Fast-food workers in St Paul, MN on strike for a higher minimum wage and better benefits, April 14, 2016. Fibonacci Blue / Flickr
On December 12, 2017, Daniel Zamora writes on Jacobin:
The Impossibility of a Left Basic Income
The question of UBI’s economic viability, though basically technical, is vital for determining its political character. That’s because UBI’s effects depend on the amount distributed and the conditions of its implementation.
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, in their accelerationist manifesto, Inventing the Future, write that “the real significance of UBI lies in the way it overturns the asymmetry of power that currently exists between labour and capital.” Its establishment would allow workers to have “the option to choose whether to take a job or not.… A UBI therefore unbinds the coercive aspects of wage labour, partially decommodifies labour, and thus transforms the political relationship between labour and capital.”
But to do this, the authors insist, it “must provide a sufficient amount of income to live on.” If the payment isn’t high enough to let people to refuse work, UBI might push wages down and create more “bullshit jobs.”
Despite the key importance of size and implementation, the countless texts dedicated to establishing a UBI — including Srnicek and Williams’s work — rarely discuss the policy’s concrete details. Many of basic income’s benefits would only arrive if it provided a generous monthly amount, meaning that a moderate or low-amount version could have potentially negative effects.
Guy Standing, a pioneer of basic income in the United Kingdom, currently defends the low-amount version. To advance his proposal, he points to the think tank Compass, which produced several micro-simulations to assess the effects and feasibility of the measure in the UK context. Compass’s study shows the risks of any basic income scheme that tries to replace existing means-tested benefits: such a “full scheme” would, in its simplest version, give every adult $392 (£292) each month while existing means-tested programs would be abolished. The results would be catastrophic: child poverty would increase by 10 percent, poverty among pensioners by 4 percent, and poverty among the working population by 3 percent.
Compass also analyzed a “modified scheme,” with a monthly basic income of £284 ($380) for working-age adults (and smaller payments for others) that would stand alongside, rather than replace, most existing social programs. But it would also count as income when calculating recipients’ eligibility for those programs, as well as for tax purposes; this “add-on” structure makes the measure less expensive than it would otherwise be, since a large part of the cost is included in existing social spending. But that also dampens the total boost to the net income of the poor. Nevertheless, the total cost of this version — the amount of new taxes that would be needed — is £170 billion or 6.5 percent of the UK’s GDP.
Despite the fiscal effort that would go into implementing the new system — 6.5 percent of GDP, or nearly twice the share of GDP that the US currently spends on its military — the results are rather disappointing. Child poverty shrinks from 16 to 9 percent, but for working-age people it decreases less than 2 points (13.9 to 12 percent), and among pensioners it declines only 1 point (14.9 to 14.1 percent). The considerable sum of money mobilized has only a modest effect on poverty and doesn’t specifically benefit those who need it most. As economist Ian Gough writes, the idea looks like “a powerful new tax engine” that “pull[s] along a tiny cart.”
This fact is even more striking when we consider that the cost of eradicating poverty in any developed country is around 1 percent of GDP. An individual unemployment benefit set at the poverty line (around $1,200 a month) and granted to all jobless individuals regardless of their place in the family structure would not only pull everyone out of poverty but also end workfare, challenge the normative dimensions of family structures, and fundamentally alter the labor market. All this, for somewhere between six to thirty-five times less money than a universal basic income.
The same criticism applies to the moderate version from Philippe Van Parijs, one of the founders of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), which has promoted UBI since the mid-1980s. Van Parijs calls for a “base” income of €600 ($710), which, like Standing’s version, is not fully added to existing social benefits. This program would cost a bit over 6 percent of GDP in a country like Belgium, with an already high level of social spending and benefits — for a system that fails to increase the meager incomes of the vast majority of people dependent on social services. This is a remarkable fact about a measure so often described as “revolutionary” — a fact made explicit in the Finnish trial: it cites its “primary goal” as being to “promote employment” by incentivizing people “to accept low-paying and low-productivity jobs.”
