Often very interesting things come across this list. I have monitored it for years but said little on it.
It has some of the usual problems with internet discussion lists which are not strictly monitored. You have a lot of people with ideological type cognitive problems promoting their hobby horses. And a lot of people who think they are taking art in some sort of debate, who would not form or follow a coherent line of thought if their lives depended on it. I do not have much patience for this. On some occasions when I challenge ridiculous thinking, I get a really vicious, narcissistic type of response and sometimes dumped off the list, so I do not bother much anymore with trying to correct net nonsense. I look for discussion lists, boards, and blogs where people are not allowed to post drivel. Here are a few points I want to make. I know a bit about Basic Incomes because I run a web site on the topic in Toronto. There are a lot of people shooting their faces off about this, too, without thinking it out and knowing what they are talking about. They claim to be supporters, but they discredit the idea. One idea is that the cost of a BI program would be reduced because part of the income gets taxed back. Nobody really into BI or other things the same idea is called, supports that idea. There is no sense in giving people money and taxing it back. It is not politically supportable to give a Basic Income to a people who are already very wealthy. This is the "wealthy banker's wife" dilemma. There is a cutoff where a Basic Income starts to be gradually withdrawn and Income taxes gradually imposed. One test of how good a model of a Basic Income is, is how much of the population will be on the 'get' side, and how much on the 'give' side. The ideal is to have the top 20% of the population paying. This is how civilization is supposed to work; everybody receives according to his or her real needs. Taxes are imposed on those who have more than they need in order to have an economy and a democracy. Massive concentrations of wealth should never be tolerated. When concentration of wealth is tolerated, as it is now, the wealthy begin playing with their money and abusing the unchecked power their wealth gives them. They start to confuse wealth with money , as though playing with money was what the economy is about and making the things needed for living is trivial. "Manufacturing can take care of itself". Pft! We are now getting the results of this, where one country has an economy totally based on military power and exacting tribute form the rest of the world. It can no longer make anything except weapons. It thinks it can just get everything from China; the proles at home are too uppity. So now it has a huge balance of payments problem. The Chinese do not want their money anymore. In about another year they are going to run out of capacity to pay for their imports and they are going to start collapsing. They will spend about a generation rebuilding their economy, relearning how to make things, how to do things, how to act like human beings again, and what civilization is. A basic rule of economics, I mean real economics, not monetary delusions, is that you do not import what you can make locally. To keep everybody employed, and income distributed correctly, you put increased productivity into increased leisure time rather than increased profit taking. People are also learning that in order to maintain the land base on which civilization depends, demand must be restricted to what that land base can support. It is not; how high can we pump up production and consumption? It is; how can we satisfy all needs with the least effort and least resources? Where a Basic income fits into this is that it helps to break the control of an owner class over people's lives, so they can work for their benefit, not someone else's. When everyone is assured of their basic well being, then they are prepared to accept less and to share the world with other people. History is an endless conflict between civilized people and the cro- magnons. The latter cannot grasp civilization; they see it as something they can exploit. They see themselves as in competition with everyone, instead of having a common interest. They need to finally be removed from power and segregated away from the normal human being, so we can finally complete the evolution of the human and the fully developed civilization in which we humans can thrive. That is enough. tr _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
