above are even LESS sympathetic, as they’d apparently blame US for “making” them fire 90% of their employees in order to remain competitive. What a grand system, this capitalism.

Guaranteed basic income to every citizen, whether or not they are employed to ensure their survival and that they live in a dignified, humane way, preventing poverty, illness, homelessness, reducing crime, encouraging higher education and learning vocations as well as helping society become more prosperous as a whole. 

Wow. Forget raising the minimum wage. This is much much better idea.

The minimum wage could actually drop if we had basic income.

But Americans would never go for it. Miserably slogging through 12 hour days and having businesses open 24/7 is too engrained in our culture.

“BUT WHERE WILL THE GOVERNMENT GET THE MONEY?” screamed Joe Schmoe, slamming a meaty fist onto the table and getting mouth-froth all over the front of his greying tank top. “You libt*rds all think money grows on TREES!! HAHA!” “But where will people get the incentive to work?!” Mindy Bindy cried, flapping her hands in front of her face. She’d had a fear of the unemployed lollygagging about ever since she was a child and her mother told her to be afraid of the unemployed lollygagging about. “You think people should get paid for nothing? I work hard for my money!”

“But who will serve me?” grumbled Marty McMoneybags. “Who will make me feel important? Who will do my laundry and cook my food and stand in front of me wearing a plastic smile while I take out all my stress—because I do have a lot of stress, you know, being this rich is stressful—on them?” He paused and straightened out the piles of hundred dollar bills on the desk in front of him, then raised his two watery, outraged eyes up to the Heavens. “Lord, if there are no poor people, how will I know that I’m rich??”

I laughed. This is perfect! Well said!

The thing is, while I’m sure you could scrape up a few people who’d be willing to just float by on a guaranteed minimum income? For most people the choice to work would be a no-brainer. “Hmmm. I can get by on 33k a year, or I can take that part time job and make 48k… enough to move to a better apartment, maybe take the family on vacation. Sold.” Hell, most people would want to work simply because it gives one a sense of dignity and something to do with one’s time. (Speaking as someone who’s been unemployed, on extended sick leave, etc. in her time, the boredom and sense of isolation that comes with not having a job is almost as bad as the humiliation of having to depend on other people for one’s survival.)

And with this system, part-time jobs and “non-skilled” jobs would be much more readily available because nobody would need to work two or three jobs just to stay afloat!

Which would ALSO mean that employers and customers couldn’t shamelessly exploit employees the way they can today, because if losing a job weren’t necessarily a financial disaster, more people would be willing to walk out on jobs where they weren’t being treated with dignity.

And if this also applies to students (and it should) then student loans would become much less of a problem, and fewer people would flunk out of school because of having to juggle studies and work.

Far fewer people would be forced to stay with abusive partners, parents or roommates because they couldn’t afford to move out.

And the thing is, all those people who suddenly had money? They’d be spending it. They’d be getting all the stuff they can’t afford now - new clothes, books, toys, locally-produced food, car repairs - and with each purchase money would flow BACK to the government, because VAT, also income tax.

The unemployed and/or disabled wouldn’t need special support any more - which would also mean the government could fire however many admins who are currently engaged in humiliating - *cough* making sure those people aren’t getting money they don’t deserve. Same for medical benefits and pensions. And I’m no legal scholar, but I somehow imagine less financial desperation would lead to less petty crime, and hence less need for police and security everywhere?

TL;DR Doomie thinks this is a good idea, laughs at those who protest.

reblogging for more top commentary

They tried something like this out in Canada as a sort of social experiment, called Mincome. What they found was that, on the whole, people continued to work about as much as they did before. Only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less hours. 

But wait, there’s more. Because parents were spending just a little more time at home and involved with their families, test scores increased. Because teens didn’t have to work to support their families, drop-out rates decreased. Crime rates, hospital visits, psychiatric hospitalizations and domestic abuse rates all dropped, as well. More adults pursued higher education. Those who continued to work reported more job flexibility and more opportunity to choose employment they preferred.

Basically, now you can go prove to your asshole family members that society won’t collapse without poor people for you to feel better than.

The picture is awesome, but read the commentary, that’s what I’m reblogging for.

Unfortunately, the proposition was defeated in Switzerland, but it’s apparently going to happen in Finland, and Canada’s Liberal Party has made it part of policy - not platform yet, but policy.  

Most of us have grown up in societies where having a job is a basic requirement for existence.  For the past few decades, though, there’s been a cultural shift towards acceptance of the practice of cutting jobs to maximize profit, thereby making jobs scarcer and competition for them a lot fiercer.  This allows corporations to make all sorts of demands of individuals, governments, communities, and postsecondary institutions that we would have considered unacceptable not long ago.  It also means that there is a large and growing group of talented, educated, hard-working individuals who, unless something changes, will work for their entire lives (often at things that our culture increasingly refuses to recognize as work) without being able to expect a living wage.

