To: The Treaty of Noordwijk aan Zee at URL
www.treatyofnoordwijkaanzee.com
Citizen's Income (CI) Discussion site at URL
http://citiinco01.uuhost.uk.uu.net/discussion/index.shtml,
And friends on several mail lists.
Good day folks,
In a 10/01/2000 post to mail lists [EMAIL PROTECTED] and
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (CCMJ), Boudewijn Wegerif said "No" to
a Basic Income. Boudewijn's thoughtful and concise post is archived
at URL
http://www.geocities.com/w_b_ryan/9-21-00/wegerif-9-19-00.html
I have also said "No" to a Basic Income, as it has been discussed by members
of BIEN (Basic Income European Network) and by members of The Citizen's
Income Discussion web site, and concluded that "Basic Income" is a
red-herring, because the discussion never includes the sound technical
justification of a basic income for children and students, from birth until
they become selfsupporting. Some of that sound technical justification was
outlined in the seven months old post copied below.
Think about it, and then talk about it. Its your future, not mine!
Kind regards,
Wesburt
>>>>>>>>>>>> Begin the seven months old post <<<<<<<<<<<<
Posted by Wesley S. Burt on February 24, 2000 at 20:48:27:
Subject: The Universal Citizen's Income (UCI)
To: Citizen's Income Online at URL
http://citiinco01.uuhost.uk.uu.net/discussion/index.shtml
and friends on several mail lists
Hi folks,
By the word "The," I understand "The one and only one." By "universal," I
understand a public policy applicable to any society. And by "Citizen's
Income," I understand a periodic payment from the public revenue to
each citizen of a subsistence level income, not taxed, and regardless
of other earned or unearned income. Such a financial structure is
absolutely necessary to bring every person who wants to work into the
labor market with "decreasing returns to scale," and thereby enable the
free market to approach an optimum allocation of human resources
(cost per unit of value-added is the same for all suppliers). The future
piecemeal steps we must take to introduce a UCI depends on our
present condition and which parts of the UCI have already been
established.
Now it seems to me that the standard practice of our most capital
intensive industry, electric power, the industry which defines the
lifestyle of industrial societies, provides a powerful argument in favor
of establishing a UCI in four sections, for our human assets. The
standard industry practice is to subsidize, from corporate revenue,
three fixed expenses of each plant; that is, the debt service on the cost
of acquiring each plant in the first place, the expense of maintenance
to keep each plant in good working order, and the expense of the
no-load losses of each plant while each plant is unemployed but
available for production when required. These three subsidies, from
corporate funds to the plant, suggest the first three sections, of a four
section UCI for our human assets.
The guiding principle here is to remove all fixed costs from the data
used by the control system at the plant level, so that supply and demand
can be matched at every level of production with a minimum fuel input
to the whole system at every level of production. Corporations obey this
principle because it is the only way to make an automatic control
system work reliably. Governments, on the other hand, seem to think of
society as a big bean bag, without any regulating principles, which can
be punched up in any desired shape by just passing a law. Our present
condition shows that corporations treat their productive capital assets
much better than governments treat their citizens. If the US power grid
were operated under the same financial rules which our government
imposes on its citizen, the US would have a "third world" power system.
The same standard practice is also a vital technical requirement for the
efficient operation of the workforce. A free market automatic operation
of the labor market price mechanism can properly regulate only about
70% of the total value-added because the other 30% must be diverted by
taxation to subsidize the fixed or sunk costs which, by definition, cannot
play any role in achieving a "Pareto Optimum" dispatch of value-added
from the available suppliers. In other words, over the lifecycle of any
reproducible productive asset, human or capital, three subsidies must
be paid from that part of corporate or public revenue (the gross margin)
which is over and above the direct manufacturing costs of producing the
value-added.
The first subsidy is for the cost of development, which is a sunk cost
by the time the asset becomes productive. The second is for the cost
of management or government, that is, the salaried workers as
opposed to direct labor. The third subsidy is for the cost of
maintenance and no-load losses while the plant or person is available
for production, but not in production. For human assets, of course,
there is an additional fourth cost for maintenance while in retirement.
It is that fourth cost, social security payments, which presently gives
this writer the freedom to say what he thinks without regard to zerosum
employers or pecksniffian mail list moderators.
