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No Ed, you are reading me through old lenses.
There is nothing in what I said that implied making people do anything except
give back. Even that is within the context of freedom to loaf if
need be. Who knows, maybe there is a Descartes or Veblin amongst
them. But what I did mean to imply was that the money should have
built into it the desire to give back to the society that creates
it. There are many jobs that are fulfilling and renewable that
people would enjoy as a life's work. Work should be a pleasure, a
job and a challenge. The problem with profit is that those three
things are irrelevant to it. Its an accident if it
happens. Luck. On the other hand if you understand that
their are four challenges in life: Transcendancy, Relationship, Work
and Play and that all have to be dealt with, if you are to have four legs for
the table you dance on then, you will do what brings good back to you and your
community.
I am a culturalist or on a more primitive level, a
gardener and forester. l believe in long term
planning and a sensible timing to things to make them happen without
disturbing others. I'm the type of guy who used to cruise mainstreet
hitting every light green. I never got much out of revving my motor and
racing to a stop. If I could get all the way to the end of Broadway
without ever stopping then I felt good. I didn't feel like a
"jerk." Jerking from one light to another.
Gardeners deal with the light of weather and foresters deal with the timing of
the great cycles of life and death. Being more sensible about
cities in ways that the great American architects like Sullivan and Wright
advocated may not work completely but they were on to something in the questions
they asked about quality of life, freedom and humanity to one
another.
Everything else is just theology or worse, politics to
me. All of the isms and the idolatries that make one view the
transcendant one. Instead there should be a society that makes it
possible for all views to exist and have their place. People should
be encouraged to continue growth and to find happiness and fulfillment in
significant life rather than in the slow entropic running down of their
universes.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003 1:52
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] A Basic Income
as a form of Economic Governance
Wow! If I read you right Ray, you are still
associating BI with work, whether for profit or not for profit. I can't
go there with you. It sounds a little too much like workfare,
essentially grabbing people by the scruff of the neck and making them do the
shit work nobody else wants to do in order to teach them "responsibility" and
"self-reliance". IMHO, a BI has to be based on need and if there is a
moral purpose behind it, it has to be that everyone has a stake or
"entitlement" in society that must be respected by society. How great is
this entitlement? I don't think that a liberal democracy could function
properly unless it recognized that everybody's entitlement is
equal.
If one were to look at this entitlement in terms of
income, which is only one of many ways, one might say that everybody should
have an income that provides for the basic needs of families, including needs
associated with education and health. For families that need that
income, whether their heads are working or not, that level of income should be
provided without any stigma and without grabbing people by the scruff of the
neck in order to teach them "self-reliance". Indeed, the underlying
assumption has to be that people are self-reliant, but they are not in a
position to exercise their self-reliance due to circumstances beyond their
control. People who do not need the income should have it available to
them for the sake of universality, but it should be withheld or clawed back
via the tax system.
What I've argued is that a variety of programs for
the poor that are currently operated by governments be cobbled together to
form at least part of a BI. What can happen when these programs are kept
separate and administered by separate bureaucracies using different rules is
illustrated by a tragic case which occurred here in Ontario recently. In
the summer of 2001, a young woman, Kimberly Rogers, pregnant at the time, died
in her sweltering apartment while under house arrest. Rogers was convicted of
fraud for violating the rules of social assistance; she concurrently received
both social assistance and a student loan. I might add that Rogers has
become something of a cause celebre by advocates of better ways of
treating the poor, but she can't take any pleasure in that because she's
dead. Surely we can do better.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003 12:41
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] A Basic
Income as a form of Economic Governance
I want to thank you all for this excellent
discussion. For me, I prefer the Capitalist system's attitude
towards work. But I believe the limitation of for profit
only works for certain types of work that cannot be "free ridden"
on. i.e. the problem of "public goods" that are essential but are
incapable of profit or capitalization because they cannot be limited or the
limitation does not equal the cost of production.
"Productivity" is another problem concept for these essential
businesses.
