With a UBI, everybody gets the same amount of money from the government, regardless of their needs or contributions. How does that sit with a mindset we have had for decades called user pays?

The brief Wikipedia article on user pays mentions the most common example, which is petrol/gasoline tax. Ultimately it is a cop-out by governments, just like out-sourcing and privatization. If you want better roads, we will need to put up the price of gas.

That is the kind of simplistic logic that satisfies (fools) the common man. But it is very wrong. Roads and road travel are ubiquitous. While most of us drive, all of us depend on roads. Almost every person and business benefits from roads to some degree, directly and indirectly. Their usefulness is so universal that taxing fuel due to a “user pays” concept is simply wrong.

Aside from trucks – as they primarily are what causes damage. A tax on their activities is warranted.

The cost of infrastructure should be borne by all of society, and all of society should have equal access. That way of thinking is an extension of UBI, and also a part of a parallel concept known as Universal Basic Services.

With the rise of electric vehicles, governments are scrambling to keep their fuel taxes happening so that roads can be funded. In Victoria Australia, there is already a kilometre tax for electric vehicles, which is the antithesis of encouraging such vehicles. Now Texas is charging EV owners an annual fee.

I look forward to a country adopting a “roads for all” policy and getting rid of the blame-shifting, responsibility-shirking road taxes once and for all.

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What if instead of employers dictating wages, we turned it upside down: people bid for jobs, how low they were lowing to offer for a job.

But otherwise, a “shitty” job would end up paying more per hour, and an “easy” job would pay less.

The qualifications and performance issues are immense. But a hybrid is possible if all jobs were up for auction:

• You can only apply for jobs you are minimally qualified for (determined by the employer)
• Lowest bid wins – no matter what
• 3 month probation period – can be fired for no reason
• being fired in the past affects future bids – you have a premium, so you need to bid lower. That premium goes into a fund

We would need an arbitration process for unjust dismissals…

A Universal Basic Income is an absolute key to this – the idea that I could sit at home and watch TV instead of working in the garbage industry… Without that the vulnerable and unqualified would lose out massively.

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Being retrenched, or being made redundant, is possibly going to become a major aspect of society in the coming decades. Potentially we are entering the age of leisure, where coming up with new jobs to keep us busy becomes difficult.

As I discuss elsewhere, a major roadblock to a UBI (Universal Basic Income) is the presumption that it needs to be universal from day one. I am advocating for UBI by stealth, where is appears in different places under other names and guises, and given a chance to prove itself.

For a UBI to work it needs to be based on the minimum amount required for someone to live, the bare basics, but with dignity. Once we have established what that amount is (and it can vary according to circumstances, for example, if you have children) we can start sneaking it into society.

The loss of jobs is a strong argument against progressive policies and actions, like combating climate change. What happens to miners?

A UBI can be added to the arsenal of other solutions to redundancies, such as retraining and exit payments from the employer. The government can say that nobody will starve, and nobody will be forced to complete the requirements to receive an unemployment benefit. Especially so for mining, this means that people are given a greater capacity to remain where they currently live.

Again, this is not a solution, this is a little extra to help.

Politicians shouldn’t mention not starving

It could be called a Reestablishment Benefit that recognises that their skills are no longer needed by society, and potentially not transferrable, and therefore it helps them maintain the life they are used to when they take on new, different and probably lower paid employment.

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It might be a lot or a little. It might be a federal or a local tax. Sometimes it only applies to larger businesses. But its existence it is pretty standard.

Ostensively it is a way of businesses to contribute to social security, to help their workers. In reality it just means they pay workers less. The only genuine benefit it could have is giving an advantage to smaller, local businesses who might not need to pay it.

In recent times Robot Tax has become a popular meme, to stop or reduce robots from stealing jobs. It is sometimes mentioned that robots have appeal because they do not incur payroll tax. No, robots have appeal because they can be cheaper overall. Payroll tax is a negligible factor.

So, they say, lets tax robots! None say exactly how they would do this. They are perhaps imaging a humanoid robot who sits at a desk and replicates a clerk’s job. No, robots come in all different shapes and sizes. How much would you tax a Roomba? Or a dishwasher? Or a drone?

Taxes are used to make undesirable things less appealing, less profitable. We often forget that the alternative is to subsidise the things we prefer.

So let’s turn things upside down and reward businesses for employing people, instead of taxing them for it.

Let’s pay businesses a UBI based on full-time employees, regardless of how much they are paid.

Why not a tax break, based on employees? Well, that would work fine in the current system. But in a future system with different types of money, we can pay the Business UBI with money that can only be spent on certain things, like employee health, renewable energy, public transport passes, safety audits… it is only limited by imagination.