Of course, we could plead for a more generous version, closer to anticapitalist or accelerationist proposals, like that of French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang. His UBI proposal amounts to €1,100 ($1,302) a month for each citizen and would be added to existing benefits.
In France, it would cost €871 billion, or 35 percent of GDP. When the French socialist party’s think tank, Fondation Jean Jaurès, studied the budget impact of a €1000 monthly UBI, it estimated that it would cost as much as all current social spending — pensions, unemployment, social assistance, and so on — plus the budgets for either national education or health care. Suffice it to say, this version is unlikely to see the light of day.
Moulier-Boutang himself acknowledged this, writing that although “a detailed balance sheet must still be drawn up,” “one thing is certain: the current income tax system can only fund a small partial application of this measure.” To solve this problem, Moulier-Boutang suggests replacing the current taxation system (including progressive income tax) with a 5 percent tax on financial transactions — a “fiscal revolution” that would “reduce the budget deficit” while “keeping the current level of social spending and adding a UBI of 871 billion euros.”
The author’s rather fantastic calculations sound tempting, but a financial transaction tax could never collect such a large sum. The volume of financial transactions is vast — currently ten times GDP — but that’s precisely because they’re not taxed at 5 percent. Since financial transactions are typically carried out to achieve profit arbitrages as small as a few tenths of a percent, they would simply cease if we set up Moulier-Boutang’s proposed tax. By way of comparison, the “Tobin tax,” the only financial transaction tax being seriously considered today, is generally envisioned at between 0.05 percent and 0.2 percent at most — one hundred times smaller than Moulier-Boutang’s proposal — yet it’s specifically designed to reduce speculation (and thus transactions).
No existing economy can pay for a generous basic income without defunding everything else. We would either have to settle for the minimalist version — whose effects would be highly suspect — or we’d have to eliminate all other social expenditures, in effect creating Milton Friedman’s paradise. Faced with these facts, we should question UBI’s rationality; as Luke Martinelli put it: “an affordable UBI is inadequate, and an adequate UBI is unaffordable.”
Until we profoundly transform our economies, we can’t implement a measure that would cost more than 35 percent of GDP in economies where the state already spends around 50 percent of GDP. The power relations needed to establish this level of UBI would constitute an exit from capitalism, pure and simple, rendering depictions of UBI as a “means” of social transformation nonsense. Indeed, many defenses of basic income can be classified as what Raymond Geuss called “nonrealist political philosophy”: ideas formulated in complete abstraction from the existing world and real people, completely “disjoined from real politics” — like the Rawlsian model of justice that serves as an important inspiration to figures like Philippe Van Parijs.
If UBI does take shape, current power relations will favor those who have economic power and want to profit by weakening the existing system of social protection and labor market regulations. Who will decide the monthly amount and who will dictate its terms and condition? Who do today’s power relations favor? Certainly not the worker.
The Crisis of Work?
When asked about work, Philippe Van Parijs likes to quote the physician Jan Pieter Kuiper, who launched the debate on basic income in the Netherlands in the 1970s: “Among my patients there are guys who are sick because they work too much, and guys who are sick because they are unable to find work.” This contradiction runs through the history of capitalism, and it motivates Van Parijs and many of his followers.
UBI would create a society in which “those who work too much … work less, in order to avoid burnout, breathe a little, retrain for new work, or care for their loved ones, and the jobs thus freed up could then be taken by others.” That is, it doesn’t aim at “working less, so all can work,” as the workers’ movement traditionally did, but letting everyone choose how much to work at any given moment. Proponents present it as a way to achieve a more harmonious distribution of work. That objective may seem sensible, but it raises several questions. Most important, it risks amplifying employers’ current race to the bottom.
Today’s labor market is highly stratified: some people enjoy access to good jobswhile others, subject to harsh competition, can only find precarious and unstable work. A low or moderate UBI — too low to let people refuse job offers — could relegate the least qualified people to more intensely precarious situations. As Luke Martinelli puts it:
“The lack of an exit option for such workers, and their weak bargaining position with respect to employers, means that basic income could end up exacerbating poor pay and conditions if other workers were willing to reduce their wage demands as a result of the unconditional payment.”