I feel like I’ve said this before, but the longterm desirability of tying work to jobs to wages aside, you simply can’t make jobs both the basic requirement for existence in your society and a reward dispensed only to the most talented, educated, hard-working, flexible, and lucky.  Universal Basic Income is the best way I can see of going forward.  Even three years ago, I didn’t think I would see it in my lifetime, but it seems like an idea whose time has come, and I can’t wait.  

@andersonsallpurpose here is some answer for you ^^^ 

thanks @chromalogue because i was also wondering the same thing and didn’t remember to ask or look it up.

Guaranteed basic income to every citizen, whether or not they are employed to ensure their survival and that they live in a dignified, humane way, preventing poverty, illness, homelessness, reducing crime, encouraging higher education and learning vocations as well as helping society become more prosperous as a whole. 

Wow. Forget raising the minimum wage. This is much much better idea.

The minimum wage could actually drop if we had basic income.

But Americans would never go for it. Miserably slogging through 12 hour days and having businesses open 24/7 is too engrained in our culture.

“BUT WHERE WILL THE GOVERNMENT GET THE MONEY?” screamed Joe Schmoe, slamming a meaty fist onto the table and getting mouth-froth all over the front of his greying tank top. “You libt*rds all think money grows on TREES!! HAHA!” “But where will people get the incentive to work?!” Mindy Bindy cried, flapping her hands in front of her face. She’d had a fear of the unemployed lollygagging about ever since she was a child and her mother told her to be afraid of the unemployed lollygagging about. “You think people should get paid for nothing? I work hard for my money!”

“But who will serve me?” grumbled Marty McMoneybags. “Who will make me feel important? Who will do my laundry and cook my food and stand in front of me wearing a plastic smile while I take out all my stress—because I do have a lot of stress, you know, being this rich is stressful—on them?” He paused and straightened out the piles of hundred dollar bills on the desk in front of him, then raised his two watery, outraged eyes up to the Heavens. “Lord, if there are no poor people, how will I know that I’m rich??”

I laughed. This is perfect! Well said!

The thing is, while I’m sure you could scrape up a few people who’d be willing to just float by on a guaranteed minimum income? For most people the choice to work would be a no-brainer. “Hmmm. I can get by on 33k a year, or I can take that part time job and make 48k… enough to move to a better apartment, maybe take the family on vacation. Sold.” Hell, most people would want to work simply because it gives one a sense of dignity and something to do with one’s time. (Speaking as someone who’s been unemployed, on extended sick leave, etc. in her time, the boredom and sense of isolation that comes with not having a job is almost as bad as the humiliation of having to depend on other people for one’s survival.)

And with this system, part-time jobs and “non-skilled” jobs would be much more readily available because nobody would need to work two or three jobs just to stay afloat!

Which would ALSO mean that employers and customers couldn’t shamelessly exploit employees the way they can today, because if losing a job weren’t necessarily a financial disaster, more people would be willing to walk out on jobs where they weren’t being treated with dignity.

And if this also applies to students (and it should) then student loans would become much less of a problem, and fewer people would flunk out of school because of having to juggle studies and work.

Far fewer people would be forced to stay with abusive partners, parents or roommates because they couldn’t afford to move out.

And the thing is, all those people who suddenly had money? They’d be spending it. They’d be getting all the stuff they can’t afford now - new clothes, books, toys, locally-produced food, car repairs - and with each purchase money would flow BACK to the government, because VAT, also income tax.

The unemployed and/or disabled wouldn’t need special support any more - which would also mean the government could fire however many admins who are currently engaged in humiliating - *cough* making sure those people aren’t getting money they don’t deserve. Same for medical benefits and pensions. And I’m no legal scholar, but I somehow imagine less financial desperation would lead to less petty crime, and hence less need for police and security everywhere?

TL;DR Doomie thinks this is a good idea, laughs at those who protest.

reblogging for more top commentary

They tried something like this out in Canada as a sort of social experiment, called Mincome. What they found was that, on the whole, people continued to work about as much as they did before. Only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less hours. 

But wait, there’s more. Because parents were spending just a little more time at home and involved with their families, test scores increased. Because teens didn’t have to work to support their families, drop-out rates decreased. Crime rates, hospital visits, psychiatric hospitalizations and domestic abuse rates all dropped, as well. More adults pursued higher education. Those who continued to work reported more job flexibility and more opportunity to choose employment they preferred.

Basically, now you can go prove to your asshole family members that society won’t collapse without poor people for you to feel better than.

The picture is awesome, but read the commentary, that’s what I’m reblogging for.

Can you imagine the changes to the workforce and how we treated workers if no one HAD to work to survive?

Like often I see these complaints about a universal basic income that are like “well then no one would work!” and I think there are lots of people motivated to have more money even when they have enough to get by, but I also I think, that’s kind of true, if regular employment looked and functioned the way it does now.

But with UBI if both employers and society wanted people in certain jobs those jobs would have to offer more than just “you need us to survive”. They’d have to offer satisfaction and community and purpose.