Studies show that, in general, reward achieves more than punishment. Imagine the difference in the mood of your boss if she is receiving a check instead of having to write one.

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Just like we don’t question the idea of profiting from owning a house, we grumble about, but don’t question, the absurdity of paying almost as much for childcare as you earn from going to work. It is perhaps a remnant of patriarchy, punishing (typically) a woman for choosing not to be a full-time Mum. Yet the desire to work is so strong in many women that they do so, and are apart from their children, for low financial gain. Regardless of your opinion on how parenting should look, we know that many women want to be a mother and also work. That alone is a strong argument against the idea that the UBI will lead to laziness.

Free child care is UBI by stealth, given without question to parents who choose to work when they have pre-school children (it should also be extended to after school care for older kids). And it isn’t so radical, many advanced economies already give benefits and tax credits to those who have children – this is just the next natural step.

When the cost of child care is removed from the equation, parents can make genuine decisions around whether they should work, or not. Instead of the absurd situation of literally paying a fee for the privilege to work, like the cost of commuting on steroids. Nobody would take a job when 75% of your pay is spent on the commute, and yet working parents do exactly that with child care. Like the UBI, free child care enables us to have more freedom and choice.

When the concept is being debated, we can bring up the value provided by carers, and argue that the role they play in society is worthy of higher pay. Child care is predominantly a female profession, is seen by some men as being an easy and unskilled role, and is a key aspect of why women are paid less than men in aggregate. 

Free child care would be a boost to the economy. The recipients are not the parents, but the child care industry, providing jobs and growth. The parents get to work more, which is also a boost. And, if we want to delay population decline, it will certainly lead to more babies, perhaps more than any other incentives that have been tried.

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Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth distribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality
Stephen Hawking, October 2015

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.
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), Martin Luther King Jr.

There have been a number of hindrances to the adoption of a UBI:

• Cost, which is extraordinary if everyone gets it at the beginning (we should consider a subset of society getting it first to prove it works)
• Trials – all have been too narrow and too short-lived
• How much? All trials have used arbitrary amounts, not based on actual needs
• Focus on employees

While I have significant thoughts on all the above, I want to focus on the focus on employees. One of the un-proven issues with UBI is that if people have enough to live on, they won’t go to work, and employers/businesses will suffer.

Not considered, from what I have read, is the impact of the UBI on the self-employed. Even more so, how it would affect the self-employed who barely make a living?

We are all well aware that large corporations (example: Walmart) have robbed us of small “Mom and Pop” stores. While this is a consequence of efficiency and economics, that doesn’t equate with being good. In the USA there are now food deserts, where the best solution for some – a corner store a block away that costs a bit more – has been replaced with a big box store 10 miles away that you need a car to get to. Numerous times I have seen poor people taking taxis to and from supermarkets…

“Mom and Pop stores” aren’t motivated by profit. They are motivated by pride and community and survival. Many such stores would not survive if the owners paid themselves a fair wage, but they persist because it gives them an identity and purpose in society. It is not uncommon for people to buy a business as a way of buying a job.

Pure capitalism works on averages. Whatever works best on average will win, regardless of the people on the margins is doesn’t work for. A fast food franchise won’t stock a beverage that only 5% of society will order, because it is less efficient. Those 5% feel left out. Efficiency is not necessarily optimal, especially when only averages are considered.

“Mom and Pop stores” serve a very real need, both for the proprietors and the customers. Capitalism and averages mean that they are dying off, and Walmart-type businesses (which most people would consider to be soulless) are taking their place.

With a UBI, everything changes at the lowest level of retail, the “Mom and Pop stores”. With the UBI they can operate without staff wages being a factor. In poorer outer suburbs, where rent is less of an issue, this can be a significant advantage. Big Box Stores will still need to pay employees. Nobody receiving the UBI will work for free for Walmart (although I can envisage some kind of Walmart intern scheme as they scramble to survive…). But those people who run a business based on ideals of being useful, providing service, and getting by will thrive.

I do not think we can underestimate the ability of a UBI to counteract the advantages corporations have had in destroying small businesses.

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Physically a country is a an area of land, and sometimes a bit of sea or ocean, with boundaries that separate it from other countries, or parts of the globe that are not assigned to anyone.

In that physical space we have:

• earth/soil/rocks/minerals/oil/gas below us
• air above us
• flora and fauna
• human-built structures
• humans

We also have intangibles, which all come under the umbrella term society. Without society it is hard to have money, religion and knowledge. And it is impossible to have a country.