Martinelli highlights “the danger that basic income ‘would aggravate the problem of low pay and subsidize inefficient employers,’ leading to a proliferation of ‘lousy’ jobs.” In this scenario, those with good jobs will continue to lead fulfilling lives, now supplemented by universal income, while others will have to combine their UBI with one or more “lousy” jobs, with little gain in income. The proposal makes no attempt to help those without a job today get one tomorrow or improve the job they have. Indeed, everything suggests that the opposite will happen: the UBI will function like a war machine for lowering wages and spreading precarious work.
This aspect of basic income isn’t new: it explains why the neoliberal economist George Stigler originally proposed a UBI, in the form of a negative income tax. In contrast to Keynes, who downplayed the role of wage levels in his explanation of unemployment, Stigler’s famous 1946 paper “The Economics of Minimum Wage Legislation” argued that the minimum wage reduced employment. He called on the government to abolish such regulations so that workers could accept wages that don’t exceed the market price.
Stigler’s negative income tax, which would supplement incomes up to a certain point, would allow workers to accept low-wage jobs while still living above the poverty line. In effect, the system guarantees a minimum income without affecting the wage price. As Friedman wrote in 1956, the program, “while operating through the market, [does] not distort the market or impede its functioning,” as Keynesian programs do.
Today, one still commonly sees UBI advocates resort to neoclassical platitudes about employment. We can only be astonished, for example, at the dubious claims made by Van Parijs and Vanderborgh in their recent book Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, such as: “where the level of remuneration is and remains firmly protected by minimum wage legislation, collective bargaining, and generous employment insurance, the result tends to be massive losses of jobs.”
We shouldn’t be starting from the premise that too-high wages generate unemployment by disrupting the economy’s optimal equilibrium: that’s precisely the idea we should fiercely challenge. Indeed, recent studies seriously undermine these claims. Contrary to neoclassical predictions, countries that tax work the most have the highest employment rates because income taxes fund social services, which promote labor market participation, especially for women.
Who Works?
Still, imagine that it was mathematically possible to establish a UBI high enough that none of us would have to work. Suppose we could have this generous basic income and still have a strong welfare state. Certainly it would be a game changer. Yet even this utopia rests on two problematic assumptions work.
First, it assumes that unemployed people don’t want to work or would be just as happy to receive a generous monthly check. But what if that’s wrong? The notion that we should reduce the demand for jobs rather than fight for full employment fails to consider that many people do want to work. As Seth Ackerman has argued, it assumes that the despair expressed by unemployed people amounts to false consciousness, a problem that can be mitigated by propaganda campaigns promoting non-work.
This is a faulty explanation of what’s at stake with the question of work. There’s something deeper at play: work is more than a means for earning money. That’s not just due to “pro-work ideology,” but also to the objective conditions of a society based on a large-scale division of labor in which everyone contributes individually to collective production. This system generates a certain income distribution as well as a certain distribution of work. People are obviously worried about income inequality, but aren’t they also worried about job inequality? As Ackerman writes, “so long as social reproduction requires alienated work, there will always be this social demand for the equal liability of all to work, and an uneasy consciousness of it among those who could work but who, for whatever reason, don’t.”
That’s why a universal job guarantee and a reduction in work hours still represent the most important objectives for any left politics. Collectively reducing work time is politically and socially preferable to creating a socially segmented pool of unemployed workers, a situation that would have serious consequences for the employed. It’s not hard to imagine how this situation could foster divisions within the working class — as it already has over the last several decades.
Second, such a “utopian” UBI raises questions about how the distribution of work — that is, the division of labor — would be determined in a society where we could choose not to work. Under capitalism, the division of labor is set in a brutal fashion, relegating large sectors of the population to jobs that are difficult and badly paid, but often of great value to society. A “utopian” UBI, by contrast, simply assumes that in a society liberated from the work imperative, the spontaneous aggregation of individual desires would yield a division of labor conducive to a properly functioning society; that the desires of individuals newly freed to choose what they wish to do would spontaneously yield a perfectly functional division of labor. But this expectation is assumed rather than demonstrated.
