Following up on my “why we call it Citizen’s Income” piece and
reactions to it and other ideas people have put across; I don’t
have any specific problem with anything anyone is saying. But I do
not think much is going to come of these discussions.
It is as I said; the people interested in a guaranteed income do not
know enough yet. Therefore, a nation wide organisation to promote
a Citizen’s Income is not going to happen just yet. There is a lot
of educating which has to be done, as well as some researching as to
how best to promote to the public a new type of society.
And, sorry folks, talking about a guaranteed income or basic income
in isolation from everything else is not going to go anywhere. I
think I have had more experience than most people on this list at
talking up the concept with various kinds of people. I also know a
little about framing. I would like to know a lot more.
Any kind of guaranteed income is a direct contradiction to the frame
or paradigm most North Americans have had rammed into their heads
from a very early age. There simply are no answers to the objections
to be raised about a BI-GAI within that frame. You have to break
the frame.
For example, you cannot argue for a demogrant from fairness. What
you get back is that a bigai will be very unfair to the people who
will have to work harder to support the people who are ‘not pulling
their weight’. Some people with a philosophic bent are calling this
the ‘lazy versus crazy’ or ‘free rider’ problem. It is unanswerable
on its own terms.
The answer to all this is; “Nobody has any ‘weight’ to pull. There
is enough of every necessity for everybody. People who are working
harder are doing so because they want to or believe they have to.
There is no sense at all to keeping everybody working 40-60 hour
weeks when all material needs can be satisfied with less than a
twenty hour work week.
In the ‘lazy versus crazy’ parable, crazy is crazy not because she is
working twice as hard to carry lazy, but because she is wasting
the limited resources on their little desert island.
But the real world is not one of these little castaway islands
beloved by economics debaters. We left the neolithic age behind
long ago. We live in a sophisticated technological society with
finished goods several stages removed from the resources extracted
in making them. The technological machine has made it possible for
us to produce everything we need with little effort but we cannot
make the mental adjustment to a world of leisure and abundance. We
still act like neolithic people.
We have about fifty years to make the mental changeover. Then we
go back into a dark age for who knows how long. The climate change
and environmental contamination all around us is not going to be
solved by some modifications to the existing economic structure.
Talking about sustainable development is nonsense, there is nothing
which can be ‘developed’ indefinitely.
The breakdown of the natural environment is happening because we are
trying to take out of it more than it can give. The solution is to
take less. That means an end to the present economic system which
depends on constant growth and the reification of money. Reification
is the fallacy of making a thing out of an abstract idea. Money is an
abstract idea.
We are going to organise a steady state economy, in which production
is limited to what we can reasonably get from the natural world
given our technological level. This is going to happen one way or
another. We are going back to the middle ages or we are going to
develop a kind of very big co-operative.
Now, what are you nattering at me about communism for? Who told you
what communism is? Who told you what anarchism means? Who told you
what libertarianism means? Who told you what democracy is?
The government of China still calls itself communist. It is a
totalitarian state running a system of state capitalism and beating
the hell out of the private capitalists on this continent. It has
as much to do with communism as the United States has to do with
free markets or the vatican has to do with christianity; nothing.
Any time communism, or cooperativism because it means the same thing
in effect, has had a chance to work, it has worked very well. So well
in fact, that extreme efforts are always made to stop it; for
example, in the old Soviet Union under Stalin.
Yes, capitalism has worked very well for awhile, or corporatism, a
much better word for it; the control of society by and for large
interests. Then it destroys the base on which it depends, because
it requires constant growth in a finite world. However the world is
going to be run in the future, it will not be by a system requiring
interest on money which must be repaid with wealth that does not
exist when