Forgive me, I am not a Christian, so I do not believe that God has given us a right to dominate other animals. So when I think of equality, it goes beyond rich and poor humans. I feel that to some degree any talk of equality must involve the air, the soil, forests and animals. To discuss these, tap the shoulder of nearest greenie.

A country cannot exist without society. A country is society. So, what is society?

One dictionary definition is the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.

Wikipedia says:

Societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent of members.

A country is society. And society is everybody.

As society improves, it becomes more inclusive. Country was once the rulers, the chiefs and aristocracy. Those who didn’t own and run the country, may not have even known their country existed. Monty Python is a good resource for this:

ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady. I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that?
WOMAN: King of the who?
ARTHUR: The Britons.
WOMAN: Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR: Well, we all are. we’re all Britons and I am your king.
WOMAN: I didn’t know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.

After that society was just men of power, then just men, then women as well, then you couldn’t exploit children any more… and now today, in all advanced democratic economies, everybody is equal – no matter your race, sexuality or religion. We are on the verge of giving rights to the land and animals, as we end caging chickens and give personhood to rivers (New Zealand’s Whanganui River).

I am all for ending animal cruelty, but as we move onto respecting the non-human aspects of country, we are forgetting that there is a lingering item of inequality amongst humans that has not been fixed: wealth, intelligence and income. The current trend is for such inequality to get worse. It is a by-product of capitalism, and capitalism is seen as untouchable by politicians.

Lets take a moment to leap forward 20 years and look at inequality around intelligence. Let us take an easy connection between intelligence, ability to improve wellbeing of all, and rewards for doing so.

Just like everything else you are born with, intelligence is there. Nobody earns intelligence, and intelligence leads to greater prosperity (I don’t expect anyone to bother me to back that up…).

If we extrapolate trends towards improving equality, one day intelligence will be in the mix of discussion. The end result seems obvious to me – people who achieve wins for all of society should be primarily rewarded with knowing they have done well (and social applaud), and secondarily with rewards of wealth. The latter will inspire people to achieve, it simply needs to be balanced right.

As a parent I noticed that my children would strive for relative superiority over their siblings, regardless of what the reward for success was. Exaggerating to make a point, it could be given 5 twigs instead of 4.

While retaining rewards connected to economics, we need to reward other forms of contribution to society. And more so, we need to make sure that something you are born with, and cannot change – intelligence – should not condemn you to a suffering in any form.

If we look at the most equal societies – also known as the most primitive – we see that that even those who are least capable to contribute, are afforded equal status.

There are no statistics around equality in “primitive” cultures, because nobody owns or earns anything. That is instructive in itself.

Ultimately country is society, and society is everybody. Capitalism, machines, culture and jobs are all the result of society, the result of everybody. Without the person who maxes out their credit card to buy the latest Apple smartphone, there isn’t the CEO (Tim Cook) earning $125 million per year.

Society is a collective, and we should collectively share the bounty that comes from our natural resources and our collective endeavours. A great deal of our wealth has come from a system based on rewarding those who do well, so we cannot end that. But we need to recognise that they do not “do well” purely on their own. Their parents raise them, society teaches the, society provides them with the framework to succeed in, and society gives them rewards by taking a little from everyone else.

Inequality doesn’t mean that the wrong people are rewarded. They should continue to be rewarded. But not at the expense of the pool, the desperate and the disenfranchised.

All of society participates in growing the the wealth of the successful. Much of society suffers, despite being good, caring, hardworking people.

Inequality cannot exist without society. And we need society to fix it. The solution is obvious – every member of society gets to receive enough reward for their participation (which is essentially simply existing) to achieve minimum standards of healthcare, food, housing and enjoying being human.

I propose calling UBI a Celebration Dividend, a payment that reflects the fact that humans have never achieved as much as right now, and we all deserve to be rewarded.

The post What is in a Country? A case for UBI appeared first on Unism.

Reparation is a difficult thing – on both sides. Deciding who pays is arduous, and the default is the government, which basically means everyone provides for those lesser off. Deciding who receives it, generations of sometimes undocumented lives later, is also difficult.

It doesn’t need to be so complicated. Inequality operates in extreme wealth and in abject poverty. Universal Basic Income works on a pure and base level. Everyone gets more, the same more, which means that in proportion the poor rise up more. Inequality reverses.

In any country where reparation is too difficult or simply will never happen, UBI is a way to provide reparation, without even mentioning it by name.

The current COVID-19 pandemic is the perfect excuse for right-leaning governments to do the right thing.

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