Imagine the changes places like WalMart and McDonalds would have to make to how they run their enterprise if they had to woo and entice their employees into wanting to be there. Imagine the end of “the customer is always right”, both because employers know their workers won’t put up with and because consumers are forced to have a respect for workers choosing to do this with their time to make the community function when they don’t have to.

Imagine the progress to automation and technology now that we don’t have to worry about unemployment as a result. So instead of a store having 40 employees, they have 10 and automated self check out and price scanners and store apps you can pay on, and automated self-driving bots to keep inventory and restock at night. (And that’s when you don’t just order online, shopping in-store is now inherently a Boutique experience).

But those ten remaining employees are So Valued by the company, and so carefully educated and trained and respected as experts in what they do. People go “you could do that when you grow up, help people shop and find what they need and know what products are best for them.” And it wouldn’t be an insult like “you’ll wind up flipping burgers”, but instead a respected option “you can help people have warm fresh food in one of the oldest and most prestigious international groups in the world, and look at their travel programs and free clubs and classes” (McDonalds wins the Fast Food Mario Kart Tournament every year, their team is best in the nation and if you want a good esports program you work at McDonalds).

Evidence shows people would still work. Evidence shows people want to improve their situations and want to have structure in their lives. Evidence shows the only populations who take advantage of a UBI to not work are students who choose to focus more on their studies and new mothers, who choose to spend more time with their kids.

But it would increase the bargaining power and social power of the average employee by so much. They’d have the option to walk away. And employers would know it and consumers would know it and employees would know it. So if we wanted it to keep working, employers would have to start catering to their employees wellbeing and health and happiness as well as their wallet.

And it would be so good.

what i want to work for. 

The whole “you have to earn a living” rhetoric is really toxic. Have we considered that maybe, in 2015, basic needs like housing, food, and medicine don’t really need to be “earned” but should, in any reasonably industrialized country, be guaranteed?

The problem is that if people have those things guaranteed, they have no incentive to work in order to pay for them on their own. That’s why certain countries with benefit/welfare have many people who could work but refuse to work because they simply don’t need to.

So people will have more time to spend on their educations, family, friends, and passions? 

I don’t think that work is inherently ethical and that leisure is inherently immoral. 

Leisure isn’t immoral, of course.

But welfare can only be provided at the expense of other taxpayers who do work. Working people give up some of their spare time to work, in order to provide for themselves and pay taxes that support others. Is it fair that unemployed people get more leisure time than working people, and at the direct expense of working people? Do unemployed people deserve special treatment? 

Working may not be ethical, but if everyone gave up their jobs to live on welfare, there wouldn’t be enough taxes to support a welfare/benefit system. The money has to come from somewhere. The government doesn’t have a bottomless pot of money to give everyone welfare, because the people on welfare are directly relying on working people.

Of course, it’s not bad to be on welfare/benefits. Some people have no option, or are disabled, or simply can’t find a job. Benefits don’t make you a bad person. What makes a bad person is being able to work but refusing to work, specifically because sponging welfare is easier.

- Tax the super rich

- Spend less on the military

-Invest in increased automation for undesirable but needed labor

No one deserves to die because they are poor. 

And actually, for the record, a good amount of study has been done about Basic Income and Work Incentive. 

And there have been places that actually put basic income in place. And we know how things worked there.

In studies of the Mincome experiment in rural Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s, the only two groups who worked significantly less were new mothers, and teenagers working to support their families. New mothers spent this time with their infant children, and working teenagers put significant additional time into their schooling.[source] Under Mincome, “the reduction of work effort was modest: about one per cent for men, three per cent for wives, and five per cent for unmarried women.”[source]

Another study of a pilot project implemented in 2008 and 2009 in the Namibian village of Omitara also showed no loss in work incentive; the assessment of the project after its conclusion found that economic activity actually increased, particularly through the launch of small businesses, and reinforcement of the local market by increasing households’ buying power.[source]

is 2p really suggesting that an expansion of the welfare state would lead to a societal collapse because everybody would just stop going to work and let themselves starve to death as we ran out of food

This is also where I get so confused, because half the people preaching that subsidizing basic needs would bring society to the brink ALSO talk a good game about “follow your passions”

Well, surprise! If you don’t have to “settle” for just scraping by and paying out the ass because ~capitalism~ people get to follow those dreams. All the people who WANT to become farmers and horticulturists and whatever the fuck they want get to do that. If anything, it would pave the way for greater everything, because people would have the space to breathe.

And the people who act like people would stop working if they had their basic needs met forget that people want more shit than their basic needs. Like, if I got enough to eat my basic nutritional needs, buy basic clothes from basic stores, and so on, I’d still want designer clothes and concert tickets and plane tickets and all the shit not provided for me. The difference is that I would be able to survive while figuring out how to do that in a way that utilizes my talents and passions rather than tossing those to the wayside to do bullshit so I don’t die.