If we want to envision a society where the division of labor is no longer determined through compulsion, then we will have to rethink work itself. And a rethinking of work will only point in an emancipatory direction if work is made more meaningful and attractive. In a society where the nature of work is profoundly unequal — not only in its distribution but also in its content — transforming it becomes fundamental.
Cash or Decommodification?
Beyond arguments of feasibility or the effects on the labor market, we need to ask a more fundamental question: is distributing €1,100 to the whole population the best use of 35 percent of GDP? Isn’t the best way to fight against capitalism to limit the sphere in which it operates? Establishing a base income, by contrast, merely allows everyone to participate in the market.
Our current economic crisis goes beyond the problem of income inequality. While inequality garners the most attention, it’s a secondary feature of capitalism. One of capitalism’s most remarkable achievements (but also one of its most violent) is that it made market exchange the nearly exclusive means to acquire the goods necessary for our own reproduction. In doing so, it turned money into almost the only valid medium of exchange and it made the majority of the population dependent on capital, enforcing a fundamentally asymmetric power relation between the boss and the worker. This profoundly unequal relationship not only subordinates people within the sphere of labor, but outside it as well, through the powerful influence economic power exerts on politics, ideology, and culture.
By the end of the nineteenth century, leftists understood this problem perfectly well. The welfare state tried to limit the areas in which the market and economic power could operate. If industrialization had made only owners full citizens with real rights, then social security and unemployment insurance established what Robert Castel called “social property,” marking “the emergence of a new function of the state, of a new form of rights, and a new conception of property.” As the British sociologist T. H. Marshall explained, equality isn’t possible “without restricting the freedom of competitive markets,” without opening socialized spaces free from market imperatives. In other words, for the Left, the economic effects of extending the market (as well as the political and cultural effects) were never divorced from a questioning of the logic of the market itself.
Though this perspective has suffered enormous setbacks since the early 1970s, it still offers a vision radically different from our current neoliberal consensus. The ultimate aim is not to make competition more “fair,” less “discriminatory,” or less “normative.” Instead, it seeks to curtail the space in which competition exists. In this sense, freedom doesn’t signify the ability to access the market, but rather the ability to reduce the space in which it operates.
Hillary Clinton was right to say that she underestimated the power of “big ideas.” But that doesn’t mean UBI is the big idea we need. We should reconnect with the postwar period’s emancipatory heritage. The institutions workers established after World War II did more than stabilize or buffer capitalism. They constituted, in embryonic form, the elements of a truly democratic and egalitarian society, where the market would not have the central place it now occupies. And if the recent successes of Bernie Sandersand Jeremy Corbyn are anything to go by, the door may now be open to a rebirth of socialist politics.
Utopia is not beyond our reach — it’s closer than we think.
Gary Reber Comments:
This is a complex subject. Amazingly throughout the article the word “owners” is used only once, and “ownership” never. Yet the article appears to justify any solutions, all involving redistribution, that represent an alternative to “capitalism” as the ONLY way to combat “capitalism’s” growing concentration of ownership among the already wealthy capital asset ownership class.
The “capitalism” practiced today is what, for a long time, I have termed “Hogism,” propelled by greed and the sheer love of power over others. “Hogism” institutionalizes greed (creating concentrated capital ownership, monopolies, and special privileges). “Hogism” is about the ability of greedy rich people to manipulate the livesof people who struggle with declining labor worker earnings and job opportunities, and then accumulate the bulk of the money through monopolized productive capital ownership. The rich and politically powerful sell every capital project on the basis that it will create jobs,when the real wealth-building benefits are vested in the already wealthy capital ownership class who seek to own more capital wealth.