If I may be allowed to take you on a little circle
here as we look at some of the key issues for me from the perspective of my
own work. Just a quick review so that we are on the same
page. The problem of for profit
capitalism is one of making expenses and then making enough to pay yourself
and your stockholders a profit. Capitalization means that you
have to guarantee some form of profit return in exchange for the seed money
to make things possible. Expensive projects that do not guarantee
profit are either lotteries, like Broadway Shows where you gamble on
the show "Hitting" the audience and then you make a big return on a long run
or they are stable ventures like industrial companies where your money is
supposed to be, but in the case of Enron etc. isn't always,
safe. I realize this is an artist's
over-simplification. But I think that is basically the story on
capitalism. Everything else, hedge funds, etc. are
improvisations on the basic story for the purpose of some "getting
ahead" of others and winning a higher profit. But this works only
for certain segments of the society and it is extremely externally
motivated.
Certain activities are in the long run highly
"profitable" for a society but in the short run are too expensive to
actually accomplish privately. Space Programs for
example. In fact, if you look at most of the crucial
services of society like education, law enforcement, healthcare, religion,
or culture to apply the for profit motive amorally in a business
sense is to create a nightmare of chaos. Chaos is always
creative ultimately but inhuman and horrible in the short run.
Such a thought is Nazi like in its application. Consider if your
doctor chose to make you sick in order to heal you or to test a drug
without your permission or if your teacher deliberately created
problems that he knew he could fix (not uncommon in the voice teacher
world). Neither case is a substitute for real healing for
real education. Healing and Education are
expensive. More expensive than for-profit private work can
accomplish. They are not productive. They cannot be
mass produced and sold at a profit and they cannot be downsized and
succeed. Like the old economist joke that can't tolerate a flute
player in an orchestra not playing and still being
paid. There are other issues here than just
"profit."
Let's look closer at just one of these, for
example in education, you must have small classrooms and the
possibility of individualized instruction that shapes the material to the
perceptual profile of the student. A for profit school
can work for a time but truly outstanding students will eventually destroy
it because they are expensive to teach. Scale or mass machine
type production is essential for productivity. Outstanding
students often don't "fit." Not "fitting" costs
more. Truly productive schools can't tolerate outstanding
disruptive students if they are to be "profitable." That is the
same problem with individuals that pharmaceutical companies have with
nutrition. In the case of nutrition, people are bio-chemically
individual and programs must be individually developed for their nutritional
needs. That too is expensive.
In the case of education, people are perceptually
individual and the one size fits all education used today eliminates all but
the three Rs, all in the visual perceptual mode that is
inadequate to fit the needs of any one student who happens to
be primarily aural, kinesthetic, haptic, kinetic or chemical in their
perceptual dominance. The idea that all
perceptual modes need to be integrated to achieve a symmetrical synergy
for maximum individual efficiency is a foreign country to most educators who
are still stuck in the out of date European school models. Even
home schooling is preferable when the student is not primarily visually
dominant. The primary tools for education
integration of these perceptual universes is the Arts and yet this tool is
both expensive and exceedingly time consumming of teachers.
Especially music (aural) teachers have to be virtuosically trained not only
in education but in the performance of the artistic subject.
Often students are required to expend hours a day in extra supervised
rehearsals with groups outside of school just to keep up and then spend
hours in individual practice as well. Such a requirement is not
in keeping with the scale activities of science, math and reading which
require much less time and are more controllable with fewer teacher
supervised hours. Also, visual testing is not done in
public and teachers are not submitted to performance type criticism if
a student fails a math test. If an instrumental or choral
ensemble performs poorly the teacher is blamed and the entire community
knows they failed.
I admit the exception to this in the graphic arts
and so the graphic arts have recieved more money while other arts are
cut. (check the US Dept of Ed. Stats on the net) Graphic
arts are visual and relate to the visual curriculum and individual
tests unlike dance, music, drama or home economics where the
chemical modes of taste and smell are buried in the current
curriculum.
As an aside, it doesn't seem to compute with this
society that the chemical mode might have anything to do with the rampant
obesity of the nation as a whole and that it could be an issue of
educational development. Because junk food is, like junk TV,
productive one only visually notices the effects of such monetary
success while ignoring the disease and chaos that comes about as a result in
the individual lives of people who aren't fortunate enough to have a
quick metabolism but who lunch daily at McDonald's.
