Billionaire’s Basic Income

The basic thing wrong with the basic income movement

I assume the reader is familiar with the term ‘basic income’ and has some idea of the discussion about it. This essay is about the failure to define the concept and the point of it, and the problem this has caused. I also discuss why a good kind of UBI cannot be achieved in present conditions and what must be done first to make it a viable concept.

It will be soon followed by a second essay. This go into more detail about the methods of some basic income advocates and their nefarious nature. In the process the follow up essay will demonstrate a right understanding of a BI, and how it will be a key part of a post capitalist economy.

I have been an advocate for a Basic Income for a very long time. In fact, since long before it was called that. However, in recent years I have had to accept that the concept must be put on the shelf for now.

There are two basic reasons for this. One is the kind of people who have become the main voice of a Basic Income. The other is because it has become clear that it is not realistic under the present economic system.

I will get into the complex explanation for the realities behind these facts. The simple explanation is that there has always been a good basic income and a bad basic income. I have been aware of this as long as I have been a BI advocate.

I have never been just a BI advocate. I have always seen myself as an advocate for the good idea of a BI and against the bad idea of it. I have always had a hard time making myself understood by the ‘beautiful idea’ people in the UBI community.

These are the people who have become enamored with the idea of BI without any real understanding of it. They do not understand that people can use the same words to mean substantially different things. For this reason, advocacy for a BI has been very inept.

The world BI movement, carried by such organizations as Basic Income Earth Network, United States Basic Income Guarantee, and Basic Income Canada Network, (BIEN, USBIG, and BICN), has put off as many people as it has attracted. Indeed, its way of explaining the idea usually puts off exactly the people it needs to attract. Worse, it tends to attract the wrong kind of people.

They fail to understand that they have to precisely define the concept. They have to explain what the problem is that it is supposed to solve. Instead, they mostly seem to have the idea that any kind of program in which government hands out some money to people is a BI and is wonderful.

A Universal Basic Income is an income paid to everyone without conditions, and adequate to cover basic costs of living. Its real purpose is to simplify the problems of managing a complex, technological political economy, so as to comport fairness with efficiency.

Examining these problems requires a complex discussion of economics. The purpose of this essay is, instead, to discuss the political problems which have arisen in discussing and advocating for a UBI. This requires me to define several concepts the reader may not be familiar with, or may misunderstand.

Financial Capitalism- The division of the capitalist oligarchy which gets its money from owning assets.

neoMathusianism- The main political doctrine of Finance Capitalists, which is that most of the population is useless and should be reduced.

Industrial Capitalism- The division of capitalist oligarchy which gets its money from extracting surplus value from labor.

Capital Productivism- The idea that industries must keep expanding and using up as much resources as possible, to shut out all competition. The population of countries is a big cattle herd, which must be expanded as much as possible, but kept under control.

Socialism- The idea that the economy and society should be organized to meet human needs.

Social Productivism- The idea that increased productivity and efficiency should be used to reduce resource consumption and working hours, without a decline in living standards.

Liberalism- The idea that everyone will be tolerated as long as they stay within defined categories. This is the most dangerous of all ideologies and is associated with finance capitalism.

Libertarianism- The idea that all efforts to create a government to maintain social systems and civilization, is “communism”, totalitarianism:, etc. and an interference with “personal freedom”, meaning the freedom of industrial capitalists to do as they want.

Chartelism/Functional Finance/ Modern Monetary Theory- The idea of studying economies on the basis of government management of money and finance, not on “markets” which do not actually exist.

The basic problem with BI goes back to the foundations of this movement in the 1960’s USA. There was a concern that technology would cause unemployment or drive down wages. This seems strange because at that time unemployment was quite low.

But this issue of technological unemployment keeps coming up, all through the modern age. People who identify with industrial capitalism will insist that technological change creates jobs, rather than eliminating them. The truth is that new technologies do create unemployment and reduce wages, unless remediated.

The remedy for this problem has always been to raise minimum wages, reduce work hours, and improve social services. However, these are imperfect solutions and always leave some people behind. They tend to drive up living costs, harming those who are not in the work force; the retired, disabled, ill, stay at home mothers, or people simply disqualified from participation or in rebellion from coercive relationships.

When the idea of giving everyone enough money to cover basic needs was first brought out, it quickly created two camps. This divide has been there ever since. The basic problem with the basic income movement has been the inability to recognize that this difference is not reconcilable.

The right idea is the use of BI to maintain full employment. The bad idea is about using BI to move out of the way the surplus population which some elements of the capitalist classes prefer not to employ.

This idea is not recent. It precedes BI and has been linked to BI for as long as there has been a movement for BI.