“Capitalism” is based on individuals not owning human labor, but owning the non-human means of production, which is the primary means for people to be fully productive and become affluent in an age in which tectonic shifts in the technologies of production increasingly eliminate the necessity for masses of human labor. This elimination, caused by technology’s increasing greater input, as well, as American corporations who have over decades outsourced their parts and finished products to low-labor cost countries, without penalty of importing tariff-free back into the United States economy, are the primary causes of economic inequality.
The authors and those that they quote who advocate for a Universal Basic Income — an unconditional income to every citizen — are stuck in the mind-set of one-factor thinking. Yet, in reality there are two independent factors of production: human labor workers who contribute manual, intellectual, creative and entrepreneurial work and non-human physical capital: productive land; structures; infrastructure; tools; machines; robotics; computer processing and apps; artificial intelligence, certain intangibles that have the characteristics of property, such as patents and trade or firm names the like which are owned by people individually or in association with others. Fundamentally, economic value is created through human and non-human contributions. NOTE, real physical productive capital isn’t money; it is measured in money (financial capital), but it is really producing power and earning power through ownership of the non-human factor of production organized through businesses, owned by individuals or assemblages of people. Financial capital, such as stocks and bonds, is just an ownership claim on the productive power of real capital.
The system, as presently structured, requires one to have past savings in the form of valued productive capital assets or wealth assets that can be sold for money to be invested, or if not sold, to be pledged as collateral (security) against failure of an investment in the formation of new productive capital to self-liquidate the capital credit extended by a commercial bank . What is not well understood is that “past savings” can be replaced with “future savings.” This means that new money can be created to finance capital formation without the requirement of past savings. Thus, the system reform that is necessary is to free growth from the slavery of past savings.
What does this mean for ordinary Americans who ONLY have a job from which to earn an income? It means that ordinary Americans would have the opportunity to acquire personal ownership stakes in the formation of productive capital assets simultaneously with the growth of the economy with for-profit corporations, both established and viable start-ups, paying out their full earnings as dividends to their owners. At present, corporations, who are narrowly owned, use retain earnings and corporate debt financing (neither which creates any new owners) to finance their growth. As a result, economic inequality widens with the already wealthy capital asset ownership class getting richer while ordinary, propertyless (in the capital asset sense) Americans, struggle to stay afloat and not fall into poverty, requiring redistribution of the earnings of those who remain productive (whether as labor workers or capital owners) in the form of taxation.
A Universal Basic Income would require those who remain productive contributors to the economy (those still working and those who own income-producing capital assets) to be taxed so that their income can be redistributed to provide an unconditional income to every citizen in an amount (with conditions), that would be politically determined and implemented using the coercive powers of government and whatever elite group controls it. This is what a UBI would require, rather than empower EVERY citizen, whether employed or on government assistance, to become productive and earn an income through owning wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets to meet their own consumption needs, with government becoming more dependent on economically independent citizens.
The result of a Universal Basic Income would be that all citizens would become dependent for their economic well-being on the government and whatever elites control the coercive powers of government. This is diametrically opposite of the vision our Founding Fathers had for our country. Their vision was that securing “Life, Liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing Property” is the highest purpose for which any just government is formed.
Those who argue that a UBI would result in “better-balanced capitalism” by which “everyone-gets-a-share capitalism” is false, as the ownership of the productive capital assets of the economy would still remain concentrated among the already wealthy capital asset ownership class, who would remain able to further concentrate wealth ownership as the economy grows.
To empower EVERY citizen, regardless of current status, to become affluent simply requires that EVERY citizen have equal opportunity to acquire ownership stakes with the means of acquiring and possessing productive capital assets simultaneously with the growth of the economy. Note: equal opportunity to acquire and the mans to do so does not mean equal results.
To prevent exhausting the ecological limits to growth, democratic corporateship and governance would require that the formation of new productive capital, through innovation and invention, and its restoration be implemented using sustainable and material recycling practices along with proper maintenance and restoration in the technical sense through research and development. In this manner, economic development and redevelopment can be expected to go on producing income indefinitely for EVERY citizen-owner.