Another proof of the tyranny of vision is found in
what constitutes "proof" itself. How many chemistry majors
have known what an "unknown chemical compound" was for a chemistry class,
but couldn't prove it in visual testing and therefore it wasn't
true? They knew what it was because of the smell and the
taste but they couldn't construct a visual formula to prove their own
body computer's conclusions.
I realize that I am on a "Shamanic" orgy of
connectedness here so I will get back to the "visually primary point" that
work is more complicated than capitalist for profit
economics can even imagine much less consider important.
Still I prefer the capitalist structure as a base to
the overt control of a socialist one. But, that being
said I believe that it has to be admitted that the capitalist structure
as a system is incapable of meeting the medical, educational,
religious, legal and cultural needs of a working society.
Business should be business but it should be clearly articulated what IS
business i.e. profitable and what is not. It should
also be said that all work need not be business but that everyone needs to
eat and have money for the development of their work.
In this realm I believe the Soviet system was superior
in their intelligent application of money to non-business
enterprises. If you passed the test for artistry you were
paid a stipend to create. It was acknowledged that some would
never do much more creating than they did under the external motivation
of force. These were admitted and paid basically
welfare. While the main group used the money to
free them to create. As a result, the artistic
productivity of the Soviet Union far outstripped anything the West had to
offer. No matter what the Master Art happened to be they
developed far more product and at a very sophisticated level than the
US or the rest of the world in spite of the KGB's interference.
The one exception to this was when the US government funded the
European Arts programs through non-communist socialism in order to
compete with the Soviet Union in the cold war. But that was
not so in America. That is why the Russian immigrants and
international artists are taking over much of our artistic
institutions even though they are bringing in a foreign culture and
stripping American culture of its
identity. Eventually American children
will speak Russian music, not our own unless you are talking the
simpler folk forms. The Master forms and accents are
Russian. Instead of Charles Ives' July fourth
Masterpiece we are more comfortable with Tchaikovski's 1812 Russian overture
and its not just the cannons and the hymn. We know as much
about contemporary Russian composers on our concerts as we know about Ned
Rorem. American Masterworks are written but performed rarely
and in many times only once, as an oddity on concerts that preach a TNC
musical ideal which is as destructive of American identity as it is of other
national industries and even the concept of identity
itself. What we would resist as visual military conquest
we welcome aurally because we are aurally unsophisticated.
Keith may not like the EU but the EU is the political
version of the statelessness that is indicative of the Internationalist
ideal manifest in TNC corporations with no loyalty to anyone but their own
little Aristocrats and citizen stockholders.
So what does this mean for BI and for
Capitalism? I believe the answer lies in the concept
of balance and the human body. These are all just systems
in the body of society and each must be balanced, made symmetrical and
efficient so that society can achieve a geniune synergy reaching beyond the
sum of all of these parts and into what it means to be human. In
order to do that people need to eat, be healthy, have education, proper
shelter and enough money to work in capitalizing their work whether for
profit or not for profit. In each case people should be paid
for their work whether it fits in the for profit world or
not. As I believe it was Keith that mentioned,
use often runs years behind discovery. Under the for
profit tyranny, that condemns creators to poverty. That is
a stupidity akin to blaming your eyes for telling you that your face is
dirty. A balance must be achieved and a logical direction must
be planned. Human wisdom must be more important than just making
money on something that is non-renewable. I'm
tired of these grazers who never stay in one place long enough to become
geniuses at anything. But there must always be a place for sheep
and cattle so I guess I will just have to accept them. But such
animals need Shepherds or they die alone. They also
need herding to give them motivation. That is not my
culture or my ideal.
BI is a form of providing the pasture for
free. All pastures are free but if not sustained through
group activity decline and turn to desert. That is the lesson
that I would suggest about BI. People should be paid for
work and work should be created that sustains the society and given the
status that all renewable activities should have in such a limited
environment where even the energy is peaking at this time and we can't even
ratify the ideal of not smothering each other in industrial
shit. Forgive the lack of political correctness here
Arthur. I was feeling French for the
moment.