Given the propensity of wealthy, healthy, intelligent, and powerful WHIPs
to "do whatever it takes" to survive and evolve to a better condition for
themselves, how can we explain why the United Kingdom has remained
locked in a public policy which has generated 2-3 percent per year
inflation and 4-10% unemployment, ever since the advent of
industrialization in Adam Smith's day? Even more perplexing, how can
we explain why the United States, after wining its War for Independence
from England and its Civil War to remain one nation, reverted to the
same second-best public policy after the advent of industrialization in
the US in the late 1900s? "The Great Transformation," as it was called
by that prominent social scientist, Karl Polanyi in 1944, is clearly shown
on Figure 10 of The Global Model at URL
http://www.freespeech.org/darves/bert.html.
The inflationary trend of this second-best policy is illustrated also by
the profiles of the price indexes for the two countries shown in a 1993
book, THE GREAT RECKONING, by authors James Dale Davidson
and Lord William Rees-Mogg. The unemployment levels of this
second-best public policy, as two centuries of experience in the UK
and one century of experience in the US confirm, are moderated only
while the nations are at war. Surely this is a sorry performance
compared to the stability and economic efficiency demonstrated by our
corporations over the last two centuries, and by Japan, Germany, and
the smaller European industrial nations during the three decades
following World War II.
Even if John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was accurate in his
assertion "that not one person in a million can diagnose inflation," we
should today have about 300 such persons in the English speaking
countries: the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South
Africa. Is it reasonable to conclude that these 300 people remain silent
because they are at the top of the heap and fear to disturb the status
quo by addressing the general welfare of their respective nations in
public? I think not. The silence must have a much more fundamental
cause.
Sally Lerner, owner of list [EMAIL PROTECTED], has
written often of the obstacles to getting a public debate started in
North America on the need for a UCI, and has established list
[EMAIL PROTECTED] to get that debate started. In the
UK, Kevin Donnelly, spokesperson for the Christian Council for
Monetary Justice (CCMJ), recently invited my attention to a 1986
paper by Sir John Wally KBE CB. The paper entitled, PUBLIC
SUPPORT FOR FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN; A Study Of British
Politics, traces the question of subsidies for families from 1795,
when Prime Minister Pitt critiqued the Spleenhamland System,
down to today's "academic pressure groups who had no interest
in the principles of income taxation, except to misrepresent its
deductions for children as handouts to the better-off." Of course,
any reduction of taxes, based on exemptions from taxable income
multiplied by progressive tax rates, is exactly a "handout to the
better-off." It does nothing for the working poor!
Clearly, there has not been a generation of English speaking people in
the last 200 years without one or more prominent persons speaking in
favor of public support for parenting families. But today, the public is
numb on the question, and prominent persons are quiet as church
mice. It is as if there were a powerful religious taboo in effect, but
never articulated in the public debate. A taboo which proscribes all
assistance to parenting families until they become unemployed and
sink into poverty and dependence on public welfare. Much of the
teaching of the Church of Rome has carried over, unmoderated, into
the teaching of the Protestant denominations and the principle of
"Subsidarity" is one such teaching which addresses the relationship
between higher and lower levels of social organization. I only recently
noticed the shift in emphasis over the sixty year interval between the
following two definitions of "Subsidiarity."
#1, Subsidiarity, 1931, as defined in the Papal encyclical
Quadragisemo Anno, forty years after RERUM NOVARUM, on the
condition of the working man:
>>
"It is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order for a
large and higher organization (the government) to arrogate to itself
functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller, lower
bodies (the family)..."
<<
There is no question about the determination of most families to provide
adequate support and education for their children. We all did it. The
proper question is: how did this practice contribute to the deficiency of
purchasing power among English parenting families? A deficiency
which made "Imperialism" the second best solution, as J. A. Hobson
described it in his 1902 book of that title? Then and now, the only
sustainable solution was, or is, the UCI designed to satisfy Say's Law.
#2, Subsidarity, 1991, as defined in the Papal encyclical Centesimus Annus,
Page 94, one hundred years after RERUM NOVARUM, on the condition
of the working man:
>>
"Here again the principle of subsidiarity must be respected: a community
of higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of
a lower order, depriving the latter of its function, but rather should
support
it in case of need and help to coordinate its activities with the activities
of
the rest of society, always with a view to the common good."
<<
Does this statement imply the Church's present approval of a UCI for
every person over their whole lifecycle? For children and students only
until they enter the workforce? For retired people only, at the expense
of families with children? This latter segment of a UCI is all that the UK
and the US have implemented adequately, two centuries after Pitt, the
younger, proposed children's allowances as a practical alternative to the
Speenhamland System of wage supplements indexed to the price of
a loaf of bread.
Think about it, and then talk about it. Its your future, not mine!
Kind regards,
Wesburt
>>>>>>>>>>>> End the seven months old post <<<<<<<<<<<<