Unleashing responsible “green” growth through optimized technological implementation with EVERY citizen an owner would let everyone choose how much to work at any given moment. Using practical ways, designed to correct the imbalance between production and consumption at its source, and broaden ownership of productive capital in conformance with private-property free-market principles, simultaneously with the responsible growth of the economy, will result in a future economy that a can support general affluence for EVERY citizen.
In this scenario, a JUST Third WAY free-market system would economically empower all individuals and families through direct and effective ownership of the means of production. Those with good jobs could continue to lead personally fulfilling lives, now supplemented by a second income derived from owning productive capital assets, with others satisfied with the income from owning productive capital. For both choices, citizens would have more leisure time to engage in the intellectual, creative and entrepreneurial work that motivates and satisfies them, not having to be dependent on a job that deters or prevents them from pursuing such options.
Planning begins with a vision and a goal. This is not rocket science but it does require national leadership. Implementation requires amending a few laws that basically authorize the transactions that will broaden capital ownership paid for with the future earnings of capital investment. Allowing such transactions will provide incentives for profitable opportunities to employ unused capacity and promote stable and robust economic growth that protects and enhances the Earth, our home.
Sadly though, after more than a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that could restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new. Though relatively obscure, it has not yet registered in the minds of leaderless politicians and their advisors from the left to the right of the political spectrum and a population of people who have been miseducated and misled by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics. This will require a personal commitment to acquiring this knowledge and thinking in new ways, followed by political action.
Economist John Maynard Keynes, whose Keynesian model is widely taught (and is reference within this article), falsely presumed that the only way to balance mass productive power with mass purchasing power is through a wage system — ignoring the possibility of democratizing future ownership of labor-displacing productive capital technologies and rising ownership incomes as a market-generated means of eliminating wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery for the 99 percent of humanity. Binary economist, corporate tax attorney and investment banker, Louis Kelso argued that the Keynesian model fails to recognize that “when capital workers [owners] replace labor workers as the major suppliers of goods and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate because labor’s share of the income arising from production cannot provide the progressively better standard of living that technology is making possible. Labor produces subsistence at best. Capital can produce affluence. To enjoy affluence, all households must engage to an increasing extent in capital work.”
It is imperative that leaders seeking new solutions cease the opportunity presented in presidential and congressional elections to implement effective programs for expanded ownership of productive capital, and address the problem of education on this subject.
At one point in 1976, the discussion led to The Joint Economic Committee of Congress endorsing the two-factor policy to broaden capital ownership as an economic goal for America. The 1976 Joint Economic Report stated: “To provide a realistic opportunity for more U.S. citizens to become owners of capital, and to provide an expanded source of equity financing for corporations, it should be made national policy to pursue the goal of broadened capital ownership. Congress also should request from the Administration a quadrennial report on the ownership of wealth in this country, which would assist in evaluating how successfully the base of wealth was being broadened over time.”
Unfortunately the Congress and no past or present President have never paid any attention to this policy, and the goal has subsequently been unacknowledged and unheeded by our plutocratic political leaders.
Instead,the American people have been promised that if the wealthy ownership class could gain even more earnings through low taxes and deregulation, the savings would be reinvested to grow the economy and create more and better jobs and higher wages. Of course, there is always some truth to the idea that new jobs will be created through re-investment, but jobs are eliminated as well, as the re-investment is increasingly directed to the formation of new, highly-efficient non-human technological means of production, requiring far less workers and/or to extensions to other countries with lower labor costs and no or few regulations. Americans should be smarter and realize that this is an underhanded scheme for the already wealthy and their heirs to OWN America and further concentrate and monopolize ownership of ALL productive capital, present and future. Such “trickle-down” thinking does not work. As a result of such un-workable policies, fewer and fewer people remain good “customers with money” to buy what the economy is capable of producing. And even then, as consumers, the vast majority of Americans have gone into consumption debt in order to provide for themselves and their families. Americans increasingly do not feel secure and are being challenged as to how to survive, faced with mounting over-extended consumer credit as well as less and less job security to earn sufficient income to pay off their debt. Unnecessarily, millions of Americans are faced with losing their savings and homes — and their dreams for a better life — with no way to earn through owning the wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital now formed and that which will be formed in the future.