This version of a BI is really sinister. A large part of the population is supposed to just be happy about being made redundant. They can all go away and become artists or make great discoveries, or whatever.

Mostly, they are just supposed to go away. They will be steadily segregated from the rest of society. Their basic incomes will get ever more basic and more conditional upon submission to regulation.

They will become a permanent underclass. They will be contingent labor. They will become increasingly unable to improve their situations.

Contrast this again with the idea that a BI should create full employment at a good living standard. This is the better tendency in BI advocacy. This proper idea about BI needs to be disassociated with the malign idea, so that it can be developed into a form which can be seriously advocated.

Good BI should make it possible to reduce working hours without reducing people’s incomes. It will reduce labor costs for employers. Thus something close to full employment can be maintained.

This is the first and very simple issue with BI. It is like the battle of light and dark, good and evil, within this realm. Seen this way, it comports with the good side of another doctrine, productivism.

Productivists are people who want to increase human productivity. Socialist productivists want to improve productivity in order to reduce overall work times while maintaining full employment. At the same time, people’s quality of life is maintained at a high level.

However, real social productivists understand that natural resources cannot be depleted or degraded. A balance must be struck with the needs of the population of an area and the ability of the natural environment there to sustain them. The Jevons rule must be considered, that increasing the supply of a resource without any regulation, simply creates waste and destruction of the resource.

Thus, the ideology of industrial capitalism is the bad side of productivism. And thus, a BI would seem to work against industrial capitalism. The political organizations of the industrialists are now the biggest opponents of a BI.

However, there is always the worry that some of these people could get the idea that a BI could subsidize their human cattle herd. Thus, people could be exploited even harder, with no net improvement in their living conditions. Conditions could be created for the kind of contingent, “on call” labor force the industrialists would like.

Contrast this again with the dark side of BI, the neoMalthusians. Since financial capitalists get their income from owning things and charging rent, not from producing anything, they do not see productivity as benefiting them. Rather, they think there are too many people in the world who consume to much.

Some of these people have always advocated the bad side of BI, of managing surplus people. Only in the last decade has the new techno billionaire class latched onto the BI topic, and begun promoting it in a big way. This needs to be examined closely.

There was very limited interest in a BI until about ten years ago. It was hard to pull together forums or study groups. It seemed like just another vague, utopian idea.

Then, something very interesting happened. Public awareness of the BI concept suddenly blossomed. It was unclear at the time why.

Looking back, it is clear this happened in coordination with the emergence of the “tech billionaires” as a political force. These are closely aligned with the WEF of Klaus Schwab. These are the people telling us all that in the future we will own nothing and we will like it.

The clear aim of these people is to engineer economic collapse so they can buy up everything. They want to establish a new form of feudalism. They want to reduce the earth’s population to only those people they need to serve them.

To prepare for this, they need to get a large part of the population to accept permanent unemployment. A BI fits perfectly with this. This is why most discussion about BI has come to be in terms of the bad side of BI; creating and managing mass unemployment.

This new BI trend seems to be driven by Scott Santens in the USA and by Floyd Marinescu in Canada. They are, of course, former ’tech entrepreneurs’. They suddenly became zealous converts to BI about ten years ago, because they decided we need a solution for the inevitable ‘technological unemployment’.

They, and many other unemployment promoters like them, are very well funded. They are becoming increasingly obnoxious. They seem to gloat at any report of people becoming unemployed due to some new technology.

People are beginning to think that all BI is about is disemploying and replacing people, and trying to convince them this is a good thing. This is, again, making BI hard to advocate for among the more clued-in population. Most people with any knowledge of the subject are aware that such mass unemployment is always threatened but never actually comes about.

The old stock BI advocates do not like the Santens types. Yet, being such poor advocates, they have trouble responding to them. They insist they are in favor of full employment, because people want, and need, to have work.

What both sides of this debate within the BI movement refuse to consider is the objections raised by those on the outside of it. When this explosion of interest in the concept occurred, some very good thinkers in political economy looked into it. They raised some very good objections to the conventional idea of BI.

Rather than take this as the cue to rethink and improve their arguments, BI advocates ignored it. Like true believers, they merely dismissed all contradictions. So, those offering constructive criticism of BI moved on, and the BI movement again ossified into a cult-like group; just a bigger one now.

I, however, have evolved my thinking about BI.

To repeat, I am a long time advocate of BI and an observer of the BI movement. I have also gradually become a serious socialist over this time. That means, I no longer have any illusions that capitalism will coexist with democracy or a BI.

I also find that the dumb way in which BI advocates frame the issue makes it harder to advocate for. It is especially so for other socialists, or other knowledgeable people.