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003 1:39 AM
Subject: [Futurework] A Basic Income as a for of
Economic Governance
> Hi
Chris:
>
> Thank you for continuing this discussion with your
usual intelligence and
> extensive background.
>
> As
with many things you and I can spent time on defensive positions,
attacks
> and riposte at another's gaffes or lack of knowledge.
It's fun but
> pointless.
>
> It seems we have to ask
some really basic questions in terms of outcomes so
> that the issue
of a Basic Income has some context or as ol Marshal would
> say, some
figure ground relationships. So, lets see if we can build some
>
background on which we can place the Economic device called a Basic
Income
> on.
>
> Taking the present, nation state,
capitalistic economic system,
> globalization, robotation as
ideas and forces that we live in and under,
> the question becomes
"What about human beings?"
>
> Human beings, young, just born,
adolescents, young parents, mature workers,
> senior citizens - that
is what it is all about - what about them? What are
> they,
families, individuals, citizens, consumers, workers, men and women -
>
what are they?
>
> Well, there are many things aren't they, but
what might be their
> commonalities no matter age, sex or
state.
>
> 1. They all need to eat 3000 or
some variant, calories a day.
> 2. They all need
protection from the elements.
> 3. They all personal
clothing
>
> And there we can stop - or we can go on:
>
> 4. They need governance.
>
5. They need a system of laws and rules to live
under.
> 6. They need to feel physically
secure
> 7. They need a reliable and consistent
economic system
>
> And we can go on from their:
>
> 8. And they need a Constitution and Bill of
Rights
> 9. And they need education.
>
10 And they need meaningful work.
>
11 And they need a medical system for
health.
>
> And as we go on defining the background finer and
finer, we come to choices
> and it these choices in response to the
above needs, and many more unnamed,
> that lead us to discussions of
how to distribute goods and services.
>
> One model, that I
might suggest you and Keith feel comfortable with is the
> basic
existing model of capitalism as it is practiced in America and
Europe.
> Basically, income is distributed through work and therefore
we need more and
> more work for economies to grow - without any
stated goal of when growth
> shall be achieved. And with this
model, more and more people work harder
> and longer to satisfy the
goal of growth. But this model has been coming up
> against the
challenge that more and more work is being done by machines and
> less
and less human work is needed. Of course they are many more
challenges
> to this system but our area of focus is primarily the
redistribution of
> income so that human needs can be fulfilled.
Unfortunatly, within this
> system is a cruelty that states that if
you can't make it, then die. The
> worker is valuable, the
non-worker is not - he becomes an expense.
>
> Another Model is
one in which the needs of humans is considered a "right"
> and that
model suggests different ways of providing for all human beings
>
needs. Of course this model will have different answers to the
problem. If
> societies and the world, made it a priority that
every human being should
> have their needs satisfied as a basic
acknowledgement of their being, then
> means would be found to do
this. It would demand different solutions to
> current
mindset.
>
> Now, without writing a book and meaning this to
only be an introduction to a
> way of productively looking at our
differences - which are differences of
> perspective rather than
truth. One solution for Model One is:
>
> I would do
something else immediately on taking office. I would ask
> Congress
for a Full Employment Act, guaranteeing jobs to anyone who
> is
willing to work. We would give the private sector all the
>
opportunity to provide work, but where it fails to do so, the
>
government would become the employer of last resort. We would use as
>
a model the great social programs of the New Deal, when millions of
>
people were given jobs after the private sector had failed to do so.
>
> As quoted by Brian Adams in a recent E Mail
>
> In
Model Two, the model I am defending would be a Basic Income. My
argument
> for this is that there is no need for us, as human beings,
to continue to
> live at the level of lack of needs that is currently
present for three
> quarters of the world or more and that it is time
for our Nation States to
> redefine the Rights of Man to include the
right to a Basic Income. And it
> is up to countries with wealth
to show the way.
>
> It is not really a question of
money. It is a question of perspective.
> Once we can clarify a
perspective, then we can find the means to implement
> that
vision. If I have defined the problem correctly, I will be
pleased.
> If not, I ask you for your perspective at the level of the
needs of human
> beings as the background for your choice.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Thomas Lunde
>
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