Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg writes on Futurism:
AN APPROACH WORTH EMULATING
An excursion is always a learning experience. That was certainly true for Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan when they visited Alaska. The social media entrepreneur was impressed by the various social programs he found in America’s Last Frontier, particularly a basic income initiative that Alaska’s been running since 1982.
The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) is a basic income program that allots $1,000 or more per citizen. “[A] portion of the oil revenue the state makes is put into [the PFD],” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “Rather than having the government spend that money, it is returned to Alaskan residents through a yearly dividend.”
Another basic income Zuckerberg learned about is by Native Corporations in Alaska. These privately owned corporations that develop land run and owned by Native Alaskans give annual dividends to to their native shareholders according to the resources they develop. “So if you’re a Native Alaskan, you would get two dividends: one from your Native Corporation and one from the state Permanent Fund,” Zuckerberg wrote.
UBI’S BIGGEST HURDLE
Under a universal basic income (UBI) program, individuals receive a fixed amount of income regardless of their social or employment status. UBI is an old idea that’s become more popular recently as a potential response to unemployment due to automation, but it is not without critics. An issue these critics often bring up is funding. Zuckerberg was impressed by how the Alaskan basic income model solves this. “[I]t’s funded by natural resources rather than raising taxes,” he wrote.
This means that running a UBI program isn’t impossible, at least in some cases. In fact, a number of countries already have trial programs to test UBI — most notably Finland, which launched the program in 2016. Canada has two initiatives in the works, while Hawaii recently passed legislationthat will study implementing UBI in the state.
In the end, Zuckerberg thinks it’s all about mentalities. “[W]hen you’re profitable, you’re confident about your future and you look for opportunities to invest and grow further. Alaska’s economy has historically created this winning mentality, which has led to this basic income,” he noted. “That may be a lesson for the rest of the country as well.”
https://futurism.com/mark-zuckerberg-the-u-s-should-learn-from-this-states-basic-income-program/
Gary Reber Comments:
First off, the Alaskan Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) is derived from taxes on the earnings from oil revenues generated by oil companies operating in Alaska. While the Fund uses “Dividend” in its title, this is really not a dividend in the sense that it is not tied to individual citizens owning shares of an economic development corporation or what I would prefer to call a Citizens Land Bank corporation. The PFD, a government agency, is owned by the State of Alaska. The fund is driven by the state’s royalty oil (50 percent) and the value of investments (50 percent) such as stocks, bonds and real estate. These earnings are distributed to qualified Alaskan citizens on an annual basis.
While this has been casted as “The oil companies don’t own the oil, ALASKANS DO!,” it is somewhat mislead, but telling of a growing segment of the American population that is challenging the conventional notion that our natural resources can be owned by narrowly owned extraction companies.
Also, privately owned Native Corporations in Alaska develop land run and owned by Native Alaskans. The earnings from development of resources are returned annually in the form of dividends to their native shareholders.
A far more powerful alternative that would directly benefit EVERY Alaskan citizen would be to incorporate a Citizens Land Bank, which would own the public lands under which the oil fields lie and would otherwise acquire ownership of other landed oil fields.
The Citizen Land Band would be a for-profit, professionally-managed, citizen-owned-and-governed community land planning and development enterprise, designed to enable every citizen of a community of any size to acquire a direct ownership stake in local land, natural resources and basic infrastructure.
The Citizen Land Bank would be a social vehicle for every child, woman and man to gain, as a fundamental right of citizenship, a single lifetime, non-transferable ownership interest in all the Bank’s assets, share equally in property incomes from rentals and user fees from leases or use of the Bank’s assets, accumulate appreciated equity values from enhanced land values, and gain an owner’s voice in the governance of future land development.
The Citizen Land Band would serve as an innovative legal and financing tool empowered to borrow on behalf of all citizen-shareholders and service the debt with pre-tax dollars to meet the land acquisition, capitalization and operational needs of the Bank. The CLB would shelter from taxation the equity accumulations of citizen-shareholders and protect the outside assets of the citizens in the event of loan default or if the enterprise fails.