For example, when I lived in Alberta in the seventies, I started talking about the Dauphin experiments which were happening at that time. Albertans in those times still remembered the shameful interlude of the Social Credit party and its “funny money”. They had finally thrown off the quasiFascist Socred regime and were enjoying a short lived renaissance.

“Are you f***ing Socreds going to try to start this all over again again? It is still the same; you can’t give people money if you don’t have the money to give them.” I still find old style Socred ‘funny money’ cretins hanging around the corridors when I attend BI conventions.

A few years on, Basic Income Earth Network developed, and then its affiliates in North America. Their basic problem is that they were started as vehicles for philosophy professors who want to debate the stupid non-issue of ‘reciprocity’. That is, how do people contribute as much as they get so that they do not ‘exploit’ anyone.

People’s needs are highly quantifiable. The value of people’s real contributions cannot be measured. Everyone gets far more out of society than they could ever put back in.

This is really about liberalism; creating false obligations for people. It also seems to set the stage for the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its version of neoMalthusianism. That is, most of us are unworthy people because we have to depend on a BI, and so we should not talk back as our overlords arrange the world for us.

This BI movement was never able to define their concept adequately. They kept dropping one or other of its conditions. They could not do the most important thing; explain what the problem is for which BI is the solution.

A BI is an ideal tool under socialized governance, for creating a balanced and equitable economy and society. It does so by creating an equitable distribution and a stable demand, while keeping unit labor costs low. It results in optimal living standards, productivity, and employment.

Lacking such an explanation, they could not define anything regarding the concept. They could not study how such a policy would be initiated and administered. Therefore, their discussion has not advanced in the slightest in thirty years.

So, the neoMalthusian version of UBI must be repudiated. However, the more traditional, productivist view of a UBI is also a serious problem. First of all, Industrial capitalists are no friends of humanity and their ideas should not be defended.

Socialists are the natural opponents of capitalism, industrial productivism, and libertarianism. They generally have not adopted the idea of a BI, partly because of how it is presented. Also, most real socialists still believe that full employment at adequate wages is a realistic idea.

We are never going to have the good kind of BI until socialists adopt it, and until they gain power. However, in discussing socialism in the context of the present western world, we must remember that real socialism is highly suppressed. We have a phony left, and people who think they are left and socialist, but who are usually, actually, liberals.

The right wing perception management machines project delirious ideas about what socialism is. However, a good definition of a BI in socialist terms would be; a regular payment to everyone so that employment augments income, rather than being depended on for survival. A social basic income is one of the three basic versions of a basic income; the good version, the liberating version.

We live within Capitalist society. The main ideas in political economy acceptable to capitalist oligarchy are; Libertarian and Liberal. These produce the other two of the three ideas about a BI.

The Liberal version of BI is as an improved version of social welfare. As core unemployment, and social problems created by capitalism, increase in society, the old style welfare systems become harder to manage. In Liberalism, social welfare is always about keeping people under control and “attached” to the labor market.

Libertarianism is the more extreme ideology of industrial capitalism, which sees almost any manifestation of government as getting in the way of ‘liberty’. That is, the liberty of the powerful to do as they please, and of the powerless to to take what is offered or starve. Their idea of BI is to treat it as a replacement for most social services.

For example, instead of government organized health care, people can take their BI and use it to buy health care or health insurance privately. It would be the same thing with education. In other words, it removes all responsibility from society and state, if libertarians get control of them.

Some people imagine a different, or third ‘L’, a liberating idea of a BI. They are on the margins, regarding themselves as socialist or anarchist. They want a BI to free people from having to work, or to enable them to easily move between jobs. They do not or will not recognize that this works well with the financialist/neoMalthusian idea of BI.

Many people have observed that a BI works directly against the logic of capitalism. That is, to extract the maximum value from labor. Also, to get the most from rents.

No matter how much you increase people’s incomes, as long as capitalists command the economy, they will find a way to get most of it out of people. These tendency has increased dramatically since the development of neoLiberalism in recent decades.

Thus, it is seen there is no way of applying BI which would not turn into a menace, not a help, to ordinary people. That is, until real socialism is achieved.

Thus I have adequately explained the political problem with advocating for a UBI in present times. It is not achievable under capitalism. This is what puts socialists off about it.

However, once socialism is achieved, a Basic Income becomes a viable idea. As I said at the beginning, a discussion of the economics of a UBI will require its own blog post. A UBI will be a necessary part of a social economic system.

With this post as a necessary prelude, my blog on the economics of a social UBI is coming soon.

It has arrived. Link here.