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man’s greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won’t use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor — the equivalency of mass murder — the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
To prevent the hoarding and concentration of capital ownership as the economy grows, among the already 1 percent wealthy capital ownership class, is the challenge of our era. Yet no one in politics or academia, or any already wealthy owners, is focused on ensuring that future generations will universally own, as individuals, the future of production. Instead, their solutions are to tax those who do own and redistribute through various government dependency programs, resulting in Americans becoming less independent.
By ignoring the hoarding and concentration of capital ownership, the productive capital assets that result from this never-ending shift in the technologies of production, will be owned by those individuals who now own America’s productive capital wealth. As well, millions of Americans will have fewer prospects for jobs as the masses of people will not be needed to perform tasks previously associated with production.
The challenge is how will the masses of Americans be empowered to contribute productivity and earn an income to support themselves, as individuals, and as families?
The solution, which upholds the natural law that humans have the right to own “things” including “things” humans use to produce goods, products and services that are needed and wanted to advance their personal affluence, must ensure that property rights are not withheld or suppressed by elite forces of government who seek to make all citizens dependent for their economic well-being on the government. Such proposals as Universal Basic Income eat away at private property rights and result in citizen dependency and the continued hoarding of productive capital ownership and control by the elite wealthy ownership class and their political frontmen and women dependent on money from the wealthy to become elected to the “public” offices of President, Senate and Congress, and their political appointees .
A solution that retains the natural law right of ownership and ensures personal, responsible ownership of the non-human means of production must result in empowering EVERY citizen to become an owner of productive capital to meet their own consumption needs. As the formation of future capital wealth becomes broadly owned, citizens would become effective democratic voters to create a government responsible to the people, not to the economically powerful elite who influence elections with big money political contributions and lobbying to control policy making. Instead, free of elite economic and thus political power, a government by the people and for the people can serve to enact legislation that will empower our entire population to productively contribute to the building of affluence for EVERY citizen, while responsibly protecting and enhancing the environment, and preventing the further concentration of capital wealth ownership among the 1 percent group of individuals and families and their heirs, who now own America and will own America’s future, if we do not reform the system.
I call this solution the “Own The Future Deal.” The solution requires reform of our monetary system with the activation of Section 13(a) of the Federal Reserve Act and enactment of new legislation and policies to provide EQUAL opportunity for EVERY child, woman and man to become a productive capital owners through access to insured, interest-free capital credit, repayable solely from the earnings of the investments in the building of a future, environmentally protective and responsible economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen. The legislative policies would provide to EVERY citizen an equal, annual amount of this capital credit in accordance with the needs to finance viable and responsible growth. Enactment of this legislation would enable EVERY citizen to be productive and benefit from the growth of the economy without taking from those who already are owners (at least until death using a transfer tax to encourage the super-rich to spread out their monopoly-sized estates). EVERY citizen would be able to accumulate, as owners, viable, wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets and over time secure an affluent state of retirement. Such a deal would show its economic benefits immediately in job creation and within a generation following its activation, universal ownership benefits, and continue to build the economic foundation of affluence as days, months, and years of the future transpire.
The following contains everything one needs to understand the foundation of the “Own The Future Deal,” though this wording is not specifically used:
Support the Agenda of The JUST Third WAY Movement (also known as “Economic Personalism”) at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/…/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-…/ and http://www.cesj.org/…/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-…/.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the enactment of the proposed Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act and Economic Empowerment Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/…/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-get…/, http://www.cesj.org/…/capita…/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/. And The Capital Homestead Act brochure, pdf print version at http://www.cesj.org/…/uploads/2014/11/C-CHAflyer_1018101.pdf and Capital Homestead Accounts (CHAs) at http://www.cesj.org/…/ch-v…/capital-homestead-accounts-chas/
For an overview, see “Economic Democracy And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” athttp://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=11 .