The Citizen Land Band would serve as a social tool designed to encourage a just, free and non-monopolistic market economy. It applies the democratic principles of equal opportunity and equal access to the means to participate as an owner as well as a worker. It demonstrates that anything that can be owned by government can and should be owned, individually and jointly, by the citizens.
The Citizen Land Bank is a major feature in a proposed national economic agenda known as “Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen,” which is designed to reform existing monetary, credit and tax barriers to provide every American an equal opportunity to share in the governing powers and profits from new entrepreneurial ventures, new technologies, new structures, and new rentable space built upon the land. Capital Homesteading offers a “Just Third Way” of reversing unsustainable federal deficits and debt, and revitalizing and growing the American free enterprise system in a sustainable and environmentally sound way.
With a Citizen Land Bank in place Alaskan citizens would generate income by leasing conditioned rights of natural resource extraction to the oil companies wanting to profit from such extraction. In this way the land and the natural resources would truly Be Owned by Alaskans, each owning an equal share of the assets and benefiting from the income generated.
For more information on the Citizens Land Bank see http://www.cesj.org/?s=Citizen+Land+Trust
We are getting near to one solution to generating annual income to citizens. But we need more than Citizen Land Banks to generate more income to citizens.
So, let me address what is avoided in all articles about a universal basic income – alternatives.
While a Universal Basic Income sounds appealing to those solely dependent on a job or welfare, there is a far better way for EVERY child, woman and man to EARN more income by providing equal opportunity to acquire personal ownership in future wealth-creating, income-producing capital formation using insured (lending protection) interest-free capital credit, repayable out of the future earnings of the investments in the corporations growing the economy. This would not require anyone to pledge as collateral (past savings/equity as security for repayment).
Using such new owner-creation financial mechanisms would enable EVERY citizen to contribute productivity to the economy, create demand for a higher standard of living, while not taking from those who already are capital owners through taxation to support otherwise under-productive and non-productive citizens.
We should be looking at how “the rich are getting richer,” not on how we can take and redistribute the earnings of the rich and middle class. Obviously, the distinction between the rich and the non-rich is that the rich OWN wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets, the very essence of technological progress, and the poor only have their labor to sell to the wealthy capital ownership class.
The fact that the core function of technological invention and innovation is to invent “tools” to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive, should surprise no one who is conscious and who has even causally observed the constant shift to non-human productive inputs in the manufacturing, distribution, and sales of products, as well as the delivery of services, that has been occurring during their lifetime.
The urgency is to figure out means for people to earn an income without dependency on jobs. The focus should not be on a pro-job growth future but an alternative to wage dependency as economists across the board predict further losses as AI, robotics, and other technologies continue to be ushered in.
Such future invention and innovation should be financed using mechanisms that create new owners simultaneously with the growth of the economy, while respecting the private property rights who now own, and ensuring that any further concentrated capital ownership acquisition will be abated.
The fundamental challenge to be solved is how do we reinvent and redesign our economic institutions to keep pace with job destroying and devaluing technological innovation and invention so not all of the benefits of owning FUTURE productive capacity accrues to today’s wealthy 1 percent ownership class, and ownership is broadened so that EVERY American earns income through stock ownership dividends so they can afford to purchase the products and services produced by the technology economy.
A National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream should be advocated by the progressive movement, which addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what capital ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and capital ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through monopoly ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity and access to become capital owners.
The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and services,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
The solution is obvious but our leaders, academia, conventional economist and the media are oblivious to the necessity to broaden ownership in the new capital formation of the future simultaneously with the growth of the economy, which then becomes self-propelled as increasingly more Americans accumulate ownership shares and earn a new source of dividend income derived from their capital ownership in the “machines” that are replacing them or devaluing their labor value.
The solution will require the reform of the Federal Reserve Bank to create new owners of future productive capital investment in businesses simultaneously with the growth of the economy. The solution to broadening private, individual ownership of America’s future capital wealth requires that the Federal Reserve stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every man, woman and child to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. Policies need to insert American citizens into the low or no-interest investment money loop to enable non- and undercapitalized Americans, including the working class and poor, to build wealth and become “customers with money.” The proposed Capital Homestead Act would produce this result.
The end result is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on the State and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/.
